Archive of Our Own

Meet me tomorrow. 6 PM. Dress nicely.

You stared at your phone for a very long time.

Then you stared at it some more.

You typed back: Dress nicely? You? Are you dying?

The reply came four seconds later. No.

Are YOU dying?

No.

Is this a prank?

No.

Saiki.

What.

You set your phone face-down on your desk, pressed both palms flat against the surface, and took a slow, measured breath.

In the year and a half you had known Saiki Kusuo, truly known him, past the careful facade of blandness he wore like a second skin for the benefit of the general population, you had catalogued his habits with the quiet diligence of someone who understood that with Saiki, the details were everything.

He ate coffee jelly like other people drank water. He watched television with an expression of deeply reluctant enjoyment. He chose the cheapest item on any menu, every single time, with a consistency so absolute it had stopped feeling like frugality and started feeling like philosophy.

Once, at a school festival, he had spent forty-five minutes calculating which food stall offered the best caloric return per yen before settling on the most sugary food that cost one hundred yen and eating it with the quiet satisfaction of a man who had won something.

You had teased him about it for weeks.

So the instruction to dress nicely sat in your chest like a small, bewildering stone, and you turned it over and over all evening, through dinner and a shower and the restless, half-awake hours before sleep finally took you.

ψ

You changed your outfit four times.

This was embarrassing, and you were aware of it, but Saiki could read minds and therefore already knew, so the embarrassment was somewhat theoretical.

You settled eventually on something that felt right; not overdressed, not underdressed, something that said I made an effort without screaming I was nervous about this for eighteen hours straight, which was true but felt like private information.

At 5:58 PM you stepped outside.

He was already there.

You stopped walking.

Saiki Kusuo was standing at the end of your front path with his weight shifted slightly to one side, his pink hair catching the low gold of evening light, and he was... he was dressed up.

Genuinely, unmistakably dressed up.

A white double-breasted suit, impeccably fitted, over a pale pink dress shirt with a white tie that sat just slightly loose at the collar in a way that managed to look intentional rather than careless.

On his wrist, a watch you had never seen before, silver-cased, with what looked like a pink-faced dial, glinted quietly. His green-tinted glasses caught the light, the small familiar details that grounded him as him even dressed like this, even standing on your street looking like he had walked out of a magazine spread that had not yet been published.

He was holding a box.

Gold-wrapped, square, tied with a red ribbon that had been folded into a bow so precise it looked almost architectural. He held it in both hands with the careful, slightly stiff posture of someone who was not accustomed to carrying things they were worried about dropping.

You stood there for a moment that stretched like taffy.

"You're two minutes early," he said, by way of greeting. His voice was exactly as flat and unimpressed as it always was, which was somehow the most stabilizing thing about the entire situation.

"You're... Saiki, you're wearing a suit."

"I'm aware."

"A nice suit."

"Also aware."

"Where did you even..." You stopped, gestured vaguely at all of him. "This."

He looked at you for a moment with those green-lensed eyes, and then he held out the box.

You took it automatically, the way you might catch something thrown at you before your brain had fully processed the throw. It was heavier than it looked. The ribbon was smooth under your fingers, the paper crisp and unwrinkled.

"What is this," you asked.

"For later," he thought at you, the words landing in your mind with the quiet clarity of a dropped coin. "Don't open it yet."

"You're being incredibly mysterious for someone who famously refused to pay an extra thirty yen for cheese on his burger last month."

"The cheese was not worth thirty yen."

"The cheese-" You took a breath. "Okay. Where are we going?"

He turned and began walking, which was answer enough.

ψ

The restaurant was not the kind of place you had ever expected Saiki Kusuo to take you.

It occupied the upper floor of a building in a part of the city where the streets were quieter and the shop fronts were lit with the kind of understated lighting that communicated expense without advertising it.

The elevator opened directly into the dining room, which was low-lit and warm, with deep-set windows that looked out over the city spreading gold and glittering into the dusk. The tables were spaced far apart. There were flowers, real ones, pale and fragrant, in small vases at the center of each table. A musician in the far corner was playing something slow and unobtrusive on a grand piano.

The host greeted Saiki by name.

You turned to stare at him. He was looking straight ahead with the expression of a man who had prepared for this moment and was not going to give you the satisfaction of reacting to your reaction.

'He made a reservation,' you thought, slightly dazed. 'He made a reservation at a restaurant with a piano.'

"Obviously," he thought back. "Walk."

You walked.

The table he had reserved was by the window. The city below was doing that thing it did in the evening when the sky hadn't quite darkened and the lights had just started coming up, that brief overlap of blue dusk and gold electricity that lasted maybe twenty minutes and made everything look like a painting of itself.

You sat down across from him and for a moment neither of you said anything, and the piano played something you half-recognized, and the city glowed below the glass.

"Saiki," you said finally.

He looked at you.

"What is going on?"

He picked up his menu. Looked at it. Set it down. Looked at you instead with the even, assessing expression he wore when he was choosing words with more than usual care, which was saying something because Saiki Kusuo treated every word like a non-refundable expenditure.

"You mentioned," he said, not out loud, because he rarely bothered with out loud when you were alone together and could receive him clearly, "in February. That you had never been taken somewhere nice."

You blinked. "I said that in passing. In the middle of a completely different conversation."

"I know."

"That was four months ago."

"I know."

You looked at him across the white tablecloth, across the small vase of pale flowers, across the candlelight that was doing something genuinely unfair to the angles of his face, and you felt something shift in your chest.

Not dramatically, not the way it happened in the stories Teruhashi probably narrated to herself in the mirror. Something quieter. A thing that had perhaps been there for a while, rearranging itself into a configuration you could finally read clearly.

"You remembered," you said.

"I remember everything," he thought, with perfect matter-of-fact neutrality. "That's the problem, mostly. Tonight it was useful."

You laughed. You couldn't help it. The laugh came out of you a little unsteadily, and you pressed the back of your hand to your mouth, and Saiki watched you with the expression he had when something had landed the way he'd intended it to but he was not going to acknowledge that it had.

The server appeared, unhurried and professional, and recited something about seasonal menus and chef's recommendations. Saiki listened with polite attention. When the server left, you watched him look at the menu again with the particular quality of focus he applied to anything that required evaluation.

"Tell me you're not calculating cost per gram," you said.

A pause.

"...I was comparing the set menu to the à la carte options on a total value basis."

"Saiki."

"The set menu is objectively the better value."

"We're at a nice restaurant. You wore a suit. You brought me a present I'm not allowed to open yet. You can order whatever you want without mathing it first."

He looked at you over the top of his glasses. I always order whatever I want. I want the best value option.

"Then order it and stop looking guilty about it."

"I don't feel guilt."

"You're making the guilt face."

"I don't have a guilt face."

"You have about eleven distinct faces that you think are all the same neutral expression. They are not."

He looked back at his menu. After a moment: "...what does the guilt face look like."

"Like you're very calmly disagreeing with yourself."

The corner of his mouth moved. Just barely. It was the thing that passed for a smile when Saiki was in public, or in low-lit restaurants, or in any situation where he had decided smiling was an available option but one that should be deployed with restraint.

You smiled back, properly, without restraint, because you had never seen a reason to be restrained about it.

ψ

Dinner was extraordinary.

This was not something you said lightly. The food was the kind that arrived looking almost too considered to eat and tasted like whoever made it had thought about it seriously.

You had something with delicate ribbons of something citrus-bright running through it; Saiki had the set menu, as promised, and ate with the focused appreciation of a person who took flavor seriously even when he pretended not to.

You talked the way you always talked, which was sometimes out loud and sometimes not, the hybrid of spoken words and received thoughts that had become natural to you over months of practice until you barely noticed the seam between them.

You talked about Nendou's latest catastrophic misunderstanding of how supermarkets worked. About Kuboyasu's latest lapse to be a threatening delinquent while clearly having adopted a stray cat. About Hairo, who had at last broken the school's record for consecutive push-ups and cried about it with such pure, uncomplicated joy that even Saiki had watched the video you showed him with something approaching genuine warmth.

"He works hard," Saiki said, which from him was a significant statement.

"You like them," you said. "All of them. Even when you're pretending they're an inconvenience."

"They are an inconvenience."

"Sure."

"A manageable one."

"High praise."

"Don't repeat that."

"I'm going to repeat it constantly."

He looked at you with the expression that meant he had already accepted this outcome and was simply registering his objection for the record. You beamed at him.

Outside the window, the city had completed its shift into full night, and the gold had won, spreading uninterrupted now in all directions, the lit grid of streets and the moving chains of headlights and the dark river running through it all with its own scattered reflections.

It was the kind of view that made the city feel like something generous, like it was offering itself up to be looked at, and you looked at it for a while in comfortable silence while the piano found something slower and more deliberate in the corner.

"This is really nice," you said, quietly, not really directing it at him, more at the window, at the evening, at the general fact of being here.

"Good," he said, just as quietly. And then, after a pause: "You should have been brought somewhere nice before."

You turned to look at him. He was looking at his water glass, tracing the rim with one finger with the focused non-expression of someone who has said a thing they meant and are waiting to see what happens next.

"Saiki."

He looked up.

"Is this a date?"

The pause was very brief. He was Saiki Kusuo; he had known you were going to ask that before you knew you were going to ask it, and he had prepared. But there was still, in the moment before he answered, a quality of... not uncertainty, exactly. Of weight. Of someone choosing something carefully.

"I thought it was obvious," he said, "that it was a date."

"You didn't say it was a date."

"I said to dress nicely. I made a reservation. I brought a present."

"Those things could all be-"

"They couldn't," he said, and though his voice in your mind was the same level, even tone it always was, there was something underneath it that you had learned to hear, a frequency of sincerity that he almost never let through in full. "They couldn't be anything else. You know that."

You did know that. You had known it when you changed your outfit four times. You had known it at the end of the path when you saw the box and the suit and the evening light. You had known it and been unwilling to assume, because assuming things about Saiki Kusuo, you had learned, was a good way to be wrong, and being wrong about this, about him, was not something you had wanted to risk.

"Okay," you said.

He raised an eyebrow.

"Okay, it's a date." You looked at him steadily. "A very nice date. An embarrassingly nice date, honestly, given your documented relationship with spending money."

"I don't have a problem spending money," he said, with great dignity, "on things that merit it."

"You once debated for six minutes whether a vending machine coffee was worth the extra ten yen for the hot option."

"The temperature differential wasn't-"

"Saiki."

"...yes."

"Thank you," you said. "For this. All of it." You gestured at the table, the window, the general improbable loveliness of the evening. "Thank you for remembering. And for doing something about it."

He looked at you for a moment. His green-tinted lenses caught the candlelight and turned it amber, and the piano was playing something gentle, and the city sprawled its gold beyond the glass.

"You're welcome," he said. Simply, plainly, without fuss.

Which, from Saiki, was everything.

ψ

After dinner, you took the long way back.

Not because Saiki suggested it; he didn't suggest things like long walks home, in general, as a rule, but because you stepped out of the elevator into the cooler night air and turned left instead of right, and he fell into step beside you without comment, which was as close as he got to agreement without words.

The streets were quieter here. Your footsteps made a comfortable sound on the pavement. Somewhere a few blocks over, the city was louder; here it was muted, filtered, the kind of urban quiet that felt earned.

You walked with the box tucked under your arm, still unopened, and the ribbon had stayed perfect, which felt like a small miracle.

"Can I open it now," you asked.

"Yes."

You stopped under a streetlight. Saiki stopped beside you, hands in his pockets, watching with the patient stillness of someone who has already seen every possible version of the next few moments and has chosen to be present in this one anyway.

You undid the ribbon carefully. Pulled back the paper; it was properly wrapped, corners folded with a precision that seemed like too much to be anyone's first attempt. Inside was a plain white box. You lifted the lid.

Inside, nestled in tissue paper, were two things.

The first was a small jar of the coffee jelly you liked, the specific brand from the convenience store two neighborhoods over that was slightly more expensive than the regular kind but genuinely, measurably better. You had mentioned this once, probably in passing, probably without thinking.

The second was a photograph.

It was printed properly, not on regular paper, on actual photograph paper, the kind with a slight gloss. It was a picture of the two of you from a school trip three months ago, one you hadn't known existed.

You were standing in front of a painted wall, laughing at something, you couldn't remember what now, and Saiki was beside you, not quite smiling but not quite not smiling, looking at the laughing version of you with an expression on his face that you had never seen photographed before. An expression that looked, unmistakably, like someone looking at a thing they are glad exists.

You stared at it for a long moment.

"Who took this," you asked.

"Kuboyasu. I asked him not to mention it."

"You asked Kuboyasu to take a secret photo of us."

"Not secret." A pause. "Candid."

"How long have you had this?"

"Three months."

You looked up at him. He was looking at the middle distance with great concentration, which was the specific thing he did when he was waiting for you to say something and was not going to rush you.

"Saiki," you said. "Look at me."

He looked at you.

In the amber of the streetlight, in the quiet of the evening, with the city doing its murmuring all around you, Saiki Kusuo looked at you with his real face; not the careful blankness, not the management-of-others expression, but the face underneath all of that, the one that was simply his.

"How long," you asked. Not about the photograph.

He understood. He always understood.

"Long enough," he said, "that I stopped counting."

You took a breath. Held it. Let it go.

Then you reached out and took his hand, and his fingers folded around yours with a quiet certainty, like they had always known that was where they would end up.

You stood there for a moment, in the streetlight, with the city glowing all around you.

"Next time," you said, "you can pick the cheap place."

"There will be a next time," he said, which was the most romantic thing he had ever said in his life, and probably would be for quite a long time, and was somehow completely enough.

You walked home.