"Hey, wake up."
Itto snorts himself into wakefulness at the feel of something hard prodding his cheek. When his eyes pull into focus again, he realizes that he fell asleep inside the shrine-turned-practice dojo, and Ayato was poking him with the hilt of his sword.
Ayato's lips spread into a small smile. "Were you trying to practice that super-frickin-cool move that Ranpo-dono showed us this morning?"
The Kamisato heir seems to find it amusing, how Itto is even more awake because of the older boy's poor impression of him. Rubbing the bleariness out of his eyes, he takes the hand Ayato offers and gets back to his feet—dusting his clothes off with a tinge of red on his cheeks.
"I didn't mean to stay behind," Itto grumbles. "I got tired after trying so many times, and next thing I know I was in dreamland chasin' a bunch of yakisoba bread in a field."
Ayato lets out a quiet laugh. It was a reaction he always gives him whenever Itto does something stupid or astounding or stupidly astounding, so on any other day, he wouldn't have thought twice about it. But now, even when Itto was fresh out of slumber, he can somehow sense the strain in his kind voice, the stiffness of his usually eloquent posture.
Looking around, it was already sundown—the red-orange sunlight starting to streak through the windows of the dojo. Ranpo doesn't really lock this place up, so the kids of the Shuumatsuban could train longer if they wanted to, or have a place to stay if they had nowhere else to go. Today, it's just Itto lingering longer than the usual training hours. By this time, Ayato would have already returned to the Kamisato estate before the attendants could catch wind of his absence.
Yet here he is, still wearing the same training robes he wore this morning.
"You alright?"
Ayato doesn't react oddly to the question. He simply looks at Itto with reserved curiosity—as if he has no idea why he could be asking that in the first place.
"I should be asking you that," he deflects. "Sleeping on the wooden floor can't be very comfortable."
"I've slept in worse places." Itto brushes it off with a laugh. "Seriously, is anything the matter? You don't usually hang around here at the shrine for too long. Unless your old man's try'na give you a hard time again."
Now that rouses a reaction from typically composed Kamisato Ayato.
Of course, he's quick to recover. He always is. "I just wanted to go on a walk before supper. It just so happens that I saw the doors to the shrine wide open, so I thought I'd go check."
Hm. Convincing argument, but Itto has known Ayato long enough to call out on his bullshit. Except he's not going to, as his friend obviously isn't inclined to share whatever's bothering him. Itto can be annoying, but he still has some shred of tact.
"Okay," he says instead. "Wanna grab some yakisoba bread in the city since you're out here anyway?"
Ayato blinks. "But supper is almost—"
"Yakisoba bread is supper," Itto chides him, grabbing his own sword off the floor before tugging Ayato away. "Come on! The line gets annoyingly long after six. And I don't wanna fight over the last piece with petty salarymen today either."
"Do you even have any cash on you right now?"
The reality check immediately makes Itto drop the older boy's wrist. Shit.
"Uh..." he drawls awkwardly, mustering the best puppy eyes he could manage. "You can cover for me in the meantime, right? I swear I'll treat you to some fancy dinner once I get my allowance!"
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reparations | genshin impact
Fanfiction[ modern au ; florist!reader x arataki itto ] Running a business in Hanamizaka was one thing-but doing so in the turf of the Arataki Gang was something else entirely. Although, as long as you paid rent on time, they assured that you wouldn't run in...
