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“Make yourself useful and get the lights, will you?” Raito requested oh-so-kindly as he flopped into bed.
“‘Kay.” Tomoro got up and shut the lights off.
Raito’s eye twitched.
“What’s wrong with you today?”
“What do you mean?”
“You haven’t talked back once all day. It’s creeping me out,” Raito complained.
“You’ve been right a lot today.” Tomoro shrugged and returned to his own bed. “And my bed is closer to the light switch.”
The twitch worsened.
“Since when did that matter? Normally you’d argue with me about whether or not two and two is four.”
“Yeah, and? Maybe I’m sick of being wrong.”
Silence hung heavy in the air after that. Raito felt a pang in his chest and a knot in his stomach, and he could just go to sleep and take the win, but something told him he’d regret it if he did. With a huff, he stomped his way over to Tomoro’s bed and sat down beside him, glaring down at him.
“What?” Tomoro narrowed his eyes.
It was hard to say if it was because he was annoyed, or because he was struggling to see Raito in the dark with his glasses off.
“Tell me what’s wrong,” Raito urged.
“Nothing’s wrong,” Tomoro insisted.
“Yes it is. I’m not stupid like you, I can tell.”
“Clearly you are, if you think something’s wrong.”
“Do you really want to go back and forth like this all night?”
“I have a big brother. Try me.”
Raito groaned. Of course Tomoro was going to be stubborn about this. Whatever. Two could play at this game. Rather than get up and go to bed, Raito chose to lie down beside Tomoro, leaning in uncomfortably close and staring at his face. Tomoro kept his own eyes firmly shut, refusing to acknowledge Raito’s existence.
It was a battle of sheer will: one that Tomoro lost after an agonizing twenty minutes.
“Fine! I’ll talk, just stop breathing on me,” he caved.
A mad cackle escaped Raito as Tomoro scrambled to sit up and get away from him.
“Why are you all depressed? Was it something I did?” Raito asked, his tone serious after his laughter subsided.
“Sort of,” Tomoro half-answered.
“Tomoro.”
“It’s not just you,” Tomoro confessed. “Now that our teams have been working together more, I’ve been able to see how everyone operates, and I feel so…behind. You and Reina are so good at assessing the situation and making a strategy on the spot, but me? I just brute force everything until one of you tells me what to do. That last bounty, when we all got separated? I was the one closest to them, but I screwed everything up and they got away. Then you guys showed up and immediately figured out all the things I should've done instead. I felt…useless. Stupid.”
“That’s what you’re sad about?” Raito raised a brow at him.
“Yeah, basically.”
“How stupid. Moronic, even. You’re such a dummy,” Raito sighed.
“H-Hey!” Tomoro smacked his arm. “Aren’t you supposed to be comforting me or something?!”
“I’m not Reina, you idiot. If you’re being stupid, I’ll call you stupid. Stupid.”
“Raito, you little—”
“Do you know why we work as a team?” Raito interrupted. “It’s so we can cover each other’s weaknesses. All of us and our Digimon have different strengths, and it’s a leader’s job to know those strengths and use them to make the most efficient plan. It’s not your fault we didn’t anticipate getting separated, and it’s not your fault you didn’t know what to do when Plan A failed. If anything, it’s on me and Reina for not making a Plan B.”
Tomoro blinked at him, a pout forming on his lips. “Then why did you start listing everything I did wrong?”
"We were discussing what went wrong so we know how to take that asshole down next time. We weren’t blaming you.” Raito rolled his eyes, though he doubted Tomoro saw it.
“Oh.” Tomoro nodded slowly. “But, if that’s the case, why do you still keep calling me stupid? I kinda thought…we were friends now?”
The last part was barely more than a whisper, Tomoro nearly chickening out of saying it.
“I don’t know. Force of habit?” Raito guessed. “It just slips out. Plus, the face you make when I say it is cute.”
“Are you serious?” Tomoro’s pout deepened, and his eyebrows furrowed.
“Yeah, that face right there. I like it.”
“You’re such a jerk.”
“Never said I wasn’t.”
Deeming the crisis resolved, Raito got up and went back to bed—though not before flicking Tomoro’s forehead and drawing a hilariously childish growl from him.
“Stop overthinking things, idiot,” Raito said as he climbed under the blankets. “If something’s bothering you, talk to me next time.”
“I’d rather hurl myself into the sea,” Tomoro scoffed.
“So you’re saying you don’t feel better now?”
“...Go to sleep, Raito.”
“Whatever, dummy.”
Raito laughed again when Tomoro made a sound akin to a furious cat. The insult was nothing less than that moron deserved. The Tenma Tomoro being useless? It was the dumbest thing Raito’d ever heard.