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“The longer I think about this,” Hiromi starts, staring down at himself. “The more that I feel there’s no actual merit to this, and you’re just seizing the chance to play out a long-held fetish.”
“Nonsense!” Gojo claps once. He looks too delighted to be telling the truth. Rarely does Hiromi see him looking this downright happy without someone else’s misery – albeit mild – following immediately afterwards. Today, it’s his own.
“The frills suit you,” he adds. “You know. Really emphasize your waistline. And now you’ve got child-bearing hips, which is the most important thing for a maid.”
“I’m sure you’d know, clan boy,” Hiromi retorts. He decisively ignores whatever this dress and its many petticoats are doing for his waistline, which exists only as a plausibility rather than a fact.
“Hey! None of our maids ever dressed up like this,” Gojo pouts. He sidles in close to pat down Hiromi’s chest, really more of a fondling than smoothing out the cheap fabric of the costume like he’s pretending to do. His hands are big, his manicure alone costs more than the dress itself, and he’s enjoying himself far too much for the situation. “I’ll get you a nicer one sometime, how’s that?”
“It’d be a waste,” Hiromi remarks. “But you’re lucky I like you tearing my clothes off as much as you like doing it. Do as you please, young master.”
Gojo’s eyes widen, his lips parting for a second.
Hiromi resists the urge to smirk. “Something the matter, sir? Cat got your tongue? Shame. I’m just getting into character, seeing as I’m about to present my innocent self to the masses out there. And they’re paying good money for respect.”
“Hm. You know what? I take it back. This was a terrible idea and really I should be the one in that, I’ve got the legs for it,” Gojo starts, immediately reaching behind Hiromi to try and unzip the dress.
“No, absolutely fucking not,” he snaps. Hiromi takes a pointed step back, makes a frankly heroic effort to avoid both Gojo’s resulting pout and the extra arms he seems to have spouted as a new extension of Six Eyes. “You got me into this, you convinced me, I’m not backing out now. I’m already dressed.”
“You just want to prove me wrong,” Gojo argues.
“Yes. I do. There’s absolutely no way this is going to work,” Hiromi says back. He readjusts himself, smooths out the folds of fabric, and just ruffles the petticoats so they’re voluminous, or whatever. He’s not entirely sure how they work, only that they make his stockinged legs look strangely lean.
“Well, I happen to know that it will! Maids are catnip to tired salarymen,” Gojo tells him sagely.
“Our target isn’t a salaryman.”
“He was! Their horrible taste must have rubbed off a little bit.”
“Wow. Thanks.”
“Ah, but it’s tempered with the very good taste of being into you,” he tacks on. “Trust me.”
“Whenever you say that, something bad happens,” Hiromi mutters, but it’s a losing fight. It’s never that bad, never something that neither of them can handle, though Gojo in particular is prone to disaster and Hiromi sometimes thinks he’s cursed by having what Shimizu would call Mercury in retrograde, but for his entire life.
“But you trust me anyway.” Gojo fairly beams as he leans in to steal a kiss, their mouths tacky with gloss. Hiromi’s not used to it on his own, just the strawberry scent to Gojo’s lips. It still isn’t unpleasant, though he tries not to look at himself too hard in the tint of Gojo’s glasses as the man pulls away. “So, go out there and get ‘em, tiger.”
He swats at Hiromi’s ass as he pushes him out the door, the effect of which is entirely ruined by the volume of his skirts.
Hiromi allows himself a moment of satisfaction – there’s some perks to this getup, after all.
Maybe just the one, though.
Their target comes in a little past six, earlier than the expected salaryman crowd, a little too late for the leering teenagers – though only one of them had been overtly interested in him, probably on the heels of some issues that need working out but are sure to make him a stellar catch for another middle-aged man, one who’s dodged an early life crisis only to have a whopper of a late one coming soon, and who isn’t dating someone like Gojo.
Nanami Kento walks in, quiet, and sits at a corner booth with the practiced motions of a man who's done so a hundred times before. Hiromi wonders what that says about him; he seems serious, not the type to come to a place like this, but seriousness is a good veneer for sleaze underneath, no matter the type of person someone seems.
A few of the others perk up at seeing him – possibly because he's a regular, possibly otherwise.
He’s handsome in a severe sort of way, circles sunk deep under his eyes and the planes of his face sharp from his jaw to his cheeks, at odds with the delicate, gold-rimmed glasses perched on his nose.
Hiromi isn't saying he gets it, but. He gets it.
He makes his way over before anyone else can, and pretends resolutely that Gojo isn't staring them down through the wall.
Hiromi suspects that may let the cat out of the bag, a little, unless this Nanami has forgotten Gojo completely – and that, he thinks, is unlikely. Gojo is polarizing, yes, but above all he’s memorable.
All the same, he saunters up to the table, trying for coquettish since that’s what the role requires, and likely aiming at bow-legged. It’s a small mercy that his target only looks up from perusing the menu when Hiromi’s shadow casts across the table.
“Ah. Just a coffee, please,” Nanami Kento says simply. He looks Hiromi directly in the eye, unstraying, and taps the menu. “I need more time to decide on the rest.”
That shouldn’t be quite as disarming as it is. He’s calm, not quite like Hiromi’d expected, though it’s impossible that he doesn’t know Hiromi is a sorcerer of some capacity. He’s been told that his cursed energy is distinctive, and absolutely no one has elaborated on that in a way that is remotely understandable.
“The cake is good?” he offers, in a lame imitation of the specials he’s sure they have listed but has not memorized, seeing as he knew about this precisely an hour ago, and forty-five minutes of that were spent arguing with Gojo and trying to wriggle into the outfit.
“I don’t have a sweet tooth,” Nanami tells him.
“Okay. So no sugar in the coffee,” Hiromi hazards. He doesn’t remember how to do this. It – well, it wasn’t fine when he was being ogled, but he’s not worked a customer service job since one ill-fated month at the university bookshop, and that had not been a successful one.
“No milk either,” he says. A blink. “You’re not writing anything down.”
“I have an eidetic memory.” Hiromi rarely manifests side-effects from spending the majority of his free time with Gojo, but this is one he’s been unable to halt or cure.
Nanami tilts his head, assessing, and then shrugs. Hiromi can’t tell whether he’s decided that’s bullshit or decided to believe him – it’s not strictly speaking, truthful, in that he’s never been tested for that kind of thing – but he’s clearly made a decision to drop the topic entirely.
“Fair enough. It’s not a complicated order, anyway, I just thought they had all the new starters write everything down.” He says this so matter-of-fact that it doesn’t even sound like an excuse. On second thought, it’s distressingly plausible, given that Nanami is apparently a regular here.
“It’s a maid cafe,” Hiromi feels compelled to point out. “I think they’re happy to let us do what we want, so long as the customers are happy.”
He pauses, then asks, “Are you happy? Or would you prefer I write your order down. Black coffee. Cake undecided.”
“One of those questions is easier to answer than the other. You don’t need to write it down,” Nanami answers – not smoothly, exactly, but with only a hint of irony on the first sentence.
“I’ll be right back then,” Hiromi says, and whisks himself away before his mouth can do any more damage. He’s past thirty, he shouldn’t be so disarmed by a man in the nebulous region between curse user and sorcerer proper, who speaks politely and seems utterly disinterested in anything Hiromi could do. He certainly shouldn’t be floundering this much.
He rings the order in – this much he remembers how to do – and sets about pouring coffees. With optimism, more than he usually reserves for any situation, and with a healthy dose of avoiding where Gojo is lurking in the kitchen. He’s sure the man has words after that performance, and Hiromi wants to hear precisely none of them.
He isn’t sure the appropriate time between ordering and being served, so he dithers for a second at the coffee station anyway, picks up one of the miniature bowls of sugar cubes and a little jug of cream for the presentation. He even adds two of the small biscuits, the ones that smell like ginger and cardamom, several of which Gojo shoved into his pockets when he thought no one was looking. Thievery, Hiromi’d sentenced him idly. He’s probably eating the dough in the kitchen even now.
Only when a few minutes have passed does he take the tray over to Nanami, who’s still studying the menu with unexpected intensity.
“Coffee,” he says, and sets the tray down. “Have you decided, about the cake?”
“No. The brioche is off the menu,” Nanami answers, almost mournful. “I won’t be having anything else.”
“That’s alright.”
Nanami helps himself to a cup.
“It’d be customary for me to sit with you,” Hiromi says after a moment. He’d brought two coffees, and now that feels presumptuous. Or like he should’ve spiked his heavily with liquor first, but he’s not one for drinking on the job.
Nanami blinks at him.
“Alright,” he says. “Since you brought your own drink.”
He seems more indulgent than upset, more pleased than a man whose peaceful evening is being encroached on. He also takes a moment to stare at Hiromi’s legs before his gaze darts away, back to respectful.
Gojo will never let him live this down, Hiromi reflects with a sigh. He hates being wrong. Somehow, it happens more these days than ever before.
“I wouldn’t want to have to get up in the middle of a riveting conversation.” He sits down. It’s more difficult than he thought, with layers of skirts and frills to arrange, but he manages and is grateful for the underside of the table keeping them somewhat in check.
“What makes you think my conversation is riveting?” Nanami asks. He still sounds amused.
“Isn’t that what I’m supposed to say? All customers’ conversation has to be riveting,” Hiromi points out, and is rewarded with Nanami hiding a smile in his cup.
“Fair enough,” he murmurs. “But I don’t have much to talk about.”
“That’s fine, I can ask questions.”
“Like what, an interview? I can’t say that I’m interesting enough to interview.”
“Why not? False humility helps no one.”
“Now you sound like someone I used to know,” Nanami says, and offers no elaboration. Hiromi, unfortunately, knows exactly who he’s talking about.
“Good or bad?” He wants to know. He’s curious.
Nanami considers this, sips at his coffee again. “Bad, at the time. He used to annoy me to no end. Now, probably at least neutral. It isn’t as if he didn’t have the right to brag.”
Hiromi can practically feel Gojo’s smugness radiating from the kitchen, though he can likely only make out half of what they’re saying by reading lips.
“I’m the same way. Not – well, I know someone like that. But if you’re good at what you do, there’s no sense hiding it, don’t you think?”
Nanami meets his eyes. “Eidetic memory, right? No, I suppose there’s no sense hiding it just to make us regular people feel better about ourselves.”
“I didn’t say that to make you feel bad,” Hiromi says hastily.
“I know. You said it because it was an explanation, and a fact of you.”
Well, partially because he’d had to say something, and his mouth had gotten ahead of his brain, but Hiromi supposes that logic isn’t incorrect either. His memory is good, he only ever needs to read something once or be told it once to remember it, and he put this to use in his old life. It’s not useless in his new, but memorizing precedent is less informative, less frequent here.
He only shrugs. “Here, let me balance the scales. I’m also shit at throwing a punch.”
“You can always improve,” Nanami says, entirely serious. His gaze lands somewhere over Hiromi’s shoulder, and then returns to his face. “I’ll never have a memory as good as yours. If we’re going with this example still.”
“That doesn’t mean you should beat yourself up over it,” Hiromi argues. He dumps three cubes of sugar into his coffee, pointedly ignores Nanami’s grimace, and finishes it off with the cream. “I’m not trying to launch an overture in a psychological war.”
“True, you haven’t asked any really loaded questions yet.” Nanami’s look is knowing. Because he knows. Hiromi would wonder what gave him away, but the answer is likely everything; there are reasons neither he nor Gojo are well-suited to undercover missions, albeit vastly different ones.
“And I’m trying to steer clear of them, with my baggage. I’ll set myself up for a loss if I get into that territory.”
“Baggage? From a man your age working here? Never.”
Hiromi surprises himself by barking out a laugh. “Yeah, you’d be surprised. I really went off the rails in my thirties.”
“Hm. I did that in my teens. And then again in my twenties. It’s not quite on a ten year cycle, so by the time I hit thirty I anticipate another derailing,” Nanami says mildly.
“Teenage rebellion doesn’t count. What happened in your twenties?”
“Realized that I hated my job. Loudly and somewhat violently,” he says, still mild. “Not that it made me special. I just couldn’t suck it up and keep going like everyone else.”
“That’s not a bad thing,” Hiromi says, startlingly reminded of himself. “That doesn’t end well either, trust me.”
“Guessing it has something to do with how you went off the rails?”
“It’s the train car crash itself. One minute I was in court, the next I was sitting in tepid water in someone else’s bathroom, fully clothed.” He’s simplifying, of course; he remembers everything that happened in between, up to and including Gojo hauling him out of the tub, grip iron-tight, eyes gleaming, looking like something from another world that hated him.
He’s learned since that Gojo’s eyes are just like that.
“Huh. And now you’re in a maid cafe.”
“Well. For now. I don’t know if it’ll work out, not sure I fit the clientele.”
“But you still got back up on your feet after that,” Nanami pushes.
“You could say that,” Hiromi says. He’s not sure he had much of a choice in the matter, but he suspects that’s not useful to share here. “Some days it’s kind of comforting, though. To think that the worst thing I could’ve done is already behind me. It’s literally all uphill from there, which sounds trite until you remember how low the bar is. Now I can be fully clothed in my own bathtub.”
“Small victories,” Nanami murmurs, like he’s thinking hard about it.
“Why, is there something you’re trying to come back from? That crisis you mentioned?”
“Not that,” he says, so sure that Hiromi believes him. Nanami, surprisingly, has not yet tried to lie to him. He’s meeting Hiromi’s level of candor almost exactly.
“There’s some things you can’t come back from,” Nanami explains. “I think that’s one of them. But I wouldn’t exactly say that I’m mourning the loss either, except for maybe the life I could’ve had. Get rich quick, retire in Malaysia early, spend the rest of my days living on the beach.”
It doesn’t really appeal to Hiromi; he’d be bored out of his skull by the third day of the rest of his life, and he burns too easily to even think about being under the tropical sun for more than fifteen minutes at a time, a discovery made unfortunately as a teenager on a class trip.
“That sounds nice,” he says as diplomatically as possible.
“You hate the idea.”
“It’s not for me,” Hiromi admits. “I don’t do well in the sun. But you could still go on a vacation, if you wanted. It just won’t be the early retirement you’d planned.”
“I’ve had too many late nights in a cubicle to not appreciate the sun when I get a chance to experience it,” Nanami says idly. “You’re not wrong, though I think that some things are better as a distant dream. I can still work towards it, if I want.”
“Can you? You just said that it’s something you’ve given up on.” It’s a strange contradiction – and frankly, Hiromi doesn’t understand the issue with a simple holiday, but he at least knows better than to say it here and now.
“I’ve always thought that you became an adult when you accumulated enough small miseries. No more sandwiches at the konbini closest to work, no brioche at the cafe you like, a car splashing you with a puddle, forgetting your umbrella. Now I think it’s about the little delusions you let yourself have too. Like Kuantan, on the beach,” he adds, pensive. Nanami, if Hiromi recalls correctly, and he knows he does, is a year younger than Gojo, which makes him nearly nine years younger than Hiromi.
He does not sound like a man nine years his junior; he sounds like a man fifteen years his senior.
“I can’t say I’ve ever looked at things that way myself. When I was stuck in a job that felt like it was going nowhere and swallowing me whole, I didn’t have any of that going on,” he admits. “I just thought, if I try one more time, do this again, maybe it’ll be different. You might be on to something with those delusions, though a beach was much nicer than the one I was clinging to.”
“What did you say you used to do, again?”
“Oh. I was a lawyer. Public defense.” Hiromi stares into his cup, doesn’t think about the people he couldn’t save. Thinks instead of the ones he has, directly, since he left.
“Isn’t the conviction rate – ?”
“Yes,” Hiromi says shortly. It’s terser than the fiction they’re maintaining requires, but he doesn’t bother trying to rein in his tone. Nanami, he thinks, doesn’t seem the type to mind.
“I’m sorry,” Nanami tells him. He sounds it, too. “That must have been difficult.”
“I didn’t get into it for the money, obviously. At least I realized I could do more good elsewhere, that helps.”
Nanami contemplates that for a second, and then downs the rest of his coffee. He doesn’t seem to have much of a response to that.
“Another?” Hiromi asks. He’s not finished his, but makes no motion to follow suit. Too much coffee this late and he won’t sleep at all tonight.
“No. One’s enough.” He looks down at his watch – bulky, almost gaudy on anyone else, with a thick band and bright metals all around. “Thank you, though.”
“Oh. Yes, no. No problem. It was good talking to you,” he says, awkward, and made more so by the fact that he means it. “Meeting you, and all that.”
Stalling is also not one of his talents, if it doesn’t require opening his domain. He realizes, abruptly, that he has no idea how he’s meant to make Nanami stay – seduce him into the bathroom? Actually suck his dick in the bathroom? His boyfriend may be opposed to that, but then again, probably not as much as Hiromi would prefer.
Thankfully, this problem is solved in its entirety by Gojo sauntering out of the kitchen and announcing cheerfully, “Nanami! You, my beloved kouhai, are under arrest.”
Nanami has absolutely no right to turn a betrayed look on Hiromi, and that look in turn has no right to be so effective.
“Laying it on thick, aren’t you?” Hiromi mutters. True to form, Gojo ignores him.
“Under what charges? Last I checked, you weren’t a police officer, and I’ve done nothing illegal,” Nanami counters.
“You did kill those people,” Gojo says, since he knows nothing of tact or what Nanami and Hiromi have studiously avoided discussing about either of their pasts. Well, Hiromi knew that bit about Nanami’s; the reverse is almost certainly untrue.
“You’ve forgiven worse,” Nanami retorts, and Gojo actually flinches, and then Nanami looks apologetic. “Sorry. That was below the belt.”
“No, no,” Gojo shakes it off. He recovers fast, even when he shouldn’t. “By all means! Go below the belt. Below the belt is very inviting, I hear, especially with it’s genuine leather.”
“There’s no belt holding those uniform trousers up,” Nanami says, shockingly decisive. Hiromi feels like he’s lost not so much the thread of conversation as the bolt of fabric, wholesale, has gone tumbling from his hands and into the abyss, unrecoverable.
“How do you know? Are you looking?” He sounds hopeful. Perhaps too hopeful to be teasing.
“Seriously, Satoru?” Hiromi asks, world-weary. Unfortunately, he recognizes the gleam in Gojo's eye, having had it turned to him too many times before he decided to stop ignoring it, because it wasn't going away. And now they're living together.
“What?” Gojo asks, making his eyes very big and wide.
“Make those normal again and leave the poor man alone,” Hiromi says. It's not a suggestion.
Gojo cocks his head, answers with a smirk. “Since you asked so nicely, daddy.”
Nanami’s eyes dart between them, and something like panic crosses his face before he visibly gets his shit together.
“Ignore that,” Hiromi tells him.
“Oh. No, sorry. I didn’t realize you two were –,”
“Going to the boneyard on the regular?” Gojo supplies. “Smooching on the sly? Sneaking off to hold hands?”
“Together,” Nanami supplies.
“What a boring way to put it, Nanami,” Gojo says, singsong. “Should’ve expected that much of you! Don’t worry, I’m not upset. I know where he sleeps at night, and really, who could blame you with that outfit on!”
Both of them turn to look at Hiromi. He does not like this turn of events.
“Enough, can we just get the job done?” he asks, exasperated. “Yes? Thank you. Nanami, will you come with us?”
Nanami looks very pointedly at Gojo, conveying his lack of choice in the matter without a single word. Somehow, Gojo grins wider.
“Hey, Hiromi over here’s no slouch either. Special Grade, manifested his cursed technique as a Domain Expansion the first time he ever used it,” Gojo brags shamelessly.
“I still don’t know how to throw a punch properly,” Hiromi offers, lame. Absurdly, he doesn’t want Nanami to think he’s been lying about everything – or anything. There’s no reason for trust to have been established between them over the span of a single conversation, and yet he’s sitting here somehow reluctant to break it.
“Right,” is all Nanami has to say. “I’ll come with you, though. It took you long enough, Gojo-san.”
“What! No Gojo-senpai? I can’t believe it. You’re as much as a brat as before, Nanami,” Gojo sighs theatrically, and simply begins to manhandle Nanami out of his seat and towards the door.
“I haven’t paid,” Nanami says, his only form of protest.
“Covered! Say please and thank you, Gojo-senpai.”
“Absolutely not.”
“Oi, oi, Hiromi, are you coming or what?” Gojo asks over his shoulder, apparently pleased with the resolution of Nanami’s not-protest. “Ijichi’s been waiting for an hour now, I told him to stick around after dropping me off.”
“Still bullying him, I see.” Nanami manages to sound disapproving even over the chime of the shop bell as they open the door. Hiromi has to cross the distance almost at a run, his heels clacking satisfyingly against the ground as he does, mouthing an apology over his shoulder at the manager who’d doubled as their Window today.
Ijichi is in fact waiting down the block, and Gojo’s got an arm wrapped around Nanami’s waist, which Nanami bears with less grace than Hiromi does. Ostensibly it’s to keep him from running. Hiromi strongly suspects that if Nanami wanted to run, he’d simply given up on the idea as soon as Gojo showed his face.
He’s sure Gojo knows that too.
“He needs it,” Gojo defends himself. He slows only briefly to let Hiromi catch up.
“He doesn’t,” Nanami disagrees. “You’ll have given him a full head of grey hair at this point.”
“I haven’t!”
Hiromi, who has suspected Ijichi of dyeing his hair for nearly two years now, remains silent.
“Hiromi, tell him I haven’t,” Gojo whines. They’re just about at the car now, and Hiromi raps the window twice until the lock clicks and he can open the door. He gently takes Nanami from Gojo, who crosses over to the other side to slide into the backseat. Hiromi always gets shotgun, by dint of bribery with candy, but he’s clearly being allowed this one on credit.
“I cannot believe I’m arresting your high school crush in a maid outfit,” Hiromi says instead as they bundle Nanami into the car. He says it with the door open, of course, so Nanami answers with a dry, “I thought they were going to kill me outright. I’m not sure this is an improvement.”
A pause, and he leans into the front seat a little to say, polite as anything, “Hello, Ijichi-san. Long time no see.”
Hiromi meets Gojo’s gaze across the top of the car.
“What?” he says, faux-innocent. “I told you it was a valid strategy.”
fin