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Isamu blinks when the door of his apartment opens and only one person walks in.
“Where’s Naki?” He asks. Wordlessly, Yua flops down across from him.
After a long moment, however, she finally explains the missing Humagear.
“They said if I didn’t go home at a reasonable time, they’d shove a pair of ZAIAspecs on me and make me,” she explains. “They spent too much time in your head.”
Isamu huffs, but he doesn’t rise to the bait. He might have once, but, well, things have changed.
Yua quirks a smile, nonetheless.
“They said they’d finish my work, too,” she says. “I am. Unfairly lucky to have them around.”
“You used to do the same for me.”
“Because you’re terrible at paperwork,” Yua counters. Isamu hmfs and doesn’t otherwise bother to reply to that.
“It’s unnecessary,” he says. “All that paperwork just to do your job.”
“Back then, you would have been the one to shoot Naki,” Yua points out, which… is actually fair.
“Probably,” Isamu says. “Things change.”
“That they do.”
Isamu can’t think of anything to say after that, and so he doesn’t, and Yua leans back and closes her eyes. This is nice, in its own way. Quiet moments like this where it’s easy to remember life before things had changed. Back before Isamu had somehow found himself the sane one in most situations. Before he’d realized how deep and trapped his former partner was.
It is nice to have her over, though. Back then, she would never…
Wait.
“Weren’t you supposed to go home?” He asks.
“Your place is closer, isn’t that why you first bought it,” Yua asks, though her eyes are still closed. She’s right, of course. “Naki said they didn’t need to charge today, so I can take the couch.”
“Didn’t you think to ask first?”
Yua opens one eye only to give her a completely unimpressed look.
“Would you have told me to leave?”
“Of course not!”
“Exactly.”
She knows him too well, unfortunately.
It is nice, though, that she knows it now. Isamu takes this moment of silence as Yua closes her eyes once more to check the clock. Oh.
“It’s time for my evening run,” he says, getting up from the couch. “Should I grab you a blanket or something?”
“I’ll be fine,” Yua says. “Thank you.”
Isamu comes back an hour later to find Yua completely asleep on the couch, the news playing on his phone, and her suit jacket tossed on the floor. he news playing on his phone, and her suit jacket tossed on the floor. He tries to remember… she’d left clothes last time, right? Had he thrown them in with his last time he washed his clothes?
He thinks so. It wasn’t that long ago, though.
He grabs a blanket from the closet and throws it over her before sitting back down next to her.
“One day you’ll move in and I won’t even notice the difference,” he mutters, sitting by her feet and taking a moment to watch the news.
(Fittingly, about the case currently exhausting AIMS, he notices.)
Then he turns it off.
He wakes up to her alarm before she does. This is not the first time this has happened. Anything but, in fact. Isamu stumbles from his bedroom to go turn it off, when she doesn’t, and he shakes her awake.
Yua groans.
“Isamu?” She asks, sleepily.
It takes Isamu longer than it should to realize she’s talking to him. He blames his exhaustion.
(Isamu, huh?)
(…Then again, how long ago had he started thinking of her as “Yua”?)
“Your alarm went off,” he says. “Probably means you should get up.”
Yua stretches, yawning, and her face quickly shifts from soft with sleep to frowning.
“Great,” she says. “It’s too early.”
“I checked and your clothes are clean,” Isamu offers. Yua turns to him, and her frown lessons.
“Thank you,” she says.
“Of course.”
This is ridiculously domestic, isn’t it?
But Isamu thinks he’s growing to like it.