After Hours

Summary: Mimi returns home to realize her dream of opening an upscale coffeeshop bakery, with only two things in her way: the dive bar on its last legs in the basement, and its owner, who just so happens to be her college ex-boyfriend. Well, they won't stay long. One way or another, she'll get that space, too, and expand her culinary empire even further. Mimi guarantees it.

Remember the rooftop parties
Remember the friends
Remember the way I love you now
And the way I loved you then

("Now and Then" by Lily Kershaw)

then

The night everything changed nearly slipped by her.

To be fair, Takenouchi Sora had spent the better part of that first few weeks of summer organizing and adjusting to her new schedule, stacked as it was towards the goal of earning a place in the country's most lauded graduate arts program. Everything had been set: her extracurriculars, organized between the community service kind and the physically active team-building kind; her part-time job as a freelance designer, building a substantial portfolio of polished works; and her academics, which, contrary to what everyone else thought about her career aspirations, did matter. As Sora believed, being a creative meant seeing with clear eyes. She took schoolwork seriously, no matter the subject, because this disciplined her visual thinking as much as her understanding of her place in the world. That, and it helped make the case to her parents, one a renowned and prolific scholar on his own merit and the other a business owner turned rising star in the city council. She could never have presented her dream career to them without proving she had a solid plan for successfully carrying it out to prominence and acclaim. Besides, no one had a work ethic like Sora's.

Now this wasn't entirely true. It was just that her friends didn't share her worker's enthusiasm about every little thing; most of them tended to be a little more selective on where to dedicate their attentions. Until that semester, she had counted in this category Taichi, who now hadn't been able to dedicate his attention to anything but his summer job, possessing and displaying a hurried preoccupation that was worrying her more for how suddenly it had manifested than what it actually was.

This new interest hadn't bothered her all that much at first. She had been busy and hadn't noticed the depths of it. For one, her schedule was promising to be quite grueling, with the summer coursework she had elected to take in order to meet her electives early. She had thought that the emptying of campus during the break would have been a small reprieve from its usual bustling busyness, but the assumption proved unfounded. Studying at the library rarely made sense now, given the time it took to get to and from campus from her various classes and clubs, and the non-metered parking wasn't always available. But then Taichi had started his internship, and with him gone for morning football practice and afternoon internship now, she'd taken over his workspace, which was really the small second-hand desk in the corner of the room he'd been renting in a flatshare a few blocks from campus. It was cramped, sure, but it had plenty of light and private parking for her trusty two-door coupe, meaning she could walk to campus for a quick meeting or library trip and not come back to a ticket. She could even overnight her car there, and did, more often than not, lately.

Their current pattern wasn't an exceptional one, and had begun, in truth, long before.

Indeed, Sora could not recall a single exam since junior high school that she hadn't been over at Taichi's cramming for in the days prior, quizzing him on flashcards as he protested the severity of her diligence, as it seemed that her preparations were exceedingly more challenging than the actual tests. She'd claimed she was doing him a favor; Hikari always countered with admiration for her devotion to lost causes; Taichi always had a pillow handy to smack his little sister's shoulder with; Mrs. Yagami always hollered at them to keep their noses to their books if they wanted any dinner that night; and Mr. Yagami always begged them to save themselves while they still could.

Sora loved being with the Yagamis. If she could have made up tests to study for, she would have, just to hear the laughter that seemed to electrify the life in their tiny and humble two-bedroom apartment. It was the kind of life at devastatingly plain odds with the sterility of her own home; she couldn't remember the last time she and her parents had sat down at the table together for a meal. Ambition didn't make for much warmth.

That was why his announcement of his summer plans in the month prior had taken her by such surprise—well, not the plans per se, but the how. Because he had gone to her mother, without even mentioning the idea to her first, expressing in that act her parents' kind of ambitious, calculating play that put off thinking of others, like her.

Sora had yet to bring this bothersome fact up to him; she was as hesitant to discuss perceived slights as he was oblivious to see he'd ever even committed any. And to be honest, she wasn't sure how she would have reacted had he spoken to her first. He knew, better than any one, the complicated relationship she had with her mother. Maybe he'd wanted to spare her the tense drama over it, given the numerous freelance project deadlines she'd been working on at the time. Or maybe he thought she'd have talked him out of it—not just the request to her mother, but the entire endeavor of a political career. And he would have been right to assume this, because she knew him better than most, too, and knew that that path wasn't right for him. Not her mother's brand of it, anyway. She'd have ruined him, the one good thing in her life, like she always did everything Sora cared about.

So she'd stopped it. And maybe that, she thought much afterwards, was why she hadn't seen what was coming next, because she'd thought she'd ended it.

But what would going back again do, even if it were possible to imagine an otherwise?

Sometimes even now she'd catch herself remembering, rehearsing, recalling as much as she could, beginning with the look on his face when he finally arrived back at his flat share, nearly an hour after he'd promised he'd be home. She was already sitting up on his bed when the door opened stretching her arms around and under her bare legs. Her eyes thinned at the tightness of his movements, diagnosing the cause of his mood almost instantly. "Practice didn't go well?"

"Oh, it went," replied Taichi, but despite the muted anger, he didn't slam the door behind him, merely shut it gently. He slipped his stiff shoulders out of the team zip-up athletic outerwear, careful to hang the prized possession on the hanger over the back of the door. His hair was still a little damp from the after practice shower, and he'd swapped the jersey shorts for dark jeans already, too, kicking off his sneakers and dumping the gym bag by the door. "Just not with me."

Alarmed, she lowered her knees to a crossed-legged position, hands in her lap. "You're benched?"

"Apparently I'm 'lacking commitment,'" began Taichi, "since I was late to three of last week's practices—don't start."

But her jaw was already hanging open. "Three? Taichi!"

He pulled back the rolling desk chair, undoing his laces. "I have a job, Sor."

"An internship. And how early does a CPA get to work?" she protested. Without giving him a breath to even try to defend himself, she continues, heated, "Tai, this is your team—you love your team—,"

"I can't ride on that for the rest of my time here."

"That scout was wrong—,"

"We're not talking about that again," he brushed her off, voice sharp enough for her to listen this time. She didn't answer, not willing to engage when he was bratty to her. He seemed to realize this, walking back on his tone of voice with his next, softer words, "I'm sorry. It's been a long day."

"And frustrating," she offered.

"Tell me," he said, and it took her a moment, then, to realize he wasn't merely confirming her statement, but asking her, of her frustrating day. She glanced at him, silent. It was when he did things like this that softened her, and in the days after that night would make her feel so much worse.

She waved a hand at the desk he was slouched in front of, her drawing books and a tablet neatly stacked beside a thick textbook. "I got stuck on this one problem set, so I took a nap."

"A woman after my own heart." And he dove into the bed next to her, plunging face first into the spare pillow. The mattress sank under his weight, and she slid ever so susceptibly towards his hip, her knee knocking into his side without her intending it. Face still buried into the pillowcase, he swung an arm around the top of her leg where it lay near his, possessive. "Staying over?"

Sora patted his hand. "Nope."

Taichi groaned, "Typical!"

"Relax, you're coming with me. It's Catherine's surprise going-home party, remember? We're combining Thursday night with her party, at the off-campus bar."

With everything else hidden from her, she saw only the tips of his ears turn a dark, dark red, and it took everything she had then not to laugh. "Sorry, can't hear you," he said and pressed his face even further into the pillow, scrunching up the corners to stuff into his ears.

"Yes, there's that future statesman."

He flipped her off as she slid from the bed. His arm flailed around a bit into the empty space she'd left, and he flopped over onto his side to see her approaching his closet. "Uh-uh," Taichi called out. "Your choosing her side means losing borrower's privileges."

Sora rolled her eyes, picking through the scattered selections, all mixed up by now. "Where's that skirt I bought for Koushiro's birthday?"

Taichi's eyebrow danced. "You don't buy clothes for me—whoa!" He ducked and dipped, smoothing his hair back from the near miss. "A belt? Really? My face is all I have now, Sora!"

"The hits just keep on coming for you, don't they?"

"Yuk, yuk, yuk, hilarious." He watched as she retrieved the black leather skirt and a cream-colored T-shirt from from a pile of other clothes she'd left here, a stash she'd smuggled in deliberately. The amount of it, by now, surprised her, and to her dismay caught Taichi's attention then also. "Did you move in and we just never talked about it?"

Sora kicked off her knee socks, sitting on the edge of the bed. "Mom would kill me if I brought anything like this home," she reminded him.

"She remembers how old we are, right?"

"It's different for me," she muttered. "And another reason why it's good you're not interning with her."

"Why kick me when I'm already down?" he complained, throwing his head back. She guiltily turned away from him, changing from her lounge shorts to the skirt while he was distracted by his wallowing. "Listen, I get that your mom is intense. But you have no idea what I'm dealing with without her. I mean, Keisuke's great, but the daughter—and God, his wife—,"

"Annoying, too?"

"No, like—hot."

Her head snapped up, aghast, and Taichi burst out laughing. Irritated, she finished dressing and stood up. "You're disgusting."

"I'm only stating facts."

"I'd recommend checking that impulse before your big political debut."

"Let's not get that carried away," he said, tone striking a distinctly lowered quality.

Sora glanced at him, head lilting to the left as she studied his face, as though he were that easy to read. And he was, most of the time; but then there were moments like these, when he wasn't. And the idea he'd ever keep a part of himself from her—

She sucked in her breath, smiling, "You're saying Mr. Tachikawa's not modeling the right career choices for you, after all those rumors about how he'll eat literally anything with sprinkles on it?"

"Those are true, by the way." He stood up, bending over at the waist to pull off the long-sleeved crew neck he'd had on. They switched, her pinching the sweaty garment between two fingers with a scowl, and him taking the dark green button-down she held out for him, pausing ever so briefly to appraise it. He held it up before his chest, frowning. "We really sure this is my color?"

"Worried what Cat will think?"

He didn't quite buy the bait. Instead he just muttered, more to himself, "I don't want to look like I went goth over a one night stand."

Sora brushed the tone off this time. "We all could use a personality tune-up now and then."

He laughed, "Well, aren't we flying high and fast with the zingers today," and swung the end of a sleeve at her knee, snapping the fabric lightly over the top of her thigh before she could get fully out of the way. "What's with the good mood? I though you said your day was frustrating."

"My problem set was frustrating," Sora corrected. "My day wasn't all that bad." Now is what she left out.

He pulled the dress shirt on, one arm at a time, bringing the collar loose about his neck, and rolling the sleeves up just over his elbows. He frowned a little while concentrating on the buttons in the cuff, attempting to work them together with one hand, so she stepped toward him, fastening them herself. He grunted gratefully when she was finished, ignoring how she rolled her eyes, and stood before the mirror over his closet. He bent his elbows up and turned to the side, appraising the width of the folded rolls on his sleeves, a gesture that made the muscles in his arms that much tauter. She sighed, "Can we leave before your reflection drowns you?"

"Now, that's a whole lot of lip to show someone making you look this much hotter by association."

"Oh, is that what we're doing?" she exclaimed, and he grabbed for her, but she ducked, laughing, and found her purse hanging off the back of his desk chair. "Come on, we have to pick up Koushiro on the way. And you're driving."

Taichi groaned, "Seriously?"

"I drove last party—,"

"—I don't remember that."

"Curiouser and curiouser."

It was in her car, him settled behind the wheel and her in the front passenger seat, and a begrudging Koushiro resigned to his dubious weeknight choices in the backseat, that Sora reminded everyone of the newly imposed rules to their Thursday night traditions. "No karaoke, no open tabs, and no using me to ditch covering your turn at the next round, Taichi."

"You can't signal out the designated driver."

"I can when the designated driver always seems to find his way out of being so," she raffled back at once, and he defaulted.

"I won't, I can't. I've got work tomorrow."

"Wait, is that why you've not been making it regular to practice?" asked Koushiro, looking up from his phone to peer at Taichi's face in the rear-view mirror.

Sora rounded on Taichi, who deliberately avoided her gaze, both of his hands on the wheel. "He knew before me?"

"He's on the team, Sor."

"To be fair, she does live with you."

"You lost your side-choosing privileges after shifting us for that convention last weekend."

"You could have come along."

"We're not tethered to each other, you know. Please, let me hold onto some dignity."

"Quite a thin fraying thread, isn't it?"

The car swerved, sending Sora launching into the side door and Koushiro into the back of her seat, both of them grunting in surprise, as Taichi pulled into a lurching stop. "Oh, look, we're here," he said in a lilting tone, ignoring the glare she shot him in response. He stopped Koushiro for a minute when they got out of the car, motioning for him to hang back.

"What's wrong?" asked the younger redhead.

Taichi shook his head. "Not wrong. Just, uh—if it comes down to it, you can still—?"

He didn't let him finish, or rather, he didn't need him to. Koushiro merely nodded, silent, and Taichi smiled appreciatively, immediately turning the small smirk into a wide grin when Sora yelled at them to hurry up before they ruined the surprise.

The off-campus bar was about as full at it ever got; in truth, it wasn't very popular with the more happening crowd. Even so, it boasted loyal customers, mostly those who passed on the traditional weekly gatherings from class to seminar to fraternity and beyond, building up a sort of regular sea of faces that seemed to satisfy the grumpy bartender enough to not mind some groups now and then making the space the location of these impromptu parties.

Taichi didn't mind such gatherings much himself, but tonight hadn't been something he was looking forward to. It wasn't that he had an issue running into exes; that wasn't exactly a realistic hang-up for him to have, truth be told. It was that he had an issue running into this one. Seeing her at games those first few times after had been hard enough, but then he'd gotten distracted—intentionally so, admittedly—by the effort and time it had taken to land his City Hall internship. He told himself that at least now he'd have something to say he'd be up to over the summer, instead of thinking about where he might have been if he'd told her yes all those months ago, but he wasn't much for nostalgic regret, and he didn't particularly like the idea that she nearly changed this about him. Taichi didn't like the idea of anyone changing him, but him.

Sora steered them to a small corner of a booth where a few of his and Koushiro's teammates had gathered, one of them immediately wrangling them into their current round of beers. She relented, pleased, chatting her hellos warmly to the familiar faces, while Taichi tried not to look too visibly guilty over meeting people he knew he was letting down at practices these days. That was another problem, but he really just needed things to settle down a bit, settle in at home, at work, at—

"Hey," he said suddenly, eyes fixed to the bar counter, and turning to Koushiro. "Who's that up there?"

Koushiro needed a minute to figure out who Taichi was referring to. "Looks like Kido Jou? Works in the campus bookstore on Tuesdays and Fridays. His eldest brother was the captain of the debate club. He lives with—,"

"No," waved Taichi. "The other one."

Koushiro frowned, while Sora squinted. "That's…oh," and he nodded with recognition, "that's Takaishi Takeru. First-year, but plays first-string on the basketball team. Works in the writing center and for the campus's alternative paper, plus he's running for class representative against Motomiya. The first-years seem to find Takaishi the more appealing candidate; they say he's personable. Hard to tell what people think about Daisuke—,"

"Yeah, yeah, okay, but—," and he paused, unsure, "—you don't think he sort of looks familiar?"

"Um, there are a lot of blond guys here, I guess, but—,"

"Izumi, I swear to God—,"

It dawned quickly, when it finally did. "Oh. Oh." His face took on a decidedly paler tinge. "Should we—?"

"I'll take care of it," muttered Taichi, putting his hand in his jeans pocket to search for his phone.

"Wait, but are we sure he's—,"

"Beers are here," Sora declared, not realizing she was interrupting.

Taichi and Koushiro immediately separated, the former biting his tongue in a forced smile. He kept glancing at the blond kid at the bar, distractedly confused by the odd way the sight of that hair seemed to nag at him, and almost missed the question Sora was lobbing at him. He grabbed some mixed trail mix out of the bowl on the table, stuffing his mouth to avoid having her see through him too easily. "Huh?"

"I said, do you want to go for a game of cups? Some of the guys have set one up in the bac—,"

Taichi coughed suddenly, swallowing a particularly plump raisin whole.

"What—," gasped Sora, alarmed, but he waved her back, nearly rolling out the booth in his struggle to sit up.

"She's here," observed Koushiro.

Taichi choked out, "Where—can't—bathroom—?"

"Basement, second door."

He clapped a heavy hand to the side of Koushiro's head, stroking his ear in gratitude, and stumbled away from them, ignoring Sora's annoyed calls, and pushing through the crowd that was gathering en masse at the bar entrance for Catherine's imminent arrival. He managed to make it halfway down the stairs just as everyone burst into cheers over her surprised laughter, and he almost second guessed himself. He pulled the phone out when he got to the bottom of the staircase, frowning at the notifications, and stepped inside the single occupancy restroom, turning to lean a shoulder against the door after he closes it behind him.

"Occupied," said the voice from his daymares.

Taichi hung his head, still clutching his phone. "Of course, this happens to me," he muttered, then began to turn around when she shrieked an incoherent protest. He froze at once. "What?"

She continued yelling, "What do you mean, 'What'? Why else am I in the bathroom! Don't turn around!"

He lowered his hand, mind blank. "You're not actua—,"

The toilet flushed, and he immediately shut up.

Her giggling confused him even more. "No, of course not, the door wasn't even locked," said Mimi cheerily, voice emptied of the bloodcurdling pitch it had had only seconds earlier. Taichi peered out of the corner of his eye, hesitant, and found her standing before the bathroom mirror, a square bit of bathroom tissue folded into a triangle as she evened out her lipstick. She winked at him through the mirror, deliberate and coy, and he caught the prank at last. His back slumped too visibly in relief, and she laughed, "You are so easy."

"Don't believe everything you hear," he said, and she made a gagging face at the flippant comeback. He sank one shoulder against the bathroom door, glancing over her reflection in the mirror. She wore a plain black jumpsuit, strapless and heart-shaped over the front of her chest, a thin gold necklace fastened tight over a slender throat. The high ponytail made her neck seem even longer, and there were a few curls there, at the nape, that distracted him for the way they moved when she lifted her chin to stare back at him through the mirror. "What—uh, what are you doing here?" She waved her lipstick tube, and he rolled his eyes. "I mean at this bar."

"This place always does college night on Thursdays."

"Yeah, I know," he shook his head. "It's just that this particular Thursday night is a surprise party."

There was a thundering cheer from over their heads, and they both looked up to the bathroom's roofed ceiling, then at each other. She pursed her lips. "Oops." When he merely shrugged back in muted agreement, she appraised him stiffly. "Why are you hiding from the surprise?"

"Ex…fling, I think? What label comes before labels?"

She made another O, wiggling her brows. "Easy, indeed."

Taichi relented, not liking to make too many jokes at such expense, "No, Catherine's not like that."

"Oh!" Mimi's eyes widened. "I think I know her! French girl, right? My boyfriend set her up with his lab partner last October."

Taichi groaned, swallowing a sigh. Well, that fucking explained that.

"I sort of thought it was going to be an odd pairing, actually. Her type is definitely more the star athlete kind of thing." At this, her pause became dramatic, her muted gaze latching onto his reflection with vague regret. "Sorry."

"Yeah, no, it's fine," he admitted, because in truth it was. "She was definitely popular with my teammates."

"I mean, yeah, that accent—," "—those legs—uh, yes, the accent." He winked at her, and she wrinkled her nose, making a face back at him.

She didn't seem willing to let him off with such a distasteful joke. Her eyes narrowed on his shirt. "Are we sure that's your color?"

"You suggest I don't look good in green?"

"Mm, you are pretty jealous about how much better at your job I am."

"Yeah, why are you always hanging around your dad's office?" Taichi asked, redirecting to a pattern he'd noticed over the past few weeks. A very, very annoying pattern. Getting time alone with Keisuke has been hard enough the first week, what with all the onboarding tutorials and meetings he'd had to attend with the other City Hall interns. But it seemed anytime he had the opportunity to get a bit closer to his mentor, to plot out strategies for leveraging the new summer gig to something more ambitious, the way Councilwoman Takenouchi had advised him to start planning for in their earlier conversations, she just found a way to pop up. And just like that, Keisuke's attention would be snapped, lost as it ever was, to whatever came out of his daughter's mouth. No wonder he'd been stuck in that basement office for so long. How was anyone supposed to get anywhere with such helicopter family members?

Mimi leaned closer to the mirror, bending over the sink with a hand balanced on the side. She applied her lipstick coat delicately, taking the sort of detailed care that might have proved her expert penmanship, except he'd seen her doodles and knew the truth. He braced for a snappish answer; instead, she said simply, "I've brought my father lunch every day since I got my driver's license. It's our time, always has been. Interns come and go, but favorite daughters are forever."

He began with a quick comeback, but the image this detail of her life wrung up stilled his tongue. It felt like an intrusion, an odd sort of intimacy, to stand there in a barroom bathroom with its grimey walls papered over in layers of concert announcements and posters and graffiti, watching her put on her make-up while listening to her take the mask off of her life.

"Can you be an only child and not the favorite?" he wondered aloud after a moment.

"You've never asked your girlfriend that?"

Taichi stood straight, "What?"

Mimi shrugged, making a gesture as though it were the most obvious thing in the world. "Sorry, is Sora not your girlfriend?"

He felt his face grow hot, itching under the collar of his shirt. "What do you know about her parents?"

"Plenty, trust me," continued Mimi, unaware of how his voice had changed then, its defensive, protective quality darkening the browns of his eyes. "Councilwoman Takenouchi is such—well, let's just say I wouldn't want to be her favorite, either. Pretty sure she's not capable of—,"

"Ever try shutting your mouth about shit you don't understand?" Taichi glared, reaching for the door.

Mimi stopped, her lips still only half-way coated. "What's your problem?"

He scoffed, "My problem?"

"You heard me," she snapped back. "And that attitude isn't exactly nice, either."

"Wow—,"

"See, Yagami, that's exactly why I hang around Daddy's office so much. You can't trust people who put their seniors on pedestals just because they're elder. Same applies to parents." She capped her lipstick tube, returning it to her purse, and used the perfectly angled nail of her index finger to retouch the colored line outlining her bottom lip. "Parents are human, sometimes even more than their kids. What's the point in treating them like they're faultless? It makes no sense."

His fingers tightened around his cell phone, surprised, only then, that he's still holding it. A glance to the dim screen returns his attention, briefly, to the name that flashes across it. "Guess not," he admitted after a minute.

Finished with her lipstick touch up, Mimi turned her attention to her ponytail, adjusting strand by strand for the perfect impression of casualness. "Disappointment in one's parents is something to set our clocks by. The first sign I've got a cold coming on is if I miss my weekly feeling of parental betrayal. One time, Daddy had gone home to eat lunch with Mama, and I just sat there in that basement hallway for, like, two hours. Honestly, I should have known better, prepared. It was pasta carbonara day, and my parents are weirdly turned on by egg-based foods. I remember one Easter weekend I caught them i—,"

"Okay, please, stop. I need to be able to look your dad in the eye tomorrow," Taichi complained, shuddering, and Mimi just squawked loudly.

"Who cares about you? I have to look them in the eye every day—,"

"You could solve that by just not going home to see you parents every day, you know. You are in college."

Mimi stopped, hands suspended above her head, and hazel eyes wide as saucers. She looked horrified. "Why on earth would I not want to see my parents?"

Taichi had trouble keeping a straight face then. "Weren't you just going on and on about parental betrayal?"

"Yeah, and if you don't water your plants every day, they die!"

"What about cacti?"

"My parents are not pricks!"

He burst into laughter, bending at the waist, fingers combing through the sides of his hair. "Jesus, I really can't keep up with you."

She continued working at fixing her hair to distract herself, visibly flustered, and evidently deeply thrown by the idea that there were people in the world who didn't get on with their parents, favorite or no favorite. "They might not be worth constant deference, but they're still needy."

"Maybe just you three are." Codependent is what he wanted to say, but wisely thought better of it after noticing the way she tugged violently at a particularly thick tendril.

"Daddy said you wanted this internship to stay close to home, too," she fired back accusingly.

Taichi should have known the gossip would have extended past City Hall doors. Keisuke and his damn sugar-induced tendency to jabbering. He really needed to stop bringing in the sprinkle doughnuts with the morning coffee. Maybe he was contributing to the madness of the basement. "It's more that it's easier, overall, to be around this summer," was all he was willing to offer as clarification at that point, but it seemed to pacify her nonetheless.

She nodded at his reflection in the mirror. "As opposed to next, I'm guessing?"

"Well, next would be the summer after graduation, so yes." He leaned back against the door, slipping his phone back into his jeans pocket. "I'm definitely getting out of here after that."

"Graduate school or law school?"

"Business."

She made an O with her mouth, and he realized she was whistling; there was another roar of the crowd above their heads in the barroom upstairs, heavy gaits pacing back and forth quickly. He thought he heard Sora's distinctive yelp, the kind she made when she was winning a game, and he glanced above to the ceiling, wondering how much time it'd been since he came down. "Interesting. Not a lot of municipal politicians go the corporate route right off the bat. I mean, Daddy does have that one friend of his from boarding school—Inoue, I think? I can't remember—,"

"I don't want to do municipal government," interrupted Taichi, intervening before her next tangent could unravel further. "At least not around here." He paused. "I don't want to be here. At all. City Hall was just the best way to prove to my parents I was looking at all the options. They wouldn't believe in me otherwise, or trust me, I guess, to make different choices than theirs." He had prepared himself for a stupid remark in response, or a laugh, or, if fortune was truly looking out for him, an end to the conversation entirely, but instead Mimi frowned, suspicious, and finally turned around to look at him directly, face to face. That unnerved him more than the sudden realization that he'd admitted to her what he hadn't quite admitted to himself. How did she do that to him?

"What?" he asked.

"I might have been too severe in my pronouncements earlier," she began. ("What's that? You were wrong?") "Our parents aren't always great people, but that doesn't mean we should hide parts of ourselves from them, right?"

"I'm not hiding anything."

"You just said you went after this internship so you could avoid being honest with yours."

"Well, we all don't have egg-based attractions to distract our parents from news with."

"News that you want to leave? What child doesn't want to leave?"

"You?"

"Funny."

"Sorry, I'm just not really following what this is all supposed to be." He grinned anyway, "What do you mean?"

"I mean," said Mimi slowly, stretching this last singular syllable as far as his patience permitted in the moment, "that the real problem here seems to be that you don't know how to stand up for yourself."

Taichi laughed. "All right, we're done, this is going nowhere—,"

"No, come on, listen," and she pressed a hand to his chest, pushing him back. "Your parents are, what, in their sixties?" ("Yes, that makes perfect mathematical sense.") "And you, as the blessed heir, have built up not only a singularly narrow idea of what they expect you to do with said blessing, but you've also made it out as though doing anything else would break their heart, when, actually, you're their heart. So the only way to break your parents' heart, Yagami, is to give up on your dreams when they worked so hard for you to have them."

She looked at him, preening at the profundity of her own words, and waited for a response. It was this posture of expectation, really, that wouldn't let him react the way he might have otherwise; something he didn't quite understand or very much like made him want to wipe that knowing smirk off her lips one way or another. So, instead, he peeled her fingers off him, masking the thick lump in his throat with a cough too casual to deceive anyone who really knew him—which would not be her, he swore then and there. "Well, you're right about one thing: I am pretty blessed."

Her face melted into a petulant scowl. "Jesus—,"

"Okay, okay, sorry, sorry," and he grinned, chuckling at her disgust. "It's hard to turn it off after practice."

Her face grew even longer at that excuse. "Why do you even hang out with those guys anyway?" She shuddered at the perceptively timed roar from upstairs.

"They're my teammates."

Her tsk carried a particularly judgmental tone. "I wouldn't be caught anywhere near people who could risk my reputation," she declared.

His mouth twitched at the arrogance. "Aren't you smart."

She continued, oblivious to the forced tenor to his voice now, "I mean, reputation is really about your friends, isn't it? That's all people who don't know you have to start from, who you spend time with."

He straightened, hands in his pockets. "This your way of telling me I don't deserve my internship again?"

She turned her head to the side, appraising him. Her eyes were lighter under the bathroom lighting, but her gaze still so precise. "I haven't decided yet," she said, honest, as though genuinely believing he might be anxious to have her opinion. "But Daddy's reputation is my reputation."

"You sure like to fight 'Daddy's' battles for him," he said.

"Don't you call my daddy 'Daddy'—,"

"'Mayor Daddy' better?"

Her lips parted scandalously, and he had to catch himself from impulsively closing the distance to them, when the door opened.

"Mimi, you in here still?"

Taichi glanced behind him to the now opened door, where a bespectacled tall man stood, his dark curls impeccably smoothed into waves. Damn, what he wouldn't give to get his nest of hair to obey gel laws like that.

"Yes, I'm here!" Distracted from her next comeback, Mimi, smiling, threw out her arms for a hug, which Jou obliged out of exasperation, walking her out into the hallway again.

He kept his arm around her waist as they started walking to the basement stairwell. "So is Yamato. He's been calling you."

"My phone's dead again."

"I keep telling you to close your apps," he reminded her.

"But you never know when you might need to use one!"

"Then you just reopen the app."

"See, that's adding an extra step where one needn't be—,"

Taichi spoke up then, ears starting to bleed. "This is riveting, really, but I'm going to need to get by y—,"

Jou glanced back at him, as though only just realizing who he was, and where he had been before. He returned his attention to Mimi as they made their way slowly back upstairs. "Why were you in the bathroom with plum guy?"

("Is plum guy supposed to be me?")

"He's trying to hide from Catherine."

Jou's face finally opened, "Wait—that plum guy?"

Taichi looked at Mimi, amused, "Exactly how many plum guys do you have in your life?"

Halfway up the stairs, her lips slid into a low, arrogant grin as she leaned towards him, bringing Jou's face inadvertently closer to Taichi's ear when he was forced to dip down along with her. "That is a very personal question, Yagami."

He would have responded to that, almost at once, but Mimi wasn't listening anymore, distracted attention caught by the young man waiting at the top of the stairs, his dark blue eyes warming at the sight of her bright face. Taichi looked past her, meeting the man's gaze. His heart was back in his throat, stomach knotted as tight as his fist, without his even thinking to make one.

"Ishida?"

Mimi, still holding onto Jou's hand as she came to a stop on the stairs midway between them, exclaimed in surprise over her manners, "Have I really not introduced you two yet?" Tsking herself, she waved Yamato to come halfway down to meet them, but Taichi interrupted, "We've met."

She looked confused, hesitant in her cheer now, "Oh—how—?"

Their eyes met, over the top of her head, like a whole life had passed by without her. Yamato's face changed, chin lowering, and Taichi's voice found itself, calm but hoarse, all at once. "He dated my sister."

Author's Note: I am really sleepy. More importantly, this is turning out to be a very long and complicated story, but still overall quite silly. I appreciate the low expectations.