His eyes felt like gravel pits in his skull.
Rubbing at them with the heels of his hands to alleviate the gritty feeling, Dimitri acknowledged he desperately needed sleep. Not to mention a shower. And clean clothes. And a shave. But his stomach chose that moment to loudly remind him food was actually the most urgent need.
He was not spiralling down a depression again. He could not afford to be. There was no one around who cared enough to pull him out again. He simply had to work harder these days. His health and his business depended on it.
After he graduated, he and a couple of his friends opened a company called Blue Lion Software. It was a dream of theirs, having a place of their own, be their own bosses, enjoying the freedom they have been denied most of their lives, and, while they survived mostly on contractor work, business have been going well.
They had been, that is, before his partners jumped ship collectively last Summer, leaving him effectively by himself to honour their contracts. It was all for a stupid reason, too. It all unravelled so fast, and the fallout did prove that they did not care as much for the business as he did.
Screw them, really.
Now, he has to work himself to the bone. He did not mind too much, though. Not only did the Blue Lion need to recoup the year's losses, with the reckless abandon that his former partners spent company money, but he had also discovered if he stayed completely absorbed in work, he could forget everything else for a while.
Almost. Close enough.
What was those expenses, you ask? What could possibly put their otherwise solvent business on the red? Unsuccessful infertility treatments of the former team software engineer's and his wife's, for one. They had all agreed to a loan from the company's capital, and Dimitri was happy to help, but his former friend clearly had no loyalty to the company.
Of course, their designer just had to be best friends with the wife, and leave in solidarity. Recklessness seemed to be a damn epidemy in there.
Stomach rumbling incessantly, Dimitri stood and stretched the kinks out of his stiff back and legs. Even though the former office manager had replaced the desk chairs with ergonomic alternatives years ago, they obviously were not made for a person to sit in them for twelve-hour working marathons.
Had he really worked all night? Again?
Yep. It was 7:30 on Saturday morning. He shook his head. Pathetic.
Not bothering to stifle an enormous, jaw-cracking yawn and kneading his hollow stomach, the blond shuffled around desks to get to the kitchen area. He yanked open the ancient, faded harvest gold refrigerator. Or tried to. The handle came off in his hand, making him take a stumbling step backward.
Damn it.
The former software developer enjoyed mechanical work on the side and had babied the appliance and kept it in good working order while she was here. Without a doubt, the new person he found for the position was brilliant, but he reserved that brilliance solely for paying jobs, nor did he understand the first thing about electric devices. It had proven a problem when their product managed to overheat the testing machine in his office.
Sighing, Dimitri tossed the faulty handle on top of the refrigerator before prying the door open with his fingers.
He wrinkled his nose. It was nearly empty and what remained smelled sour and mouldy. The new manager was very efficient with invoices and payroll, but she had informed him early on that cleaning and grocery shopping was not in her job description.
He supposed those duties fell to him now, and he always thought that it is better to get it over with in these situations. He could catch up on sleep later, and he would sleep much better knowing that there was a meal waiting for him when he woke up, even if it is a frozen dinner.
While tossing out the spoiled food, he found a half-empty box of stale graham crackers way in the back. The sweetened sort, that came in shapes. Their former intern must have left them there. The sixteen-year-old girl had a weird habit of not acting her age, at times being innocent and naïve, and at times being oddly sage.
The green-haired teen knew absolutely nothing about computers or apps, weirdly enough. She was the second cousin of their office manager, that is why he hired her. The woman told him her relative needed some breathing space away from home to grow as a person or something in that vein, but he did not care either way. He was happy doing whatever the manager asked of him. Ignoring the sharp pang in his chest, he hastily ate a handful while jotting down a list of needed items.
If the prior QA was still there, this task would not be necessary either. It would already be enumerated and alphabetized, stuck on the refrigerator at a perfect ninety-degree angle under a novelty magnet. The new quality guy did not have a knack for orderly behaviour, nor did he care very much about the welfare and well-functioning of the office, so he stuck to statistics and calculations needed for troubleshooting.
Dimitri despised grocery shopping. Not only was it a mind-numbingly dull, mundane task, the stores were usually packed with humans. Old folks poking the produce, health nuts reading the fine print on labels, children whining for treats, all of them always congregating in the aisles making it impossible to get to the products on his own list.
Children. He really disliked children. No, this is not right, he did not mind children too much, he even appreciated the class he taught in computer science as an internship back in college. It is the chaos he loathed, the missed deadlines, the irresponsible behaviour, the lack of commitment. This is not the fault of children themselves, now, is it?
Yes, Felix, I know that your son is just a new-born, but the project is not going to finish itself!
Dimitri sighed again. Their business analyst was always closer with the architect than him. The redhead always saw him as someone to be feared and respected, in his own way. Certainly, he had lost that underlining respect, but it would be nice to have someone to deal with people in his stead. He had never been good at it.
The worst possible day of the week for grocery shopping due to those exact circumstances? Saturday. Until he arrived at the store, he had also forgotten it was Ethereal Moon.
The whole experience was suddenly made even worse because it was the holiday season. Everyone else was baking and feasting, making shopping for food even more essential for them. Thus, making the store even more annoyingly crowded for Dimitri.
It was no surprise he had forgotten, really. There were no yule decorations adorning the office this year. Aside from the challenging nature of some of the Blue Lion's contracts, one day pretty much blended into the next and he did not really notice the changing seasons any longer.
His office manager once told him that people are emotional around yule because it is the darkest and longest night of the year, and therefore the most miserable one of all. From then, things would get increasingly easier until Summer. Would this be true for him this time?
Gritting his teeth, he dodged his cart around a trampled package of hamburger buns and two irritating, chatting shoppers on his way to grab coffee filters.
And there she was. Byleth.
Dimitri froze. This was another reason he avoided shopping. Probably the primary reason, if he was being honest. He had no desire to run into her, and therefore no impetus of placing himself in circumstances that carried this risk. Or maybe he did and that was the problem.
His eyes drank in the sight of her as his stomach gave a painful lurch. He could not see her fully because her profile was toward him as she stood on tiptoes searching the back of a tall shelf. However, he could tell her hair was shorter and darker, swinging just above her shoulders and brushing her jaw line. Her face seemed a little bit rounder, but he could not tell if she had gained weight in general because her tan trench coat hung open around her sides.
Before he could stop staring long enough to retreat, the box of filters dropped from his nerveless fingers hitting the ground and splitting, scattering the contents with all the subtlety of fireworks display.
Of course, she turned her head instantly. Their gazes locked. He felt a jolt go through him and watched her eyes widen with shock and dismay. Well, what did he expect?
Dimitri quickly stooped to pick up the mess, haphazardly stuffing filters back in the ruined box, fully expecting her to be gone once he had stood back up. Until the familiar toes of her favourite boots came into his peripheral vision, that is. One slim hand passed him a stack of filters and he took it, being careful not to touch those artful fingers. He mumbled a semi-coherent 'thanks'.
They both stood up simultaneously. And the box tumbled from his hand again even as his jaw dropped.
Byleth was pregnant! Very pregnant! Her globular abdomen protruded as if she was shoplifting a basketball. He quickly did the math in his head.
She smiled wryly and said, "Happy birthday, Dimitri."
