Oh dear. More dmmd fic. This is mostly noiz x aoba but plans have changed a little (ie i fudging love koujaku and might get a little OT3 all up in this story) so watch out for a little multiple boyfriend action. But mostly noiz and aoba. Anywaaaaayy, takes place right after the events of reconnect, and all the stuff about Noiz's family, his last name, his brother's name is all made up by me because - much to my frustration - none of that information was ever fully revealed. So yeah. That's fun. Anyway, here's the new fic. There'll probably be more because I'm crazy like that. Enjoy and, as always, tell me what you think!

UPDATE: I JUST REALIZED I MESSED UP AND POSTED THE WHOLE DOCUMENT INSTEAD OF JUST THE FIRST PART ON ACCIDENT *bows* IM SO SORRY okay really I'm gonna write the second half of the other chapter and post it wow, talk about not paying attention again, really sorry. CARRY ON

Welcome Home

Above the clouds, the sky was a brilliant pink. Light red, with just a touch of the prettiest orange, the sky gleamed upon a bed of white clouds. Aoba watched for as long as he could, trying desperately to hang onto his consciousness to watch the cotton-candy sky.

"I've never been in a plane before," he told Noiz several times, straining his eyes out the round airplane window.

"Go to sleep, Aoba." Noiz's voice carried with it the faintest trace of a smile. He rested his arm on the top of Aoba's head, casually running his fingers through Aoba's hair.

"No way." Aoba blinked sleepily, leaning his head against Noiz's shoulder. "I want to see this."

"You're delusional," Noiz muttered into Aoba's ear, resting his lips against the shell of skin. "Go to sleep."

"But I'm not tired," Aoba lied. The events of the past few days fell on him like weights. Noiz's sudden arrival, their conversation with Granny . . . all of it became suddenly hard to carry and Aoba's head refused to stay up. The events of last night especially made consciousness hard to muster. His words swirled around Aoba's head and worked to draw him closer and closer to sleep.

"I want to see Germany," Aoba said, sitting up a little taller in his seat and poking his head closer to the round window.

"We'll be there in a couple of hours, Aoba." Noiz gently pulled him back, curling the sleepy blue-haired dork closer into his side. "Just sleep."

His hand was so soothing on the back of Aoba's head. He felt himself drifting and struggled to open his eyes, dragging himself back into consciousness with the sheer force of his will.

"Why are we alone?" he asked when he opened his eyes, looking around the small airplane cabin.

"Private jet, Aoba." Noiz's lips were back on Aoba's ears and his hand was even softer on Aoba's hair.

"Oh." Aoba nodded like he understood, but in the back of his mind he was mentally tallying up just how rich Noiz's family actually was.

"Isn't it nice?"

"Mmmmhmmm." Aoba stretched his legs out way in front of him, as far as they would reach towards the back of the next chair. "Niiiiicccceeee."

Noiz laughed softly.

"Are you sure there's no one else?"

"Yes, Aoba. It's just us and the pilot."

"Ooookkkaaayyy."

"Man, I'd love to see you drunk," Noiz whispered against the back of Aoba's head.

"I'm not drunk!" Aoba grumbled, letting his head in a little niche in Noiz's collarbone.

"I didn't say you were." Noiz laughed.

"Good," Aoba muttered, slipping into silence as his dreams overtook him. "'Cause I'm not."

Noiz laughed again and pressed his lips to the back of Aoba's head. He then leaned forward and got a blanket out of a compartment by the first seat and wrapped it snuggly around Aoba's shoulders. He drew the fabric, and Aoba, closer into his side until he was fit snugly against the taller man. Smiling happily, Noiz let the blanket fall and put his other arm around the short blue-haired young man and settled in for the ride.

When the plane landed, Aoba was gently tugged awake and into a waiting car. He stumbled into the seat beside Noiz and quickly drifted back to sleep nestled back against Noiz's side. Noiz spoke to the driver softly and the car sped away, whisking the two away from the airport and into the German countryside under the cover of darkness.

When they reached Noiz's house – the Bäcker family manor home – Noiz instructed the driver to pull around back. Gently lifting Aoba from the car, Noiz carried his sleeping boyfriend from the back driveway and up to his room. And so, Aoba's life in Germany began while he was sleeping, curled in Noiz's bed with the lanky young man poised above him, gently stroking his hair.

"Aoba." A deep, familiar voice scratched at Aoba's ears, accompanied by the sound of sheets rustling gently.

"Hmmm?" Aoba turned his face towards the sound and smiled softly when something warm and sticky began to stroke across his face. "Ren?"

"It is morning, Aoba." Ren answered him, licking Aoba from chin to hairline.

"Stop it, stop it." Aoba rolled away from his Allmate, turning his face back into the sheets. "Go away, Ren. I don't want to get up."

"But you must." Ren was insistent, scrambling over to Aoba's other side and continuing to lick his face. "There is a strange –"

"P!" A high chirp interrupted Ren's voice, piercing Aoba's sleepy eardrums.

Rocketing upright, Aoba cried out, falling out of the bed when he saw a familiar little green box perched on his forehead.

"What the . . .?" Aoba ground his teeth, reaching up to grab the little green box. "You!" he squished it between his fingers and the little thing giggled, shivering in Aoba's grasp.

"What the hell, guys?" Aoba let the box go and buried his face into his hands. He looked at Ren and the little green box that sat perched on his ear. "Why are you trying to wake me up so early it's only –"

Aoba looked beside the bed for a clock.

And realized he wasn't in his room.

He wasn't even in Japan.

He was in . . . Germany.

With Noiz.

Righttt.

"So that really happened then." Aoba picked both Ren and the little cube that was Noiz's Allmate and climbed back into bed, pulling the sheets around his knees.

"Huh?" Aoba scratched his head, sitting up and looking around the large room.

It was completely barren. A big white room filled with boring white furniture surrounded by boring white walls that held up a high white roof and a tall white door. There were no decorations, no knickknacks or trinkets to mark the room as Noiz's. It was all so sterile. So freakishly pristine and empty.

Aoba's mouth slipped into a frown. "Hmmm," he said through pursued lips.

"Are you okay, Aoba?" Ren wiggled in his arms so his little head was poking through a crook in Aoba's arm.

"Yep." Aoba gently stroked the top of Ren's head with his fingers. "I'm fine." But his frown lingered like a sour taste on the back of his tongue.

"So who are you then?" Aoba poked the little P cube with the tip of his finger. He got out of bed, blushing when he saw he was in nothing but a pair of boxers (he didn't even want to think about how he'd gotten that way). He roamed around the room looking for some clothes, anything he could put on to go exploring in. He finally found a pair of pants – his pants, to Aoba's relief – and slipped those on, but either Noiz didn't know what a normal shirt was, or he simply didn't have any of them. Aoba finally sighed and settled for nothing but his jeans.

"I am Nikolaus's." The little cube twitched beneath Aoba's finger and settled more deeply into the folds of Ren's fur.

Aoba's brow furrowed in confusion. "Nikolaus?" he frowned, opening the door to Noiz's barren white room and stepping out into the hallway. "Who's . . .?"

The sentence died on the tip of his tongue when he saw what was beyond Noiz's boring white door.

Rich.

He did say his family was rich.

Aoba just didn't realize how rich.

Golden tapestries hung down from a rich, gilded ceiling. Behind the tapestries, the walls were painted a rich red, like the color of blood in the veins of someone's wrist. Huge paintings, framed in gold, hung from the walls between the tapestries and before the red walls, depicting various scenes of family life, although these families were like nothing Aoba had ever seen.

Elegant white ladies fanned themselves with dainty golden fans thinner than a single piece of paper. Robust blonde men tossed red balls to their dogs and shot ducks while smiling at their blonder, blue-eyed children. Girls and ladies in large skirts with even large white powdered wigs pranced about from painting to painting, eyeing the men and whispering behind their thin golden fans.

And the food. Aoba had never seen so much food before in his life, and it was all in one painting! Little cream pastries sat side by side with all kinds of exotic meats. Plates and plates of some white fluffy dough – mashed potatoes, he later found out – oozed thick grey sauce onto rich green vegetables. But the best, by far, were the dessert portraits. Donuts and candies and pastries and puddings. Pies and chocolates and cakes and fruits! Oh, just looking at the desserts, made Aoba's stomach ache.

He had never seen so much luxury in his life, and Aoba hadn't even made it down the hall yet. If he had known what was awaiting him at the end of the stairs, he probably would've turned around and headed back to bed. But, naïve little mullet-head as he was, he took a deep breath and pushed on, leaving the rich portraits and tapestries behind.

"Whooooooaa." Aoba breathed, gently pulling the door closed and tiptoeing out into the carpeted hallway.

"Where are we?" Even Ren, little toy robot dog as he was, sounded a little shocked and maybe even a tad bit impressed.

"We are at the Bäcker family estate, home of Master Nikolaus." Noiz'z little green cube piped up, rattling off a very formal sounding answer to Ren's innocent question.

"Master?" Aoba glided forward, feeling like he was walking on air.

His head swiveled like a pivot on his neck, looking everyone and nowhere at once. He didn't know what he was looking for exactly, Aoba just knew he wanted to see. He wanted to see it all. All the luxury and beauty Noiz had grown up in – all the things Aoba had never known for himself.

But, more importantly, he wanted to see Noiz.

"Umm, hey." Aoba paused and the end of the hallway, looking for the little green cube hiding in Ren's fur. "Do you know where Noiz is?"

"Master Nikolaus is just down the hall." The cube answered. It's slit black eyes watched Aoba with an uncanny intelligence, an expression he'd seen many times on the face of the cube's owner.

"Hmmm." Aoba frowned, but pushed on.

At the end of the hall there was a single broad window, set high into the rich red wall. Stretching up onto his tiptoes, Aoba could just barely see out of the bottom of the pane, but what he saw astonished him.

It was nothing but rolling green hills as far as the eye could see. Fields and fields of green grass stretched over the hills with the occasional group of trees clustered around the brown backs of a couple houses. Far off, beyond the hills and fields of green, Aoba could see the blue peaks of a distance mountain range. A shade or two darker than the blue sky above them, the mountains were unlike anything Aoba had ever seen.

Lowering himself from the windowsill, Aoba took a moment to rest his head against the wall, breathing deeply in and out through his nose.

"I'm gonna have a massive headache at the end of the day," he grumbled. "It's been, what, five minutes and I've already seen more down this hallway than I have before in the past twenty or so years?"

"You lived a sheltered life, Aoba." Ren tried to comfort him, but Aoba, still a little tired and rather frazzled for such an early hour, did not want to be soothed.

"Sheltered is not the word I would use." Aoba turned back to the window sill and curled his fingers along the bottom, stretching up again to get one good luck at the German countryside. "More like isolated," he grumbled, as he released the window.

Beyond the window, there were the beginnings of a wide stone staircase. It disappeared down into the floorboards and Aoba warily followed it, heading down two flights from what he assumed was a remote tower of the castle to a more hospitable area of the family home.

"Just down the home, my arse," Aoba continued to grumble as he finally left the spiraling stone staircase behind and came out into a wide open room resembling a Great Hall or meeting room.

"My instructions were correct," the little cube sniffed.

Aoba almost smiled at how very Noiz's like the cube's new attitude was.

Past the Great Hall – another wide open room loaded down with golden tapestries and huge gilded paintings – there was a smaller (relative term) dining room and two more wide rooms that had been recently converted into conference rooms. Aoba poked his head in each one, counting the number of empty chairs seated around the wide rectangular desk and looking with wide eyes at the numerous other chairs stacked up along the wall if more seating was necessary.

"Wow," Aoba breathed after passing the fourth meeting room with still no sign of Noiz. "I wanna be rich too."

"Agreed." Even Ren sounded a little shell-shocked.

Aoba had to stop halfway down the hallway again and lean his back against the blood-red wall. His hands fumbled around his stomach while Ren and the little cube puttered around at his feet. "What a cultural shock." Aoba's head was buzzing and his jaw hurt from how long he had left it hanging open as one thing after another passed by and surprised him. "I think I'm going to be sick."

"Be strong, Aoba." Ren licked his bare foot with his little wet tongue.

"Nikolaus is close." The little cube bounced up Aoba's feet and onto his shoulder. "Let us go."

"Umm, okay." Aoba turned to go, but turned around quickly when the sound of a door creaking open sounded from behind him.

Half a dozen men in crisp black suits began to exit the room, paying Aoba no mind as the turned left and headed down the hallway.

"What do I do?" Aoba said out of the corner of his mouth, flushing deep red with embarrassment.

"Run?" Ren padded around at Aoba's feet. "Aoba, you're heart rate is increasing rapidly!"

"It's because I'm half naked, stupid!" Aoba could feel the blush all the way down to his toes. None of the men turned to look at him, but the fear that they could, at any moment, and see him standing there totally shirtless in a strange house in an even stranger country, made the poor blunette's blood run cold.

Slowly, Aoba backed away from the men who continued to file out of one door in the deep red hallway. Their faces were drawn in the same frowns of frustration, their eyebrows pulled down in sharp scowls of irritation. Aoba caught snippets of their conversation as he slowly moved away, holding his breath so as not to make a single sound.

"If only we could make him see . . ."

"The old man's harsh, but his son is worse."

"And that other boy. Man, he's just as fierce as the rest of them."

"If only we had a bargaining chip. A tool. Something we could use against them."

"Then maybe we'd have our deal."

"Maybe then we could have our money."

Finally, finally, Aoba's hand found the cold silver of a doorknob. There were so many doors up and down the hallway, Aoba was sure one of them lead to an abandoned meeting room, like the one's he'd seen earlier. If he could just slip inside without being noticed . . .

The doorknob turned slowly, creaking with effort.

Aoba held his breath.

None of the men looked his way.

He gently pushed the old wood open just a crack, barely big enough for his body to fit through. Slipping inside, he made sure to keep watching the men as they left and refused to shut the door until every last one of them had made it down the hall.

"Phew," Aoba said, finally shutting the door and breathing deeply. He turned around with his eyes closed and sat with his back against the door, folding his arms around his bare stomach. "That was a close one."

"Nikolaus is here!" A high voice chirped in Aoba's ears.

He opened his eyes and almost choked when he saw three figures standing up from their seats at the far end of the table and coming towards where Aoba rested against the door.

"What?" Aoba's mouth was dry and he tried to stand, fumbling awkwardly with the doorknob behind his back. "More people? Oh, shit, shit, sh–!"

"Aoba?" A familiar voice, tinged with surprise and a healthy dose of amusement, turned Aoba away from the door and back towards the figures in the room.

Noiz, in the same grey suit he'd worn upon arriving at Heibon, stood in front of Aoba with one hand in the pocket of his pants and the other folded over his twitching lips. Everything about him, from the hand covering his bemused half-smile, to his shining amber hair, to his deep green eyes, to his smooth pierce-less face, was smiling. It was a friendly smile, with just a touch of cruelty in it. He was laughing at Aoba's discomfort. The thought made the blunette stiffen with rage, which only added fuel to the fire of his embarrassment.

Beside Noiz, standing with open mouths, were two men about the same height as Noiz with vastly different faces. Their hair was blonde and their eyes were green yes, but both faces were aged in a way Noiz's was not. There was touch of harshness and cruelty in their eyes that had not been softened by any form of love or friendship.

One of the men was Noiz's father, and physically he was definitely the oldest. He wore wrinkles all over the lines of his face, but more than that, Aoba could see there was a dull glimmer in his eyes that really defined his advancing age. The other man looked about the same age as Noiz – presumably he was Noiz's younger brother – but he did not look it. There was a coldness of character that made him look older than Noiz, less friendly, and, ultimately, more dangerous.

"Oh, God," Aoba sighed, hands still fumbling for the doorknob behind him. "Hi." He let out a shaky breath, cheeks flushed red with a deep embarrassment. "I can explain."

"Welcome home, Aoba." Noiz laughed calmly, strolling forward with his arms outstretched.

Aoba saw the embrace coming and tried to move away, but Noiz quickly caught him and pinned the shorter man's head beneath his chin. He held him for a moment, with Aoba struggling wildly in his grasp, before pulling away and placing his hand beneath Aoba's chin. He tipped Aoba's face up towards his and pressed their lips together in a gentle kiss.

"Noiz," Aoba tried to say against the younger man's lips. "Noiz, stop it!"

"I mean it, Aoba." Noiz pulled back just a fraction, resting his lips on the very tip of Aoba's nose. "Welcome home."

And despite his embarrassment and his intense shame at having been caught without his shirt on, Aoba couldn't help but smile.

That's where I was supposed to end it. So for anyone who read past there, I'm sorry, hey you got a preview of the next chapter. Lol, okay, sorry. Have a nice day I guess