Chapter Text
The thing about crashing from excessive caffeine is that you don’t notice it happening until you’re already there.
One moment, Yuuta is sitting at the counter—Toge having pulled a stool around for himself, close enough that their knees are almost touching, working through the last of the closing tasks—and the next moment, the counter is holding Yuuta’s head because his body has given up on him. His shoulders have dropped somewhere around his elbows. His hands are in his lap and not particularly interested in being anywhere else.
“You’re crashing,” Toge observes.
“I’m fine,” Yuuta says on reflex.
Toge looks at him with an expression that does not dignify this with a response.
“I’m crashing,” Yuuta concedes.
Toge makes him something to eat.
This is not up for negotiation. He disappears into the back and comes out with a bowl of the rice congee they keep for staff meals. It is plain, but it’s a good kind of plain your body accepts gratefully when it’s been running on convenience store protein and spite. He sets it on the counter next to Yuuta in the same way he set down the dorayaki and the water.
“You don’t have to—” Yuuta starts.
Toge hands him a spoon.
Yuuta eats the congee.
It is, like everything Toge makes, good in the way that has nothing to do with complexity. Just correct. Just exactly what it is, made with attention, which turns out to be sufficient.
He eats half the bowl before he realizes he’s been eating in silence for several minutes, and Toge has been sitting on his stool watching him.
“What?” Yuuta asks.
Toge shakes his head. Nothing.
“You’re looking at me like something.”
Toge reaches for the notebook on the counter.
You always ate like you forgot food existed until someone put it in front of you.
Yuuta reads it, then looks at the bowl.
“That’s not—” he starts.
He stops.
“That’s accurate,” he sighs.
He eats the rest of the congee.
The first real silence falls somewhere between the congee and the tea that Toge makes after. He has made hojicha, roasted and low-caffeine, which Yuuta understands is the same deal as the congee and accepts without comment.
It’s not an uncomfortable silence. It’s different from the casual silence they’ve been maintaining for eight weeks. It’s also different from the silence during the last eight days.
It’s the type of silence that only exists between the two people who know each other enough not to need to say anything. It just sits there, between them, belonging to both of them equally.
He had forgotten that this kind existed.
Or not forgotten. He deliberately buries it so deep within himself that he pretends it doesn’t exist.
“I should explain,” Yuuta says.
Toge wraps both hands around his own cup and looks at him.
“Why I’ve been coming here. I told myself it was for the work. That the light was good, the ambient noise was at the right level, and I needed somewhere that wasn’t the library or my apartment. And all of that is true. But it was also—”
He looks at his cup.
“I missed you,” he admits, feeling the weight lifting from his shoulders as the words come out. “I just wanted to see you once on that first day. But then I couldn’t stop myself from coming back. I told myself that it wouldn’t hurt.” He exhales. “But it hurt, gradually. I didn’t realize it until it was too late.”
Toge is quiet for a moment. Then he writes in the notebook and turns it: I know why you came.
“And you didn’t—” Yuuta stops. The sentence has several endings, and none of them is quite right. “Why didn’t you say something?”
Toge looks at him with the expression that says the answer is obvious, and he is being patient about it.
“Because we agreed,” Yuuta says.
A small incline of the head.
“Because I needed—” He stops again. “Because I was the one who—”
He can’t finish that one either.
Toge writes:
You needed to come back in your own way. So I let you.
Yuuta reads it twice.
“That was very generous of you,” he says, and it comes out slightly wrecked at the edges. Toge hears it, and his expression does something careful and open that Yuuta has to look away from for a moment.
The hojicha is warm in his hands. The refrigeration unit hums. Outside, the street is doing its late-night version of itself—quieter, the occasional car, the distant sound of people passing by.
“I was going to leave after the first day,” Yuuta says.
I know.
“And then I didn’t.”
I know.
“And then I kept not leaving.”
I know, Toge underlines it once more.
They stay like that for a while. It doesn’t need to be filled with anything in particular. Yuuta drinks his hojicha and watches Toge finish what remains of the closing tasks—small things, the kind that can be done from a stool, nothing that requires distance or movements.
At some point, his eyes travel to Toge’s arm.
He’s writing in the notebook—seasonal drinks, new ideas, whatever comes next—and his sleeve has ridden up slightly, and the tattoo is there. The upper half is still hidden.
“The tattoo,” Yuuta says.
Toge looks up. He glances at his wrist before looking back at Yuuta. What about it?
“I’ve been trying to see the whole thing for eight weeks,” Yuuta says. “The sleeve kept—” He makes a gesture that means: falling back into place at the wrong moment, every time.
Toge looks at him for a moment. Then, he unceremoniously sets down the pen, pushes his sleeve all the way up, and holds out his arm in front of Yuuta.
Yuuta sees the whole thing then. The stem climbs the inside of the forearm. And above it, finally, completely, without the sleeve taking over at the wrong moment: a camellia. Single bloom, small and detailed, the petals opening in the clean lines. Dark ink stark against Toge’s pale skin. The same flower as the sign above the door, the same one worked into the hand-painted lettering that Yuuta had noticed on the very first day, the detail you’d miss if you weren’t paying attention.
He had been paying attention.
“It’s the same as the sign,” he says.
Toge inclines his head. Obviously.
“When did you get it?”
Toge picks up the pen and writes:
Before I took over the shop. When I decided.
Yuuta reads it.
“What did you decide?” he asks.
Toge tilts his head for a moment before he writes again. It takes longer than usual, and when he turns the notebook, the handwriting is more deliberate than his usual unhurried precision, as if he has been holding this for a while and is choosing how to set it down:
That I was going to build something that was mine. That would still be there. That didn’t depend on anything that I couldn’t control.
Before Yuuta can respond, Toge takes the notebook back and adds something underneath:
I didn’t plan for you to walk through the door.
Yuuta reads it. He looks at the camellia on Toge’s forearm, still held out, still visible, the eight weeks of partial glimpses resolved at last into the complete image.
“Is that—” He stops. “Was that—”
Toge writes: Good or bad?
Yuuta looks at him. Toge shrugs.
I don’t know yet. Ask me in a year.
Toge holds his gaze for a long moment.
“Okay,” Yuuta nods, feeling the pounding rhythm in his chest. He lets it settle before allowing himself to speak again. “We can start counting tomorrow.”
He glances at the tattoo. Then, he reaches out slowly, giving Toge time to move if he wants to. He puts his thumb against the camellia. Against the ink. Against the decision made before the shop became Toge’s, before the sign was painted, before Yuuta walked through the door.
He holds it there for a moment. Toge lets him. They sit like that without saying anything to each other. Yuuta is still processing everything, and Toge lets him.
After a while, Yuuta says, “The sweater.”
Toge looks at him with his eyebrows raised.
“The grey one. You wore it the first day I saw you.”
A pause. Toge ducks his head slightly as he writes in the notebook: It’s a common color.
“You’re doing what I did.”
Toge’s lips press into a thin line, still not looking at Yuuta. He writes: It’s a very common color. Many people own something like that.
“Toge.”
He stops writing.
“It’s mine,” Yuuta says. “You took it from my closet after we moved in together. I almost forgot it was mine.”
The pen stays on the notebook. Toge’s ears are very pink.
“I wasn’t going to say anything about it,” Yuuta says. “I told myself it was a similar style. I was very convincing.”
Toge writes and pushes the notebook over in one motion.
I forgot I still had it until I found it in September.
“And you wore it.”
It’s a good sweater.
“Toge.”
A longer pause. Toge sighs in defeat.
I wore it. I didn’t expect you to see me wearing it.
“Yeah,” Yuuta laughs.
The word lands softly. Yuuta just realizes now that both of them have, apparently, been very bad at the thing they agreed to do.
They leave together at ten-fifteen.
Toge locks up with the same key that he gave Yuuta, which Yuuta had returned, and which Toge had pocketed without comment. They stand for a moment on the pavement outside, the December night cold enough that their breath is visible.
The dry cleaner’s dark. The stationery shop is dark. The old street lamp flickers. The street is empty and quiet.
Yuuta’s subway is left.
Toge’s apartment is right.
They look at each other.
“I should—” Yuuta starts.
Toge reaches out and tugs on his sleeve. Yuuta stops talking.
“Walk with me,” Toge says.
It’s three words, which is extravagant by his usual measure. Toge’s eyes are bright with a specific expression in them that Yuuta has never been able to say no to. He looks at the two fingers on his sleeve.
“My station is the other way,” he tries to reason.
Toge’s head tilts. I know.
“It’ll take me an extra twenty minutes.”
Toge waits, with infinite patience. The two fingers are still on Yuuta’s sleeve.
“Okay,” Yuuta says.
They walk. They take the long way, not intentionally. At first, they turn right because Toge tugs on his sleeve, pulling him that way. Then they take the turns that come, the ones that lead through the quieter streets of the ward where the buildings are lower, the light is softer, and the occasional bicycle passes with a polite bell. The cold air makes the world feel slightly more present, clearer, the kind of weather that sharpens the edges of things.
Yuuta puts his hands in his coat pockets.
Toge walks with his at his sides, which has always been his way.
They are not talking, and it is the good kind of not talking. Yuuta feels something in his chest that takes him a block and a half to identify because he hasn’t felt it in long enough that the label has gone slightly stiff from disuse.
He feels like himself.
Not the researcher-at-the-podium version. Not the careful regular in the corner. Not the person performing normalcy for the sake of an arrangement that was costing him two hours of sleep a night at a minimum. Just Yuuta, on a street at ten-thirty PM, in December, next to the specific person whose absence has been a needle in his heart for the past six months.
Yuuta is aware that they still have things to talk about, things that will require more than one night in a closed coffee shop, things that will be uncomfortable but necessary. He knows this. He is not confused about this.
But Toge is here, and the street is quiet. The needle has been removed for now, and his heart is no longer bleeding. The street has given way to a small park that Yuuta hadn’t known existed, and they slowed to pass through it without discussing it. The gravel path is underlit by the low lamps along its edge; a cat watches them from a bench with profound indifference while licking its own paw.
“I went to the mixer,” Yuuta breaks the silence. “The sociology one. You saw me.”
Toge glances at him.
“Itadori made me go.” He looks at the path. “I met someone. A PhD student, second year, very normal and uncomplicated. We went for ramen.”
Toge is quiet.
“Once,” Yuuta says. “Just once. And it was—fine, she was kind and interesting. But I spent the whole dinner thinking about you instead. I felt terrible about it and told her I was dealing with something. She was very gracious about it.” He pauses. “I’m telling you because it seems like something you should know. Not because it was significant, but because I don’t want to not say it.”
Toge walks for a moment.
Then he takes out the notebook from his bag and writes without stopping—a practiced move, the kind of thing you develop when your communication requires it. When he’s done, he holds it sideways so Yuuta can read while they walk:
There was a regular who came in every week. He worked at the architecture firm down the block. He asked me to dinner in October.
Yuuta reads it. “Did you go?”
Toge shakes his head. No.
“You don’t have to have said no on my account. We weren’t—”
I know we weren’t. Toge writes slowly while walking, the pen moving with its usual unhurried precision. I said no because it felt dishonest to go to dinner with someone while you were at the corner every day, and I was pretending not to know you.
Yuuta reads this.
He thinks, for a moment, about the paperback man. About the notebook passed between them. The easy laugh. The almost-smile. The second drink made without being asked, the relationship between which he had at the time declined to investigate.
“Was it—” He clears his throat. “The one that was there today. Was that him?”
Toge looks up from the notebook.
He looks at Yuuta.
Then he laughs, out loud, his shoulders vibrating. He shakes his head. It takes Toge a moment to compose himself, which is longer than expected, and then he writes.
That’s Haibara. He was my friend growing up. He just moved here, and we started hanging out again. He’s also been engaged since March.
Yuuta reads this.
“I see,” he mutters under his breath.
Toge is still doing the thing where his mouth is trying to settle back into a neutral expression and not entirely succeeding. His eyes are in the shape of crescent moons.
“I wasn’t jealous,” Yuuta says.
Toge writes, without looking up: You grabbed my hand from him. He was very confused.
Yuuta sighs, the corners of his mouth resisting the urge to smile. “I didn’t think straight. I had four Americanos today.”
Toge underlines the you grabbed my hand and turns the notebook to face him again.
“That’s not—” Yuuta looks at the notebook, then at Toge’s expression. Toge seems to have abandoned any remaining pretense of not laughing. “I’m not going to dignify that with a response.”
Toge caps his pen, his eyebrow slightly raised and his shoulder vibrating.
They walk out of the park and back onto the street, and the cat does not follow them. Toge puts his notebook back in his bag. Yuuta takes his hand out of his coat pocket and grabs Toge’s hand before it falls to his side again.
Toge goes still for a second but doesn’t say anything about it. They continue walking.
At the corner where Toge’s street meets the main road, they stop.
His building is visible from here—the fourth floor, the window that faces east.
The light is on. Toge must have left it on when he went to work this morning, which was always a thing he did—he never liked coming home to a dark apartment, which Yuuta knows.
“I left the light on,” Toge says, following his gaze. His voice is soft in the way it gets late at night, when it’s just them and no one else is around.
“I know,” Yuuta says.
A pause, Toge is looking at him with his eyebrow raised.
“I walked past once. In September, before I started going to Sazanka. I was taking a different route.” Yuuta scratches his nose and looks away.
Toge’s mouth curves.
“It was once,” Yuuta says.
Mm, Toge’s expression says.
“It was a different route.”
Toge tilts his head toward his building in the way that says: Come up.
Yuuta looks at the building, then back at Toge.
“It’s almost eleven,” he says. He’s aware his voice is not that convincing.
Toge waits.
“I have a meeting with my advisor tomorrow afternoon.”
Toge waits.
“I haven’t slept properly in forty-seven hours.”
“Come up,” Toge says out loud.
Yuuta looks at him. At the light on in the fourth-floor window. At the distance between here and the door, which is not much, his feet could cover in approximately forty-five seconds without any particular effort.
“Okay,” he says.
They walk up four flights because the elevator is slow and takes longer than the stairs, which Yuuta knows because he has used it multiple times before. At the fourth-floor landing, Toge unlocks the door, pushes it open, reaches inside to flip the light switch, and then steps back.
The apartment is warm.
It smells of everything that belongs to Toge. Coffee, faintly, imprints into the air because he makes it every morning. Something clean beneath that. The ambient smell of a lived-in space that has absorbed its occupant over time.
Yuuta steps in. He takes off his coat and hangs it, without thinking, on the hook on the wall. The motion stops when he realizes the hook is still there—it has always been there, because it was always his, because the hook was added for him. After all, at some point during the two years and seven months, a second hook had been installed, slightly higher than the first.
His hand is still on the coat.
Yuuta turns around.
Toge is watching him from the kitchen entrance, leaning against the doorframe, with a smile on his face.
“It’s still there,” Yuuta says, pointing at the hook.
Toge inclines his head.
“You didn’t—”
No, his expression says.
Yuuta looks back at the hook.
Then, he crosses the hallway in three steps. Toge straightens up from the doorframe. They are close enough now that Yuuta has to look down slightly, the way he always has, and Toge has to look up, the way he always has. Neither of them has to think about it because it has always been this way, and some things, it turns out, do not change regardless of how long they are apart.
Toge's pale eyes are reflecting the light. And in those eyes is the expression of someone looking at something they thought they’d lost.
Yuuta brings his hand up and presses the back of it against Toge’s forehead.
“Normal temperature,” he says.
Toge smiles. He grabs onto the front of Yuuta’s shirt to pull him down. Yuuta let himself be pulled, then Toge gets on his tiptoe and presses his hand to Yuuta’s forehead, mimicking the same motion that Yuuta’s hand just made.
“Normal temperature,” he whispers.
Yuuta feels the corners of his mouth curve. His chest does the complicated thing it’s been doing since the first day he walked into Sazanka and ordered the most impersonal drink on the menu and tried to be a stranger, which he was never, not for a single moment, not once.
He drops his hand but doesn't move away.
Neither does Toge.
“Tell me what happened,” Yuuta says. “To us. Tell me your version. Not tonight—” He shakes his head. “Not yet. But I want to hear it. I need to hear it, and I need you to hear mine, and I think if we’d done that—I think that’s what we should have—”
Toge puts a hand on his arm and squeezes gently.
I know, his hand says. We will.
Yuuta breathes.
“Okay,” he says.
“Okay,” Toge says and leans in to kiss Yuuta.
Yuuta falls asleep on the couch at eleven-forty.
He doesn’t mean to. He’s sitting at one end, shoes off, head tipped back, while Toge sits at the other with his legs stretched and a book open on his knee—the same book from the badly-organized shelf in the shop. Yuuta notices it and thinks: he reads it on his break.
It’s just a new habit Toge has started during the six months without Yuuta knowing, which has been true this whole time without him, and he is only finding out now because he is sitting close enough to see the spine.
He wonders how many other new habits he’s not aware of. He intends to find out.
His mind wanders as he’s listening to Toge turn pages. He’s thinking about the seasonal drink coming back. About Toge tugging on his sleeve, walk with me, and the hook that is still there. At some point, he stops thinking about any of it, and just—
The last thing he is aware of is Toge reaching across to put something over him.
The soft blanket from the back of the couch, which Yuuta had bought and put there a while ago, on his skin.
Then the warm settled smell of the apartment.
Then the sound of a page turning.
Then nothing.
He sleeps and does not wake until morning, when the light comes in through the windows and finds him. For a moment—just a moment, in the soft confusion of waking in an unfamiliar familiar place—he doesn’t know what month it is or how long he’s been away.
Then he hears, from the kitchen, the sound of coffee being made.
Grinder, kettle, the sound of water hitting the coffee grinds, the slow dripping intervals.
He lies there and listens.
Outside, the morning is doing its thing. The light is gentle and warm, slightly diffused, coming through and resting easily on the wooden floor.
Yuuta puts his arm over his face and breathes.
Two years, he thinks. Seven months and some days, I’m not counting.
Then, because the kitchen smells like coffee, and the apartment smells like itself, and the hook is still there, and the cardamom hot chocolate is coming back, and Inumaki Toge makes coffee the way he makes everything—with attention, without performance, exactly what it is and nothing more and nothing less:
Yuuta gets up.
He goes to the kitchen doorway.
Toge is at the kitchen counter with his back to the door, making breakfast, the morning light catching the silver-blonde strand, the heather-grey sweater—Yuuta’s sweater, worn at home now, worn without apology—pushed up at the sleeves.
“You’re awake,” he says without turning around.
“I’m awake,” Yuuta says.
Toge turns to look at him.
“I’m making breakfast,” he says. He’s always more talkative in the morning. “You can’t have more coffee until I say you can again. I need you to know that.”
“Yes, until you say I can,” Yuuta agrees without a second thought.
Until I say you can. That means it will be a while from now. That means that Inumaki Toge will be in Okkotsu Yuuta’s life for a while from now. And the thought of that makes Okkotsu Yuuta’s mouth do something stupid, and he’s aware of that, but he won’t do anything to stop it.
Toge is still looking at Yuuta, who is smiling like an idiot, with an expression that has decided to be fond rather than exasperated, which is a decision that takes visible effort and is made anyway.
“You’re wearing my sweater,” Yuuta says.
Toge looks down at the sweater and then back up at Yuuta, his eyebrow raised.
Yes, the brow says. And?
“Nothing,” Yuuta says. “Just noting.”
Toge turns back to the breakfast.
Yuuta leans in the kitchen doorway, watching him, and does not think about anything in particular.
He just looks.
They walk to Sazanka together at eight-fifteen.
The morning is cool and clear, the specific clarity of early winter after a cold night. Their breath is visible for the first block before the air warms enough to absorb it. They walk the same way they walked last night—Yuuta’s hand in his coat pocket and Toge’s hand at the side, and their hands holding each other in between.
The stationery shop is opening. The dry cleaner has its light on.
Sazanka is dark when they arrive. Toge unlocks the door. The bell makes its dinging sound.
Yuuta steps over the floorboard.
Toge pauses behind him.
Yuuta turns. “First time,” he says.
Toge steps over the floorboard, too.
He goes to the counter and begins the opening routine. He turns the machines on, checks the grinder, and brings out the cold brew from yesterday’s prep from the back. He moves through it without thinking, the body knowing the sequence before the mind has processed the first step.
When he passes the season drink board, he stops.
He stands in front of it for a moment—the current description still chalked there, whatever it says, whatever it has been saying for the weeks Yuuta has been ordering black coffee and pretending it was sufficient—and then takes the chalk from the small cup beside the register and erases the board. Then, he writes.
Yuuta puts his bag down on the corner table, watching him as Toge writes the drink first—cardamom hot chocolate—in the same careful hand that chalked the original menu. Then the description, two lines. Then, at the bottom, smaller than the rest, underlined once:
coming back (finally)
Toge steps back, looks at it proudly, and returns the chalk. Then, he turns around and smiles at Yuuta.
Yuuta looks at the board for a moment, then at Toge. He smiles, too.
He takes out his laptop and opens it.
He has, he thinks, approximately six hundred data points remaining in his labeling phase. His methodology chapter is in an acceptable state. His advisor’s last email contained, for the first time, only one comment. The spring conference application is due in February, and he has, provisionally, something worth presenting.
He has work to do.
He opens the data file.
Behind the counter, Toge is refilling the grinder. Then, without turning around, he asks: “What do you want?”
And Yuuta—
who spent eight weeks ordering plain black coffee, who stood in an elevator and told himself to stop going, who counted data points and closing times and the seconds that someone looked at another person leaving, who stepped over a floorboard without telling himself, who ate the dorayaki and drank the decaf and removed the hand from the back of his neck because he was scared of what might happen, who came back and kept coming back and could not be a stranger because he never was—
Looks up.
“A cardamom hot chocolate,” he says. “Please.”