Chihara had always hated mornings after a bad crime scene, not that there was such a thing as a good crime scene, obviously, but his mind made categories anyway.

There were clean atrocities and messy atrocities, professional atrocities and stupid atrocities, ones that ended at the epicenter and ones that followed you back to your desk with drying blood in the grooves of your shoes. There was something uniquely cruel about returning to a room full of people who had not stood in that apartment, who had not felt the floor stick under their soles, who had not bent down beside a corpse and picked up one small gold button from the corner and felt, with ridiculous clarity, their own career shift one inch closer to ruin in the palm of their hand.

He walked through the office with the same expression as always. Wit his hair tied low, tie straightened, coat damp at the shoulders, face composed enough that no one looked at him twice.

That, he supposed, was the benefit of having experience, or reputation, or the type of tired face people mistook for calm because it had survived too many terrible mornings already.

“Chihara-san,” one of the junior officers called from near the desks, half-rising with a folder in hand. “The preliminary report from last night…”

“Leave it on my desk, please.”

“Yes, sir.”

He did not slow down, he did not look too eager either, he did not look like a man who had slept beside the person behind a brutal murder and woken up with the memory of a whispered confession folded carefully inside his chest.

You matter to me more than I know how to say.

Chihara sat down at his desk and stared at nothing for a moment. Then his hand moved before his thoughts did; he opened the top drawer, took out a notepad, and wrote in small, tidy handwriting near the corner of a page:

• Gauze, tape, antiseptic, saline, painkillers? proper eye patch.

He paused with the pen hovering over the page, not thinking, absolutely not thinking, only reviewing what had been missing the night before with the same detached practicality one might bring to an inventory list. The gauze and the tape from yesterday were too old, and Hitomi’s glasses were almost totalled. The bruising around the eye had looked bad enough that Chihara’s stomach had twisted every time he came too close to touching it. None of that was emotional, that was just observation, evidence, data, extremely inconvenient data with a swollen face and a tendency to say unbearable things in a small voice.

He added:

• New glasses. Need a prescription?

He could still see Hitomi as he had looked the night before, terribly bruised and swollen, with one eye hidden beneath the clean gauze Chihara had taped down himself, pretending not to flinch even while his fingers trembled against his own shirt. Hitomi moving around that apartment half-blind, injured, hungry, and alone. Hitomi sleeping badly, Hitomi waking up and needing water and bumping into something and deciding, somehow, that calling for help would make him too much trouble because that's how Hitomi is.

The thought sat under Chihara’s ribs like a stone.

Ugh.. No, absolutely not. Horrible image.

He shook his head once, as if the motion could physically dislodge it, then wrote another line.

• Easy food. Something warm. Something sweet.

He looked at the words for a second too long, then he tore the corner from the page, folded it once, and slipped it into his pocket before anyone could walk by and ask why a detective in the middle of a murder investigation was making a shopping list like a worried wife.

Work did what work always did: it demanded structure from him.

Reports, phone calls, evidence logs, statements, corrections, names repeated until they stopped sounding like names and started sounding like items on a form. The victim’s name came up again and again, insisting on itself like an annoying phone call, and each time it was spoken with slightly less sympathy once his criminal record circulated through the room. Nobody said good riddance out loud. They were not that stupid, or maybe not that honest. But the silence after the charges were read carried its own judgment as an agreement no one had to sign.

Chihara listened, nodded, and wrote what needed to be written, acting as normally as he could. He was so normal that if normality were a performance, he deserved a round of applause.

Every few minutes, his gaze moved to his phone.

Nothing.

That was good, he told himself. Hitomi was probably still sleeping, because Chihara had told him to rest, and Hitomi was occasionally capable of listening when an instruction aligned with something he already wanted to do, and Hitomi is a star at wanting to sleep anytime.

Maybe he had taken painkillers, maybe he had eaten, maybe he was curled under the kotatsu with his hair stuck to his cheek and his one visible eye narrowed in irritation at being alive and expected to maintain himself.

By late morning, Chihara had checked his phone eight freaking times, eight! Like an idiot, like a teenager waiting for a reply after a confession. Which this was not, this was not that, this was a welfare check, a practical concern, a man had been injured, left alone, and he happened to be someone Chihara could not stop thinking about for more than ten consecutive minutes without his chest doing something humiliatingly young.

On the ninth time, he gave in.

[11:21]: Are you awake?

He stared at the message for too long before sending it, annoyed by the weight behind so few words. It was not a lover’s message, of course not. It was not even especially warm, he was simply checking whether Hitomi was conscious. That was all! Sensible, responsible, ordinary, perfectly explainable, as long as no one ever asked him to explain anything.

The reply came twelve painful minutes later.

[11:33]: I haven’t left my bed yet. But I’m alive, if that’s what you’re wondering.

Chihara exhaled through his nose, and for the first time that morning, his shoulders eased. He wondered if the message had woken Hitomi up, and the mental image of him replying from bed, grumpy and half-blind and offended by the morning made something in Chihara soften before he could stop it.

[11:34]: Eat something at least (*・∀-)☆

Hitomi replied almost immediately this time.

[11:34]: I will, boss.

Chihara looked at those words until the screen dimmed. Then he turned the phone face down on his desk before someone caught him smiling.

In the afternoon, the case came back to him. It came from two desks away, brought up in the way people share theories or work gossip, this one just carried a bit more blood than necessary.

“Hey, Chihara-san,” another detective said, leafing through a stack of older notes. “You remember that one case from last year? The missing guy with the weird clean-up? There’s something about last night’s scene that reminded me of it. Same kind of amateur panic, don’t you think? But some parts are too careful, so…”

He trailed off, as if the rest of the thought could complete itself.

Chihara did not move for half a second.

The pressure rose fast inside his ears. He did not panic, but his body acted dramatically before his face had granted permission. His hand stayed where it was, his pen did not twitch and his breathing remained even, keeping it cool.

“Which case?” he asked.

The detective named it, case number and everything. The number went down Chihara’s throat like he swallowed a blade, and it lodged somewhere behind his sternum.

He knew that case, of course he knew that one. He knew every case that circled close to Hitomi, every report that had nearly drawn a line around him, every loose thread Chihara had touched and moved and touched again, again and again, until it no longer looked like a thread to anyone else. He never destroyed them, though.

He was not stupid.

Destruction was loud, destruction left fingerprints, empty spaces, strange absences that invited questions from the exact sort of bored, clever person who liked pulling on loose threads.

Doubt was different. Doubt could be cultivated, it could be watered patiently, pruned into a convenient shape, and allowed to grow in the right direction. A priority could be redirected, a file could become less urgent, a witness statement could be made to look frail where it was already weak. A similarity could be acknowledged, respected, and then buried under three better explanations. Chihara had become very good at it, too good even, it would have impressed him if it were done by someone else.

And Hitomi had thought he was angry over an ignored text message, hah. That was almost funny (it was not funny at all.)

Chihara set his pen down calmly. Very good acting there.

“That case?” he said, uninterested. “Different victim profile, different location, different probable motive.”

“Yeah, I know,” the detective replied, already losing interest now that Chihara sounded certain. That was the ugly magic of certainty; people wanted to borrow it from you. “Just the scene, you know? The blood clean-up attempt, the missing trace… you know.”

“I know,” Chihara said. “I also know panic can look very similar when people don’t know what they’re doing.”

“Hm. True.”

“Don’t connect cases because of a feeling,” Chihara continued, his tone gentle enough to pass for instruction. “If you see a concrete overlap, bring it to me. Otherwise, you’ll waste half the room chasing ghosts, and you know how I feel about that.”

The younger detective laughed awkwardly. “Right, right. Fair.”

The conversation moved on, but Chihara’s pulse did not.

He sat with his hands folded over the report and a blank expression on his face while the room continued around him. In the distance, someone complained about the printer, someone dropped a file, and a phone rang in another room. Near the back, the kettle clicked off with a small, domestic finality that made him feel briefly insane.

Inside his pocket, the folded shopping list pressed against his thigh.

He wondered if Hitomi had any idea how much of his life had been held together by hands he never saw moving.

By the time Chihara was finally able to leave, the sky had already started to dim.

He bought the medical supplies first. Gauze pads, tape, antiseptic, saline, a proper eye patch, disposable gloves, clean cloths, painkillers, a cheap thermometer, and a small bottle of eye drops he bought only after standing in front of the shelf overthinking for nearly a full minute. In the end, he decided he would rather be excessive than sorry, which sounded reasonable until one considered the broader situation and realised that the concept of Reasonable had left the building several murders ago.

The worst part, obviously, was that none of this was enough.

Hitomi needed a hospital. That was the correct answer, the adult answer, the answer any sane person with a bruised, half-blind, possibly concussed twenty-three-year-old in his care would have reached before breakfast. A doctor should have been tilting Hitomi’s chin up beneath a white examination lamp, asking him how many fingers he could see, checking the pressure behind the eye, swelling, fractures, nerve damage, all the terrible little words Chihara knew just well enough to fear but not well enough to do anything useful with.

Instead, here he was.

Detective Chihara, thirty-five years old, respected by his department, trusted by his juniors, experienced enough to tell when a witness was lying from the way their hand moved around a paper cup, and apparently reduced to standing in a pharmacy aisle with a basket full of supplies.

Great, excellent, very professional.

He dropped the eye drops into the basket anyway, because the correct answer had become dangerous, and the safe answer was not care, not really. It was concealment wearing the clothes of care. Gauze and antiseptic and clean cloths, all these useless things sealed in plastic packaging, as if he could wrap enough tenderness around the truth to keep it from bleeding through.

The cashier said nothing about the pile of first-aid items. Chihara appreciated that, then disliked how easy it was, then filed the detail away automatically because apparently some part of his brain was still at work even while the rest of him was busy falling apart.

Pharmacy cashiers rarely ask questions about suspicious purchases. Good to know, but terrible at the same time.

Then he stopped at a convenience store.

He stood in front of the refrigerated shelves with the exhausted seriousness of a man examining evidence. This was food for Hitomi, which meant it had to be chosen carefully, which was an absurd amount of pressure to put on packaged rice porridge, but there it was.

Rice porridge, egg sandwiches, jelly drinks, yoghurt, bottled tea, miso soup, cut fruit, and two onigiri. Soft food that required little effort and very little chewing, because Hitomi’s jaw had looked bad, and Chihara could still hear the small catch in his breath when the bruised side of his face moved too much.

Then pudding, of course. He picked it up too quickly upon seeing it, ordinary pudding in a plastic cup, food no one should put emotion into, and yet there he was, thinking of Hitomi’s face brightening around a spoonful of sweetness, that tiny visible change he probably did not know he made, and the almost-childish pleasure of it.

Chihara wanted to see that again, so he bought it.

At the last second, for reasons he chose not to examine too closely, he bought a toothbrush.

Then he stood outside in the evening air with two plastic bags in his hands and realised, with quiet horror, that he had also bought enough to imply he intended to return to Hitomi’s place and stay the night.

…

That was one way to learn something about himself.

Hitomi opened the door after the first knock.

Too quickly, suspiciously quickly. As if he had been waiting near the entrance and then dared to look irritated about the fact that Chihara had arrived.

He looked better, but not good. The bruises had darkened overnight, settling into ugly purples and yellows along his cheek and jaw. The gauze over his eye had gone slightly crooked, as if he had slept badly and then pretended that counted as rest. His hair was mussed, his sweatshirt hung loosely from his small frame, and his remaining eye lowered at once to the two plastic bags in Chihara’s hands with such immediate suspicion that Chihara almost wanted to hide them behind his back. Ridiculous impulse, as if he had not carried evidence bags out of murder scenes before.

“Why did you bring so many things?” Hitomi asked. Not hello. Not you came back. Not anything soft enough to reveal how quickly he had opened the door.

“Hello to you too,” Chihara replied, stepping inside before Hitomi could decide whether to invite him in properly or block the entrance out of wounded pride.

Hitomi still moved aside for him, with a faint frown and one hand hovering near the doorframe. Then he watched Chihara remove his shoes, shrug out of his coat, and hang it on the rack near the entrance with the quiet confidence of a man who had already decided he was staying long enough to justify being comfortable.

“What is all that?” Hitomi asked again, softer this time, curiosity beginning to escape through irritation as he tried to peek into one of the bags.

“Things you need,” Chihara replied.

“I don’t need that much.” Hitomi said, sounding as if he were defending himself. Chihara quickly refuted, “You don’t even know what’s in it yet.”

The apartment was still dim, but not as suffocating as it had been the night before. A cup sat on the table, the blanket by the kotatsu had been folded badly, which was still better than being left in a defeated heap on the floor, and beside the sink rested a rinsed bowl upside down, proof of something Chihara had not yet asked about but noticed immediately anyway.

Hitomi noticed him noticing.

“I ate,” he said at once, with the tense defensiveness of someone submitting evidence before an accusation could be made.

“I can see that,” Chihara replied, and despite himself, there was a little warmth in his voice. “Good job.”

Hitomi’s face warmed, barely, but enough for Chihara to catch it. He looked embarrassed by the praise, though not enough to hide the small way his shoulders relaxed, and then seemed embarrassed by that too, which was almost impressive. Hitomi was capable of making comfort look like an egotistical offense.

He followed Chihara to the table and hovered there while Chihara began unpacking the bags, not helping or interrupting with commentary, just looking. Gauze pads, tape, antiseptic, saline, disposable gloves, clean cloths, painkillers, eye drops, and a thermometer. One item after another appeared on the table, and with each new thing, Hitomi’s expression moved further from suspicion into something closer to alarm.

“Oh my god,” he muttered, staring at the growing pile. “You bought a whole pharmacy.”

“I wanted to be prepared.” Chihara said, as he busied himself arranging supplies on the table, because it was easier to look at antiseptic wipes than at Hitomi’s face after unpacking such a large amount of supplies from a bag. Then he pushed one of the convenience-store bags toward him.

“There’s pudding.”

Hitomi looked at the pudding, then at Chihara, then back at the pudding, as if the plastic cup might explain itself better than Chihara had.

After a long silence, he asked, “Why?”

“Because you’re injured.”

“No,” Hitomi said, still staring with that strange guarded confusion, as if dessert might have a hidden motive. “I mean the pudding. Why?”

Chihara glanced down at it, suddenly aware of how ridiculous it was to feel caught over a convenience-store dessert. “I thought you might want it.”

Hitomi’s expression changed very slightly, his mouth pressed together, and his gaze dropped back to the plastic cup as if Chihara had set something much more fragile than pudding in front of him. For a moment, he looked like he did not know what to do with being remembered, then he reached for it.

“Thank you,” he muttered, holding it carefully in his bruised hand.

Chihara changed the bandages with quiet concentration.

Hitomi sat by the kotatsu with his hands tucked between his legs, enduring the attention with the strained patience of someone who both hated being fussed over and desperately needed not to be abandoned halfway through it. An awkward combination, but a very Hitomi combination, to be fair. He flinched when the tape pulled at his skin the wrong way. Chihara apologised each time, even when the flinch was so small most people would have missed it.

“The swelling went down a little,” Chihara said, leaning closer to inspect the injured eye.

In all honesty, he was not entirely sure it was true, but he said it anyway. Lying to reassure an injured man whose injury he could not safely take to a hospital was probably not a good idea, it actually felt like another dignified milestone in his moral decline.

Hitomi looked doubtful. “It looks disgusting.”

“It looks better than yesterday.”

Chihara dabbed carefully near the edge of the bruising. Hitomi’s good eye followed his face. Without glasses, his gaze had a softness to it that made Chihara feel too visible, as if the blurriness made Hitomi less able to keep the rest of himself guarded. Or maybe Chihara was simply standing too close to him and inventing poetry to justify it; either was possible.

“You went to work?” Hitomi asked suddenly.

Chihara glanced at him for half a second before returning his attention to the bruise. “Yes.”

Hitomi’s brow furrowed. “Have you been home yet?”

“No.”

“That’s stupid,” Hitomi muttered in a small, irritated voice. “Take a shower at least.”

Chihara pressed the tape down with his thumb, smoothing the edge so it would not catch. “I’ll think about it.”

Hitomi held his thoughts for a second, a bit annoyed at how Chihara said things so easily. “Thinking about things doesn’t count as doing them,” he remarked.

That almost made Chihara laugh, almost, he did not laugh. Hitomi was watching his face with an intensity that would have been easier to endure if he could actually see him properly. Chihara’s hands paused for half a second, just long enough for the silence to notice, then continued smoothing the tape into place. “Maybe I will.”

Hitomi was quiet for a moment. His gaze lowered, fixing somewhere around Chihara’s wrist instead of his face. Then, after a few minutes, he said, “Did they notice anything?”

Chihara knew what he meant; he was not asking about showers anymore.

“About yesterday?” Chihara asked, though they both knew there was nothing else it could be. He pressed another edge of tape down with careful, unnecessary precision. “No.”

Hitomi swallowed. The answer should have comforted him, but instead, his shoulders drew inward, and guilt settled heavily in the space where fear had been.

“You shouldn’t have done that,” Hitomi said quietly.

Chihara finished pressing the last strip of tape into place before answering. “I know.”

Hitomi looked up at him, confused by the flatness in his voice. “Then why?”

Chihara sat back on his heels, and the room seemed to grow still around them.

Because I saw your button and thought of you bleeding somewhere alone, he could have said. Because I was afraid before I was reasonable. Because by the time I recognised it, I had already chosen. Because whatever this is, it has moved past the place where I can pretend I would stand aside and let them take you.

He could have pulled his brain apart trying to explain it to Hitomi. He could have laid every ugly, frightened, unprofessional piece of himself on the floor between them and still not found the right order for it.

Instead, Chihara said, “Because if anyone was going to find it, I wanted it to be me first.”

Hitomi’s expression changed before he could hide it. His face tightened, not with pain exactly. More like shock, the shock of having heard something too direct to misunderstand.

Chihara stood, took the used gauze to the rubbish, washed his hands in the sink, and returned to sit across from him. He did all these things slowly because if he moved too quickly, he might decide not to say anything at all.

“There’s something I need to tell you.”

Hitomi went very still. His fingers tightened around the hem of his sleeve almost automatically, like his body had reached for armour before his mind knew what was coming. He had been bracing for bad news for so long that fear had become almost domestic to him, a household object, something he kept within reach.

Chihara noticed immediately.

“It’s not about last night,” he said first. “Not exactly.”

Hitomi did not speak.

Chihara rested his hands loosely over his knees and looked down at them for a moment. He had thought about how to say this plainly, clinically. As information and not a confession. Ridiculous, again, because the thing itself was a confession. Every version of it was a confession. The only question was whether he dressed it in professional language first, as if that would somehow make it less ugly.

“Months ago, right after our trip to your town, someone brought up a lead at the precinct,” Chihara said. “A real one.”

Hitomi’s face changed.

“It wasn’t solid proof,” Chihara continued carefully. “It wasn’t enough to name you directly or bring anyone to your door. But it was not nothing. It had dates and connections between places that should not have been connected. If the wrong person had held onto it long enough, if they had been stubborn enough, it could have started narrowing things down.”

He hesitated.

“To you.”

Hitomi’s face drained of colour.

“Was it one of the men I killed?” he asked.

Chihara’s silence answered him, and Hitomi looked away, as if shame came over him. For several seconds, there was no sound except the faint hum of the refrigerator and the quiet traffic beyond the walls.

“I see,” Hitomi said, it was a terrible voice, flat, small, trembling and already retreating.

Chihara leaned forward slightly. “No, listen to me. It didn’t spread.”

“…What do you mean?” Hitomi’s visible eye moved back to him, filled with sudden dread. “You did something again?”

“Yes.”

Hitomi closed his eye.

The confession did not comfort him at first, Chihara could see that clearly. It struck him like a delayed blow, not only had he been protected, but protection meant danger had been close enough to touch him without his knowledge. It meant Chihara had been moving around him in the dark all this time. It meant the silence Hitomi had filled with guilt had been occupied by something larger, uglier, and far more real.

“That’s why you didn’t text me again,” Hitomi said, piecing together the silence that had followed him for the past few months.

Chihara’s throat tightened.

“I thought…” Hitomi’s voice thinned, but he forced the words out anyway. “I thought it was because of what I said about us that morning.”

Chihara looked at him.

Hitomi’s fingers twisted in his sleeve. “I thought you were disgusted with me, or angry, or hurt, or maybe you realised I was too much trouble. I didn’t know… You didn’t say anything.”

“I was angry,” Chihara said quietly. Hitomi flinched. Chihara did not sound angry right now, but the mental image of Chihara’s anger seemed to move through him anyway, cold enough to raise shivers down his spine.

“I was offended too, at first,” Chihara added. “A little, I won’t lie to you.”

Hitomi gave a faint, humourless laugh.

“But that’s not why I stayed away.”

Hitomi looked back at him then. His visible eye was wet, angered, confused, too young and too old at once.

Chihara kept his voice flat, almost impartial, though something in his chest had begun to hurt. “I stayed away because I was trying to keep that lead from becoming official. From becoming something I couldn’t manage. I couldn’t afford to be distracted. I couldn’t risk anyone noticing I was too interested in it. I couldn’t risk being seen near you while they were looking in your direction.”

Hitomi said nothing.

“So I did what I could,” Chihara continued. “I questioned the connection, redirected it, made it look frail where it was already weak. There wasn’t enough to hold, but there was enough for someone curious to start pulling, and I stopped them from pulling.”

Hitomi’s lips parted, but no words came.

Chihara looked away first. “I should have told you something, I know that. Even a message, anything.” His jaw tightened. “But every message felt dangerous, a visit could become evidence. And then yesterday there was actual evidence in front of me. I saw your button on the floor and realised I had been careful for weeks just to end up there anyway, standing in blood, choosing before I even had time to think.”

Hitomi stared at him. The walls around him seemed to shrink under Chihara’s words.

“You did all that,” Hitomi said finally, voice barely above a whisper, “and I didn’t know.”

Chihara did not answer. Hitomi looked down at his hands, his bruised knuckles, the torn skin, the faint remaining rust of blood under one nail that no amount of washing had fully removed.

“I thought I ruined it,” he said.

Chihara’s expression shifted. “Ruined what?”

Hitomi’s mouth trembled once, then steadied through sheer force.

“Whatever this is.”

The words went through Chihara.

Whatever this is.

Still unnamed, still unclaimed, still somehow heavy enough to ruin both of them.

“No,” Chihara said, and the answer came out too quickly, almost rough. “No, you didn’t.”

Hitomi stared at him, thrown for half a second by the distinction. “You’re saying I didn’t ruin this?”

“I’m saying you didn’t ruin this by not answering a silly message.”

Hitomi’s expression folded inward. He turned his face away, trying to hide behind the damaged angle of it, behind the eyepatch and bruises and hair falling over his brow. Chihara gave him the mercy of not reaching for him immediately.

“I kept thinking about it,” Hitomi admitted. “Our conversation, my stupid question, your text... everything. I kept opening your text and not answering. Then too much time passed, and it felt worse. Then I thought if I called you after I killed that man, you’d think I was only calling because I needed help.”

“But you did need help,” Chihara said, and the certainty of it seemed to stab him.

“I didn’t want to be more trouble.”

Trouble.

That stubborn, rotting little belief Hitomi kept hidden somewhere under his ribs, always growing back no matter how many times Chihara tried to cut it out. Disposable, burdensome, too much, a problem to be managed until, one day, someone became tired enough to stop managing him. Chihara hated it, he hated that thought with a purity that surprised him. It did not matter how many times he tried to push it out of Hitomi, it returned, crawled back in, made itself comfortable, and put its feet up on the furniture.

Fine, then, if it wanted to be stubborn, Chihara could be worse.

He reached across the table and covered one of Hitomi’s hands with his own. Hitomi froze, startled by the sudden contact.

“You are trouble,” Chihara said calmly. Hitomi stared at him, confused by the honesty and slightly offended by it.

“A lot of trouble, actually,” Chihara continued. “More than I know what to do with most days.”

Hitomi’s face went blank, wounded before the rest of the sentence could arrive. Chihara’s hand tightened over his.

“And even then, I am still here.”

Chihara leaned forward, searching for Hitomi’s gaze. “I need you to understand that both things can be true. You can be difficult, dangerous, even. You can scare the hell out of me sometimes. You have made terrible choices, you have hidden your injuries, left my messages unanswered, and nearly died in strangers’ apartments that smell like blood and rot.”

Hitomi stopped breathing for a moment.

“And I can still come back,” Chihara said in a soft voice, letting the silence open between them for a long minute.

Hitomi looked down at Chihara’s hand over his. His fingers were thinner, bruised, still swollen in places and yet Chihara’s hand covered them too easily. It was unfair, really, how simple it looked. As if all Hitomi had to do to disappear was let someone larger hold on.

Hitomi looked up, anger flickering through the wetness in his eye. “Don’t say it like it’s easy for you.”

Chihara’s mouth softened at the edge. “I never said it was easy.” Chihara held his gaze. “Even if it’s hard. Even if I don’t always know how. I will try to keep coming back to you.”

Hitomi searched his face, and whatever he found there made his expression falter. For the first time since Chihara had arrived, Hitomi moved toward him on purpose. Not much, just a small shift across the kotatsu, a leaning of his tired body into the space between them, but Chihara understood it for what it was and met him halfway. Hitomi’s forehead came to rest against his shoulder. It was not an embrace, not exactly; his hands stayed in his lap, his body remained tense, as if waiting to regret the softness. But his forehead pressed into Chihara’s shirt, and that alone felt like more trust than most people ever handed over with both hands.

Chihara stayed still, and after a long while, Hitomi muffled his voice against the fabric. “I really thought it was my fault.”

Chihara closed his eyes. “I know.”

“No,” Hitomi said, and his voice came out small, smaller than anger. “You don’t get it. I thought I had made you leave.”

Chihara’s hand rose slowly and settled against the back of his head, careful of the bandage, with his fingers resting in Hitomi’s hair.

“I’m sorry,” Chihara said. “I should have found a way to tell you.”

Hitomi shook his head lightly, enough to show frustration without lifting his face. “No. You were being smarter than me. You were protecting me. I get that now.”

“That doesn’t make my sudden distance less painful.”

Hitomi absorbed that slowly, without moving. Chihara could feel the warmth of him through his shirt, the small weight of his head, the faint tremor still hidden in his body, or maybe not hidden at all.

On the table, the pudding sat unopened beside the medical supplies, all the soft, insufficient things he had bought because he could not buy safety, could not buy innocence, could not buy a world where the correct answer was not dangerous.

Hitomi’s hand shifted under his, and very slowly, his fingers curled around Chihara’s sleeve.

Then, very quietly, he said, “Thank you.”

Chihara did not tell him there was nothing to thank him for, that would have been kinder, maybe, cleaner, more decent. Instead, he rested his hand more securely in Hitomi’s hair and stayed exactly where he was.

After a long silence, Chihara reached for the convenience-store bag and pulled out one of the onigiri.

“Eat this.”

Hitomi lifted his head from Chihara’s shoulder with obvious reluctance. He took the onigiri, opened the wrapper with careful fingers, and bit into it, a small bite, demure bite, a very Hitomi bite, as if even hunger had to ask for permission before entering the room.

“You’re staying tonight too?” Hitomi asked, with his mouth half-full.

Chihara did not answer immediately.

The truth was that he should not. Staying would be stupid, which was becoming an unfortunately recurring theme in his personal life. There were already too many threads, too many risks, too many ways his judgement had begun to rot around the edges. Any sensible man would leave after changing the bandages, after making sure Hitomi had food and supplies, confirming he was alive, telling him to call if the fever rose, and then going home to sleep in his own bed like an adult with a career and a future.

Also, and this was a smaller but still very real problem, Chihara had been wearing the same clothes for two days. Two nights, technically. One night here, one full day at the precinct, and now possibly another night here, which meant if he walked into work tomorrow morning in the same suit again, someone would notice. Not everyone, maybe, most people were tired and overworked and less observant than they liked to think. But the precinct was full of detectives, which was terribly inconvenient when one was trying to act normal while making increasingly indefensible domestic choices.

Hitomi watched his hesitation and misread it instantly.

“It’s fine,” he said too quickly. “You don’t have to.”

Chihara looked at him with eyes that seemed to figure out a puzzle, there was no accusation in Hitomi’s voice, that was almost worse: no anger, no pressure, no attempt to keep him there. Just that quick retreat into making himself easy to leave, as if he could spare Chihara the discomfort of wanting anything by pretending not to want it first.

Chihara hated that too.

He was beginning to suspect he hated quite a lot of things when it came to Hitomi, the self-loathing, his avoidance, his untended injuries, his cold apartment, the exact angle of his mouth when he expected abandonment and was trying to look mature about it. A truly impressive list.

“I was thinking I should leave before morning,” Chihara said at last, carefully, because the truth was not always kind, but silence had already done enough damage between them. “I need to change before work.”

Hitomi’s eye returned to him, and for one brief, naked second, he looked relieved that the hesitation had not been about him, then he looked guilty for being relieved, then he looked irritated, probably because he realised Chihara had watched the whole thing happen on his face.

“You’ve been wearing the same clothes since yesterday…” Hitomi observed very quietly.

“Yes.”

Hitomi’s gaze fell to his tie again, and something about that small, practical attention made Chihara feel more exposed than he had any right to feel. The tie was still straight, the shirt was not dirty in any dramatic way, there was no obvious stain, nothing that would explain the strange intimacy of being noticed. But Chihara knew, and now Hitomi knew, and the two of them sat there with the ridiculous, domestic horror of it between them: he had crossed police offices and pharmacies and convenience stores and this apartment in the same clothes, like a man whose life had narrowed down to work, murder, and making sure Hitomi ate.

Hitomi’s face folded into a frown. “Take a shower here.”

Chihara almost laughed, it wasn’t funny really, it was such an impossible little act of kindness. “And put the same clothes back on?”

That stopped him. Hitomi looked annoyed with the logistics, as if the clothes had betrayed him. “I can wash your shirt.”

“I don’t think it will quickly enough, though” Chihara remarked as gently as he could.

“I have a hairdryer.” Hitomi quickly said as if presenting a new and groundbreaking piece of information.

“Your hairdryer will not save us, unfortunately.” Chihara tried to contain his smile after noticing Hitomi’s determination.

Hitomi looked genuinely offended by that, and Chihara had to look away before the smile manifested on his face and made everything worse. It was absurd, it was absurd that this was the conversation they were now having after the day they had survived, it was absurd that a man was dead, that Chihara had misdirected an investigation, that Hitomi had almost lost an eye, and now they were discussing whether a hairdryer could return a dress shirt to professional respectability before sunrise.

But maybe that was what living was, in the end. Not redemption or absolution, just the humiliating continuation of ordinary needs, of food, gauze, laundry, sleep, a clean mouth, somewhere to put one’s tired body.

Chihara remembered the toothbrush in the bag and felt, with sudden painful clarity, that he had already known he would stay before he allowed himself to think it.

“I’ll shower,” he said finally. “I’ll sleep for a few hours. Then I’ll leave early, go home, change, and head to work from there.”

Hitomi looked down at the onigiri in his hands, “That sounds tiring.” Hitomi stopped to reconsider the situation. Maybe he was being too needy, too unfair, too selfish, trying to keep Chihara to himself for this long. “You should just go home then.”

“You should stop deciding what is easier for me.” Chihara responded. His words came out quiet, not even harshly, but Hitomi still froze around them. Chihara regretted the phrasing at once, he was too tired for delicacy, too tired, maybe, to pretend that Hitomi’s constant attempts to make himself disposable were not wearing him off.

He softened his voice. “I know you’re trying to be considerate, but let me decide.”

Hitomi’s mouth tightened into a line. He did not look up, then, after a long moment, he nodded.

Such a small thing, but such an enormous thing at the same time. Chihara wanted, absurdly, to praise him for it and knew that would make Hitomi combust on the spot, so he kept that impulse where it belonged, buried somewhere with all the other terrible urges that had become his private torment.

The shower was another problem. Hitomi gave him a towel that smelled faintly of detergent and old apartment damp, then stood in the hallway holding a change of clothes he had clearly found through sheer optimism: a soft black t-shirt, loose on Hitomi, maybe, but not on Chihara, absolutely not. It looked like it would either tear at the shoulders or cling to him in ways neither of them was emotionally prepared to survive.

Hitomi seemed to realise this at the same time Chihara did, as they both stared at the shirt, then slowly lowered it in shame with their ears going pink.

Chihara had to turn his face away. “Thank you,” he said, appreciating the kindness offered.

Chihara took the t-shirt and the towel, and left the bathroom door not quite shut because the lock was broken, apparently, or because Hitomi did not use it, or because this apartment had been designed by someone who hated dignity. The shower pressure was weak, the water took too long to warm, he washed his hair with shampoo that smelled faintly like apples and something clean enough to make his throat tighten, because it was Hitomi’s shampoo, and that was a ridiculous thing to have a feeling about.

He scrubbed the day from his skin, but could not scrub all of it away, as much as he tried. Blood did that, guilt did that, some things got under the nails of the mind and stayed there, no matter how hard you scrubbed.

Chihara came back out wearing his trousers and the borrowed t-shirt, with his hair wet at the ends and the towel around his neck, feeling far more vulnerable than a man in his own trousers had any reason to feel. Hitomi was sitting very still by the kotatsu, with the onigiri finished and the pudding unopened beside his hand. His visible eye moved once over Chihara, from the damp hair to the bare forearms to the t-shirt stretched across his shoulders, then away so quickly it almost made a sound.

Oh.

Chihara pretended, very professionally and heroically, that he had not noticed.

He sat down more slowly than usual, because the room had changed by a fraction, not dramatically, nothing had happened. Except his shirt was hanging in Hitomi’s apartment and his toothbrush was still inside one of the plastic bags and Hitomi had looked at him with a lascivious face for half a second before remembering to hide. The world remained technically the same, but it also did not.

After an introductory cough that fooled neither of them, Chihara began outlining the rest of the week with the composure of a man discussing nothing more consequential than errands. First, they would sort out Hitomi’s glasses; he only needed the old prescription, and Chihara could order the replacement pair for him. Then they would buy groceries, proper groceries, not just convenience-store survival food. And after that, once those smaller and more manageable problems had been dealt with, they would have to start apartment hunting-

Hitomi had been reaching for the pudding when Chihara said it. His hand stopped midway, scared by the reality of what was just said, because thinking about leaving this place is one thing, but moving out is a terrifyingly different possibility.

“You said you wanted to move”, Chihara reminded him, gently. “We can start there.”

The bruises and bandages seemed to pull the words from the night before back into the room.

I want to try enjoying life again. Even if I don’t know how yet.

Hitomi’s gaze lowered to the table. For a moment, he looked embarrassed by his own desire to live, as if wanting a future had been a melodramatic thing to say while concussed and bleeding. And now, terribly, someone remembered that.

Chihara had said “we” so positively, too. Does he see himself in Hitomi’s future with this much certainty?

He contemplated for a long time, searching for the trick in it, the hidden condition, the place where the offer would turn back into loneliness, or betrayal or anything that would make more sense. Chihara let him to his thoughts; he had nothing clever to add, and for once, that felt like the point. There wasn’t any lecture or argument or anything that sounded too professionally stiff, they just sat there across from each other in a dim apartment full of medical supplies, one old shirt, and a future so small it could fit inside the word we.

Eventually, Hitomi looked away first.

He opened the pudding and Chihara pretended not to notice how his hands moved with greater confidence than before.

The apartment remained tired and full of things that could still destroy them, but the shape of the night had changed. Chihara had thought he would stay only long enough to keep watch, maybe sleep sitting up if he could not make himself lie down. Yet now there was the low heat of the kotatsu around his legs, the soft sound of Hitomi eating pudding in careful spoonfuls, the apple-clean smell of Hitomi’s shampoo in his own hair, and the troubling fact that his body, traitorous thing, was beginning to understand this place as somewhere he had returned to because his heart felt warm in it.

It was nearly the end of the year, he realised suddenly.

That seemed absurdly impossible, how? This fast? The year had been too long and too short and rotten all the way through, and yet December had come anyway, with audacity, dragging its lights and advertisements and ridiculous cheer through the city as if the world had not noticed what had happened inside it. Soon, the pharmacies and clinics would change their working hours, offices would close, families would make plans, people would buy cakes, argue over train tickets, visit shrines, drink too much, and pretend the turning of a calendar meant anything could be washed clean.

Chihara watched Hitomi scrape a little pudding from the corner of the cup.

“Do you have plans for the end of the year?” he asked.

Hitomi paused midway with the spoon close to his mouth, it was a simple question, it should have been. But there were no simple questions in that apartment, only harmless-looking ones with teeth hidden inside. Hitomi thought about it seriously, as if Chihara had asked for a statement.

“Christmas… no,” he said after eating the spoonful of pudding, his voice was cautious, almost distant. “I don’t usually do anything, not anymore.”

Chihara knew that and had not known it at the same time, knowledge settled poorly in this vague space.

“And New Year?”

Hitomi’s spoon rested against the pudding cup. “I wanted to visit my grandmother.”

He said wanted, not want, Chihara noticed the difference immediately.

Hitomi did too, probably, because he looked down with a small frown. “I don’t know if I can now, if my eye still looks like this, she’ll worry. My parents might be there too. Or neighbours… people might ask things.” His mouth tightened, not quite in fear or frustration. “I wanted to go before. I thought maybe if I went there, if I saw the sea, if I slept in that room again, I could… I don’t know.”

Start over, maybe. Remember himself, stand somewhere that had known him before all this and see whether any part of that boy answered back. Chihara did not say any of that, but he understood the feeling in silence.

Hitomi took another spoonful, but he did not seem to taste it this time. “It depends on my eye,” he concluded.

“Then we’ll see how it heals.” Chihara concluded, and Hitomi nodded.

The silence after felt loudly obvious; Chihara could no longer pretend he had asked by accident, because he had not. The thought had been there since the convenience store, maybe earlier, maybe since he had written something sweet on the shopping list and folded the paper into his pocket like a secret. Christmas was not sacred to him in any serious way anymore, maybe when he was engaged, yes, but that is in the past. It was a date people made too much of, a night of crowded restaurants, overdecorated cakes, couples walking too close together under lights that tried too hard. It should not have mattered now.

But it kind of mattered.

It mattered because Hitomi had no plans, because Chihara wanted to give him one, because asking meant something, and not asking also meant something, and he was tired of leaving Hitomi alone with all the wrong meanings. He wanted a solid promise so Hitomi could cling to it. And maybe Chihara also needed a promise, for himself.

Chihara looked down at his hands, they looked larger than usual in the warm kotatsu light, his knuckles were rough, and his nails clean from the shower; there was no visible sign at all of what they had done today. Useful hands, guilty hands, reliable, dependable, such good hands, they had moved files, changed bandages, bought pudding and touched Hitomi’s hair. He flexed them once against his knees.

“You could spend Christmas with me,” he said.

It somehow sounded like a confession, which he did not mean to, technically it wasn’t one. It also barely sounded like an invitation, if one wanted to be cowardly about it. But the words entered the room and changed the air anyway.

Hitomi did not answer right away, which was terrible for Chihara, who could not bear the memory of his own voice resonating in his brain, ugh he sounded terrible, pathetic even.

Chihara did not look up immediately either, which was ridiculous because he had said it, he was the one who had put the idea between them, but for one childish second, he wanted to avoid seeing what it did to Hitomi’s face. He was too old for this, too tired, too far gone, apparently, because his pulse had started beating in his throat over Christmas, Christmas! Of all possible disasters.

When he finally looked, Hitomi was staring at him, he did not look confused, not really. More like the meaning had reached him too quickly, and his body had not yet decided what to do with it. The pudding cup sat forgotten in one hand, his visible eye looked dark and bright in the dimness, still wet around the edges from everything earlier, still guarded, but no longer retreating.

“With you…” Hitomi repeated.

“If you want,” Chihara said, sounding apologetic for even putting the thought between them.

Hitomi’s mouth moved slightly, as if several answers had tried to arrive at once and collided. Chihara watched him swallow them down, it would have been easier for him to turn the invitation into something practical, to say Hitomi should not be alone while injured, or that restaurants would be crowded, or that it was only food, only company, only a normal evening arranged because normal evenings were healthy for people recovering from traumatic injuries and murder. He could have dressed it in care, he could have buried it under usefulness, but he is being rarely dumb right now, impulsive, reckless, driven by a strange force residing in his chest that he does not want to acknowledge.

“Because I want,” Chihara said before Hitomi could ask him. Before he found an excuse to make himself dismissable.

The spoon slipped softly against the inside of the pudding cup.

Hitomi looked down at it as if startled to find it still in his hand, then he set it on the table with exaggerated care. Hitomi’s hand crossed the space between them and stopped near Chihara’s wrist, not touching, only close enough that warmth could become a question.

Chihara let him decide, and for a long, tender moment, Hitomi did nothing.

Then his fingertips touched the inside of Chihara’s wrist.

Barely, the smallest possible contact, but he did not pull away, and Chihara felt it travel through him with such force that it was almost humiliating.

The kiss did not happen immediately; it could have, maybe, if either of them were easier people.

Instead, Chihara turned his hand slowly beneath Hitomi’s fingers, giving him every chance to retreat, and when Hitomi did not, he took that bruised hand carefully in his own. Hitomi’s breathing changed, and Chihara noticed it, he heard it, the room was too quiet not to.

He leaned forward, not all the way, not enough to steal the decision from him. Hitomi’s eye widened slightly, and there it was again, that moment of fear or want or both. Chihara stopped before their faces were close enough to call it inevitable. He waited there, close enough to feel the faint warmth of Hitomi’s breath, close enough to see the damaged skin around the bandage.

Hitomi closed the remaining distance himself.

The kiss was careful, it had to be. His face was bruised and the corner of his mouth was sore. Chihara was suddenly aware of every possible way he might hurt him, every rough place, every selfish pressure, every careless angle. So he kept it soft, almost still, a brush of mouths that became a second one because Hitomi did not move away, then a third because Hitomi’s fingers tightened around his wrist as if asking for more.

There were no words in it.

That was the mercy of it.

No answer for “what are we” and no promise large enough to frighten either of them back into silence. Just Hitomi’s little mouth that felt warm and trembling against his, tasting faintly of pudding and rice and the salt of a terrible day survived. Chihara’s hand raised carefully next to a bandage to cup the side of Hitomi’s face where he could touch without hurting him. Hitomi made a startled soft sound when Chihara kissed him back with a little more certainty, not enough to take, but enough to answer.

Yes.

Yes, I want this too.

Yes, I know, I know. Me too.

They did not say it, but it was obvious. Words were redundant.

When they parted, neither of them moved far.

Hitomi’s eye stayed closed for a moment longer than necessary while his lashes trembled. Chihara watched him with the strange, helpless ache of a man looking at something he had wanted without permitting himself to want it. Then Hitomi opened his eye and looked at him directly, bruised and bandaged and impossibly young in the dim room, but not retreating now.

“Christmas,” Hitomi said at last, so quietly the word seemed to belong only to the space between their mouths.

Chihara’s thumb moved once along his cheek, barely a touch.

“Christmas,” he agreed.