Work Text:
"But what does it mean," Philip says frowning. Shoutarou cringes.
"Oi, Akiko, this is your fault, why do I have to deal with it?!"
"Can't he~ar you," she says vigorously. . . supervising as Terui Ryuu mutters to himself heatedly while he mops coffee and ceramic from the floor with a hand towel.
"And what about you, huh?" This, he directs to Terui. "That's twice, now twice, that you're directly responsible for this!"
". . . tastes like burnt coals, no, doesn't matter, shake off everything. . . ."
Shoutarou stands up, knocking his chair over in his haste.
"What did you say?! I will have you know my mouth is perfectly clean! I brush after every meal! Two times." A blatant lie, but what's he going to know? "And what do I get for it, huh?! Maybe it's your mouth that needs the cleaning, Terui Ryuu."
Philip's hands land on his shoulders and he finds himself turning to stare into his entirely too close face.
"I'm 368 hours, 20 minutes and an indeterminable amount of seconds older. I will attempt to calculate the seconds based on speech pattern and sentence length if you really want me to, but either way is irrelevant to my comparative age. What does it mean?"
That is not at all what "I'll tell you when you're older" connotes.
Shoutarou stares at him for a long moment, counting the pores on his nose.
"Ah, mou," he shouts and shoves Philip off him in a firm flurry of limbs. "Fine, fine, I hate you both," he says, leaning around Philip to point in abject irritation at the others.
"Can't he~ar you," Akiko repeats.
"And don't you think you're exempt," he adds, poking Philip in the chest, whose entire reply is nothing more than silence and an expectant look. "Right, fine, okay," Shoutarou says, rolling his shoulders like he's prepping for a fight.
"So there's two people right? Two-- two friends."
"Like you and Terui Ryuu."
Akiko nearly chokes herself laughing and Terui roars at the ground and scrubs faster.
"You, shut up," he snaps when Aikiko trips over her own feet and lands in a gangly heap on the ground. "And you--" he pokes Philip in the chest. "--no questions until I'm done." Philip frowns, but seems to acquiescence.
"Anyways, two friends, not at all like Terui and I, two friends who are much closer than friends," and oh he does not like the way Philip's eyes light up at that, like he thinks he understands something. He remains silent though, so Shoutarou continues, narrowing his eyes at him in suspicion, absently leaning over to set his chair to rights. "They like each other very much and to show that, they, they," he flaps a hand, first in Terui's general direction, then in a loose circle in the air around his own lips. "Kiss."
He can practically hear Akiko rolling her eyes, and his hand comes up of its own volition to protect the back of his head from a phantom attack, even though she's half-way across the office. She can be fast when she wants to be. "And some other stuff," he adds in a murmur, for no other reason than he is completely off his rocker. His hand snaps up. "No," he says, before Philip can speak. "No, I'm not elaborating on that. That, you can ask your books."
Philip's eyes narrow. "You requested I didn't."
"Yeah, well," he shrugs, and lets his legs give out from under him, flopping back into his chair and setting it to spinning in pouty little half-circles. "Things change."
Philip relaxes, body going loose.
"Good. You're not very informative."
Shoutarou sits back up.
"Oi!"
That's not the end of it, of course it isn't, Shoutarou's life is never that easy. Things settle to relative normalcy sometime after that, after Philip leaves to hole himself up in his library, Akiko comes over and smacks him over the head, reprimanding him viciously about "not explaining things half-heartedly to impressionable young minds". Shoutarou clutches at his aching head and roars, "he's not a child!" in reply, and Akiko's eyes go wide and her lips purse as she raised the shoe threateningly in his direction. Shoutarou cowers, and hops back a few steps away from her and, then, sometime many hours later Terui Ryuu goes home for once in his life.
Sometime after that.
Sometime after that, Philip comes to him in the middle of the night, when Shoutarou is sleepless, reading a novel with heavy eyes. He puts one hand on his desk, coming around to the back, until his toes are touching the tips of Shoutarou's, colored stripes against grey.
It's so late it's nearly early, and if he's honest, Shoutarou's started doing less reading and more watching the backs of his lids.
So when Philip leans in close and presses their lips together, filling the air with the floral scent of his laundry and the tang of his shampoo, the entire thing bleeds into something like a dream.
"What," Shoutarou says, blinking stupidly against the grit in his eyes when Philip pulls back, a hint of a curl at the edges of his lips.
By this time, Shoutarou's almost forgotten the subject of the day, lost in the scattered rush of people that make their office seem smaller than it is, near bursting at the seams. He is, at this point, quite certain he is dreaming.
"Thank you," Philip says and disappears in a flip of colorful fabric, descending back into his basement study as abruptly as he came.
The next morning, when Philip doesn't come up, Shoutarou writes the incident off as a figment of his imagination. Everything seems normal enough, with Akiko filling the air with shrieks, and Terui serenely brewing coffee while Shoutarou fields the seventh missing cat report that week.
Shoutarou himself is in an exceptionally good mood, despite how little he slept. It's enough that Akiko remarks on it, checking his temperature and pinching his skin between her fingers for dehydration and being a general nuisance. She hounds him, until Shoutarou cracks and forcibly removes himself to begin the search for one of the at-large pets.
He comes back to an empty office, hands equally empty. The chill late-autumn air clings to him and fills the room with the scent of fallen leaves. He claps his gloved hands with vigorous enthusiasm, unperturbed at his lack of results. Things come at their own pace, and today Shoutarou is filled with euphoric, though frankly irrational certainty.
He unwinds his scarf, humming to himself as he hangs up his heavy coat and gathers up a sheaf of clean paper for the beginnings of, well, something, to keep his hands busy.
This time, Philip apprehends him in mid-step, crowding close until he's pressed against a patch of empty wall, eyes wide at the pure suddenness of the change of trajectory. Warm hands come up to curl around his wind-chilled cheeks. Philip has always been a little cold, kept with metal and underground air, but right now, beneath the bulk of his clothes his body is insulated and his lips feel like they're boiling against Shoutarou's. Philip's so close he can feel every shift he makes. So much of him is impossibly soft over a layer of thin muscle, and thinner fat, the elegant growth of his bones hidden poorly beneath. Shoutarou's hands come up to flutter indecisively in the air, hovering just shy of touch, a decision taken from him when Philip steps back, one hand sliding away, and the other come to rest against the bone of his breast.
Philips lips twist down and his brows draw into a little crinkle of confusion and after a moment of Shoutarou staring, breathing heavy, he whirls away again. The sheaf of papers still clutched in Shoutarou's hand flutter in his passing.
This time, he's far too awake to write it off as a dream.
In the ringing silence, Shoutarou slumps down to the ground, back sliding down the wall as legs come out from under him, and swears loudly into his hands.
It wouldn't be a problem. Shoutarou's been Philip's test subject an exhausting number of times before. Costumes, food, books, culture, so many experiments he's lost count if only because he doesn't think he can count that high.
He's used to it is his point. It would be nice if he could just ignore this one like everything else, as Philip powers through every scrap of information involving a set number of people putting body parts on other body parts and frankly making a nuisance of himself. It feels like a bit of a betrayal that he can't.
Oh, it wasn't like he hadn't made his peace with it some time ago; pragmatism was an important part of his personal philosophy and he wasn't, no matter what some people might think, particularly keen on battering his metaphorical head against a metaphorical wall.
Or, well, his heart was probably more accurate in this case, but it turns out that his heart was particularly stubborn where his head was not. He'd done his best to move on with life. He kept his options open, wide open and his intentions even clearer, but his luck was never his strong point. He liked to think he was more of a 'spanner in the works', but Akiko would probably just say he had a knack for fucking things up.
So, here he was single, looking without any real luster, and now, thanks to Philip's impromptu reminder of something he very much liked not thinking about, heart-sick down to his very bones.
They were friends, partners, brothers, and he hated how greedy and ridiculous it was that his heart wanted just that one step in a different direction when they were, to each other, already more than words could say.
He doesn't get much sleep again that night, tossing and turning in his sheets, with the curtains drawn firmly against the outside world. The next morning he is decidedly less cheerful than the last, because his pretty fantasy has been taken from him and he's been smacked in the face with the reality that his partner has all the social graces of a half-tamed alley cat.
"Coffee," he growls, snapping his teeth at Terui Ryuu when he hands him a delicate tea cup filled with fragrant brew, curling up at his desk with his feet on the edge and a stack of papers strewn like a storm in front of him. He types furiously for awhile, curled up like a pretzel and muttering to himself as he works. Maybe if he looks awkward enough Philip won't accost him again and he can pretend his hands aren't shaking and his heart isn't sitting like so much dead weight in his chest.
He gains nothing from the endeavor but an unusable hank of papers and an irrational and sudden hatred of anything related to tuna.
"Uhm," Akiko says, an indeterminate amount of time later, hesitation strung through the entire syllable. "Shoutarou, are you okay?"
He looks up to find Akiko, Terui and a set of three strangers staring at him in concern, though Terui looks more violently enraged than concerned.
"I'm going out," Shoutarou decides in that moment and shoves past the lot of them and through the door into the lightly snowing afternoon.
It's not what he wants to do. What he wants to do is to march back in there, climb down the stairs, slide a hand around Philip's back and sweep him off his feet into a kiss so searing he'd never come back down from the euphoria. He can feel the need with frustrating clarity tingling on his fingertips; the soft silk of his hair, his skin, his hands, his lips.
Call the inspector, because he feels like a dirty pervert. The dirtiest of perverts.
And no, he isn't going to act on anything, because that would be stupid. It used to be easy to tuck his fantasies behind an iron wall and ignore any possible avenue that led him down that dark road in his mind. Now, temptation is dangling in front of him like a visceral carrot on a string, telling him to take it, telling him to take whatever he wanted because Philip was willing and--
And when he got bored with the subject, Shoutarou would be the one left dangling from the flagpole. And it wouldn't even be Philip's fault, it would just be. . . Philip being Philip.
Shoutarou kicks out hard at a pile of leaves. They scatter in a colorful cloud, revealing the concrete curb beneath, which his foot connects to with a hollow thump.
"Dammit," he snarls, hopping awkwardly to clutch at his toe through the leather of his boot. He ends the fiasco slumped on the curb his injured limb so thoughtfully cleared for him.
The bite of winter is in the air today, nipping at his exposed skin, because of course he forgot his coat in his haste to get away. He sighs and wedges his frozen hands up high under his arms. At least he still has his hat, so some part of him could be warm.
"Philip, you ass," he mutters to the snow.
"Sorry about that," someone with Philip's voice replies in a light tone and then his vision is being swamped by a weight of grey felt thrown abruptly over his head. Shoutarou bats it away with a shout, revealing Philip himself in the process of perching atop a pile of leaves next to him.
"You really are terrible at explaining yourself, you know," Philip greets him. Shoutarou sniffs and wipes a dismissive knuckle under his nose. He gropes at the cloth to reveal his winter coat amidst the tangles.
"Yeah, well," he mutters, wrapping it around his shoulders, sleeves dangling empty at his sides.
"Nobody's perfect."
Shoutarou grunts out a laugh and rolls his eyes.
"It loses its sting if you say it too much," he complains.
"Ah well," Philip says, adjusting himself so that's he's leaning with chin on hand. "Can't be helped."
". . .Thanks."
"Mm."
Silence, as Shoutarou's fingers remember how not to be frozen, and his body stops shivering so violently.
"There's more to it than you wanted to tell me." Philip says, finally. "A cultural importance. Friends are only one part of it."
Shoutarou gives him a sidelong look.
"You came across that in your research, finally?"
Philip shrugs.
"I was more interested in the mechanics," he admits. "And nothing I found directly contrasted what you said. It seemed your explanation was enough." He doesn't add anything else, but his tone is more than enough to communicate the reversal of his opinion on the matter.
"My explanation was fine," Shoutarou protests, but it's half-hearted at best. He has no idea what the hell Philip has been reading, and as far as he's concerned the connotations were obvious, but Philip has no frame of reference to understand. And so, like usual, his heartache is own damned fault. It's not like Philip's trying to hurt him, and doesn't that just make it all the worse?
God, he sounds like a petulant child.
Beside him, Philip breathes out a laugh. He looks down at his hands, thumb sliding over his nails in an elegant pattern and Shoutarou grumbles, "It was a misunderstanding, don't worry about it."
"No it wasn't," Philip says, without even a hint of doubt and Shoutarou whips his head around to stare at him and oh no, no Shoutarou knows that look in his eyes, the same one he had before, that knowing look, a splash of cold water right in his face.
He does not want to have this conversation. Not now, not ever and certainly not with Philip.
"O~kay," he says, kicking his foot up high into the air, then swinging forward and using the momentum to pitch himself to his feet. "Whatever you say. Hey, I'm cold. Are you cold? We should head home."
"If that's what you want." Philip's eyes are unreadable, fingers still rolling over each other in cryptic motion.
"Yes, that is exactly what I want," Shoutarou says. Philip sighs, and flows upright and Shoutarou looks away because they're graceful, together and apart, but Philip makes it look infinitely better.
"It's just," he blurts around the sudden flash of irrational irritation this inspires, speaking to a half-bare tree. "Why did you pick me? Why not ask Terui? He was the one so excited to do it in the first place." He scowls, adding just within hearing range, "You could have asked in general." Phillip draws up next to him, standing in familiar place.
"You're the person closest to me," he says like it's a simple fact.
Oh. Well.
". . .I know that," Shoutarou says, gruffly around the sudden presence lumped in his throat, around the little, cruel doubt tamped out by such easy surety.
It's so like his own words to come back and bite him in the ass.
"I'm sorry," Philip says and Shoutarou takes a cold, stinging breath.
"Yeah, well, forget about it. Let's just go home."
"Alright."
Together they turn to shuffle through the light dust of snow.
"You look terrible," Shoutarou says after a few moments of silence. "Have you slept at all since you started this?" Philip's fingers trail against his chin.
"Hmm, one or two hours, I think."
"Ah, again?" Shoutarou groans, head tilting heavenward, one hand steady on his hat. "Hey, I'm not paying the doctor's bill when you pass out from exhaustion. Just because you do it every few weeks, doesn't mean it's healthy."
"Hm, but it wouldn't be you I was going to anyways, would it?" Philip says with a tilt of his brows and that smug, yet somehow innocent look. "And I remembered my coat." Shoutarou curses at him, shoves into him with his shoulder.
And for awhile, that is the end of that. Philip's interest in the subject peters out, leaving Shoutarou to fold the more inconvenient pieces of his feelings back up where they're supposed to be and after a couple of half-worried, half-suspicious looks from Ryuu and an ear-splitting, searing scolding from Akiko about winter and coats and idiots who still manage to catch colds the whole thing gets buried, mostly, under a rug.
Though there is the time when Philip stops him, in the midst of a whirl of activity, a hand light on his arm and something serious hovering in his eyes.
"I'm getting tired of waiting," he says to him.
"I don't know what you're talking about," Shoutarou says, honest for once, because he doesn't have a clue, but his heart is beating too fast and Rui has just revealed how she's duped them. "Come on," he says because they have a boat to catch and Philip knows this, so he just sighs and, "Later," he insists, waiting until Shoutarou has nodded, bewildered, before he splits away, closing the arms trapping Uesugi in his box.
Right after that they are caught in a whirlwind of activity, fear and uncertainty and grief. Even then, there's flashes of tension between them, dark sparks that Shoutarou is unable and unwilling to read. After his family dies, Philip goes quiet with his determination, sorrow locked up tight where no one else but Shoutarou can see it. His frozen, silent lips speak volumes.
"You're right, there's nothing more to say," he says and then soon after he's gone. Ripped from the world like a fading dream, dissolving into the ether and leaving nothing but a near barren book and a lonely suit behind.
Shoutarou spends that whole empty year in a daze. He's certain, so sure that he's missing something, because outside everything's wrong, but inside nothing has changed. He sees his partner's shadow in corners, clutching a phantom of the book locked up safe in his desk. He lurks in the basement, and every time it's a shock of dissonance to find the room void and empty of occupant.
And every glimpse of his ghost breaks open those tattered wounds until he despairs of ever healing himself.
Sometimes he looks at Akiko and he feels a flash of sudden, painful camaraderie with her late father, at the absence of her before the suit, before Philip, glaring and obvious in hindsight. The sodden thread holding all the pieces together in patchwork, masking, but not hiding that empty loneliness that eats at him. He'll always have respect for his philosophies, but now he understands better what it is a symptom of. He gets up every morning spurned on by the ache in his chest, chased by shadows and phantoms and memories lurking in every corner and every alley of the city he loves. He grits his teeth and he carries on because he made a promise and the only thing that hurts worse than moving forward is letting him down.
It's hard to quantify how sick he is of people dying before him.
Around him, the world moves on, moves forward, grows up and Shoutarou feels trapped by his inability to let go.
And then one day, every moment of it, every scrap of pain is justified when he looks up to find a familiar hand stretched out to him.
"You missed me," he says, later, when they're home again. Shoutarou hasn't let him out of his sight once since he returned, because the idea that this is just another shadow hounding him is too much to bear. "Nee-san even said so. She didn't like seeing you cry."
"I didn't cry," Shoutarou lies and Philip smiles at him and Shoutarou grins back, split open by his own fierce joy.
Life continues on around them, and this time, Shoutarou throws himself into it with abandon, spinning back into it like the veritable wind tower turning ceaselessly in the continual breeze. His family, Terui and Akiko, stand at his back, firm and resolute and ready to catch him when he falls, and his Irregulars, sweeping out of the shadowy corners, always present in ones and twos.
And Philip stands right at his side, like he never left.
He still hasn't forgiven himself, not entirely, for letting him go in the first place, for spending his life like coin, over and done once it fulfilled its purpose. Philip is easy in his presence, trust unbroken despite the ugly past and sometimes Shoutarou just wishes he'd get angry at him, get it out and over with. But Philip probably doesn't even know Shoutarou's done anything wrong.
Anyways, for whatever gods he's got on his side, Shoutarou's lucky streak holds even when the universe decides to tilt every preconceived notions he's ever held on its head, holding them by their ankles and shaking them down for everything their worth.
Sometimes, Shoutarou worries about the health of his own imagination.
"Well. That's over," Philip says, snapping the book shut with a final air.
Shoutarou starts awake from where he'd been dozing, leaning up against the wall, snorting and grabbing at his hat.
"Right, yes, good," he says, like he hadn't just been dreaming of giant mechas with Akiko's face destroying Fuuto with Christmas decorations. "Yup," he adds, shuddering to shake away the haunting memory of their psychotic laughter.
Philip sighs, turning, putting his entire body into the motion because he insisted on walking like he was participating in some sort of strange, alien dance. They're in the basement and the whiteboards are covered in Russian, crawling over the walls in half-familiar characters, comprehension hovering just out of reach. Shoutarou came down because he had something to talk to him about, but if he's honest, he doesn't remember what it is. The fragile trust that he's here is still too new and he keeps getting caught up in just watching him, content with his presence and then the train of his thoughts flow away like so much smoke. "So, uh, what's next?"
Philip looks up at the whiteboard for a long moment, just looking at it, long enough for Shoutarou to feel distinctly uncomfortable.
"I'm not waiting anymore," Philip says, turning around and coming to a stop in front of him, his gravitas hanging like a mask over his features. "I want to talk to you."
". . . Okay," Shoutarou says. He stands up straighter, rolling out his shoulders to adjust the fit of his clothing into something more professional. "You can always talk to me. You know that."
"Yes," Philip says, turning away, with his hand wrapped white knuckled around his book. He holds up a finger. "Except for about one thing." He takes a step forward, pacing in a slow, wandering line with every word.
"I spent much of my time trapped in the library, trying to understand why you're so reluctant about this one issue." He spins, leveling his finger at Shoutarou. "You're frightened--"
"Hey!" Shoutarou interjects, because even though he's completely bewildered it's an important point to protest. Philip starts pacing towards him again, crouching just a little, like he's sneaking up on an easily startled animal. Shoutarou bristles, though he doesn't like where this conversation is going, not at all
"--And I found nothing of use that offered a concrete response. While I respect your privacy,"
His trajectory ends where it began, facing Shoutarou, standing toe to toe and he straightens, a short, frustrated, teenaged bear readying itself for battle.
"I'm not going to risk death again without knowing."
Shoutarou shudders, hiding it in the sway of his body as he rolls out the discomfort.
"Don't say things like that," he mutters, looking away.
Philip's hand snaps out and he grabs Shoutarou by his shirt, turning him forcibly back around.
"Then tell me why," he hisses and Shoutarous tenses and his expression twists itself into confusion.
"Why what?" He asks warily and Philip snarls, like something wild and his fingers braid into fabric, catching on buttons. He wrenches and Shoutarou stumbles forward, closing the distance between them until they're of a height. Philip's eyes are searing, dark flecks in the whites of his eyes and his lips--
"You told me to ask, so I'm asking," Philip says, like Shoutarou should know what he's saying, no, should admit to what he's saying.
"Asking what," Shoutarou says, hoarse and Philip rolls his eyes, tugging him forward until the last inch of space between them is closed.
It's more violent than the last they've shared. Shoutarou's nose crumples against Philip's cheek and his lower lip gets in the way, caught between their teeth. It's over as fast as the others though, almost before Shoutarou can register what's happened and certainly before he's processed anything at all. Philip draws back, grabbing Shoutarou's hand and yanking on it until it's pressed firmly to Philip's chest. His heart beats rabbit-legged thumps, almost violent beneath his palm.
"Why are we waiting."
Shoutarou lets out a raw cry, ripping out of him in the same way Philip is ripped from him when Shoutarou shoves him off setting him to stumbling. He lands with a crash against the railing, catching himself with a splayed hand.
"You can't, can't play with me like this," Shoutarou shouts, arms winging wildly at his sides. "I thought this was over, I thought we had an agreement, I thought we understood each other!"
Philip puts a hand over his chest, and confusion shadows his expression, turning inward as he works through what Shoutarou's saying. His eyes widen, and then he slumps against the railing as his shoulders shake and he starts, horribly, to laugh.
"You're truly an idiot, Hidari Shoutarou," he says and Shoutarou's eyes go wide in sudden rage.
"You--" he snarls.
"I'm not playing with you," he interrupts, and holds out his hand, palm up. "It seems we've had a miscommunication."
Shoutarou stares at the pale lines, open like a new blossom.
"A. . . miscommunication," he repeats and because he trusts him, because a world where he is cruel is too painful, because he knows him, he places his hand in his.
Instead of using his support, Philip tugs, gently this time, until Shoutarou goes to his knees beside him. He shifts into a similar position until they're facing each other and his hand squeezes just a millimeter tighter. Shoutarou swallows around a suddenly dry throat, eyes huge beneath his bangs.
"I don't need this," he says, the words babbling out of him in a confused torrent, one last aborted attempt to keep this away. "I really don't--"
"Need has nothing to do with it," Philip says, lancing it at the heart, and his eyes narrow, something dancing behind the dark irises. "This is want. That's the term, isn't it? I want you, Hidari Shoutarou."
Shoutarou's whole body shudders, as the sound of his own name floods something, something nameless and tingling all through his body.
"I--" he chokes out mouth fishing.
"And if that's what you want," here, Philip's voice falters, a hint of uncertainty that Shoutarou has a sudden, violent flash of hatred for. "That's where I want it to go."
"Right," Shoutarou says.
Philip smiles and tangles his fingers with Shoutarou's, laying it again at his own breast where his heart is still beating too fast. His other hand splay's over Shoutarou's own, wildly pounding heart and in a flash of sudden, obvious incite, Shoutarou gets it.
"Oh."
"You've not been a very good detective, Hidari Shoutarou," Philip tells him, amused and then he's leaning in and sliding his mouth over Shoutarou's one more time. He tilts himself onto the balls of his feet, rocking forward and presses them together, hands trapped firmly between them.
Shoutarou closes his eyes, shoves every hint of self doubt into a tight lidded box, takes a deep breath through his nose and kisses back.
After that, nothing really changes. Philip goes around looking smug for a few days, but Shoutarou can't begrudge it of him, because he's not patronizing, he's just so pleased to have figured it out. And yeah, maybe later they sleep curled up in the bed more often, but even that isn't new. They'd done it before, when their injuries were too severe for either of them to take the couch and, for a few days, near the end, where Shoutarou lay next to him and watched the little curl of worry lingering between his brows as his body rested until he couldn't keep his own eyes open anymore.
Nothing really changes and so Shoutarou doesn't get up and chase the look with a kiss, no he picks up a squishy stress relief ball and he throws it at his head. It hits him smack dab in the forehead and his eyes go wide and he watches the ball as it rolls away in fascination.
"Why did you do that?" he asks.
"Your gloating was obnoxious."
"What gloating," Akiko says, her face suddenly far too close to his for comfort. "Did Philip do something smarter than you again?" She pats him on the shoulder, nodding in an unbearably sage manner. "You better hurry up if that's why you're worried, you've a lot of catch up for, Shou-ta-rou."
"That," Shoutarou says dragging it out as he grabs her hand and pulls it off him, flinging it away with a flourish. "Is not your business."
"Oh-hohohohoho," she says, spinning away. "It's always my business Shoutarou, always. Because I'm still your boss you still have to do e~everything I say," she sing-songs, wrapping an arm around Philip's waist and twirling in a clumsy circle with him. Philip gets the most curious look on his face, laughing a little, but he goes along with it, because as far as Shoutarou is concerned, the boy is a saint. Shoutarou points at her, opening his mouth to say something, then huffing all his breath out in an explosive sound, turning away from both of them.
"If you don't want her to know you should probably not put hickeys on his neck," Terui Ryuu says, placing a cup of coffee in front of him.
Shoutarou nods to this, taking a sip of the coffee and then spitting it out all over the place when the words finally sink it.
So no, nothing changes, except for now, there's nothing more to say and nothing more to hide and maybe, probably, that will change in the near future, but for right now it's more than enough.