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It took Shuichi a moment to process what had happened when all of the lights in the apartment flickered off. There was a brief calm, and right around when he realized that the power had died, his annoying roommate, Kage, was heard swearing behind his door, realizing the same.
Shuichi removed his headphones, standing up to give the light switch a grace check even though he had heard the loud whirr of a shutdown. Brushing the curtains aside, the entire neighborhood had gone dark. It would only be a matter of time before the blackout lunatics activated.
Kage emerged from his room screeching like a pterodactyl. He was definitely a blackout lunatic.
“I’m so mad! I’m so goddamn mad!” he whined loudly, taking a couple of steps down the ladder that connected his loft room before hopping the rest of the way. “I lost my progress! Of all times for the power to go to shit!”
“Condolences,” Shuichi replied without sparing him a second glance. “Oh… there they go.” There were college students in the streets, screaming like it was an exaggerated Black Friday skit. Kage blinked over at him, nudging into Shuichi just enough to see out the window.
“I think those two are going to fight,” Kage said, pointing out of the glass. “Over by the intersection.” He bounced up slightly. “Oh, god. I have to eat all the ice cream before it melts.”
Shuichi realized that their food was going to waste if this wasn’t resolved quickly. “We can just go buy ice,” he suggested.
“Gross. I’d rather buy new groceries than do that,” Kage drawled. Shuichi narrowed his eyes at him in confusion, but Kage was already distracted, peering behind the checkered curtain separating Kokichi’s room in the studio. “Do you have any idea where Kokichi went?”
“I never have any idea where he goes,” Shuichi replied weakly, pulling out his phone to check local news. “I just know he’s not here.” A mob of screaming college students careened past their front door and Shuichi decided it was in his better interest to make sure it was locked.
Kage collapsed forward onto the couch, his legs sticking in the air. “Are you going to buy ice?” he asked dolefully. “I don’t wanna be alone.”
“Then come with me,” Shuichi told him simply, pulling his tied sneakers off the shoe rack and putting them on. “You should, anyway. I don’t want to get mugged.”
Kage rolled off the couch and landed on the floor with a thud. “Oh, sure. I’ll bring my survival knife and bodyguard you.”
“Maybe I should be more worried about you mugging me,” Shuichi remarked flatly, fishing his jacket out of the closet while Kage heaved himself to his feet. Shuichi let out an weary sigh, walking past Kage again to retrieve his wallet from his school belongings. He knelt down by his backpack, doing a double take as he reached into a particular pocket and found nothing. “Huh? Where’s…” He checked more pockets to no avail.
“Looking for something?” Kage asked, approaching him and flinging Shuichi’s black wallet at his head with a laugh.
Shuichi let out an irritated groan as it bounced off his skull and he picked it up, quickly pocketing it. “Hey, can you not touch my belongings, please and thanks?” he suggested brusquely.
“You don’t want me to touch your belongings? That’s too bad,” Kage said, the smirk on his face twitching as he snorted. Shuichi did not look impressed. “Okay, okay. I won’t touch your wallet. I just thought it was a good comedic follow-up, you know, since you were just talking about me mugging you.”
Shuichi retrieved his car keys from one of his desk drawers. “Going to hope minimal people are roaming the streets,” he said, decidedly ignoring most of what Kage said. The other boy clicked his tongue, striding behind Shuichi as they moved to the front door again. They could still see inside their apartment, but it wouldn’t be long until the sun had completely set. Kage pulled his signature yellow jacket and black hat out of the closet as they walked out.
“Geez, it’s cold,” Shuichi grumbled, his arms stiffening up. “It’s too soon for this temperature!”
“It’s November,” Kage deadpanned while Shuichi turned around to lock the door behind them, adjusting the cap on his head.
“I hope Kokichi brought a key if he decides to get back while we’re gone,” Shuichi said, pocketing his apartment key.
Kage strolled along behind as the two of them walked down the line of numbered balcony doors, several of which already had loud music blaring out of them. “He’d probably just break in. He would do that before even thinking to ask where we were,” Kage responded. He looked out over the edge of the complex, fixating his eyes on something. “Whoa… those guys are setting off fireworks…”
“Already?” Shuichi groaned. “That’s so illegal—and dangerous.”
Kage scoffed loudly. “Oh my god, those are our neighbors. They just bolted. Ready to break the law. I’d get behind that, but it’s also kind of funny to call the cops on people.” He looked back at Shuichi as they reached the stairs. “Where’d you put your car, anyway?”
“I had to park it on the far side because all the spaces were taken up,” Shuichi told him.
They shuffled down the metal stairs and started to walk across the parking lot, but Shuichi’s efforts were graciously disrupted by his feet suddenly skidding on ice. He let out a quality tiny scream as his legs slipped in front of him—but Kage was close enough behind him that his rescue of catching Shuichi under his arms could’ve been passed off as an accident.
“Why… is there ice?” Shuichi quietly bemoaned after a moment of silent shock, hanging helplessly in Kage’s hold. The other boy pushed him upright again and they both skillfully navigated around the disturbing frozen patch.
“The ground’s uneven…” Kage said.
“The ice just tried to kill me,” Shuichi grumbled, scraping his shoe against the concrete to ascertain there wasn’t more ice waiting for him. “Thanks for not watching me fall and laughing.”
Kage pursed his lips. “I think I was incapable of doing that. I wasn’t ready to step out of the way on purpose.” He snickered as Shuichi turned away, rolling his eyes. “Of course, I wouldn’t mind an excuse to hold you.”
“Is that so,” Shuichi blankly replied, attempting to brush off Kage’s infuriating nature. He’d already decided about a month ago that he wasn’t going to allow himself to expend too many brain cells on the other’s antics—not that he was highly successful. Somehow, Shuichi had ended up with two of the most insane roommates possible that only encouraged each other’s insanity, and he thought Kokichi—one of his high school friends—was bad enough on his own.
Kage moving in wasn’t originally part of the semester game plan, but he needed somewhere new to live for some ever-unexplained reason and there was barely space in Shuichi and Kokichi’s studio. Several weeks into the semester, he moved into the apartment’s random small loft room that Shuichi and Kokichi had left unoccupied by anything but storage due to its lack of decent insulation, and ever since then, Shuichi had been dealing with a fair stream of bullshit, even if he had grown somewhat accustomed to it by now.
Shuichi pressed the button on his car keys to unlock the silver vehicle—not his first choice of car color, but he was a college student and had to take what he could get. As he climbed in and turned the lights on, Kage plopped into the passenger seat and adjusted the seat far back enough that it was effectively a lounge chair.
“Did it occur to you that the traffic lights are going to be out?” Kage asked him, lolling his head in Shuichi’s direction. “Think you can handle driving without the confines of the lights?”
“It’ll be fine,” Shuichi answered simply, looking over his shoulder to exit the parking space and ignoring Kage’s attempt to provoke him. A few college students wandered behind the car and were taking their sweet time moving—no, they weren’t moving at all. Shuichi knocked on his horn just enough to make noise and the young adults meandered aside just as slowly as they’d moved there.
“Hey. Shuichi,” Kage started, randomly sticking his fingers in Shuichi’s hair.
Shuichi put his foot on the breaks. “Hey—!“ he started in dismay, recoiling slightly and swatting at the other.
“You have a bug in your hair,” Kage told him.
Shuichi stiffened up instinctively. “It’s freezing out! How?”
Kage pulled something dark out between two fingers. “No, wait. It’s just a fuzzy,” he said, flicking the tiny clump of fiber away.
Shuichi deflated slightly. “Please let me drive in peace.”
As they drove slowly and carefully through town, the amount of people that Shuichi had to stop for and honk out of the road was ridiculous. Lunatic pedestrians proved to be more of an issue than actual drivers, who were being reasonable for the most part. Kage had his face pressed up against the window, eyes trained on a group of boys with frat house energy who looked like they were trying to cook with a blowtorch despite the countless fire pits dotted across campus and all its associated complexes.
They finally reached the grocery store, which looked like a hellhole in and of itself. Shoppers were frantically entering and exiting the store, many of which hauling carts stuffed with ice, water, toilet paper and miscellaneous items that would supposedly aid in a blackout but likely never be used again.
“They’re saying the blackout was a wire problem at the plant,” Kage said, flicking his finger across his black and white-cased phone. “We have to wait for them to fix it.”
Shuichi slumped forward after locating an empty parking space, which happened to be as far away from the building as possible. “They’re going to run out of ice,” he remarked sadly.
Kage threw himself forward from his chair and swung open the door. “Not if we’re fast,” he declared, leaping out of the car. Shuichi had a crisis trying to get his keys out of the slot for a second before he climbed out and pressed the button to lock the car. He barely had time to pocket the keys before Kage kicked him in the leg to get his attention and bolted towards the store’s automatic doors at an overenthusiastic speed. Shuichi called after him to no avail before giving in to run after him with less enthusiasm.
Kage was glancing left and right near the entrance. If the streets were like an exaggerated Black Friday skit, the grocery store wasn’t fucking around. Kage whirled on his heel and grabbed Shuichi’s arm as he caught up, immediately dragging him down the frozen items aisle. A worker was anxiously restocking the ice freezer while a handful of people stared them down like it was nobody’s business.
Kage released Shuichi, diving in and snatching two giant bags of ice from between the freezer and the employee with no regard for what it would encourage the remainder of the group to do. As Kage shoved one of the bags into Shuichi’s arms and walked past him, Shuichi felt like they were turning their backs on a potential disaster. Kage simply yawned while they joined in line at self-checkout.
He briefly blinked at the lineup of candy that stretched alongside them. A smile stretched on his cheeks, and he reached for the largest possible variation of a three musketeers bar. “Hey, can you pay for this for me?” Kage asked, waving it around.
Shuichi’s eyes were thin. “Are you going to pay me back?” he asked.
“I’ll pay you in adoration and affection,” Kage answered with an innocuous expression.
“Put it back.”
Kage let out a defeated whine, placing the candy bar in the wrong box on purpose as they proceeded through the line and eventually reached a register. Shuichi fumbled with the massive bag in search of a bar code, eventually locating it to scan it. He carefully placed it in the bagging area, taking the other bag from Kage to run it through next, but he accidentally dropped it on the scanner. Trying to briskly transfer it to the tiny bagging area, he accidentally knocked the other ice bag off and the register started screaming at him that an item was missing.
“No, shut up—” Shuichi said, trying to put the bag back and retrieve his wallet from his pocket at the same time, Kage already cracking up next to him. “Please wait help is on the way yourself!”
A very tired employee briefly dropped by to make the register shut up, as it was so preoccupied with its present stroke that it refused to accept Shuichi’s debit card. In about a minute, the two of them finally returned to parking lot to cross it with their new inventory, Shuichi reaching his limits of distress.
“Hey. Look over there,” Kage began, pointing off in the distance after they had loaded the bags into the backseat of their transportation. Shuichi’s eyes wearily followed to where he was pointing and he blinked hard a few times. Off in the distance was a group of people dressed up as Power Rangers, sprinting down the street like it was nobody’s business and spooking people out of their trajectory. There were more than five of them.
“What the hell are they smoking?” Shuichi mused, shaking his head before climbing back into his car.
A while later, they returned to the apartment complex, witnessing a few more minute disasters on the way. A few locations had acquired interspersed police cars and a couple of traffic guards had appeared at the intersections, but it somehow hadn’t improved the rate at which they reached the complex.
After carrying the ice bags into their apartment, they noticed that Kokichi was still nowhere to be found. Shuichi hadn’t really expected him to return in the short time they’d departed, but he still wondered if he would return any time soon. The sun had nearly finished setting, the apartment was almost pitch black, and Kage had resorted to using his phone flashlight after he kicked his shoes off by the door. While Shuichi organized the dwindling fridge and freezer to the best of his ability, Kage was scrolling through something or other on his phone.
“I want my ice cream,” Kage said suddenly. He let out a brief grunt as he tripped over his own feet in the dark. “Scuse.” He reached over Shuichi’s shoulder, getting as in-the-way as possible while retrieving a carton from the freezer. Whirling around on his socks, he opened it. “Aw… it’s so sad already… Hey, Shuichi. What’re you gonna do now that there’s no power and no WiFi?”
Shuichi shrugged, trying to figure out why the freezer wouldn’t shut all the way. “I don’t know, read, or something,” he replied halfheartedly.
“I’m going to be bored…” Kage lamented, changing his mind about the ice cream and trying to put it back. “We should play a game. Oh, we should build a blanket fort!”
Shuichi glanced over at him, raising an eyebrow. “You’re reminding me of Kokichi,” he said with a huff. Somehow, he managed to make the freezer to stay shut.
“Well? What do you want to do?” Kage asked. “We could play cards. Or we could have a nerf gun war in the dark! Or do you want to improvise a miniature D&D session?”
Shuichi scoffed. “That’s very Kokichi-like of you. He used to say stuff like that all the time. I think he still would if he wasn’t preoccupied by a double major.”
“Kokichi also isn’t here,” Kage told him, clicking his tongue. He glanced down at the phone in his hand, swiping his finger across it to turn the flashlight off, leaving them in almost complete darkness. “We are aloooone. You’re stuck here with me.”
Shuichi reached into his pocket, perplexed, but Kage grabbed his arm before he could pull his own phone out. Kage quickly interlaced their fingers, only causing Shuichi more suspicion.
“So… come on!” Kage exclaimed, flicking his flashlight back on and pulling Shuichi over to the ladder leading to his room. He released him, stepping up, rocking on his heels as he opened the door on the higher level.
Shuichi didn’t often enter Kage’s room, only standing in the doorway on occasion, but he knew Kage had a lot of things. He’d hauled an entire gaming PC in there, patterned curtains and posters were strewn about the walls, schoolbooks and pillows were scattered on the floor and he’d somehow managed to fit an entire loft bed in there. It was also notably colder than the rest of the studio, no thanks to its shoddy insulation.
“Jesus. This room gave up right away after the heating died,” Kage said, frowning. “Though, I bet the rest of the apartment is on its way.” He whistled as he made his way over to a shelf, snapping a lighter and drawing it over the room’s randomly interspersed candles, providing a very faint amount of light. Shuichi watched him as he climbed up the ladder to his bed, reaching for something in the corner. A string of battery lights taped to the ceiling flickered to life. “Ta-da!”
“You have so much stuff,” Shuichi commented, trying to rub the chills out of his arms. A blanket flew down from where Kage was, landing directly over Shuichi’s head.
Kage was on his hands and knees on the loft bed. “Oh, I forgot about this!” he exclaimed, pulling the exact same kind of candy bar he tried to get Shuichi to buy out of a location that the boy on the floor couldn’t see. “I already had one of these! Hey, do you need any more blankets?”
“I think that I’m—” Shuichi started, but he shut his mouth as a second blanket flew down anyway, hitting his shoulder and falling to the ground.
Kage poked his head out over the edge of the bed. “Hey, when was the last time you played something like Battleships or Stratego?” he asked. He crawled over to the ladder again, hopping off with a thump and moving over to one of the bookshelves that was mostly comprised of taped game boxes. With the new mood lighting, he’d abandoned his phone flashlight. Shuichi wasn’t sure how to feel about all of the candles with wildly different scents burning at once.
“What’s Stratego?” Shuichi asked, tossing one of the blankets he’d acquired over his shoulders to bundle himself up. “I don’t think I’ve played Battleships since I was really little. Don’t you just call out coordinates and hope they hit?”
Kage was kneeling by the bookshelf, scanning over its contents. He briefly laughed as his hand met a certain box littered with vandalization. “We could play that custom version of Monopoly I made that has murder and heists in it,” he suggested. “I mixed pieces from other games into it and it also uses a D20. It’s really convoluted and also depends on distracting the other players to get away with crimes.”
“That’s frightening,” Shuichi said.
Kage pulled a dilapidated game box out of the shelf. “Let’s just play Stratego,” he decided instead, carrying it to the center of the room where Shuichi was and sitting to dump the pieces everywhere. They were in two colors and he began to separate them. “So, in this game, you have a flag that you’re trying to protect and you surround it with an army. Every piece in your army has a different rank and can only beat opposing pieces with a higher number than they have…”
Shuichi learned how to play a board game he’d never played before. It seemed complicated on the surface, but he realized it wasn’t so bad once he figured it out past Kage’s disorganized explanation of the rules. By the time they had reached the third game, Shuichi proudly thought he’d figured it out, albeit completely congealed into a blanket ball due to the decreasing temperature—at least he was winning.
Or so he thought. Kage completely screwed him over with some tactic he hadn’t accounted for with his newcomer knowledge and Shuichi lost anyway. Shuichi pulled the blanket over his face and lay down in disappointment, facing away from the board. Kage laughed tauntingly, leaning way over the board and poking Shuichi before shaking him by the shoulder.
“You wanna do something else?” Kage asked him. Shuichi rolled over slightly, peeking out and shivering almost audibly. Kage’s eyes peered right over him with curiosity.
“It’s so cold,” Shuichi mumbled. “I need twenty more layers.”
“Hmm…” Kage put a finger on his chin. His lips spread into a wry smile. “Or we could huddle.”
Shuichi squinted. “Yeah right.”
“No, no, I’m warm, I promise,” Kage told him, sticking his hand through Shuichi’s blanket cocoon to splay his fingers over his cheek.
Shuichi tried to roll away, swatting lightly at Kage. “Your hand is freezing!” he denied. Kage didn’t recoil his hand right away, tentatively pressing his fingers against Shuichi’s skin. “… Kage?”
Kage stiffly drew away, laughing sheepishly. For a moment, his eyes had flickered below Shuichi’s. “Uh, do you want to play a card game?” he suggested abruptly, clambering to his feet to pull a drawstring bag from his shelf of games. He tossed it onto his loft bed and proceeded to the ladder. “Come up here. The ground is starting to hurt to sit on.”
Shuichi gathered his blanket tightly around himself, climbing up the ladder behind Kage to the best of his ability while trying to keep himself insulated. Kage sat on one end while Shuichi sat on the other and the former dumped the bag he held out to reveal at least seven different card game decks. Shuichi yawned while Kage examined all of them, eventually letting out a dissatisfied sigh.
“Mm… actually,” Kage started again, beginning to drop the cards back into the bag. “My laptop’s battery is pretty good, and I have an external one. How do you feel about watching a movie instead?”
“Without internet?” Shuichi questioned.
Kage let out an amused huff, tossing the re-filled bag over the side. “Yeah, they’re called DVDs.”
Shuichi blinked at him. “You actually own DVDs?”
Kage climbed over Shuichi to descend the ladder again, pulling open another drawer to reveal a long line of video game cases, hidden at the end of which was a handful of movies. “I don’t have that many. They’re mostly from when DVDs were still common.”
“And… you brought them with you to college?” Shuichi asked.
“My parents like to throw my stuff away while I’m not paying attention,” Kage answered with a sigh. “Do you want to look at these?”
Shuichi frowned slightly. “It’s too cold to move.”
Kage procured a particular case. “So, you wanna watch Shrek 2?”
Kage’s movie selection did not turn out to be particularly impressive—strangely comprised mostly of sequels—so Shuichi ended up agreeing to the first choice. As Kage climbed back up with his laptop after putting out the candles, he sat by the wall and extended one arm, a blanket draping over it and an expectant look directed at Shuichi. The latter was reluctant, but it was really damn cold, so he conceded to sit next to Kage, who was overtly excited to huddle closer.
They ended up splitting commentary for the entire movie, only paying attention about half the time. Kage told a story about how he had watched the movie at a high school party that he accidentally ate weed brownies at and how the resident jock king at his school had been dared to kiss him, but he ended up punching Kage in the face instead. Although Kage was too stoned to retaliate, the police suddenly showed up at the door and Kage miraculously escaped through the basement with one of his friends at the time.
Shuichi also wasn’t surprised when Kage started singing Holding Out For A Hero at the top of his lungs mid-movie. He found himself smiling and laughing, unable to do much else because he didn’t know the words to the song. Kage was shaking him melodramatically—considering he was a drama major, that was kind of his thing.
Shuichi was partially delirious and dozing off, so he let out a small scream when Kage straight up knocked him over in the heat of the moment, the pile of blankets they’d accumulated splaying about. The computer was slightly askew near their legs, and they were very, very… close.
Kage was frozen in place, Shuichi was frozen in place, and the longer they procrastinated moving, the longer the silence stretched on. The time that neither of them spoke a word or moved a muscle only made it more difficult to decide to address an error. Suddenly, temperature of the room was easier to ignore, even with the movie continuing on behind them.
“H… Hi…” Kage finally said very awkwardly. He watched his own hand slowly move to Shuichi’s wrist, gently pressing against it. “Um, Shuichi…”
Shuichi found his voice. “What are you… doing?” he asked hesitantly, the beat of his heart seeming louder than before.
“I… don’t know…” Kage answered weakly, his eyes trailing down to Shuichi’s lips. There was another beat of silence. Without another moment’s rest, Kage quickly leaned down to kiss him. He lingered for a moment, drawing away slowly when Shuichi did not respond. “… Never mind. Forget about it.”
Kage started to sit back up, but Shuichi abruptly grabbed him by the yellow jacket he was still wearing to stop him. “Wait a second.” Shuichi’s words came out more rushed than he expected—he’d forgotten to breathe for the past few moments. “Do you…”
“Don’t make me talk about my feelings,” Kage lamented, his shoulders slumping.
“Fine… just don’t,” Shuichi told him. He scrutinized Kage’s face for a second, carefully lacing his fingers through the other’s long hair, testing the sensation. “… Come back here.”
Kage looked surprised, but he responded swiftly, connecting their lips again with a sense of urgency. He closed his laptop with his foot to interrupt the movie’s unwanted background noise, adjusting his position above Shuichi without reservation. Kage seemed so warm—warmer than the frozen hell temperature of the room, that is.
Shuichi felt a very strange sense of deja vu.
“Shuichi,” Kage whispered, one of his hands crossing down Shuichi’s chest to caress his side. A chill crept down Shuichi’s spine as Kage’s nose tickled his ear, the other boy laughing softly. “You give in so easily.”
Shuichi gaze whipped over to him. “What’s that supposed to mean…?” he asked skeptically.
“Mm… nothing.” Kage lay down next to him, pulling a messy pile of blankets over the two of them before nuzzling against Shuichi’s neck, holding him tightly and tangling around him like a koala. “You’re warm…”
Shuichi accepted that he wasn’t going to be moving for a while. Kage reached above their heads to find a switch and the room flickered to pitch dark, sealing Shuichi’s fate—but Shuichi found that he didn’t mind all that much. It was nice being close to someone and he adjusted himself to fit into Kage’s arms the best he could. His eyes slowly drifted shut, finding a rhythm to his breathing while Kage caressed his arm like they were meant to be here.
-
-
Shuichi blinked hard as light from the room’s only window crossed his eyes. He weakly glanced around the room as his vision adjusted, giving up at the lack of clock visibility and flopping back down. He’d woken up lying on his side, Kage behind him with his limbs splayed every which way. It took Shuichi a few seconds to notice that his own shirt had ridden up and Kage’s hand had ended up under the fabric.
Kage made a half-conscious noise from Shuichi’s movements and pulled the other boy back into his hold, burying his head in the back of his neck. Heat crawled into Shuichi’s cheeks at the simultaneous sensations of breath on his skin, Kage’s hand resting on his ribs and the way that Kage wrapped their legs together—it was difficult to not immediately find himself more awake.
Shuichi tried to turn over and reach back to pat Kage into a state of awareness. “Hey… I think it’s morning,” he said.
Kage stirred slightly, his nose twitching. His eyes opened partway, and while processing what he saw, a small smile appeared on his face, sweeter than it had the right to be. “Hey,” he replied, deciding to close his eyes and do nothing different.
Shuichi squinted, reaching over to shake him. “Kage,” he chided.
Kage let out a long whine, releasing Shuichi partway to roll onto his back and stretch. “Alexa, what time is it?” he called out flatly.
“Kage… the power,” Shuichi reminded him. “Is the power back?”
The time is 8:57, the speaker replied anyway. Shuichi briskly pushed himself up while Kage groaned about it still being too early.
“So, the power is back?” Shuichi reiterated, realizing the apartment wasn’t nearly as cold as it had been the night before.
The door of the room suddenly creaked open, a set of knuckles rapping on it. “Good morning, sleepyheads!” Kokichi greeted, smiling brightly.
Kage stuck his arms in the air. “It’s not even nine!” he whined.
“Did you have fun while I was out?” Kokichi asked them, poking his face. “At least the power is back now.”
Shuichi scratched his head and yawned, sitting up high enough to see him in the doorway. “Where the heck were you?” he asked.
“Crimes,” Kokichi replied proudly and vaguely. “You should check the news.”
Shuichi wondered if he should be concerned. “… What did you do?” Behind him, Kage sat up to locate his phone at the end of the bed. He flicked through a few screens, waiting through load times.
“Power Rangers gone rogue,” Kage said, reading a headline. “Oh yeah, we saw ‘em, huh.” Kokichi let out a quick, nasally laugh.
“I almost got arrested!” Kokichi announced cheerily.
Shuichi’s eyes widened in horror. “You were one of them?” he questioned before his expression drooped. Kokichi gave him a noncommittal shrug, but the look on his face said all. “… You know what, never mind. I’m not surprised,” Shuichi finished. “As long as the police don’t show up here.”
Kokichi turned on his heel to leave the room. “Do you think my almond milk is still good?” he asked, walking down the tilted ladder like a staircase.
“Probably not,” Shuichi called after him. He looked over his shoulder as Kage came up behind him, wrapping his arms around his waist and putting his head on his shoulder.
“… Are you busy today?” Kage inquired softly.
Shuichi found himself pondering Kage’s disposition for affection. “I have homework, but it shouldn’t take more than a couple hours.”
“Great, because…” Kage started, snorting loudly before he lowered the volume of his voice. “Because I like having you in my bed with me.”
“Shut up,” Shuichi groaned in embarrassment, bumping Kage in the stomach with his elbow.
“WOW! THE MILK IS BAD,” Kokichi yelled from the kitchen.
Shuichi attempted to urge himself free from Kage’s arms. “I’m gonna go take a shower. I feel like a mess,” he said. Kage relented with a sigh, letting Shuichi move to the ladder.
“Oh, you’ll wake up feeling like more of a mess later,” Kage told him, a jovial grin on his face.
Shuichi picked up a pillow and threw it at him. Kage simply laughed, badly deflecting it before he threw himself forward, crouching over his knees and quickly taking hold of Shuichi’s face with both hands to sloppily connect their lips.
Kage intended for the notion to only last a second, but Shuichi forgot where he was going the moment he decided to return it.