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The door to their dorm room clicked open, and Morgan swallowed whole the konpeito on their tongue. They cupped the pocket watch in their palms and swallowed again to force the candy down.
“Hey Emmett,” they greeted, keeping their eyes trained on their project.
There were grooves all the way around its semi-triangular circumference, and marks at one of its round corners. They dug their nails into the groove and pulled. There was no more damage they could do to the watch, it was already broken, but they didn’t have the force they needed to get it apart without hurting themself.
Before fishing in their desk drawer for a knife to pry open the watch, they called again. “Emmett?”
They glanced up from their desk, and their eyes grew wide at the face just inches from theirs. That was definitely not their roommate. They sat in stunned silence. The feeling of warmth against their lips registered well after the kiss was broken.
“Knock, idiot!” Morgan exclaimed.
Azusa flashed them a devilish smile. “Your roommate is out.”
“You’re still supposed to knock,” Morgan huffed. “Why are you here?”
Azusa leaned in for another kiss, and they met him halfway. He cast his uniform cloak over Morgan.
“Hey! What was that for?” Morgan grabbed at the fabric, pulling on it until they found open air.
Azusa wasn’t in front of them anymore. They twisted farther around to find him sinking into their bed and examining the cat plush beside him with distaste. “Randy actually gave it to you?” he muttered.
Morgan shoved the cloak under their desk and leaned over the back of their chair. “You still haven’t told me why you’re here.”
“He’s experimenting with that wad of cotton again,” Azusa said. “Something obnoxious; I didn’t ask for details.”
“Fair enough.”
Morgan turned back to their work in progress, but before a knife, they reached first for the small, half-full bottle of konpeito. They poured a few candies into their palm, picking out a counted number of them and lining them up on the desk. The rest, Morgan funneled back down the neck of the bottle. After popping the first candy in line into their mouth, they dug out the knife they needed.
The back of the watch snapped off with some effort. Though they didn’t have a key to wind it, fifty lune still sounded altogether too much like a steal for such a simple fix. They angled the watch this way and that, peering into the cracks between the cogs.
“Ah, there’s no mainspring,” Morgan remarked. “Maybe if it had a magic spring…” Ideally, when they were done with it, the pocket watch would measure time without ever needing to be wound again.
They picked up another piece of konpeito.
“Are you only eating the white ones?”
Their head sinking between their shoulders, Morgan glanced sheepishly to the unusually well-behaved intruder in their bed. They had almost forgotten about him, but there he was, sitting up with the cat plush in his lap and staring pointedly back. Morgan turned away again before Azusa could get a good look at the pink invading their features.
“Or did you eat all the colored ones first?”
Morgan slid the small bottle of konpeito out of Azusa’s line of sight.
“I just gave you that bottle yesterday. You haven’t eaten that many of them already, have you?”
Morgan shook their head.
“Then where are they?”
Morgan turned about in their chair, looking at anything but Azusa, and gestured vaguely in the direction of the end table beside their bed. Its one, shallow drawer couldn’t hold much, but it could hold enough. Azusa crawled to the edge of the bed, cat plush abandoned, and pulled out a second bottle of konpeito – the missing colored candies.
“I don’t want to eat them,” Morgan confessed.
Azusa frowned. “Why?”
“They’re pretty.”
“I guess,” he said. “But so are paper stars, stupid. You could fill a bottle with those instead.”
Morgan buried their face in their hands. “I don’t know how to make stars.”
“I’ll show you,” he said. “I’m sure even a goof like you could get the hang of it.”