Work Text:
Urie is getting tired of having their squad meetings at :re.
“Will you please just go on a date already?” he demands. Sasaki and the barista — who had been exchanging puns and smiles and coy gazes — look over at him in surprise. Urie huffs.
“You two are making me sick,” he continues, looking down into his phone to switch songs. “Plus, the meeting was supposed to start ten minutes ago.”
“Y-you’re right. Sorry,” Sasaki says. And then he turns to the barista and says, “S-so…how about it, then? Do you want to go on a date?”
“Yes,” the barista says shyly. “I do.”
Their cheeks tinge with red.
“O-oh — that’s — that’s great!” Sasaki exclaims. “Maybe — maybe you’d like to try a different cafe, next week? I — feel like cafes are where I can best espresso my feelings —“
This feels like being stabbed in the fucking ears.
Urie leans back in his chair and turns the volume of his headphones up.
:::
They begin having more of their meetings in Sasaki’s house, and Urie’s relief immediately turns into frustration as it becomes clear that Kirishima Touka is still going to be hanging around here. She arrives halfway through the meetings, unlocking Sasaki’s door with her very own key. Though she’s usually just finished a shift at the cafe, she always begins preparing them all espressos on the little machine that she bought for Sasaki’s kitchen.
“Here you go, Urie-san,” she says brightly. He gives her a curt, wordless nod, and sips.
:::
One night, Urie waits for her to burst in and interrupt as usual, but she doesn’t come by at all.
Without her coffee to soften the atmosphere, everyone’s interactions get tense — or maybe it’s just the fact that they just can’t agree on a solid plan for their next operation.
“Maybe I should stop meddling,” Sasaki sighs. “You four have to be able to figure it out yourselves eventually. You can stay as long as you like; I’ll leave you to it.”
Lazy ghoul, Urie thinks as Sasaki retreats into his room. Slacking off just because he has a nine thousand percent Rc level or whatever.
Without Sasaki around, though, their arguments get even more heated, and by midnight, everyone is too tired to go on.
“But we need to figure this out,” Urie argues, and Shirazu shakes his head.
“It’s late. We’ve been at it for hours…maybe we all just need to sleep on it. I’m the leader,” he reminds Urie, as if Urie could ever fucking forget, and so the three of them go, and leave Urie alone with the map and their notes on the table, trying to think through all the details by himself.
While everyone isn’t here…maybe he can come up with a plan that puts him in the best position to get a promotion. Yeah, yeah. It would have to be subtle, of course — maybe he could suggest Saiko to take point — she’d never take it, and then Urie himself could step in. Hey, don’t worry, I’ll do it — that’s what he could say. Then he could be at the forefront…and the Osmanthus Award could be all his. The first of all the rest he would eventually receive. He’d have to get a shelf for them all, or maybe get rid of some of his canvases. No, wait, he couldn’t do that. He should just —
The light flicks on in the kitchen. Urie straightens and glances back. To his surprise, it’s Kirishima, and the moment she spots him she jumps.
“U-Urie-san,” she says. “What are you doing here?”
“Working,” he answers flatly.
Her eyes flick toward the clock, which reads 3:13am. Then she looks back at him.
“…Okay,” she says. “Well…would you like me to make you some coffee?”
“Coffee,” Urie echoes. “At three in the morning?”
“You still have about eight hours until tomorrow’s meeting,” Kirishima points out, and he thinks that he can hear some dryness in her usually cheerful voice.
“Alright, make me one,” he says, because he figures this will keep her, at least, from bothering him.
It doesn’t. To his dismay, after Kirishima brings him his mug, she sits down on the other side of the table and looks across the diagrams, her own cup cradled in her fingers.
“You’re really devoted to your work, aren’t you, Urie-san?”
“I’m the best at it,” he informs her. “By the way, this is classified information.”
“I’m just a barista,” Kirishima says. “What am I going to do with it?”
He scowls at her. Kirishima brushes her hair back behind her ear, unperturbed.
“I’ll just finish my coffee and go to bed.”
“Caffeinated drinks help you sleep?”
“Yes.”
He snorts, and says nothing. They sit in silence while Kirishima sips. Once she’s finished, she washes her mug in the sink, says “Goodnight,” and walks back to what is undoubtedly Sasaki’s room.
They don’t have any shame at all. Urie lifts the volume on his headphones again, and sips his coffee, and gets back to work.
:::
Kirishima begins staying over at Sasaki’s place most nights. Urie doubts that anyone else knows this, and he doubts that Sasaki knows that Urie knows this either.
Sasaki is so clueless. He probably doesn’t even know that his own girlfriend has so many sleeping problems.
“Do you drink coffee in the evenings? Maybe that’s why you can’t get any sleep,” Urie says, the third night that they meet in the kitchen.
“Maybe,” Kirishima allows. “Do you have any suggestions for alternatives?”
Urie rubs his head. Like he has any idea.
“Reading?” he says, and he's surprised to see Kirishima’s eyes light.
“I do like reading. But when I’m reading myself, I don’t get sleepy.”
“When you ’read yourself’? What do you mean? How else can you read?”
“Well, someone can read to you,” Kirishima says. “For example, my father used to…”
She trails off. Urie stares, waiting for her to pick up again, and when she does, it’s with a much quieter voice.
“My father used to read to me until I fell asleep,” she finishes simply.
“My father did that too,” Urie finds himself saying. He glances up at Kirishima, just in time to see her gentle smile.
It’s a little different than the smile she makes at the cafe, when she’s talking to all the other customers — he doesn’t know how he knows it, he just knows. There’s a quality to it that’s way more sincere. She makes this smile the next night as he tells her about the success of his surgery and about how Arima, the CCG’s greatest, had had faith in his ability from the very beginning. She makes the same smile again two nights later when she asks him what music he’s listening to and he hands her a headphone. They spend the next hour in silence, listening on Sasaki’s couch, side-by-side. Her eyes close; her head bobs, ever so slightly.
You’re so easy to make happy, he thinks. So easily manipulated.
That’s probably how Sasaki got you. Sure, he looks kind and as nice as any other person. But what if you knew that he was a ghoul?
Then she for sure wouldn’t dare to stay overnight at Sasaki’s apartment as often as she does. She wouldn’t laugh at all his stupid puns or spend so much time actually reading all his books. She certainly wouldn’t look at him the way she does when she thinks no one else is watching, like Sasaki might vanish the moment she takes her eyes off him.
There’s something strange about her, he decides. Something really suspicious. There’s no way someone like her could actually exist without some kind of big, ugly secret. He starts going to :re by himself, trying to pinpoint it, trying to figure it out.
One day, Sasaki calls him into his office.
“Are you tailing Touka?” he asks.
“What? No.”
Sasaki frowns at him.
“Stop following her,” he says, and Urie snaps, “Why? So no one will notice when you one day lose control and eat her like the ghoul you are?”
“Wh...what?”
“Nothing,” Urie mutters. “I didn’t say anything.”
:::
When the truth finally breaks, he can’t handle it. He can’t accept it. He. Can. Not.
There are a lot of things he can accept. Having some sort of attrac — rapport with some random going-nowhere barista is one of them. Having a special understanding with his boss’s lover, sure.
But having these sorts of feelings — for a ghoul —
His blood is simmering beneath his skin, beneath his eyeballs. He grips his brush, knuckles pale; the hole in his palette digs into the soft skin between thumb and forefinger. The paint splashes and streaks and drips, wetly, freely, out of control. His eyes are unfocused; he follows the rhythm of his music, and when it’s finished, he raises his eyes properly to what he’s made, breathless, like he’s been running.
It’s her silhouette — perfect — down to the way her bed-tousled hair caresses around her cheek, down to the particular curl of her hand as she nurses her coffee.
Urie snaps his paintbrush in half.
Touka is a monster, he tells himself. A murderer. Inhuman.
He goes on, and on, and on.
But no matter how long he tries, he fails to find any words that can stop the tremble in his chest.