I have tasted the bitter and the sweet of affairs / and walked over the rough and smooth path of days.

Dedicated to Lyn.

"…Ah. Leaving already?"

Lin blinked as he watched the members of the Shibuya Psychic Research agency shuffle out of the hospital room. He had returned from buying coffee to find the group moving out into the hallway.

"Yeah. I think we've bothered Naru enough for today." Bou grinned and shifted Mai a bit from where she was sprawled on his back, fast asleep. "We need to take this girl home anyway. See you tomorrow!"

Lin waved a bit as he stood to watch them depart, filling the silence of the corridor with their laughter. A few years ago he would have considered it all fluff and noise.

"I thought they'd never leave."

Naru was still up, comfortably settled back against the pillows and still poring over the very same folder he had been working on since morning. Only twenty pages in. normally he would have been somewhere in the hundreds by then.

"You should be sleeping."

Naru did not answer him and Lin did not consider this surprising. The onmyouji took his usual spot by the window and unpacked the contents of the brown paper bag he had brought upstairs. Brewed coffee, doughnuts, Dunhill cigarettes.

"Mai was blaming herself, you know, for provoking you."

"That sort of behavior is expected of her."

"Perhaps." Naru flipped a page and Lin sipped his coffee. He welcomed the warmth. It was cold in the hospital room. "Still, your heart did stop. That scared her."

"Fright is part of the job."

"I don't believe dying is."

The folder snapped shut with a flick of Naru's wrist.

"Come here."

Cold, quick, imperious, but no other person on Earth would dare to order him around, and for that reason Lin obeyed. The coffee had been robust and pleasantly bitter, and Lin knew Naru could still taste it on his lips when they kissed.

"Stop using them as an excuse," the younger man murmured with a crooked smile as they broke away. "You feared for me. That shouldn't be too hard to admit to, should it?"

"She's falling for you."

"She's still a child. Besides," said Naru as Lin moved in closer, "I think I already know what I want."

"So," Bou cheerily put in as the rest of the group got into the van. "Who wants to bet something funny's going on up there right now?"

Ayako raised her hand. "There's no other way to explain why Lin's such a stiff," the priestess explained with a yawn. "…Oh. I guess this is a touchy subject for a priest like you, huh, John?"

"N-no, not at all!" John stammered, although he had already turned several shades of red.

"I wonder how we're going to explain it to those two," Yasuhara mused as Bou started the car.

"No clue. I DO know one thing though… with Masako's powers being what they are and Mai's well on the way, I do NOT want to be around when we do."

Mai and Masako, in the meantime, remained propped against each other, blissfully tucked off somewhere in Dreamland.