Full notes in part one.


PART TWO

Satsuki was annoyed with him when he dragged himself into work—she hadn't bothered to get him coffee, and her general willingness to feed his caffeine habit, or not, was his preferred barometer for gauging her mood. But then, Daiki wasn't precisely in perfect sympathy with her, either, so it pretty well evened out. He got his own damn coffee and hunkered over his desk, annoyed with the pulsing headache that hovered just behind his eyebrows and the eternal necessity of paperwork, and got on with it in silence. Across the way, Satsuki did the same at her desk, and at least there was this: however annoyed about it she was this morning, at least she'd made sure he'd gotten home in one piece last night and had left the ibuprofen and water on the nightstand for him.

Presumably she'd also tell him what it was he'd done last night to piss her off in loving detail. One more thing to look forward to—Daiki could hardly wait.

The thing that got to him, really got to him, was that she'd known before going into that whole mess with the knee-biters from hell, that she'd let him walk into that without any warning. He could deal with the fact that apparently she and Tetsu were still buddies and that she just hadn't said anything about that, but not giving him a little bit of warning—it wasn't fair, springing that kind of thing on a guy. He'd been going along just fine until then, perfectly content with his lot in life, working a job he was actually pretty damn good at, thanks, and please note the list of positive citations in his personnel file, and a personal life that had variety to commend it. He'd been doing well, and it wasn't right for her to go throwing him into situations that only served to remind him of the past. The past was supposed to stay where it belonged, which was why it was called the past.

(He'd woken up and reached for Tetsu first thing, convinced for some reason that Tetsu would be there, drowsing warm and sleepy next to him. It had been a long and thoroughly disoriented minute before he'd managed to recall when and where he was, and why his bed was empty but for him.)

Besides, it wasn't like Daiki went around with Satsuki, pointing out all her exes who'd gone and hooked up with someone new, was it? Of course not. That wasn't buddies.

At least Tetsu had looked like he was doing well. Happy. Wasn't much Daiki could say for his taste in men, but then, that had always been true, hadn't it?

Sheer irritation fueled his work ethic pretty efficiently: by the time the end of his shift rolled around, he'd made considerable progress on the backlog of cases sitting on his desk. He hadn't said more than ten words to Satsuki either, but that was fine. Wasn't like she was talking to him either.

Another night's sleep helped; Daiki still had to get his own coffee the next morning, but Satsuki gave him a nod of greeting that he returned after a half-second of deliberation. He even got a chance to drink some of his coffee before Imayoshi-keishi sent them out to go, in his words, get some actual police work done.

In this case, that meant responding to a call about some vandalism—overturned trashcans on a residential street, a long string of them that had been knocked over to create a mess strewn across the pavement and a whole passel of annoyed residents, all of whom wanted to speak their minds to the designated representatives of the law. Daiki's money was on the culprits being a kid or kids out too late, feeling a little rowdy and lacking the common sense to have any kind of impulse control. He listened and took statements anyway—from the irritated older gentleman who insisted it was those young hoodlums who'd just started tearing up the neighborhood lately and ruining it for decent folks, and from the frightened grandmother who was absolutely certain that she was going to be murdered in her very bed, and from the housewife who was mostly just annoyed at having to clean up the damn mess. He made a dozen promises that the matter would receive the police's fullest attention and made sure to watch where he put his feet down as they made their progress from house to house.

"And to think I was afraid being a cop was going to be too glamorous," he muttered to Satsuki, who muffled her giggle behind her hand as they ambled down to the next house in search of someone who might have heard or witnessed the vandalism.

"Can't all be car chases and shootouts," she said. It wasn't exactly a peace offering, but wasn't nothing, either.

They were getting towards the end of the block when the person who answered the door at their knock turned out to be a kid, old enough to maybe be late high school or early university, sleepy-eyed and looking like he was feeling the morning pretty hard. His eyes went gratifyingly wide when he saw Daiki and Satsuki standing there, looking all uniformed and official, and Satsuki automatically took half a step back and let Daiki take the lead.

Daiki sized the kid up while going through the introductory spiel—someone had called in a complaint about some vandalism, they were making some routine inquiries and just needed to ask some questions—and watched the kid go paler with each point he made. Yep, he thought, leading off with, "Can you tell me where you were last night between the hours of ten p.m. and five a.m?"

"I was at home, here I mean, sleeping of course," the kid stuttered. "Would you like to ask my parents?"

Bingo. "We might," Daiki said, biting down on the inside of his cheek to keep from snickering, while Satsuki shifted on her feet a bit and looked very serious and professional at the kid. "Since you were home, can you tell us whether you saw or heard anything suspicious during that time?"

Indecision wavered across the kid's face—he was clearly dithering over whether to point the finger of blame elsewhere or deny everything. Daiki waited patiently until the kid went with a long, drawn-out, "Nooo?"

He made a point of recording that very carefully in his notebook. "I see," he said, seriously, giving the kid a version of Imayoshi-keishi's all-citizens-are-criminals-in-potentia stare. The kid wilted visibly. "Are you sure?"

"Yes?" the kid quavered.

"Mmhm." Daiki wrote some more, scribbling down some of the things he needed to pick up at the store, since nothing unnerved people like a police officer writing things down at them, and then shot a glance with Satsuki, who gazed back impassively. He nodded at her as though they'd exchanged some secret communication and returned his attention to the kid. "Have you noticed any suspicious characters in the neighborhood lately?" He flipped through his notebook and selected a page at random. "Some of your neighbors have suggested that there has been a rise in criminal activity in the area these past few months." Of course, that particular neighbor had been the type who reported anything he didn't like as suspicious criminal activity, up to and including the kinds of flowers a neighbor had planted ("To antagonize me," he'd said fiercely, jabbing a gnarled finger at Daiki. "That woman knows those begonias clash with her geraniums. She does it just to annoy me!").

Either way, it got the job done. "Criminals?" the kid squeaked, clearly seeing a future behind bars flashing before his eyes.

Daiki nodded as seriously as he could manage. "It's a terrible thing to see a nice neighborhood go to hell," he said. "We'd like to stop that from happening here, of course. If we can catch the people who did this, perhaps we can stop that downward spiral." He looked up and down the street at the people cleaning up the mess. "I would like to catch the people who did this," he added. "I'd like to give them a piece of my mind."

The kid actually whimpered.

"Let me take down your contact information so that we can get in touch with you if we need to as we pursue our inquiries," Daiki said, and jotted down some more things he needed—groceries, he definitely needed groceries, and more beer—while the kid stuttered out his entire biography for him. "Thank you for your time this morning. It's been most illuminating." He touched the brim of his hat. "But don't let us keep you any longer. I'm sure you want to get started on the clean-up."

Daiki and Satsuki politely stood aside to let the kid scurry down the sidewalk—still in his pajamas, even!—to start picking up garbage while they moved on to the next house. Daiki managed not to crack up, at least until he caught Satsuki eyeing him. Then he had to pretend to be coughing to cover up his snickers.

"That kid is going to have nightmares about going to jail for knocking over trash cans for the rest of his life," Satsuki said, severe. "I hope you're proud of yourself." Then she grinned.

"Damn straight he is," Daiki said, grinning back. "I'm just that good."

"You're something, all right," she said, and yeah, if she hadn't forgiven him yet, she was on the fast track to doing it.

So hey, at least going door-to-door to solve the mystery of the overturned trashcans wasn't a complete waste of the morning.

By the end of the day, things were pretty well back to normal, enough so that Daiki didn't see any reason not to grab dinner with Satsuki (takeout, of course, because Satsuki insisted that she had far better things to do with her time than cook, and the absolute lack of skills to make Daiki perfectly okay with shelling out for his half of the bill just to keep her from trying). It was a tactical error on his part, because no sooner was he comfortably ensconced on her couch and digging into his share of the vindaloo than she said, "So about Tetsu-kun—"

Daiki howled a protest that came out garbled by the food in his mouth. "No, no, no, we are not talking about this!"

"Dai-chan, I will cuff you and sit on you, don't think I won't," Satsuki said. Damn it, he'd let her get herself between him and the door. "You can't keep doing this, it's not healthy."

"First, I have no idea what you're talking about, and second, shut up, I'm perfectly healthy. I am a model of good health." Daiki studied her and the distance to the door, wondering whether he could make a break for it anyway, and then realized that she honestly was fingering her handcuffs like she meant it. He shelved that idea for the time being. "Seriously, there's nothing to talk about. So hey, let's not, and watch television instead. There's gotta be a game on."

"For pity's sake, I think we both know better than to believe that." Satsuki frowned at him, eyes dark and unhappy. "Honestly, even for you, what happened the other day was really dysfunctional."

"Hey!" Daiki drew himself up, affronted. "What do you mean, even for me?" She fixed him with one of her most exasperated looks, one that he had to hunch his shoulders against in defense. "I'm perfectly functional."

"I love you like a brother, so please believe me when I tell you that you're really, really not." Satsuki shook her head. "I knew you didn't want to talk about it when you and Tetsu-kun split up, but—"

Daiki pointed his fork at her and she stopped. "He left." That didn't count as talking about it. Getting the facts straight, though, that was necessary. "We didn't split up. He left."

Satsuki opened her mouth, but seemed to change her mind about what she was going to say. While she was visibly taking a deep breath and rethinking her approach, Daiki stole the pakoras and helped himself to her share. Anyone who used food as bait to lure an innocent man into conversations about feelings didn't deserve a share of the pakoras, and he was clearly going to need fortification if he was going to survive this. "Fine," she said. "If that's the way you want to spin it." She shook her head again and set that aside. "It doesn't matter, I guess. But whatever happened, you're a mess now, Dai-chan. And you have been ever since then, and I'm afraid you're going to keep on being a mess, and I don't know how much longer I can stand to watch you do this to yourself."

Daiki stopped in the act of shoving the next pakora into his mouth halfway through that; by the time she got to the end, they were sitting uneasily in his stomach. Satsuki looked perilously close to crying, and that was no good at all. That was so far from good that it landed on the level of world-ending catastrophes on the not-good spectrum. "Satsuki," he said, uncomfortable. "Really, I'm fine."

Satsuki shook her head, and if anything, the attempt at reassurance made her look like she felt worse. "You're really not," she insisted. "You won't talk about Tetsu-kun and you haven't dated since back then, and—"

"I date!" Daiki protested.

The smile Satsuki gave him was distressingly watery. "Taking people home from the bars and sleeping with them isn't dating, and you know it."

"...okay, I feel like you are so not the person who gets to be judgmental about that," Daiki argued, because like hell was he going to let her pretend that she didn't do the same damn thing—hell, half the time they helped each other pick out likely candidates.

"But the difference between you and me is that I have relationships," Satsuki said, doing that thing where she read his mind for him. "I've had several relationships since we graduated."

Daiki thought fast. "I've had relationships."

Satsuki gave him a long, somewhat damp look. "Keeping someone around and sleeping with them several times over a long weekend doesn't count." She reflected on that. "And neither does Kise."

Damn. Though maybe he could see where she was coming from on the Kise front, since it wasn't like Kise was really ever in town enough to count as anything but a pretty reliable drinking buddy and hookup. "Well, maybe I don't really want to get into a relationship, huh? Did you ever think of that? I know you know there's a lot of fun in meaningless sex."

"Stop trying to distract me," she said, suddenly fierce. "This isn't about me, it's about you. If I thought you were happy just sleeping around, that would be one thing, but you're not happy and I know it's because you're too afraid to let yourself try for anything that even looks like it's a relationship, and maybe if you'd just deal with what happened between you and Tetsu-kun, then maybe you could stop going around in circles like this and maybe you'd actually let yourself be happy!"

He wanted to argue with her—he was so happy, why did Satsuki think that she knew him better than he knew himself, for fuck's sake—but being irritated and combative fell by the wayside when Satsuki reached up and dashed the tears off her cheek. Fuck. "Hey." He put the forgotten container of pakoras down and slid down the couch. "Hey, please don't do that, Satsuki, c'mon, it's not worth crying over—" And because it was Satsuki, it was easy and not awkward to put his arms around her and pull her against him.

Satsuki made a sound between a hiccup and—something else. "Why are you so stupid?"

Daiki patted her back. "Can't be this good-looking and have brains, too. That just wouldn't be fair." It made her sock him one on the shoulder, but the bruise was worth it for the way the next sound she made sounded more like a cross between a hiccup and a giggle. He tucked her under his chin and patted her back gently. "Seriously, Satsuki, it's okay. I'm okay. I promise I am. I've got a great best friend and I'm not gonna date anyone who isn't at least as awesome as she is. Since I'm pretty sure that's impossible, I'll just have to make do with all the meaningless sex I can stand. It's a hard life, but I'll soldier on somehow. I'm just all noble that way."

Satsuki drew a shuddering breath and let it out slowly. "You're an idiot," she said again, very softly. "You really are."

"Yeah, maybe, but it's worked out pretty well for me so far." He patted her shoulder. "Try not to worry so much, huh? You're just gonna wear yourself out."

Satsuki sighed again and pulled away from him. She wiped her eyes and didn't look at him. "If you change your mind about talking about this..."

"I'm not going to change my mind, because there's not anything to talk about." Daiki said it firmly and hoped that she'd take it to heart, but when she bit her lip, he relented. "I know where to find you," he said as gently as he knew how.

"I guess that'll have to do," she said, wiping her eyes one last time and straightening her shoulders. She looked at the array of takeout cartons on her coffee table and frowned. "Dai-chan, you jerk, did you eat all my pakoras?"

"You were so busy talking, I figured you didn't want them." Daiki grinned at her outrage and dove into the wrangling over the food, letting it wash the uneasy feeling of that conversation away, and told himself that Satsuki was just hypersensitive about some things.


Daiki wanted nothing more than to put the whole thing out of his head—Tetsu, that red-haired asshole, Satsuki's tears, the whole shebang, all locked up in a mental box and dropped down the memory hole. If it hadn't been for the part about Satsuki, he would have, but Satsuki was Satsuki and even he knew a good thing when he saw it. So he kept an eye on her, did his best to show her that there was absolutely no call for her to keep giving him those worried looks, because he was Aomine Daiki, officer of the law, twenty-seven years old, a functional and contented adult.

He didn't have the slightest idea what that was supposed to look like, of course, but hell, when had he ever let that stop him before? So he improvised: brought her refills for her coffee without being asked and bit back his complaints at work at least half the time (except for when they were really truly necessary, damn it, some people were just that obnoxious and Wakamatsu had clearly been put on this planet to test him) and even refrained from filching food out of Sakurai's lunches, which was a heroic damn effort on Daiki's part (stolen food was always the most delicious, especially when seasoned with Sakurai's wails that he would just make extra if only Daiki would ask him to). Of course, Sakurai did immediately go to Satsuki and tearfully ask what he had done wrong and why Aomine-san was angry at him, and it all ended up in Daiki having to reassure Sakurai that nothing was wrong and Sakurai giving him a little pile of croquettes like an offering to appease an angry god. Clearly, Daiki mused as he munched on them, behaving like a mature, well-adjusted adult had its compensations.

He had no idea whether his campaign to convince Satsuki not to stress herself out over him was working or not—mostly Satsuki just looked at his efforts and then him like she could see right through him to his motivations, which in full justice she probably could, and did not seem all that reassured.

Fortunately for him and Project Make Satsuki Stop Freaking Out, Kise breezed back into town at the end of the week and demanded their attention. He'd been halfway around the world this time and showed up at Satsuki's apartment Friday night ("I just don't feel like going out to the bars," Daiki had said, piling all the earnestness he had at his disposal into it, and Satsuki had narrowed her eyes at him but accepted that excuse). He brought gifts with him, as was his wont, a filmy little scarf wrapped around a bottle of perfume for Satsuki and a box of chocolates wrapped in gold foil for Daiki.

"We are totally in the wrong line of work," Daiki said, investigating his chocolates while Satsuki tried the perfume on her wrist and Kise hovered over them, beaming anxiously and waiting to see whether he'd chosen well or not. As if there was any question that he had picked out just the right things; Kise always had been the best at reading other people, getting inside their heads and making them tick. (Sometimes Daiki thought of Kise's lost potential as a criminal profiler and wanted to gnash his teeth.)

"You'd just get bored," Satsuki said absently. "Also, you get air-sick." She stuck her wrist under his nose. "Here, what do you think?"

Daiki sniffed to oblige her. "Um. It's nice?" Something sweet and kind of floral, far as he could tell.

"You're a barbarian, Aominecchi," Kise said, not unkindly, and bent his bright head over Satsuki's wrist. He promptly went into raptures. "Ah, I knew it would be perfect! I told the shopkeeper that it was for a very special, beautiful lady, strong but feminine. She did not let me down." He clasped his hands in front of his chest and gazed at Satsuki with soulful eyes. "I swoon at your feet, Momoicchi. I must have you. Let me take you away from all this and make you mine."

Satsuki reached up and patted him on the head like a particularly sweet dog. "You shouldn't read so many bad novels, Ki-chan," she told him. "They're rotting your brain." He gave her a mournful look and she laughed then. "You're making me blush," she said, playing along and fluttering her eyelashes at him. "But I couldn't possibly go away with you. I have my duties here and I must not abandon them."

The sigh Kise heaved must have come up all the way from his toes. "You're so cruel," he said. "So cold. My heart will never recover from this blighting."

Daiki rolled his eyes and decided they'd had enough time to be ridiculous at each other. "These are pretty good," he said, licking chocolate, rich and bittersweet, off his fingers. "Get me more of these next time you visit wherever the hell you've been."

"Ghent," Kise said automatically, then did a double-take when he saw the depredations Daiki had already committed on the box's contents. "Aominecchi! You're supposed to savor those!"

Daiki blinked at him, glanced at the box, and said, "Who says I'm not?"

"No one appreciates good things when they see them," Kise moaned. He cast himself full-length upon Satsuki's couch and covered his face with his arm.

"You're ridiculous," Daiki told him, handing the chocolates off to Satsuki so she could try them herself. "We're ordering Chinese. You want anything?"

Kise uncovered his face and smiled, all sunshine again. "Yes, please," he said, and "I brought beer."

"Of course you did," Satsuki said, resigned, and went to go get the takeout menus.

They ordered enough food to feed a good chunk of the metropolitan area and put in a movie that they promptly ignored in favor of breaking into the beer instead, something with a label on it in a language Daiki couldn't read. It was cool and complicated on the tongue and good to drink while Kise rattled on about the places he'd been and seen while he'd been away. Daiki didn't think it sounded like much of a life, flying a corporate jet around and then having to sit around and wait for the boss-types to decide whether they were done or ready to go to the next place or whatever, but he guessed it wasn't his problem. Kise was the one who had to put up with all that, and he seemed to be doing well enough with it. He was the restless one, anyway, the one who couldn't ever sit still for very long at all.

Huh, Daiki thought, struck by that thought halfway through the evening. Huh. Why shouldn't Kise count?

The thought bounced around inside his skull for the rest of the night, at least until Satsuki smothered a yawn and then waved her hand at them. "Go away," she said. "I need to get some sleep."

By that point, Daiki had managed to sprawl halfway across Kise—it had happened during a scuffle over the last of the chicken a while ago, when he'd planted himself on top of Kise to keep him from getting away, and then just hadn't moved after—and they were all yawning. "But your couch is so comfortable."

Kise nodded. "It's true! I don't think I'll ever move again. I'll just stay here instead."

"Yes, you will," Satsuki said, not the least bit impressed by them. "You're both going to go home now. I don't need the two of you cluttering up my apartment all weekend."

Huh, one of the firefighters or that EMT guy must have panned out for her. Daiki grinned and opened his mouth, but stopped himself. Sure as he mentioned them, Kise would want to know all about it, and somehow they had managed not to tell him anything about that stupid festival. Daiki would just as soon keep it that way. "But how could you possibly object to having us around?" he asked instead, even as he sat up. "We're so decorative."

"And like many decorative items, totally useless," she retorted.

"Momoicchi," Kise whined, giving her a huge-eyed, hurt look even as he took the hand Daiki held down to him and let himself be hauled to his feet.

"You're less useless," Satsuki conceded. "You do bring me pretty things." She got up to see them out and stood on her tiptoes to kiss Kise's cheek and murmur something in his ear. "It's good to see you," she said before smacking Daiki's shoulder. "You I'll see Monday. Stay out of trouble until then."

"Yeah, yeah." Daiki made a face at her. "Don't do anything I wouldn't do."

Kise hummed behind his teeth. "But does that actually restrict her from doing anything?"

"More than you might think." Satsuki pointed at the door. "Out."

Laughing, they went, and wandered down the sidewalk together. Daiki glanced sidelong at Kise as they did and thought, well, why not? He bumped his shoulder against Kise's. "You wanna come over?"

Kise glanced back. When he smiled, it was a different kind of smile from the ones he wore when he was fooling around. Beneath the streetlamps, his eyes were dark. "Sure," he said, easy enough. "Sounds good."

This side of Kise was different, but Daiki liked it—liked seeing the things Kise covered up with that silly, laughing act that he liked to put on, liked how different Kise looked when he was intent on something, even if that something was only following Daiki home and pressing him up against the inside of the door for a kiss, long and hot and hungry. Daiki kissed back just as intently and reached down to close his hands on Kise's ass and pull him close, a part of him thinking about this, how easy and familiar it was. That thought didn't quite leave him even after he'd pulled Kise into his bed and they were busy stripping each other out of their clothes, even after Kise had settled against his mattress, bare-skinned and unashamed, all long slim limbs and fair skin. Daiki prowled over him, seeking out the places where he knew his fingers and mouth would make Kise arch and hiss at him and the ones that made him groan—the side of his throat and the tender skin at the jut of his hipbone, his chest sleek under Daiki's palms and the hardness of his cock sliding against Daiki's stomach. He knew Kise like this, knew him as well as anyone and far better than nearly all the lovers he'd ever taken. It was always good with Kise, whatever they did, whether it was like this, Daiki spreading Kise's knees wide and holding him there while he slid in and out of him, fucking him slowly while Kise tossed his head against the pillow and moaned for it, or something else altogether. (They'd had each other every way imaginable, hadn't they? And even come up with a few things themselves.) Daiki liked Kise and he liked this, it was good and it worked, and he liked how Kise looked under him, arching against the sheets and coming undone, flushed and wanton with his pleasure, and he liked how Kise caught him and held him when he finally came apart himself, pleasure rippling through him, warm and comfortable.

And it might make Satsuki happy. So really, why the hell not?

After he caught his breath and they'd had a moment to rearrange themselves, dealing with the condom and the clean-up, Daiki curled on his side and looked at the lazy, satisfied curl of Kise's mouth. Kise turned his head after a moment and glanced at him, lifting his eyebrows in silent inquiry.

"We should date," Daiki said, for lack of any better way to put it, a little annoyed to realize that he had no idea how one went about launching a relationship. (Not that he wanted to even think about admitting that maybe Satsuki had had a point there.)

Kise's reaction was not everything that Daiki might have hoped it would be. He gave Daiki an utterly blank look, uncomprehending. "Why would we do that?"

The key to life as Daiki understood it was not to admit embarrassment or the probability of having made a miscalculation. He forged ahead. "Because. That's what people do, right? When they—you know. Are together."

Kise blinked at him. "But, Aominecchi," he said. "We're not together."

"Well, why not?" Daiki said, fully committed now. "We could be."

Kise stared at him for a bit and then—laughed. And then didn't stop laughing, full-throated and helpless, like he'd never heard anything quite that funny. "Oh my God," he wheezed eventually, long after Daiki had stopped being surprised and moved straight into being pissed off. "Oh my God, where do I even begin?"

"If you're not interested, you could have just said no," Daiki growled, just about ready to find Kise's clothes for him and throw him out. "You don't have to be an asshole about it."

Kise pretty much giggled at him and reached out to him, smiling at him, something warm and soft and fond, maybe a little regretful. "No, Aomine," he said, resting his fingers against Daiki's cheek. "I like you and you like me, and we have an awful lot of fun together, but you're still so stupid in love with Kuroko that you don't even know which way is up."

Daiki sat bolt-upright so fast that it made his head spin. "I am not!" he yelled. It was going to earn him an unfriendly note from the neighbors, but who cared about that. "What the fuck, Kise?"

Kise only propped himself up on his elbow and raised his eyebrows again. "You really are that much in denial, huh?" he said, conversational. "Honestly, don't you think it's about time you got over that?"

"I don't know what you're even talking about," Daiki said from between gritted teeth. Fuck's sake, first Satsuki and now Kise, what was wrong with everyone he knew, anyway?

Kise sighed. "Should I use small words as I explain?" He went on without waiting for an answer. "You've been in love with Kurokocchi since we were, like, nineteen. And you've got all the emotional intelligence of a piece of soggy tissue and have never figured out how to deal with that." He waved his hand through the air. "I know you were kind of messed up back then and all, which probably explains some of the shit you got up to, but even so. I've never been able to decide whether you just thought it was better to drive him away yourself before he decided to go, or you just didn't realize what a good thing you had going until after you pissed it away. I guess it doesn't matter now, though, right? Since you've figured it out since then." He shrugged. "What really baffles me, though, is why you don't do something about it already. Stewing in your own misery isn't doing anyone any good."

"Why doesn't anyone actually believe that I might honestly be happy?" Daiki demanded, since that was the easiest part of what Kise had said to deal with.

"Because we know you?" Kise suggested. "And we're not actually stupid, no matter what you think of us." He rubbed his chin. "Also, I hate to break this to you, but you're not really that good an actor."

"I'm fine," Daiki insisted. "I'm fine, and all that was a long time ago, okay? Even if I were upset about—what happened—it was over a long time ago, and I'm just fine."

Kise sat up and set his hand on Daiki's shoulder, warm and friendly. "You keep saying that," he said. "But the thing is, you don't act like it."

Daiki tried to pull away from Kise, but Kise could be amazingly persistent when he wanted to be and stuck close. "For fuck's sake, what does that even mean?" he asked, exasperated and more than ready to be done with his friends' overinvestment in what had happened a long time ago.

"It means that we were around when you and Kurokocchi were together and know what you look and act like when you're actually happy," Kise said, like it was the simplest, most self-evident thing in the world. "The difference between you now and you then is like night and day." He squeezed Daiki's shoulder while Daiki was still trying to come up with a decent response for that. "I know you were too proud for it back then, but you could have gone after him and apologized. You still could, right?"

Oh, fuck it. "No, I couldn't," Daiki said. "He's with someone else now." Which shouldn't have been the nasty shock it had ended up being, because hello, this was Tetsu they were talking about, right? Tetsu was just good with people, liked them and wanted to be around them, even if Daiki had spent all this time stupidly thinking of him as though he'd been frozen in time since they'd parted ways.

"Well, yes," Kise said, after a moment. He sounded startled, as though he hadn't expected Daiki to say that. "That doesn't mean you can't apologize to him for being a jerk. You guys could even make up and be friends again." He smiled, proud of himself and his clever solution.

Daiki tried to imagine that, being friends again, just friends with Tetsu and watching him with someone else, and shuddered back from that. No. Fuck no. "No," he said, shaking his head, shaking Kise's hand off his shoulder. "No, I'm not going to, I don't want to—"

"Aomine," Kise said, suddenly serious, suddenly sharp, startling Daiki enough to arrest him mid-protest. Daiki looked at him, not entirely of his own free will, and Kise frowned. "Honestly, what do you have to lose by talking to him? You can't change what happened, yeah, but if nothing else, you can apologize for it and finally move on with your life. You deserve better than this, you know?" He waved a hand that was apparently supposed to encompass Daiki's tiny apartment that usually only needed to give him a place to sleep, or a place to spend a little time with a hook-up, or maybe the gesture was supposed to indicate Kise himself and their standing arrangement, who the fuck even knew.

Daiki stared at him, a hundred half-formed thoughts hovering on his lips, just waiting for him to finally figure out how to say them to another human being. But in the end, all he could do was shake his head at Kise, silent. "It's not that simple," he said. "It's never that simple."

Kise rolled his eyes. "I didn't say it was simple. I'm just saying—it would be a place to start. A way to break yourself out of this holding pattern you're in." He smiled then, bright and offensively optimistic. "And you never know! Good things might come of it."

Wait, why was Kise treating this like it was a foregone conclusion that he was going to agree? "No," Daiki said, injecting all the finality in the world into that. "No, I'm not going to. This conversation is over."

Kise smiled at him kindly. "That's what you think, Aominecchi."


"What the hell is wrong with you?" Daiki asked despairingly when he had failed to dislodge Kise from his apartment by the middle of the next afternoon. "Don't you have anything better to do with yourself than sit around and harass me?"

Kise had cheerfully raided his closet for clothes and hadn't really let the question of going to talk to Tetsu alone for more than thirty minutes at a stretch at any point when Daiki had been awake to listen. (Even then, once he'd finally caught his breath again, he'd looked down at Daiki and said, "So, what about brunch on Sunday? We could make an outing of it, you and me and Kurokocchi—" He had looked very hurt when Daiki had tried to pitch him back out of bed.) He considered the question carefully now. "Nope," he said after Daiki had just begun to get his hopes up and beamed up at Daiki, the light of pure obstinacy shining in his eyes. "Don't you think you're making this harder than it has to be?"

"Fuck you," Daiki said. "Fuck you so very much."

Kise merely smiled at him and shrugged. "Maybe later," he suggested. "Or after you go see Kurokocchi. Victory sex is always fun."

Daiki put his head in his hands and groaned.

Satsuki didn't answer any of Daiki's increasingly desperate texts begging her to help him evict Kise from his apartment, except for the one where he threatened to shoot someone—himself, Kise, Daiki wasn't feeling picky at that point. Her response to that was unequivocal: IF YOU SHOOT KI-CHAN I WON'T VISIT YOU IN PRISON. So that was right out.

Daiki was only human. When he woke up Sunday morning and Kise was still there, and the first thing out of Kise's mouth was, "Wouldn't it be a lovely day to go talk to Kurokocchi?" Daiki surrendered.

Sort of. He pulled the pillow over his face and groaned into it. "I don't even know what to say to him."

Kise plucked the pillow off his face and practically sparkled at him. "You can start with 'I'm sorry' and improvise from there. It always works for me." He paused then, seeming to consider that, and tipped his head to the side. "You are sorry, right?"

"I am sorry for everything right now," Daiki told him, though he was pretty sure Kise was ignoring all the meaning he'd poured into that. "So very sorry."

"That's fine, then." Kise bounced out of bed. "Let me go see what time Kurokocchi wants us to come over."

"Wait, what?" Daiki lifted his head while Kise dug into the pile of his clothes and found his phone. "Wait, what does that mean?" Why did he smell collusion hanging in the air?

Kise ignored him, scrolling through the messages on his phone, and executed a little shimmy of excitement. "Eleven o'clock!" He looked at the time and clapped his hands. "Right! We'd better get you cleaned up, Aominecchi, you want to make a good impression."

Daiki also looked at the time, saw that it was nine-thirty, and experienced a sudden sharp shock of dismay. "Eleven? Today?" he asked, because—no, surely Kise didn't mean to make him go talk to Tetsu right away—

"No time like the present," Kise sang as he seized the blankets and dragged them off Daiki. "Up, up, you need to clean up!"

He ruthlessly bullied Daiki into the bathroom and stood over him to make sure he did not try to make a break for it or cut himself shaving, picked through Daiki's closet again and made horrified noises at the apparently paltry range of clothes therein ("I wear a uniform five days a week," Daiki told him, aggravated, "What the fuck do you want from me?") and finally picked out a blue shirt that Satsuki had bought him a while back, and finally kept a firm grip on Daiki's arm for the entire journey over to Tetsu's apartment.

Daiki was gloomily certain that Kise would have frog-marched him there, if he'd thought it was necessary. "You've spent way too much time with Satsuki, I hope you know that."

Kise's smile was bright. "She is the world's leading expert on Aominecchi-wrangling," he said. "I can only dream of aspiring to her level of greatness." He tipped his head back, studying the numbers on the buildings, and nodded. "There, that's Kurokocchi's place. Come on, we don't want to be late."

"Speak for yourself." Daiki's feet felt like lead as Kise propelled him up the flight of stairs to an apartment that looked perfectly ordinary. His stomach roiled with something tense and uneasy, and he wished suddenly that he'd stood firm against all Kise's harassment."

Kise only tightened his grip on Daiki's shoulder, knocked on the door with his free hand, and beamed when Tetsu finally opened the door. "Kurokocchi, I have a special delivery for you!" he lilted as he pushed Daiki forward, just about shoving him into Tetsu's arms. "Aominecchi, remember what I said! Good luck! I'll see you all later!"

And then he turned around and walked away, whistling a jaunty tune.

"I'm going to kill him," Daiki said. "I am absolutely going to kill him." For getting him into this mess, for abandoning him, for being a smug fucker about it—hell, why limit himself to just one reason?

Then he remembered that he was standing in Tetsu's door, the man himself looking up at him silently, and didn't know what else to say. Or do. Or even where to look.

Tetsu didn't seem at all surprised to see him (but then, Kise had implied that Tetsu was expecting to see them). After a moment, as Kise's whistling faded with distance, he inclined his head just a bit. "Would you like to come in?"

Daiki wasn't sure that he would, but when Tetsu stepped aside, clearing the way for him, he said, "Yeah, sure. Thanks."

He stepped inside and exchanged his shoes for a pair of waiting guest slippers, looking around at Tetsu's place while he did. It was nice, warm and comfortable the way Satsuki's place was, with furniture that all matched and art all over the walls. There wasn't any evidence of the red-haired idiot around that Daiki could see, so hey, that was—something. A small mercy, maybe.

Tetsu was still watching him when Daiki chanced a glance his way. The only thing he could get from Tetsu's expression, even as it was, was that Tetsu was feeling—careful, maybe. Well, weren't they all?

They looked at each other in silence for a moment before Tetsu said, "Would you like some coffee?"

"Yeah," Daiki said, uncomfortable and awkward, and followed Tetsu into the kitchen. He didn't say anything as Tetsu put water on to heat and took things down from a cabinet, a coffee press and a tightly sealed canister and a coffee grinder. Once it wouldn't have been strange to be silent while Tetsu measured coffee beans and ground them—once it would have been comfortable and friendly—but those days were long gone. Daiki distracted himself from that thought by wondering a little about the precision with which Tetsu was preparing the coffee, trying to guess when Tetsu had turned into a coffee person, before he saw Tetsu reach for a teapot and realized that Tetsu still wasn't a coffee person.

Oh, he thought, looking aside. So it was the red-haired idiot who was the coffee person. The thought made him cringe inside, just a bit.

"You can sit down," Tetsu said, not looking out from the tea he was measuring out, his voice very calm and quiet, so Daiki pulled one of the chairs out from the kitchen table and sat and quietly cursed Kise for getting him into this mess. Who cared about getting a fresh start, anyway? That shit only worked in stupid sappy movies, the kind Satsuki liked to force him to watch with her when she'd decided to break up with someone. It never worked out in real life (well, he had to assume, that's why they were movies).

Tetsu actually got out a tray for the coffee and tea and stuff, even though it was maybe two steps from the counter where he was working and the table. He carried all that over and sat, facing Daiki across the table, reminding him uncomfortably of an interrogation setup. Tetsu looked at him, and for the life of him, Daiki couldn't read the things moving behind Tetsu's eyes.

Daiki looked away and drew the coffee press to him, busying himself with pouring himself a cup of coffee and doctoring it with sugar, though he didn't really want it, not if it was the coffee Tetsu probably kept around for—that guy. But it was something to do with his hands.

The silence stretched out, and out some more, and eventually Daiki had to acknowledge the fact that no, Tetsu wasn't even going to try to make this easy for him. And he didn't know how to begin. He had a sudden mental image of them sitting there all afternoon, not saying anything to each other, and felt the sudden urge to laugh. Or yell. Something.

He didn't, mostly in the faint hope that there might still be something he could do that would keep Tetsu from thinking any worse of him, and cursed Kise again for being a meddling, useless jerk who'd gotten him into this without so much as even a plan for what he ought to do next. Remember what Kise had said. Yeah. Sure. Kise had said plenty, but none of it had been useful—wait.

Without anything better to say or any alternatives, Daiki took a deep breath, raised his eyes from his coffee cup at least far enough to look at Tetsu's chin, and said, "I'm sorry."

Tetsu raised his tea and sipped it; it took every fiber of Daiki's being not to look away again. Eventually Tetsu said, quietly, "Do you know what for?"

Daiki wrapped his hands around the coffee mug and risked a glance up at Tetsu's eyes; all he could really see there was his own reflection. He swallowed. "Everything."

Tetsu's faint frown knit his eyebrows together. "Really. Everything?"

"Everything," Daiki said, somehow not quite able to get a full breath of air. "Do you want the full list? Alphabetical or by order of when I did it or itemized or something else?" It wasn't that he'd ever wanted to dwell on it, far from it, but what else could a man think about on a sleepless night but old mistakes? Daiki had had plenty of sleepless nights since then, more than enough to have figured it all out and wish like hell he'd been even a little bit less stupid with Tetsu.

Tetsu looked at him, tilting his head to the side just a bit, his evaluating-things pose. Then he nodded, a tiny dip of his chin. "All right."

Okay, fuck, fine. Daiki ran his hand over his face and said, "You were pretty much the best thing that ever happened to me, except for Satsuki, and it wasn't that I didn't know that, it was that I knew it too well. I looked at you and I couldn't believe how lucky I was, how fucking lucky I was and how I didn't deserve it, and I knew that no one ever gets to be that lucky twice. And I already had Satsuki." Satsuki, who'd already seen him at his worst and hadn't ever wavered, not even once.

Tetsu blinked, slow. "I meant that it was all right, I accept the apology." He pursed his lips just a bit. "But I appreciate the explanation. It clarifies some things."

Daiki stared at him, face hot, and realized that he'd fallen for one of Tetsu's favorite tricks. "...what things?"

Tetsu shrugged. "Things," he said, cryptic.

Daiki opened his mouth, halfway to demanding a better explanation than that, before he recalled that he really wasn't in any position to make those kinds of demands of Tetsu. "...fine," he said, slouching in his seat. "Good." Tetsu accepted his apology, which was not at all the same as forgiving him. Semantics always, always mattered when it was Tetsu.

Tetsu watched him toy with his coffee mug for a moment (it had a teddy bear on it; Daiki suspected that Tetsu had picked it out on purpose). "Why are you here?" When Daiki looked at him, confused by the question—wasn't it obvious?—he sighed. "What do you want to accomplish?"

The question still didn't make sense. What was there to accomplish? "Nothing, I guess." Daiki swirled the coffee around in his mug, watching it wash around the porcelain. "An apology, I guess." Which he'd done, and all Kise's assurances notwithstanding, he didn't feel particularly at peace or ready to move on.

Tetsu made a sound, something quiet and thoughtful and absolutely indecipherable. "And there's nothing else you can think of?"

Daiki snorted, almost in spite of himself. "What else is there? Seriously, Tetsu."

"I wonder," Tetsu said quietly. When Daiki glanced at him, he looked pensive. Troubled, even. He tapped his finger against his teacup, ticking out an irregular rhythm while Daiki tried to figure out what that meant. "I suppose it makes sense," he said, drawing some conclusion or another and (of course) not sharing it with Daiki.

"What makes sense?" Daiki asked, even though he didn't particularly expect Tetsu to say.

But Tetsu did. "I really expected that you would come after me," he said, perfectly calm about it, too, even as he upended all the things Daiki had thought he'd known. "Maybe not right away, of course, but after you'd finished being angry. Pretty much everyone did. None of us could understand why you didn't, and of course Satsuki-san wouldn't talk about it. Now it makes sense." He nodded, apparently satisfied, which left Daiki torn between indignation and embarrassment. Fuck.

"Everyone?" he said, though he didn't quite want to.

Tetsu nodded, apparently unconcerned by this. "Except Satsuki-san. Since she had been your friend first."

Embarrassment won out; Daiki put his head down and groaned at the thought of everyone—Kise and Midorima and Murasakibara and even fucking Akashi—discussing the end of his and Tetsu's relationship like a pack of gossiping grandmothers. "Fuck, really?"

"We were your friends," Tetsu said after a moment. "We were worried about you."

Daiki closed his eyes against that and stayed where he was. It was easier this way, easier to just say, "You thought I would come after you."

"I have my pride, too." Tetsu's voice was quiet. "That's what I thought at the time." He sighed. "Now I see that it wasn't the best way to have handled things."

"I thought about it," Daiki admitted, content to rest his forehead against Tetsu's table and not willing to see what kind of reaction Tetsu might show him. Better not to know. Much better. "I thought about it lots of times. But I always talked myself out of it." Because really, who was as big an idiot as he was?

Tetsu didn't say anything at all to that, but it wasn't like there was anything he could say, was there? Of course not. Tetsu might have waited for him for a while, maybe, but he'd clearly given up on that, and—

The touch, when it came, shocked Daiki out of the relentless spiral of his thoughts. Tetsu's fingers felt cool where they rested against his hair, cool and gentle like his voice when he said, "You really are the biggest idiot I've ever known."

Daiki didn't quite dare to move or even breathe, which was of course why it came out breathless, airless, when he agreed with Tetsu. "I probably am."

Tetsu didn't say anything to that and Daiki didn't want to move, couldn't bring himself to do it, even knowing that there was the damned firefighter to consider. He stayed right where he was and let Tetsu rub his fingers back and forth through his hair, probably making it stick up all over the place. If that made him a bad person, well, it wasn't the worst thing he'd ever done in his life, not by a long shot.

At last, too soon, Tetsu sighed. "What are we going to do with you, Daiki?"

"Don't think there's much you can do," Daiki said, against the tabletop. "Satsuki always says I'm a hopeless case."

"And she is so rarely wrong." Tetsu stilled his fingers; after a moment, he drew them away.

Even he knew a hint when it was that broad. Daiki took a moment longer to school his face, as much as was possible, and slowly straightened up. At least Tetsu wasn't wearing that carefully bland, expressionless face any more, was willing to show some of what he was thinking (at least for someone who knew how to read the subtle cues of Tetsu's expressions, someone who had made a study of those things). Just now he looked—worried, perhaps. At a loss over something. He said, "One of the things I've missed the most was my friend. I'd like to get to know him again."

Daiki took a breath, one that felt as uncertain as the faint tilt of Tetsu's mouth, the shadow of Tetsu's smile. "I—miss my friend, too." It wasn't—everything he might have hoped for, everything he might have had once, but a guy didn't need to be a genius to know when he was getting away with far more than he deserved.

Tetsu's smile lifted the corners of his mouth a bit further. "All right," he said, pouring himself some more tea. "We can start there. I hear some things through Kise and Satsuki-san, but..." He shrugged. "How have you been?"

Daiki took a drink of stone-cold coffee to give himself a moment to pull himself together, and said, "What do you want to know?"

Tetsu blinked at him and said, "Everything," so Daiki told him.


Satsuki took one look at him when he dragged himself into work the next morning, narrowed her eyes, and yanked him bodily into the observation room behind the one-way mirror of Interrogation One. "What on earth happened to you?" she demanded. "You had two days, Dai-chan! What kind of trouble did you get yourself into in two days? I was counting on you keeping too busy with Kise for anything bad to happen!"

"Kise made me go see Tetsu," Daiki said, simplest explanations being the easiest. "And he stole one of my favorite shirts," he added, since Kise had long since cleared out of his apartment by the time Daiki had left Tetsu's place, clutching an afternoon's talking and their fragile truce like the prize they were.

Satsuki looked as genuinely gobsmacked as Daiki had ever seen her; her mouth made nearly a perfect O as she stared at him. "You went to see Tetsu-kun?" she said. "You actually went to see him?"

"Kise made me," Daiki said, since it pretty well summed the matter up.

Satsuki peered at him for a moment before reaching for him, curling a hand around his bicep and holding on. "How did it go?"

"We talked." Daiki shrugged and hoped it looked casual. "About things. And caught up with each other." All that missed time and history and the sharing of it, the way Tetsu's talk of his own history had included casual, unthinking references to "Taiga"—yeah. They'd caught up. "I think—maybe we're friends again?" Or were trying to be, however that worked. Tetsu wanted it, so.

"Oh," Satsuki said, very quietly, worlds of comprehension crammed into a single eloquent syllable. "Dai-chan." She grabbed him and wrapped her arms around him, delivering one of her surprise Momoi Special hugs, the kind that Daiki usually tried to escape at any cost.

This one he let happen and—maybe—leaned into just a bit. "I'm really stupid, Satsuki," he said against her hair. "Really stupid."

"Tell me something I don't already know," she muttered back, but didn't let go of him. "Don't worry, it'll all be all right."

Daiki wasn't sure how, exactly, but he thought it might be nice to let himself believe her, at least for a bit—until Wakamatsu pounded on the door and yelled at them that Imayoshi-keishi wanted them to get some work done already, and Satsuki reluctantly released him from her clutches.