The next morning, Itsuki woke up with a throbbing headache. The whiskey from the night before had obviously disagreed with his system. He tried to roll off of the couch to grab a painkiller, but was stopped by a heavy weight on his legs. Looking down, he saw that it was Tokuchi. That had conveniently slipped his mind. As he untangled his legs from Tokuchi's, he tried to remember the night before. They had kissed. That he remembered in perfect detail. Afterwards, they had watched the rest of the movie, and finished off the bottle. That was probably a bad decision. He could infer that they had passed out soon after that. He stooped down to look through the fridge to look for ingredients for hangover food. Eggs would do nicely. After cracking them and whisking them in a pan with some milk, he heard Tokuchi stir from the other room.

"Are you up?" he asked loudly, catching the other man's attention.

"Unfortunately" was his reply.

As Itsuki scrambled the eggs, he watched Tokuchi walk into the kitchen and grab a seat at his table. He looked a little ruffled. That made him feel a certain way, and he was not quite sure what that meant. He chose to file that thought away for him to analyze at a much later date. They are breakfast in silence; neither man mentioned the happenings of the night before. After they finished, he saw Toa off at the door, and watched him walk down the hall to the elevator. He doubted either of them would ever trust a stairwell ever again.

Toa drove home as fast as he could. He had fucked up. He had royally fucked up, and he could hardly blame alcohol this time. He had imbibed half a bottle of whiskey, yes. But he still knew what he was doing. He was probably just lonely because he was still meeting people here. He hadn't had a decent lay in a while. He had gotten caught up in the romance in Die Hard. He could keep making up excuses, but he knew he had knowingly kissed Takami Itsuki, and that burned at him the entire way back.

Once he got home, Toa took a long hot shower in an attempt to scorch the embarrassment off. It did not work. He decided to banish all thoughts of Takami from his mind for the duration on winter intersession. If anyone could manage it, it would be him.

The rest of his break passed by all too quickly, and soon, Toa found himself standing in the chilly February air while he awaited Coach Imawano's instructions. They only had a couple of weeks before the players came back for spring training, and they had to make it count. Once he received his list of responsibilities, Toa felt the slightest bit annoyed. He would be working overtime for the next few weeks. As he made his way down to his office, Toa's thoughts started to wander. He would have to start working with the team soon, and he had very little to show for their postseason practices. He had taught them some signs and had them work on clarification, but that was just about it. If he wanted to make any progress this time around, he would have to double down and work twice as hard. He might even resort to being nice. He hoped it didn't come to that.

The next two weeks passed by quickly. Toa's life was once again ruled by the whims of the coaching staff -he and the interns had that in common. Despite his chilly demeanor, several of the girls had started to warm up to him. He didn't know whether to be flattered or concerned about them. It did make his life easier when he had help, though, and that was one of the only things he couldn't complain about for just as he was starting to feel a bit less on edge, the pitchers came back. They always came to spring training first.

Toa stood off to the side. He was doing his best to listen to the pep talk he was delivering to the pitchers, but he found himself distracted. Although he hadn't thought of the events of New Year's Eve lately, he couldn't help but cringe at the thought of seeing Takami again after that embarrassment. After another few minutes of trying to pay attention, he started to drift again, right up until the players all agreed loudly with something Imawano had said. With that, they all stood up and filed out of the room. Coach Imawano gestured at Toa from the other side of the room to walk with him.

"I have high expectation of you this season" Imawano said. "I hope your performance will improve in the next few weeks."

Toa didn't respond, but he did nod in affirmation. He would definitely make some progress before the rest of the battery arrived for spring training.

After they reached the field, Coach Imawano had the players warm up. Kira, Mizuhashi, and Kira were running through drills. Kawanaka started to stretch on his own. Imawano grunted in disapproval, and nodded his head towards Toa. Oh hell no. Toa was not about to go stretch Kawanaka's limbs. He wasn't that kind of coach. Imawano however, didn't seem to care, and simply glared at Toa until he reluctantly made his way toward Kawanaka, who looked like he was ready to strike at any moment.

Toa approached Kawanaka warily. The last thing he wanted right now was a foot to the gut. But Kawanaka just sighed and sat down on the turf.

"Let's get this over with" he said. "Imawano won't be satisfied until we do this so make it quick".

Toa nodded in response. Kawanaka almost surprised him how fast he acquiesced.

"What do you want to start with?" he asked, doing his best to be decent.

"Let's just get some isometric stretches in, and get it out of the way" Kawanaka said, lying down and stretching out his leg for Toa to grab.

After bracing Kawanaka's leg on his shoulder, Toa leaned forward, stretching out his hamstring. While they went through Kawanaka's stretching routine, he couldn't help but notice that the other players were no longer shooting him dirty looks at the frequency they had during post-season training. Maybe they had finally unfucked themselves, and had decided to concentrate on their real enemies. But it was far more likely that they were just too preoccupied by the pitching coach yelling instructions. Either way, he didn't really care one way or the other.

When he heard a grunt from Kawanaka, Toa released his arm from where he had been pushing it. Kawanaka stood up, brushed off his pants, and muttered a thank you before going off to join the team drill.

After receiving an affirmative nod from Coach Imawano, Toa made his way over to the bench to observe. While he watched the pitchers run through their drills, he ran through their statistics. They were from last season, and meant nothing of course, but he could see how they were affected by different situations. Kira didn't do well when yelled at. Takahashi threw poorly when he felt persecuted. Kawanaka was the dictionary definition of type A, and Mizuhashi still didn't get along with some of the second string pitchers. These issues would have to be addressed before the start of the season.

After practice ended, Toa turned in his latest report to Coach Imawano, who took it and grunted, just like he always did. But before he could leave, Imawano cleared his throat, stopping Toa in his tracks.

"I expect that you will make progress before the season starts" he stated, giving Toa a look that didn't inspire confidence.

"I intend to" Toa replied simply. With that, he turned and left. The pressure was on, and would only get worse from there. Next time he had the opportunity to gamble away another year of his life in a high stakes gamble, he would pass. No amount of money in the world was worth another year of this mess.

Over the next few days, Toa continued to do his mindless team building exercises under the watchful eye of Coach Imawano, who insisted it was for his own good. Toa did not appreciate that. Nobody did anything with his own good in mind. He sometimes had a hard time doing things for his own good. While he worked with the pitchers, he kept noticing discrepancies are the ways they interacted. His signs weren't working. They had practiced them and performed them as he had taught them, and they were better at performing orders from the bench, yet they were still struggling to work as a unit. They still functioned as individuals, and while that in itself could be of use, they were unable to take their individuality and make it work. It was getting to the point where something had to change. That day after practice, he called them over to the bench. "We need to try something different" he said, calmly facing them. "Although you seem to understand what I am telling you to do, you don't seem to understand why I am having you do it".

Then, Kawanaka chose that moment to interrupt. "So you've been having us do all of these useless signs and communication exercises for nothing" he asked, giving Toa a bit more attitude than usual.

Toa turned to face him. "They're not useless in general. Just useless for you. They served their original purpose well. You confuse fewer orders from the bench, and you throw more good pitches".

Mizuhashi glanced at Kawanaka before getting Toa's attention. "If we've been throwing more good pitches, then why are they useless?" he asked, narrowing his eyes.

"Because you still constantly look for opportunities to snipe at each other. Whenever you of you screws up, you constantly berate each other, and while that isn't necessarily bad, I have noticed that you never recognize when you've done well. You need to recognize the positive as much as you berate the negative."

After that little speech, Toa had to swallow down the wave of nausea that threatened to overtake him. Never in his life had he imagined he would be forced to tell a group of grown men to play nice. He thrived on chaos, and here he was, playing guidance counselor and trying to force them to be more positive. By the way the group was looking at him; he could infer that they felt the same way.

After that little interlude, Imawano seemed to accept him a bit more. He had started to send the interns to get coffee, and had been giving Toa bigger tasks. While he appreciated not being sent out into the cold every time the coaching staff needed a fix, he soon found himself inundated with assignments. He had to start helping with a grievance system so the players could have better dedicated channels to voice their concerns with their teammates. He also had to learn how to use a computer to build a system the coaching staff could use to keep track of different statistics, and under what conditions those outcomes could be expected. He had only learned what a forum was a year before, and now they expected him to learn how to program the damn thing. This was probably a punishment of some sort.

Within the next few days, his desk was partially taken up by a huge new monitor and computer tower. What wasn't taken up by this space age technology was filled with paperwork, notes, and programming manuals. To make thing even better, the rest of the team was scheduled to come back that day. That meant four times the work and four times the pressure.

While he thumbed uselessly through the manual, which seemed to be written in a language made up of random English letters, numbers, and punctuation markers, he heard someone start to rattle on his door handle. Looking up, Toa sighed. It was the Coach, no doubt here to give him another assignment.

Instead, the unwelcome face of Takami Itsuki appeared. He knew without any doubt he would have to face him after his New Year's Eve fuck up, but he had hoped to maintain some semblance of distance. Instead, as per usual lately, he had no luck.

Toa slowly turned his chair towards Takami. "What brings you here?" he asked, keeping his voice even.

"I thought I'd drop by and say hi." Takami said, as he rested against the door frame. They sat there in an awkward silence for a bit before Takami's eyes rested on the programming manual in front of Toa. "Why do they have you working in C plus plus?" he asked. "Are you building a database or something?"

Toa let blinked up at the intruder. "Yes, I suppose I am." he said, finally conceding. "Know anything about it?" he asked, fully expecting Takami to shrug, or give a little quip. Instead, Takami barged right in past Toa and picked up the book and skimmed the page he was on.

"What do they have you working on exactly?" he asked, seeming genuinely interested.

"I'm building a database for player statistics." Toa answered simply.

"I've done something like that before." Takami said looking at Toa with a glint in his eye.

"What did you do?" Toa asked, figuring he'd humor him one last time.

"Kind of the same thing. A database for player statistics." he looked as if he was going to go on, but he stopped himself short. Strange.

Just as he was about to shoo him away, Amami stuck his head in. "Imawano is asking about you." he said evenly. "You might want to want to stop dicking around and start practice." he finished, maintaining a blank expression.

Takami glanced over at Toa before exiting the room. "I'll see you later" he said.

"Is that a promise or a threat?" Toa asked loudly enough for him to hear.

Amami followed Takami out the door, but paused and looked back at Toa. "You should ask him about his project from last season. You'd probably find it interesting." he said, before leaving for good.

Toa watched him leave, wondering what the hell he was talking about. After another hour or so of trying and failing to decipher the manual, Toa gave up trying. After locking up his office, he made his way to the interns' slightly larger office space. They might know how to figure this thing out.

Itsuki made his way out to the field, shooting Amami the occasional dirty look. "Why did you feel the need to get him riled up?" he finally asked.

Amami shrugged and said "He is going to find out about your boyfriend eventually. The longer you wait to tell him about it, the more likely someone is to show it to him and freak him out."

Itsuki did not appreciate that. "It's a pitching machine, not my boyfriend. Who the hell started that anyway?" he asked, narrowing his eyes at his teammate.

"Probably Kitaooji." Amami replied. "You know somebody is going to think it's funny to show that thing to him, and then he's going to think you're some kind of stalker."

"For the last time, I'm not a fucking stalker. I had to get extra footage for the projection." He would have said more, but they had arrived at the dugout, and he didn't want to continue this in front of his teammates. Amami, however, seemed to have latched onto the topic of his invention.

"Kitaooji" Amami said, gaining the other man's attention "Do you think Itsuki should tell Toa about how we beat him?"

Kitaooji snorted and faced Itsuki with a smirk. "Are you going to tell him about your boyfriend?" he asked, taking the baton from Amami.

Itsuki was getting very tired of this very quickly. "I know you started that shit." he said neutrally, glaring down at his supposed friend.

Kitaooji held his glance for a moment before beckoning Kawanaka over. "Hey Kawanaka" he cried. "Don't you want to show Toa our secret weapon from last season?" he asked, almost gleeful.

Kawanaka looked between the three men for a second or two before shaking his head. "I really don't see the point," he said. "That would just cause unnecessary drama."

Kitaooji shrugged. "That's pretty big of you." he said, backing down. "I've never known you to pass up the chance to be petty."

"There's no point in being petty right now. Definitely not with Tokuchi. We would only be proving the coach right in bringing him here if we went around starting petty bullshit. I don't want any part in started this, anyway?" he asked, narrowing his eyes at Kitaooji.

"It was Amami, actually." Kitaooji stated, finally conceding.

"That's not really like you to start needless drama. You usually have a better reason." Kawanaka stated, peering over at Amami who was looking pretty exasperated.

"It just thought he should get it out of the way before Tokuchi finds out about that thing on his own." Amami said. "I never meant for it to be this big of a should probably consider it before you get too-" Takami cut him off quickly.

"I know what I'm doing." he muttered before jogging off to stretch.

Kawanaka and Kitaooji went back to the practice field, and Amami soon followed.

After practice, Itsuki walked through the hall towards the parking lot, but decided to take a quick detour by Toa's office to see if he was still around. He wasn't being clingy. He just wanted to see if he was still around. He hadn't seen or heard from him after New Year's Eve, and he knew there was probably a pretty good reason for that. They had gotten too close. But it had been a couple of months, and he had moved past it. That didn't mean he didn't want to be friendly with him.

As he neared his office, he heard Toa talking to someone. Probably a man from the sound of it. Curious, he slowed down a bit. They seemed to be talking about the database Toa was working on earlier. When he reached Toa's door, he paused and looked in. One of the interns was showing him how to open the program he would use to make the database. He looked just as clueless as Toa did.

Before he could move on, the intern glanced back and made eye contact. "Takami" he said, looking relieved. "I heard you were pretty good at this stuff. Do you mind taking a look?"

Toa didn't look too pleased at the intern's request. "It's fine." he said. "Oeda and I are figuring it out."

Itsuki was torn. On one hand, programming was one thing he was good at. On the other, Tokuchi was not the easiest person to help. "It's alright." he said, silently cursing himself. "I don't mind showing you how to start." At this Oeda looked overjoyed. Tokuchi looked like he was marching towards his own execution.

Takami took Oeda's chair by Tokuchi, and showed him how to start his first file. Then, he created a header file, and named it player, giving it attributes. After that, he created the player file, and began to write functions, and started the get average function. After he had finished showing him how to start a line, he noticed the blank look on Toa's face. "Does that make sense?" he asked.

Tokuchi sighed and said "I have no idea how you did that or what it means. "

Itsuki rested his head on his hand. "They're punishing you for something, aren't they?"

"Probably." Toa stated.

Takami was about to say something clever until he heard a snort. He looked behind him to see the Oeda was still there. "You can go home." he said. "I can take it from here," before Tokuchi could protest, the intern reluctantly scooted out of the office.

"Why were you forcing that poor kid to help you?" he asked, smiling over at Tokuchi. "He probably wasn't even out of high school yet."

"He said he knew about computers." Tokuchi replied, rolling his eyes. "And he is well out of high school. He's a year older than I am."

Itsuki did not know how to feel about that. "How old are you, anyway?" he asked, genuinely curious.

"Why do you ask?" Tokuchi said.

"Just curious", Itsuki said, before breaking eye contact and turning back to the computer. "If you want, I can come by a bit early tomorrow and help you a bit more.

"It's fine," Tokuchi said "You have other things to worry about."

"Not really," Itsuki said. "Not since I got you out of the way".

"That didn't last too long, did it?" Tokuchi asked before trying to type something in, and nearly fucking everything up in the process.

Itsuki reached over and corrected Tokuchi's mistake. He did his best to ignore the glance Tokuchi threw his way.

"Are you ever going to tell me how you managed that?" he muttered.

"Maybe someday." Itsuki replied.

After another minute of Tokuchi trying and failing to code, and Itsuki correcting his mistakes as he made them, Itsuki glanced at the time. "We better get going. It's past 11". Tokuchi glanced up and shot the computer one last look before saving their progress and shutting it down. After locking the door, they made their way out to the parking lot together. "What time do you get here?" Itsuki asked as they neared his car.

"Usually around eight." Tokuchi replied.

"Eight a.m.?" Itsuki asked, giving Tokuchi an incredulous look. "You mean to tell me that you have fifteen hour work days."

"It sounds pretty bad when you say it like that." Tokuchi said. "It's not that bad."

Itsuki knew one thing, and that was that Tokuchi was a fucking liar. "I guess I'll see you at noon, then." he said before unlocking his car.

"You mean three. You aren't supposed to get here until three."

"Yeah, but I figured I could stop by and fix whatever damage you did to the program before then. See you tomorrow." he said, getting into his car and driving off before Tokuchi could protest.

Toa stood there for a minute before walking over to his own car. "Damn guy can't leave well enough alone, can he?" he muttered to himself before getting in, driving off.