Chapter Text
Having a routine is the most important thing when you work from home, especially in a job where the days of the week are no more than just words, because everything around you is words, words, words. So Hifumi is sure to stick to it: waking up naturally (as in, scheduled-in by a nice little sleep app), throwing open his window to welcome in a morning breeze as well as a rich, thick glut of noise from Shinjuku’s business below, doing a few stretches in the daylight and then changing into a refreshing set of loungewear, washing his face, brushing his teeth. He’s heard that brushing your teeth before eating breakfast makes you some kind of psychopath. There are all sorts of things that could, technically, label him as insane, but he thinks that weighing up the effort costs between standing up again to brush your teeth after breakfast or just drinking a slightly-minty tea first thing in the morning isn’t really one of them.
Pushing his tenaciously curly hair back with a scrunchie-style headband, he applies a few dabs of anti-ageing cream and rubs them into his cheeks and forehead slowly as he sits at the kotatsu, over his tea and sunny-side-up on toast, watching the morning news. The outside world is as full of weird incidents as always, he thinks. Some guy found in the woods outside Tokyo eating emu meat but insistent he was doing absolutely fine on his own. His face blurred out, he offers some stew to the reporter. The stew is also blurred out. A supposed streaker dashing out of a pachinko parlour in Shibuya. It’s chaos out there, but at least he can still hear about it, this urban jungle. He suppresses a tiny shudder as the reporter interviews a gaggle of schoolgirls and wolfs down his breakfast, before pushing his plate off of the laptop he was using as a placemat and opening it up to begin working.
Hifumi Izanami doesn’t worry too much about his work. He could, and he does when it’s appropriate, but on the whole there’s only so much stress you should allow yourself to feel when writing light novels. That’s what his pen-name is famed for: super-sexy BL novels, wildly over-the-top cute fantasy light novels. The stuff that up-and-coming animation studios love to adapt in a 25-episode run because there’s not really much of an ending to each segment since at any time his editors could ask for a sequel. No story really ends, anyway! Each day is unique. The sequel is what you choose. There’s no happily ever after, unless you think of it! And then, after that, what? Today is the first day of the rest of your life, he writes with a flourish on books in strawberry-scented pen at signings in his flashy suit and sparkling contact lenses. You don’t need to read an isekai fantasy world softcore porn novel for a thrill. Go out there and make the cute harem you deserve!
...Or something, anyway. The pen-name ‘Gigolo’ has become ubiquitous, synonymous with that light smut that hides between the lines of mewling cat-girls in Dr*gon Qu*st-style dungeons, or blatantly in the text following kouhais asking their senpais ‘won’t we get caught?’ as they’re glimpsed between the waving curtain-blinds of their classroom at dusk. BL that pushes the boundaries of plot. Fantasy that pushes the boundaries of porn for a shounen publisher. His higher-ups want him to pick a category and stick with it, but each new volume he puts out attracts such a weird and wild spread of demographics they don’t know where to put him. It’s an ongoing conversation. Revisit this next time, it always says in their meeting minutes. Always, always, keep them guessing.
Chewing over a dumb-sounding sentence, he taps at the corner of the kotatsu tabletop with a fingernail as he stares at the LCD screen. It’s like a summoning because the other bedroom door, opposite Hifumi’s room, slides open in the wooden frame and some kind of weird spirit emerges, mumbling curses under its breath as it wobbles down the hallway.
“Mornin’, Doppo-chin! Dopp-pop-pop-chin-popo!” Hifumi sing-songs, tilting his head backwards from where he’s working cross-legged at the table, and his flatmate, his childhood buddy, his best friend forever and definitely-a-crush and almost-sort-of-coworker gurgles a reply on his way to the kitchen. He’d comment something like, ‘you’re up early!’ at 11am but that wouldn’t have the completely small-talky air he intends it with, he knows: Doppo would probably have the first meltdown of the day thinking about the last 57 days he’s woken up at 2pm.
Routine is also something Doppo follows despite his best efforts.
“Huh…? When did I go to bed…?” he repeats solemnly, shakily, after Hifumi asks him over a bowl of cereal that’s had juice poured into it, rinsed out, milk added, too much milk that’s had to be tipped out slightly but some of the cereal fell into the sink, and then finally the correct amount of cereal added but with mildly citrusy milk soaking into it gradually.
“Yeah! Sleeping! Y’know, that old chestnut.” Hifumi is a sunbeam personified in his soft shirt and heavy hanten jacket he only wears when he’s feeling seriously cosy.
“Hah… God… I dunno. After I finished the lineart…”
“Ehhh, I didn’t hear you with the computer in here last night, though?”
“Was working in my room,” Doppo mutters and stoppers his mouth with soggy cornflakes, eyebags hanging low.
Their routine… isn’t the same, despite having the same workplace. He gets up (at some point), vaguely tries some warm-up sketches (of something, somehow) in the murk of his room, checks the weather through a crack in the curtains (if it’s anything brighter than overcast then it’s too light and will interfere with his lamp), maybe he feeds himself, maybe not, but a shower happens eventually and probably a change of sweatpants preferably before he sees the unstoppable laser-beam of sunshine that is his flatmate, his childhood friend, his closest friend, his first crush-that-he's-not-over-and-may-never-be and the number one person that he would very very very much like to be his collaborative partner in the same room. Or is glimpsed by him. Either way. His existence feels more like that of a cryptid these days than that of a full-time employed illustrator Doppo Kannonzaka for light novels and drama CDs at the same publisher as Hifumi.
He’s stunned back to reality with the jab of a thumb at his eye and he chokes on his cereal, blinking and retching.
“Oh, sorry, Doppo! Did I poke you?”
“Yeees! Whyyyy?” he groans, wiping milk off his chin with the already-crusty sleeve cuff of his sweater. Oh my god, he has to change out of this. How long has it been since it was washed?
“You had sleep in your eyes! I was getting it for you!”
“I’m not a cat,” Doppo balks, “I’ll get it myself.”
“Meow, meow, little kitty, little kitty,” Hifumi purrs, and reaches out to thumb at Doppo’s cheek like a mother cat. Despite himself his face flushes pink. Those are the kinds of words he only uses when he’s donning his pen-name’s persona, the famous Gigolo, whether in blog posts, social media, signings, hell-- even his in-person editor meetings at the publishing house on those rare occasions when a video call won’t do. Fans of Gigolo’s work are named ‘kittens’ regardless of gender. It’s so seedy, but then, aren’t all his novels?
After a moment Doppo shakes himself free and takes a deep breath, choking again on a dislodged mushy cornflake before pushing his bowl away and rubbing his temples. His eyes are weary from staying up until the dawn inking the same long curve again and again and again. He wonders what the hell the layers and paths look like right now but he hasn’t had the brain space to think of cracking the laptop open yet this morning.
“Soooo, what’s on the books for today, Doppo?”
“Work,” he heaves.
“Oh yeah? Me too!” Hifumi laughs, never breaking from his constant touch-typing on the notebook laptop with its feather-light keys, even with his eyes shut in a twinkling chime of a giggle. “Midweek means cracking down! Let’s do this!”
“Whatever ‘this’ is,” Doppo sighs and drags himself to the bedroom to grab his clothes before shutting himself in the shower to peel back the layers of grime and hopefully find a brand new, marginally less-depressed and slightly cleaner Doppo underneath. Someone who can look at a deadline a few days off and complete it ahead of the forty-minute window immediately before it. Oh, he can dream.
Although they broke their streak of being joined at the hip by attending different universities, Hifumi on some cheap community-college writing course while Doppo broke his back at art school, luck would have it that their paths crossed again in publishing. Hifumi’s phobia rules out different kinds of writing, the ‘thrilling’ kinds, he calls them, like reviews, reporting, journals, scripts… He’s a ‘work from home’ guy against his will, he always says. The industry is what forced those genres and that pen-name on him.
After an hour of trying and failing to turn off the shower through his dissociative state Doppo eventually succeeds and emerges, feeling fresh and toying with the idea of bringing his laptop to the front room, to the kotatsu, where Hifumi sits and works and hums and laughs out loud at the variety show. It’s either that or stay in his dark room and do the same thing but to the sound of a streamer whose face he’ll never see in person but whose entire living situation seems to be in thrall to a group of anonymous watchers, himself included, with their subscriptions or pay-to-watches. He feels for them. Doppo worries about the day that cheap-looking pictures of yet another S*per S*nico knock-off don’t sell. It’s his only skill that translates into hard cash these days, he thinks dully.
For once a real person wins over a recorded one through headphones and with some effort he gathers up his tablet, pen, computer, charger, mouse, and drags them all to the front room, setting them up bit by bit on the table opposite Hifumi. Yes, opposite. Next to one another and all they’ll do is look at each others’ screens. Hifumi always coos over Doppo’s colouring and whines at the number of unnamed layers; Doppo finds himself intensely distracted by whatever sex scene he always happens to be writing when his eyes wander. If he didn’t know exactly how stupidly high Hifumi’s quota was for wordcount and volumes a month then he’d say he was doing it on purpose. Not that he reads his books. Not all of them. Only the ones he happens to get printed copies of for free from the publisher. You know, first print editions and things like that.
They all have some kind of sex in them and he wonders where exactly he’s getting the inspiration from.
Thank whatever spirits were at work last night that helped him to complete the lineart without the wiggles and tremors he thought he was seeing in those desperate last minutes, it looks fine. Settling in the second of three wooden-backed floor seats Doppo starts meticulously setting up the file all over again for colour.
Hifumi makes a little shocked sound under his breath, a kind of ‘gosh’ like a gossipy neighbourhood mom. Doppo looks at him over the top edge of his screen.
“Looks like you’re doing something dirty,” Hifumi whispers, a wide foxlike grin on his face as he covers his mouth with a hand, oh so scandalously. Doppo near-bursts into flames.
“I’m not,” he frowns. He balances his pen tablet in his lap and uses the keypad with his other hand. Of course Hifumi can’t see it from where he sits. He always makes this joke early in the morning-- uh, in the day. “This is just how I work.”
Teasingly, Hifumi kneels over to look at his screen despite him flailing a hand out to cover it. “Ooh, your new schoolgirl heroine is just your type, huh? Maybe I should get myself a cute little sailor shirt and I can model for--”
“No! No!” Doppo shakes his head wildly and slaps his laptop shut.
“Ehh, but it’s good! Don’t hide it!” But Hifumi is already sinking back down into his seat, looking sulky. No, no, no, Doppo thinks, more of a garbled cat’s panic-vocalisation than any real words at this point.
“It’s not… I haven’t… the brief... “
“Brief?” Hifumi grins wickedly and he knows he’s a porn writer, he deals with that goddamn fact every single day, but his teasing always finds a way to crawl under his skin and get him hot under the metaphorical collar.
“H-How would you like it if I looked at your drafts before editing?”
Hifumi shrugs. “It’ll look good if you don’t know what you’re looking for!”
“I… Well, that’s true, but. Still.” Doppo says, exhausted from the brief fight and defeat of that battle, easing open the computer again. The hinge and screen have both seen better days. His chief and editors say he needs to learn to stop taking out his frustrations on company hardware. He’s an emotional person, he always answers, but he will try. He will try. Artists are like that. Yes, he’s sorry. He’ll try.
With the buzz of the TV and low-volume soap operas, Hifumi’s endless tip-tapping on the keyboard occasionally punctured by a fierce slamming of the backspace key, Doppo falls into routine quickly enough and between the two of them a few quiet hours result in a few more percent towards the full completion of that week’s output. Minutes before 3, Doppo’s usual start-up time, Hifumi stretches his arms grandiosely with a faux-cute sound of effort that Doppo figures could easily come from the vapid-sounding voice actresses that so often have to make their slutty, niche debuts portraying the girls he draws from these shitty, shitty light novels.
“Okay! Baby break time!” he announces and stands up, unplugging his laptop and winding away the charging cable.
“Baby?” Doppo mutters back.
“Yes, honey?” Hifumi calls back from the kitchen, and it sends Doppo broiling in his seat as he continues to add freckles that his editors will inevitably ask him to erase later.
“Not a full break,” Doppo clarifies. A real ‘break’ for Hifumi is putting on some fancy outdoor suit and heading to the local convenience store for a snacks-and-drinks haul. Some outside air. Free protein, Doppo thinks, from the choke and smoke of Shinjuku’s side-alleys.
“Don’t have time for that! Just going to spruce up before Jakurai-sensei gets here!”
The sound of his name causes Doppo to etch a huge, red smudge right across the middle of the canvas.
“When?!” he gasps out, Ctrl-Zing so intensely it undoes nearly twenty minutes’ worth of work in his sudden panic.
“Like, three? Three-thirty? I told him to come whenever so we can chat, you know, catch up--”
“Shit!” Doppo scrambles to see Hifumi’s planner, some Midori travel thing even though the man never travels beyond the reaches of Kanagawa, to see the meeting pencilled in for 3.30pm like he said, and almost uproots his work station and comes close to finally ending his life tripping over the charging cable on his desperate way out of the room.
“Honestly, Do-- ahh, Doppo-chin, really, it’s no big deal! It’s just sensei!” Hifumi calls after him even though he knows that in this household, there is no ‘just’ sensei when it comes to Jakurai Jinguuji.
Within minutes of some light tidying around the kotatsu to the tune of Doppo stumbling and crashing and doing god knows what in his bedroom, the apartment buzzer goes and Hifumi answers in his singsong voice to let him up. It’s a little luxury even this two-bed place has. Privacy! Accessibility! A tatami-floored room for socialising in that makes New Year’s feel cosy every single time! And it’s not long before the man himself, the star of the afternoon, knocks delicately at the front door, and it might just be Hifumi’s imagination, but the death metal sounds coming from Doppo’s room still for a moment, just a moment.
“Sensei! Good to see you, hi, happy Wednesday! Or should I say, hump day?”
And his voice, his voice is velvet. Soothing and calming in all that he commands and says, flicked up with a smile at the ends of his lips. “Happy Wednesday, Hifumi-kun. Are you well?”
The click of a door, the gentle shift of Hifumi’s editor sitting on the front step to remove his shoes.
“Yeah, not bad! We’re halfway there, halfway to the weekend, and my spirits are soaring! How about you, how was the journey?”
“Oh, much better in the afternoon than during the morning rush hour. You certainly have the right idea, wanting to avoid that commute. Where shall I put…”
“Oh, here, there’s a space on top of Doppo--” A meaningful pause, “...’s shoes.”
“I ought to bring my own slippers,” Jakurai laughs tenderly, and Hifumi giggles in agreement. Doppo can hardly wait for the creak of sensei’s footstep on the hallway flooring to tumble out of his room, sweating from an hour’s tidying crammed into five minutes, waving and charging towards the kitchen.
“Se-Sensei, good afternoon.” he stammers out despite having rehearsed it eighteen times since learning of his arrival. But Jakurai-sensei is kind, smiling like a Buddha wearing his crown of flowing, sleek hair, as he nods carefully to him even as Doppo passes on his way to the kitchen.
“Good afternoon, Doppo-kun. Not at the office today?”
“My, er, my, I’m meeting tomorrow. Thursdays. Are my review days.” he manages. “Tea.”
“Tea?” Jakurai replies, pausing in that liminal space between the lounge and kitchen, and behind him Hifumi leaps like a puppy for treats.
“Ooh, yes, I want some! Doppo’s tea is the best!”
“The kettle. I’ll boil. What tea-- what tea do you, sensei,” Doppo’s sentence doesn’t fall into place the way he wants it to; when his idol is there, his saviour, his benevolent saint of an editor adjacent to his line of work with a soft voice and a gentle touch and overflowing, neverending patience: it’s like he has to sap all of Doppo’s calm before he’ll share it back out with him, piece by piece in his wisdom. “We have houjicha and…”
When Doppo doesn’t finish his list beyond the first item, Jakurai makes a show of considering the options even though he doesn’t have to, he doesn’t have to pretend just for me, Doppo thinks with clenched teeth, and eventually says, “Houjicha would be lovely. It’s a good idea to avoid caffeine in the afternoon.”
“S-S-So is it,” Doppo agrees, “It is,” he whispers under his breath as he turns and fills the kettle; filling, too, his time, composing his nerves before he gets to speak to him personally. Already he and Hifumi have grabbed their seats in the lounge chatting about this and that, catching up on the publishing house’s gossip.
It’s very lucky, some might say, that Hifumi gets stay-at-home meetings with his editor. If it weren’t for his phobia of women he might be forced to go in a little more, and even though his persona Gigolo is like a second skin he dons to allow him to walk amongst them, that dreaded 50% of the population, it’s the one saving grace considering how much he loves the comforts of home. Perhaps even luckier, his editor is both understanding and local to them. Things fall into place for Hifumi, Doppo always thinks. They just do. He makes them happen. He never considers this to be an oxymoron.
“--Then, you know, I saw that email exchange… he hit Reply-All again!” Hifumi gasps, like it’s the biggest affair of the year. “And the argument! I was living!”
“It certainly blew up somewhat, didn’t it,” Jakurai says, removing his jacket and folding it neatly by his crossed legs. “All over a notice for the rebrand of the girls’ monthly paper.”
“Ehh, you’re so cool, sensei, calling it a paper!”
He smiles. “What would you have me call it?”
“What it is! A comic!”
“Even when it has your novellas in the back pages?”
“They’re basically fanfic,” Hifumi wiggles his eyebrows.
“Not when you have a publisher to your name.” Jakurai smiles pleasantly. “Ah, Doppo-kun, would you like a hand…?”
“No!” Doppo stammers, channeling every ion of his energy into keeping the tea-tray steady even if nothing else about him is. “Th-Thank you! Please sit!” He delivers tea to everybody safely, pouring Jakurai’s cup first and serving it first. The teapot only gets used on two occasions: when he visits, and when there’s an all-nighter for Hifumi to pull. So it’s nice to see it in the daylight. Hifumi whoops with delight when he gets his cup, then balks as it’s too hot to drink yet. As Doppo grabs his own seat and his own nuclear-hot cup he shoots him a look, something pointed between don’t burn yourself and pleeeease don’t burn yourself, I can’t look after two people right now.
“How have you been, then, Doppo-kun? Is it a busy quarter for yourself as well?”
Jakurai practically whips the rug out from under him with that. Hifumi watches with amusement as Doppo suddenly forgets everything he’s done for the last twelve weeks.
“Yes,” he says all too quickly, then, “Always. I, I actually normally work back-to-back at this time in the month…”
“But you’re taking a break now,” Jakurai says gently.
“Th-That’s right. I’m taking your advice, sensei…”
“That’s very good. Good progress. Breaks are important.” Jakurai smiles, a weary, low-lidded smile, and Doppo feels his heart contract like an anatomically-endangered cartoon rabbit. To hold onto this feeling forever, even if it means cardiac arrest…!
“A-And it’s a screen break too. I’m trying to stop just… going on my phone all the time…”
“Yeah, he’s been really good at that, sensei!” Hifumi chips in, the number one member of the nonexistent Doppo fanclub. Like Hifumi, he tried to have a pen-name too, being that he didn’t necessarily want his ‘real-world’ art school portfolio to have the same name on it as stupidly-breasty schoolgirl pictures traced and copied across Pixiv. Unfortunately his imagination tapped out beyond just signing off his name in roman characters. Doppo. It’s fine. It’s all fine.
“Oh? The last I heard, you were having trouble managing your screen time. Well, I’m glad to hear it. Did you find some other pastime to do for the same amount of time?”
Doppo and Hifumi each guiltily think of the time Doppo now spends staring blankly at a wall feeling bad for not being productive, and Hifumi unwrapping individual rice-crackers silently in the corner of the kitchen and then eating them really, really slowly when he thinks no-one is watching. They both nod in their own level of over-the-top enthusiasm. Luckily, Jakurai seems relieved.
“It’s so, so important that you take care of your health. As creatives, of course, when the emotional toll is higher than other fields, but working from home, too…” He pauses to take a sip of his tea, Doppo noticing that he holds the japanese teacup immaculately with his fingertips on the rim somehow not getting scalded, and now looks at Hifumi. “Moving along to work matters… Am I meeting with yourself or Gigolo today? We have ten minutes before we’re due to start.”
Hifumi sighs like he’s been reminded of a troublesome twin brother. “I meeeean, it’d defeat the purpose of you coming here, but… hmmm…”
“We do have the end-of-quarter meeting soon, and the department head is keen to hear what the next steps are with the Dead or Alive series. Perhaps we could run through it ahead of time. I know she can be… quite direct.”
“Dead or Alive?” Doppo groans, “It’s a series now?”
“What, you don’t like it? The new volume sold out in Shibuya bookstores on the first day,” Hifumi snickers. Doppo has opinions about his books, especially the ones that get picked up as drama CDs. He’s just jealous that he doesn’t get to work on the character design, Hifumi asserts, correctly.
“The main guy grates on me. And why would he fall in love with a gambler, anyway?”
“You don’t think he grates on me, too? It’s something different, and anyway sales and fans say it’s a fun new direction! Y’know, different to all the high-school stuff...”
“It’s just the same BL with different clothes,” Doppo says bluntly.
“Uh, and so are your catgirls,” Hifumi coughs overdramatically like he’s trying to stifle a laugh.
“I don’t only draw catgirls,” Doppo murmurs. The trend is for dragon girls lately anyway. Every damn day he desperately tries not to think of all the evenings spent slaving away over oil paints in a dark classroom after contact hours, scrabbling for a pass as he followed his calling only for him to be told to put a sheen on some 2D teenager’s boobs nearly every other week.
“Hifumi-kun, your work and his work are separate fields.” Jakurai says softly with the click of his teacup on the table. “Let’s continue talking about this during the meeting. Why don’t you try the suit on at least, if it will help you to decide?”
“Good idea! I’ll go try it on now. Wait for me, okay?”
Hifumi exits, humming a tune, and Jakurai waves gently like he’s saying goodbye for a day. It leaves him and Doppo alone, at the same corner of the kotatsu, in the front room together, nothing but the steaming tea and the anxious twitch of Doppo’s foot under the table providing any kind of movement. After a tense moment -- at least, it feels tense to Doppo, sitting next to the overflowing well of pure serenity masquerading as a publishing-house editor -- he takes a sip of the tea, the liquid burning like tequila on the way down.
“I know you draw more than catgirls,” Jakurai says suddenly, so soothingly, that it takes Doppo a second to register it and he almost chokes in reverse on the tea he’s already swallowed.
“I-I-I, yeah.” he smiles weakly even though belatedly he realises it’s a joke, “Just guys in the next piece I’m working on…”
“Is that what you prefer to draw, Doppo-kun?”
“It is,” he sighs; his heart always feels quelled when he speaks to Jakurai, the way he never does when facing down his balding old-fashioned novel industry bureaucratic piece-of-garbage editor. “I don’t… enjoy the way the designs for female characters are… cheapening.”
“No, I imagine you wouldn’t. Particularly with your classical education.” Sidelong, Jakurai glances at the laptop that’s been kicked into the corner of the room. “Have you long to go on your current piece?”
“Y-- Nnn. It’ll get done.”
“I suppose then, that the next project will be something to look forward to. It’s for the anthology, isn’t it?”
He nods. “The one with the host club.”
“Ahh, the one Hifumi-kun likes to read,” Jakurai smiles, blessedly looking away from the pile of technological carnage Doppo had shoved there in his rush earlier.
“I asked my editor to…”
When he doesn’t finish the sentence, Jakurai nods again, in that saintly understanding without words. “It’s a good thing that you’re asserting your needs to him. Saying this as an editor myself. It’s crucial to understand one another when you must work together, you know.”
“Y-Yes,” Doppo finds himself staring into his face; at Jakurai’s long nose, the curve of his lips on the rim of the teacup when he sips, the softest upturn of his eyebrows over those heavy eyelids like he’s always concerned about the wellbeing of something, somewhere. Like a renaissance saint gazing heavenwards.
It’s stupidly romantically idiotically stereotypical, but he wonders if Jakurai has ever sat for a portrait.
“I’m talking too much, aren’t I,” Jakurai says, looking back at him with those divine eyes, and Doppo worries for an instant with a flash of heat in his chest that Jakurai is a mind-reader.
“No! No! Not at all, I love listening to you, sensei,” he wraps his hand around the teacup, still molten-lava hot against his palm, “You’re so helpful. Like, calming…”
It seems to tickle him because Jakurai chuckles and the sound in itself is a balm to Doppo’s weary soul. He wonders what it feels like to fall asleep to this. Like ASMR.
“You know, at a point in my life, I wondered if I should become a doctor. I do enjoy helping others. Listening, too, is a part of helping people.”
“In--” Doppo sits on his hands and hunches forward over the tabletop, “If-- In… In that world where you became a doctor… I would come to be your patient.”
“Oh, yes? RSI?”
He’s seen straight through him and probably through his long sweatshirt sleeves hiding his arm-brace, too. “F-For my bad habits, probably. I would have. More. If I had to commute…”
“Are you still working on… the damaging urges?”
Doppo hangs his head. “The last Cintiq got taken out of my paycheck.”
With the tap-tap-tap of Hifumi’s feet back down the hallway, Jakurai’s comforting is cut short, but not before he rubs a small circle on Doppo’s locked-up back and murmurs, “Why don’t we talk about this another time.”
“I…” he looks up, but the room is suddenly filled with a blazing light, like the sun itself has come to reside within their little apartment-- Hifumi fully dressed-up in his ‘outdoors’ suit. Flashy, gaudy in a waistcoat and matching jacket, a stupid little rose pinned to his label, his hair and skin made up perfectly like he’s stepped out of a photoshoot. Doppo wrinkles his nose at the scent of cologne.
It’s him, but it isn’t him.
“Apologies for keeping you waiting!” he announces even louder than Hifumi’s usual whine, and with a similar shift in tone, Jakurai sits up just a little straighter and loses the edge of his smile.
“Thank you for meeting me. Shall we begin, Gigolo?”
“Of course, of course! Here, let’s get started.” Doppo notices he’s dropped the ‘sensei’ immediately from his speech, and sets about gathering his CG laptop and tablet, edging his way out of the room as they begin their business proceedings with Jakurai’s briefcase unpacked with endless schedules, manuscript copies, timetables, the sound of their conversation fading once he withdraws to his room to pick up where he left off.
***
Doppo wakes up at the sound of the front door clicking, and when he lifts his head the sketchbook page he’d used as a pillow is stuck to his cheek by a patch of drool. He peels it off and as he sits up he feels a weight on his shoulders.
Touching it lightly in the dark, he squints at it, then flicks his lamp on. It’s a blanket from his bed. Someone must have draped it around him--
Suddenly, his brain makes sense of the sound he’d just heard along with the-- with the everything else, and staggers out of his room, wide-eyed beneath his mussed-up hair.
“Is he gone?” he breathes, watching Hifumi out of his jacket and waistcoats leaving him in just those fancy suit trousers and button-down, raking his fingers back through his hair as though to loosen up the setting spray there.
“Just now,” Hifumi smiles over his shoulder, semi-tired like either wearing the persona or just the whole business of a meeting has sapped some of that unlimited energy. “Did you nap? Jakurai-sensei said you were dozing.”
Doppo didn’t dream of anything so he’d count that as a nap. “Yeah. Didn’t mean to.”
“Awww. Well, you probably needed it!”
In the silence between the two of them, the apartment feeling a little emptier, Doppo’s heart squeezes as he imagines his almost-editor descending the stairs and making his way home along those busy evening streets.
“I love him,” he murmurs at the same time as Hifumi, both gazing at the door like he’s hiding behind it.