Maki came out of the changing room having just finished tying her impossibly long hair up out of the way, always fearing the worst if it were able to get caught in any of the machinery at the gym. She typically stuck to using the free weights, which held no risk of hair causing injury, but there were some times where she wanted to use some of the other equipment and needed to be careful. Her hands were wrapped in braces to keep her wrists steady when she started lifting, and as she walked towards her preferred station she stretched her arms in front of her to make sure they were limber and ready to go.

She was met at the weights by a man she'd never seen at the gym before, but someone that she always found herself running into elsewhere outside in the world. "Just what do you think you're doing here?" she asked, grabbing a couple of the weights to move them over to the bench she always worked at. "Last time I checked, you said you don't work out."

"Aw, come on, I only said that one time," Kaito replied, an indignant tone to his voice. "You were tryin' to challenge me to a race and I said that wasn't my style, I didn't mention anything about weights, did I?" Maki raised her eyebrows in suspicion at him, before shaking her head and deciding to just ignore him. If the guy she frequently ran into while she was out doing her daily routine was going to intrude on this other part of her life, that wasn't anything she needed to worry herself about. "Besides, you never said you were a gym rat, never would've thought you'd be one. Didn't seem like your style."

Putting the weights evenly on the bar so that she could get right to work, Maki knew that she could have taken offense to that statement but chose to not dignify it with a response. Her actually putting in the work would be more than enough to get him to realize the error of his ways, and she didn't need to waste her time explaining to him that she'd been going to the gym in one form or another since she was young. Working out was a release for her, after having to deal with all of the nonsense she encountered volunteering at the orphanage and hunting down criminals for meager pay, and she wasn't going to let one man ruin things for her. She grabbed the bar and attempted to lift it, but just as she got a solid grip on it Kaito told her to be careful and the one act of kindness was enough to throw her off. "I've been doing this for a long time, I don't need your warnings."

"Whoa there, I was just trying to be friendly. What's got you so crabby, you usually aren't anything like this when I see you at the store!" His weight bar looked so pitiful compared to hers, and she wanted to tell him that he wouldn't get far lifting tiny amounts, especially when his day job was stocking shelves at the local grocery store, but she held her tongue and tried to lift her bar again. He watched on as she got it up off the ground and into the air over her head, dropping it after a few moments. "That looked pretty intense, but I bet I can do better than that."

"Can you now?" It wasn't like she wanted to see him struggle or anything, but the thought of watching him fail to one-up her was amusing. "I'd love to see it happen."

"Well, I mean, lifting boxes at work builds a lot of muscle, I'm super built even if you don't think I am." He laughed, toeing the weights he'd chosen. "Lemme get some warmups in, then we'll make this a challenge. How much you wanna bet on this? I'm not exactly gonna show off to you if I'm not getting something out of it."

She snorted, watching Kaito squirm with every second she took to answer. "What, the pride of beating me won't be good enough?"

"T-that's not it, I just wanna know what I'm working for."

All things considered, Kaito seemed like a nice guy, always willing to help her find things when she was doing the shopping for the orphanage owners, and he never once complained when her questions took him away from doing his job. "How about…if you can't beat me, which you won't be able to, we go out on a date."

"That was what I was gonna say for if I can beat you, but sounds good. If I can beat you, though, you owe me money…hm, how about you owe me an equal amount to how much I lift when I beat you?" The terms seemed fair enough, and so after shaking on it they got to their own weight lifting, one in preparation for making good on his challenge and the other seeing how much she could put him through in order to beat her. She got up to her maximum lifting weight—eighty kilograms—rather easily, whereas she could look over and see that he was struggling with just over half of that, and she began to realize the trap she'd just set for herself. There was no way he was going to lift more than she could, and if he didn't then she'd have to go out on a date with him, and there was no way she could bring herself to actually do that.

"Watch out!" Kaito yelled, and Maki realized she'd started thinking about their bet while she was holding weights, having nearly dropped them on her foot but him noticing what was happening had stopped disaster from striking just in time. "Geez, you're a mess today. What, you thinking about how you've got to pay up here soon?"

"Oh, you know it," she lied, setting the weights down before taking a seat on the mat, looking at him with amusement in her eyes. "So, when are you going to take this seriously? You talked a big game, now you need to own up to your own challenge. Unless, of course, you weren't ever being serious about things."

He sputtered, looking between her bar and his own. "I was taking it seriously, but then you went and showed me up like that. How much weight do you even have on that thing?"

"Eighty. Pretty standard lifting for me."

"Let me try it, I'm sure I can do it too." She shrugged and swapped spots with Kaito, so that he could grab her bar for himself. It came up off the ground, but barely passed his knees before he was setting it back down, and she laughed. "H-hey wait, I can do it, I'm just…warming up still! Can't overwork my muscles!"

"You're not fooling me, Kaito," she said, standing up and weaseling her way in between him and the bar, putting her hands next to his. "Here, I'll play the role of the coach and help you lift this, since you clearly can't do it yourself, and then we can talk about where we're going to go on the date I owe you for being so weak."

Lifting the bar with his help was a lot easier than she expected, to the point that Maki was beginning to suspect she really had been duped in the whole scenario. She was so much shorter than Kaito that it getting to the point that it was over her head still gave him lots of room to go, and even though she shouldn't have, she decided that she was going to test him and his talk, letting go of the bar while it was above her. At once she knew that it was a mistake and that she was going to hurt someone by trying to make him own up to bragging about something he shouldn't have, but she couldn't grab the bar fast enough to keep it from falling down with a loud thud, taking them both over with it.

It was mortifying having all of the people in the gym hear the commotion and come look to see what had happened, finding Maki and Kaito partially intertwined over a weight bar, but at least neither of them had gotten physically hurt. There were sore muscles and even sorer egos to nurse over the coming days, but the only lasting damage the incident had caused was the hole in Maki's wallet taking Kaito out on a date had created. Had she known that he'd want to go all out for the occasion, because it had finally given him the chance to know her better like he'd always wanted, she might have thought twice about making that her offer in a bet she was set up to lose either way.

A/N: the prompt here was workout! I could have gone the canon route and talked about their training sessions but this idea struck me harder c: