Chapter Text
He wakes to find a dead duck on his dorm room doorstep.
Kunikida is outside as well.
They both look at it.
Finally Kunikida says, “Well at least he got the right doorstep this time.”
“He should know which is mine at this point,” Akutagawa says as he kneels and picks them up. He brings them inside. Still feathered, still bloodied, he sets them in the fridge. Only then does he go back out into the hallway.
“Is he going to keep doing this?” Kunikida asks.
Akutagawa blinks at him. How is he supposed to know? He is not the boy’s keeper. So he just keeps staring until Kunikida rolls his eyes and Akutagawa leaves to go meet Oda for coffee.
He gets there and Oda is sitting at their usual table. Akutagawa’s usual order sits on the table in front of him. He slides in next to him and wraps his hands around the mug. It’s still warm.
Oda says nothing. He just waits for Akutagawa to speak and when he does he says, “A watch.”
“No.”
He frowns. “Why?”
“Do not get Atsushi a watch. You heard his story.”
“Hm.”
Akutagawa thinks for a moment. He stares at the coffee as it sits in the glass. It does not tell him what to do.
“You are right I suppose. That would make a poor present.” There are a few days left before Christmas. He has time. He supposes he does not owe him a gift on the holiday exactly, given that Atsushi has been giving him the presents for the better part of a month, but he thinks it would be a nice gesture.
He hears the faintest sigh of relief come from Oda.
“Any other thoughts?”
Akutagawa shakes his head. The question of what gift to give Nakajima Atsushi is one that has been plaguing him for the better part of a week since he woke up to Kunikida screaming when he exited his door and found a decapitated salmon on the doormat.
Akutagawa had come out of his room to see what the fuss was, saw the salmon, understood, and texted Atsushi that he’d gotten the wrong dorm. His was across the hall.
The next morning he’d opened his door to a number of goldfish in a jar that he had to take to the pet store and hand over.
“My… cat brought them home,” he explained. They had further questions but he just ignored them and went to meet Oda for their pre-work coffee. He’d asked the older man for advice on what gift to give Atsushi to pay him back for the presents. Oda had additional questions that Akutagawa had answered and at the end Oda had said he couldn’t quite understand but he could help brainstorm.
But it’s been a week and the ideas he has come up with don’t fit. Nothing is right. He is starting to run out of time.
“Are you sure -” he starts.
“No watch,” Oda says firmly. “Do not retraumatize him.”
Akutagawa scowls.
“Fine. I will think of something else.”
He does not think of anything else. Nothing comes to mind even though he’s trying to come up with a good gift the entire day at work and as he gets home and starts cooking.
As he slides the food into two separate bowls, the door opens. Atsushi steps inside, hangs up his coat, and smiles at him. He nods in response and Atsushi slides into the chair opposite him.
He looks good. He wears a tight sweater that shows off a chiseled chest. The coat he still wears hides most of his neck, but in Akutagawa’s dorm, he does not wear it and thus his scar is visible. It’s healing though, the skin renewing.
He looks down from the scar to the food in front of them. “Marinated duck over rice,” he tells Atsushi. He needn’t have bothered. The weretiger has already half devoured his bowl.
“So those guys you asked me to watch were boring,” Atsushi says. “Went to the park and didn’t do anything. Just kept …” he continues to chat, sharing details of a gang that had caught the ADA’s eye. Atsushi is good at things like this, at tailing without needing to get too close. It also keeps him out of trouble. After leaving the mafia, Atsushi had .. difficulty adjusting. He had gone somewhere else, somewhere he didn’t want to tell Akutagawa about. The man who’d returned to Yokohama was more stable, but also adrift. So they’d started working together. Atsushi had been offered a place in the ADA but turned it down. They were partners still.
After dinner was finished, they watch a movie on the beat up old couch in his dorm. Akutagawa’s furniture had been fished out of various dumpsters over the past few months and as a result it was all rather lumpy and still held an odor, but it was his. This dorm, meager and pathetic as it was, is filled with the plants he’d been given by Kenji and the books Kunikida had passed down and the required necessities that Oda had gifted him and he would not change it for the world.
No, he thinks, as he looks at Atsushi sprawled out across his lap. He brings down his hand to run in through his unruly hair. He does not want to change a thing. He just wants to find a proper gift for Atsushi, something to thank him for his efforts. He watches the movie like this, a content tiger in his lap and his hands on the younger man, scratching and petting. When the movie finishes, Atsushi only sprawls out further and Akutagawa ends up spending the rest of the night with him on the couch. It’s warm in here. Outside he sees the snow is starting to come down, but in here it’s warm and perfect and he is content.