Chapter Text
The moment you heard the stairwell door close behind Tamaki, your spine gave out.
Not dramatically. Not all at once. More like something structural had been quietly failing for a while, and his exit was just the last weight it couldn't hold. You sank back against the front of your desk, legs folding, until you were sitting on the floor with your back to the drawers and your knees pulled loosely to your chest.
The office was very quiet.
His report tablet was still on the coffee table where he'd left it. You stared at it without seeing it.
There's someone. There's always been someone. I'm sorry.
He hadn't said her name. He didn't need to. You'd done that math yourself, years ago, and then pretended you hadn't.
Your hair was completely still. That was the worst part, somehow. Not coiling. Not drooping. Just — nothing. Limp strands hanging around your shoulders like they'd forgotten what they were for.
You pressed the back of your hand against your mouth.
You were not going to cry on the office floor.
The first sob came out ugly and involuntary, a sound you'd never made before, and you immediately tried to swallow it back. It didn't work. The second was worse. And then your eyes were burning and your face was doing things completely beyond your control. The cream silk blouse you'd chosen so carefully this morning was going to be ruined and you couldn't bring yourself to care about that at all.
You cried on the office floor.
Messy and graceless, snot-and-tears crying with your hair falling into your face in limp strands, your shoulders shaking, months of accumulated almost pouring out of you with nowhere to go. The city lights through the window watched without judgment. The PLUS ULTRA poster on the wall — still slightly crooked, you'd been meaning to fix it for weeks — watched without judgment.
You cried until there was nothing left. Then you just sat there.
Your phone lit up on the floor beside you. Kirishima's name. Then again. You turned it face-down.
Not yet. You couldn't be anyone's anything right now.
At some point the light changed — the last of the evening blue gone from the window, everything now just city glow and the pale standby blue of the computer screen. You didn't remember the transition. Time had moved without you.
You should go home.
You put your head back against the desk drawer and looked at the ceiling.
The stairwell door opened.
Taishiro smelled like good whiskey and adrenaline already metabolized. He was tired in the boneless way that came after burning through every gram of stored fat in a fight. The villain at the mayor's office hadn't expected him. The fight had been under four minutes. The statement to police had been forty more, and now all he wanted was to file the incident report before the details blurred and then sleep for the foreseeable future.
He pushed open the office door and reached for the light switch.
Stopped.
You were sitting on the floor in front of your desk.
His hand dropped. His eyes adjusted — city glow, that blue standby light — and he took you in all at once, without the careful management he usually applied to looking at you.
The cream blouse, creased from hours on the floor. Your hair completely flat, strands hanging into your face, unbothered. Your eyes, even from across the room, visibly swollen in a way that meant you'd been crying for a long time and had stopped and then had just stayed here anyway.
Something in his chest went very tight.
You hadn't heard him. You were staring at the window with the unfocused quality of someone not seeing anything at all.
He crossed the room and crouched in front of you. His knees protested. He ignored them.
"Hey."
You startled. Your eyes found his face and he watched you cycle through recognition, surprise, the flinch toward composure that didn't quite land.
"I didn't hear you come in." Your voice came out scraped hollow. You cleared your throat. "Sorry. I was just leaving."
You made no move to leave.
He stayed crouched. Studied you. The swollen eyes. The hair you hadn't pushed back. The way your hands sat loose in your lap like you'd forgotten about them.
Someone did this.
The thought arrived with a quiet fury he kept entirely off his face. His first instinct went to Monoma — then he dismissed it. You'd seemed genuinely lighter lately, since the reconciliation. Someone else.
"What happened?" he asked.
"We don't talk about private stuff."
"I know." He held your gaze. He was aware, precisely, of what he could and couldn't claim — not your father, not your boyfriend, nothing with a clean name attached. "I'm asking again. Not as your boss." A pause. "As someone who cares about you. What happened?"
You looked at him for a long moment. One strand of your hair lifted slightly, then settled back down.
"Tamaki rejected me."
The words landed flat and simple in the quiet room.
He didn't move.
He processed it. And then, in the space of a few seconds, a great many things rearranged themselves in his understanding of the last several months — why you'd applied to this specific agency, in Osaka, a city you'd had no prior connection to. The careful way you'd always positioned yourself in Tamaki's orbit without being obvious about it. The cream blouse this morning. The perfume he'd smelled across the room and spent all day aggressively not thinking about.
Of course, he thought. Of course it was Tamaki.
He felt something shift underneath that recognition that he chose not to examine.
Your face crumpled.
You turned your head away fast, jaw working, visibly furious at yourself — and then your shoulders started shaking and your hair went completely limp and you were crying again with your face averted, as though not looking at him made it less real. A strand of hair fell across your cheek and stayed there. You didn't move to push it back.
He reached out and did it for you. Two fingers, careful, moving the strand behind your ear. Your skin was warm and faintly damp.
She's so pretty, even when she's crying.
The thought arrived before he could stop it. He pushed it down hard. You were heartbroken. You were sitting on his office floor. The thought had no business being there.
He pushed it down again.
It didn't go.
He was running on adrenaline and two glasses of the mayor's excellent whiskey and the specific stripped-down vulnerability of his slim form after a fight. None of his usual defenses intact, and you were right in front of him. Close enough that he could still catch traces of your perfume — warm and coconut-sweet, the kind that settled into the sinuses and stayed — and you turned back toward him with wet eyes and said nothing, and he —
He kissed you.
Soft. Barely there. Just his mouth against yours for a moment that was over before he'd fully registered deciding to do it.
He pulled back.
He went very quiet. Your eyes widened.
"I—" His voice came out rough. "I shouldn't have. This was a mistake, I'm sorry, I didn't mean to — it's just—" He was already pulling back, hating himself comprehensively. "I don't like to see you cry. I wanted to make you happy, I think. I don't know what I was thinking."
You touched your lips with your fingers.
Looked at him with clear, considering eyes.
"Why are you apologizing?" you said quietly. "It felt good."
He opened his mouth.
"Can you kiss me again?"
"We really shouldn't—"
"Why?"
The question sat between you, simple and completely unanswerable.
Why. You were nineteen, looking at him steadily with no grief-fog in your eyes — just presence, just wanting, just you making a clear decision with your whole face before you'd even said it with your mouth. Neither of you was attached. You worked for him, lived in his house, had quietly reorganized his finances and his pantry and his patrol schedule and had apparently, at some point he couldn't identify, reorganized something else entirely without his permission.
Why.
He had no answer that held.
He kissed you again.
And this time he felt it immediately — the pressure building in his sinuses, the specific warmth behind his eyes that he recognized too late. You made a small surprised sound against his mouth, pulled back slightly. He realized with complete mortification that his nose was bleeding.
"Oh—" He pressed the back of his hand to his upper lip. Looked at it. "God."
He reached past you toward the desk, scanning for tissues, and you caught his face in both hands.
He went still.
You leaned in and pressed your lips to the corner of his mouth — deliberate, unhurried — and he felt the soft drag of your tongue against the skin there, tasting the copper-salt of him. The sound that came out of his chest was something he had no category for.
You kissed him properly then. The iron taste of it still present between you, warm and slightly metallic.It was the most unhinged thing that had happened to him in years and he stopped thinking about mortification entirely.
His hands found your waist — large enough to feel the full shape of you, your body through the silk, the way you leaned into him when he pulled you closer. Your hair was moving again, he could feel individual strands brushing his arms and neck, reaching with that open unconscious wanting it never bothered to disguise. He stood, bringing you up with him, cleared your desk with one smooth sweep of his arm — papers, a pen cup, the small succulent, everything hitting the floor — lifted you onto it, your thighs parting around his hips and kissed you again with his full attention.
"Are you sure you want this?" Against your jaw. Your throat. Feeling your pulse jump under his lips, fast and honest.
"Yes." No hesitation anywhere in it. "Yes."
He pulled back to look at your face. Clear eyes. Hair moving in slow wondering spirals around your shoulders, telling him everything he needed to know with its usual complete honesty. You were here. Decided. Wanting him specifically, not filling a hole someone else had left — or if you were, you didn't know it yet, and he chose to believe you didn't, because the alternative was a door he couldn't open right now.
"It won't be easy," he said carefully. Held your gaze. "I'll be gentle. But—" He paused. "This isn't your first time."
Not quite a question.
"No," you said. "It's not."
Something in him settled. "Good. It'll probably still hurt a little. Promise you'll tell me if it's too much."
"I promise."
He kissed you again, slower, and let his hands do the thinking.
He worked you out of the cream blouse with patient fingers — the silk warm from your skin, the buttons small in his large hands but manageable — drew your trousers down and off. You were reaching for his shirt buttons simultaneously, your fingers small and slightly unsteady, each button giving way until your palms spread flat and warm against his chest. He let you because your hands on him felt extraordinary — deliberate and curious, learning the plane of his chest, the definition of his stomach, all of it hidden in his hero form and present now, given to you without the armor.
He unhooked your bra with one hand. Drew it off slowly. Let himself look, unhurried, the city light finding the curves and softness of you, and he felt no urgency to rush past this part.
"You're beautiful," he said. Not performance. Just true.
Your hair spiraled with pleasure before your expression could catch up.
He kissed your collarbone, the curve of your shoulder, lower — taking his time — and worked his way down until your breathing changed register entirely. Then he stepped back slightly, looked at you, and said: "Lean back. Hold the edge of the desk."
You obeyed. Your knuckles went white against the wood.
He drew your underwear down your legs, folded it with an absurd calm, set it aside. Then he spread his hands on your inner thighs — large enough that his thumbs nearly met — and felt the tension in you, the anticipation.
He got on his knees.
He had always liked this. Some men treated it as an obligation, something to perform briefly before moving on. He'd never understood that — the economy of it, the impatience. He liked the attention it required. Liked learning someone this way, the specific vocabulary of their responses, what made them gasp versus go silent versus forget to be self-conscious entirely.
He took his time learning yours.
Your breathing changed almost immediately, going careful and shallow. He paid attention to that — to every small shift, every involuntary sound, the way your thighs would tighten against his shoulders when he found something that worked and then release when he moved on and then tighten again. He slid his fingers into you slowly, crooking them forward, felt your hips stutter upward toward him, and kept his mouth where it was and set a rhythm that wasn't designed to rush you but to take you apart one layer at a time.
Your hair had stopped its spiraling and gone into slow rolling waves — the kind it made when sensation was too large to process into a single mood.
Your grip on the desk tightened. A sound left you that wasn't a word. Your hips were moving with him now, not against him. The sounds you were making were becoming less careful and more honest. The composure you'd been reconstructing since he walked in fully dissolved now.
When you came the first time your whole body pulled taut and the sound you made was surprised — genuinely surprised, like you hadn't expected it to crest that fast or that completely. He worked you through it without stopping, feeling you shake, feeling the pulse of you around his fingers.
He rose back to his feet.
You looked wrecked in the best possible way. Hair wild. Cheeks flushed. Eyes glassy and still fixed on him.
"More," you said. Your hands found his waistband.
He caught your wrist. Gently.
"I need you even looser first." He held your gaze. "Trust me."
Something flickered in your expression — then you nodded.
He got back on his knees. The angle was different now, your thighs over his shoulders. You were sensitive from the first high and every touch was amplified — he could feel it in the way you initially tried to shift away from him and then immediately tried to get closer, contradicting yourself, your body not quite sure how to manage the intensity.
He put one hand flat on your stomach. Not forceful — just present. Grounding. Letting you know he had you.
He listened to you. The specific pitch of your breathing, the way it climbed and plateaued and climbed again, the small desperate sounds you were making now that had no pretense left in them at all. Your hand found his hair and gripped — not directing, just holding on. He felt the exact moment you were close by the way your thighs went rigid and your breathing stopped being breathing and became something else entirely.
He didn't ease off.
You came with a sound that went straight through him — gutted and real and completely unguarded — your hair shooting outward in a wild radial burst, your whole body shaking with it.
He stayed until the shaking slowed.
Then he rose. Looked at you.
You were breathing in long unsteady pulls, hair settling into slow disbelieving spirals, eyes finding his with an expression somewhere between wrecked and wondering.
Your hands went to his waistband again. This time he let you.
When you drew his trunks down you went very still.
A pause. Then you looked up at his face. "That's—" Another pause. "That's a lot."
"You can still back out." He meant every word. "Any time. That doesn't change."
You looked at him — his face, then what you'd uncovered, then his face again — and your hair was doing something complicated, reaching and pulling back and reaching, your wanting and your nerves equally legible.
"I want to try," you said.
"Good." He stepped closer. "But I need to know — I don't have anything here." He said it plainly, no embarrassment. "Haven't been with anyone in a while, and my size makes it — not easy to plan for. But I know my body well. I know when to pull out. Is that alright?"
You didn't hesitate. "I trust you completely."
The words moved something in him he wasn't prepared for. Not just reassurance — something with actual weight to it. The same quality as when you'd handed back his signed contracts, or walked him along the canal and told him exactly what he was risking without softening it. Completely. Extended here, now, with no professional distance left between you at all.
He kissed you before he could think too carefully about what that meant.
He positioned himself at the edge of the desk. Aligned carefully. Felt your hands grip his arms — tight, bracing.
He pushed in slowly.
The resistance was immediate, and your breath changed — going shallow and careful, not quite pain but the awareness of more than expected. He stopped. Let you have a moment.
"Still okay?"
"Yes." A small sound underneath the word.
"Breathe out," he said. Kept his voice low and steady. "Slow. Just a little more."
You exhaled. He felt you yield fractionally and pressed forward, unhurried, watching your face for anything that told him stop, finding instead the concentrated furrow of your brow, your deliberate breathing, your trust made visible.
He seated himself fully and held completely still.
Waited.
Your hands were gripping his forearms hard enough that he could feel your nails through his focus.
"How do you feel?" he asked.
A genuine pause, like you were taking actual inventory.
"Full." A beat. "Extremely full."
He laughed — surprised out of him — and felt some of the tension leave your body at the sound of it. He kissed you, slow and thorough, kept kissing you until your grip on his forearms softened.
"Tell me when," he murmured.
You shifted your hips experimentally. A considering sound. "Okay. Yeah. Now."
He started moving.
Slow and deliberate, long measured strokes, watching every shift in your expression and adjusting by fractions until he found the angle that made your eyes go slightly unfocused. He wasn't rushing. There was no version of this where he rushed. He paid you the same focused attention he paid to everything that mattered to him, reading every signal, responding in real time.
You were starting to move with him. Small rolls of your hips at first, tentative, then more deliberate, learning the rhythm and meeting it.
"Good?" he asked.
"Don't stop." Your voice had gone rough. "Don't—yeah, don't stop."
He didn't stop. Kept the pace deep and steady, one hand braced beside your hip, the other spread warm on your lower back, and the sounds you were making had gone fully honest now, no composure left to perform, just you and what you felt and what he was doing and the complete absence of anything else.
"You're so incredibly sexy." Low, unplanned. "Hold onto me."
You grabbed his shoulders. He shifted his hands to your thighs, lifted you — you weighed nothing to him, genuinely nothing — and turned, pressing you back against the window.
The glass hit your spine and you gasped, sharp and startled, the cold a shock against your flushed skin. The city spread out below and beyond the glass, Osaka's nighttime grid of light, distant and indifferent and beautiful.
"What if someone—"
"It's late." He pressed you into the glass and felt you shudder at the contrast — cold at your back, his heat at your front. "No one will."
He found the angle again. Felt the exact moment he hit the right spot by the way you stopped breathing — a perfect suspended silence — and then the sound you made was low and animalistic and completely unguarded. The kind of sound that didn't care about anything except what it was responding to.
He kept it. Kept the angle, kept the depth, watching your face against the city lights, your hair moving in slow oceanic rolls around your shoulders. Your head dropped back against the glass. Your nails dug into his shoulders.
You came with a sound that went straight through him — he filed it somewhere permanent, knew he'd be hearing it for a long time.
He let you down gently, turned you, brought you back to the desk. Your hands found the edge and gripped it, your back to him now. When he pressed back into you the angle was entirely different — deeper, more direct — and you made a small overwhelmed sound at the change.
Just a bit longer, he thought. Just—
He felt it building at the base of his spine, that specific narrowing of focus. He held on, kept moving, his hands steadying your hips, and heard the sounds you were making go ragged and desperate and then —
He pulled out. Got his hand around himself and finished across your lower back, the release rolling through him in long shuddering waves that he breathed through quietly, his free hand still braced warm against your hip.
For a moment neither of you moved.
The city hummed. The standby light on the computer blinked its patient blue. The succulent sat on the floor among scattered papers, entirely unbothered.
This time he found tissues in the desk drawer and cleaned you up with careful hands — thorough, gentle, a completely different register from everything before it. You let him, leaning forward on your forearms with your eyes half-closed, your hair settling in slow exhausted spirals around your shoulders.
"Are you okay?" he asked. "Did it hurt badly?"
You considered this genuinely.
"The first time with me is always a bit—" He left the space open.
You filled it. "I felt like I was a virgin again."
Something between a laugh and a groan escaped him. "I'll take that as a compliment."
"You should."
You dressed. You found your blouse near the chair. He buttoned his shirt with steadier hands than he deserved. You moved around each other in the small space without collision, quiet, inside your own separate heads.
He sat at his own desk, door open. You sat on the couch.
He opened the incident report template and started filling it in. You watched the city. The conversation between you had narrowed down to almost nothing — not awkward, exactly. Just quieter than usual. Both of you somewhere interior that didn't need words yet.
Twenty minutes later he glanced up and saw you were asleep from across the office.
Head tipped against the couch arm, hair fanned in loose peaceful curls around you, the cream blouse still slightly creased. Your face entirely slack in sleep — all the grief and the wanting and the exhaustion of the evening smoothed away, leaving just you, quiet and warm in the low light.
He saved his draft.
Crossed to the couch and gathered you up carefully. You were warm and light in his arms, your face turning into his shoulder with the unconscious trust of sleep, your hair curling loosely against his forearm.
Osaka's late streets were quiet around him. Streetlights pooling orange on the pavement. The smell of the canal. Someone's izakaya still burning somewhere in the dark, smoke and soy sauce on the air. A cat. A distant train. He walked slowly, your weight steady and warm against his chest, no reason to hurry.
What did I just do.
Not panic. More like standing at the edge of a very tall building and looking down and understanding, without drama, exactly how far it was to the bottom.
You'd wanted it. Had asked for it clearly, no grief-blur, no manipulation — present and decided with your whole self. You were both adults. Neither of you attached. It's not just on you, Ken had said, laughing over the last round.
But she works for you, the other part of him said quietly. Lives in your house. You are thirteen years older and you are her employer and you sat on that couch holding her while she had a fever and thought about kissing her and then hated yourself for it. You built those walls specifically because you knew what you were capable of. And then tonight with the adrenaline and the whiskey and her sitting there devastated on your office floor and the perfume and her hair reaching for you even while she was crying—
Your face pressed more firmly into his shoulder in your sleep. A small, contented sound.
His arm tightened around you before he could decide to do it.
He didn't loosen it.
I still shouldn't have, he thought. And underneath that, quieter. I'd do it again.
He didn't examine that.
The house was mostly dark.
Mostly.
Kirishima was sitting in the front room with his phone in his hand, no lights on, and he looked up the moment Taishiro pushed the door open. His eyes went immediately to you — to your face turned into Taishiro's shoulder, your settled hair, the slight crease still in your cream blouse — and something moved across his expression fast and complicated before landing somewhere carefully still.
Taishiro raised a hand. Gestured quiet.
Kirishima's jaw worked. He was doing the math — Taishiro could see it, the pieces fitting together in a way that made complete sense and was also completely wrong. Tamaki home early with guilt written all over him. You not answering your phone. Fatgum finding you at the office and carrying you home. It was a legible story. A simple, caring story.
He nodded. Once. Slowly.
Taishiro carried you upstairs.
Your room was dark, your bed unmade from this morning, a book open face-down on the pillow. He laid you down carefully, pulled the blanket over your shoulders, tucked it around you with more attention than strictly necessary and did it anyway.
He stood there a moment.
Then he leaned down and pressed his lips to your temple. Quiet as a kept secret. Barely there.
"What should I do with you," he murmured into the dark. Not a question. Just the acknowledgment of a problem that had no answer yet, said where no one could hear it.
He straightened.
Turned off your lamp and pulled the door closed behind him, gently, so the latch barely made a sound.