They only let him go so wrong out of kindness, I suppose.

This one takes place after the game. Mild spoiler-ish things for the Secret Reports. The title is taken from the 31 Days theme for May 6, 2008.

Twelve days after the end of the Long Game, Hanekoma Sanae is lighting up the stove with a fire pin behind the counter of his café and Joshua comes around somewhere between breakfast and lunch. He just walks in, all brisk elegance and perfect ennui, sweeping his hair out of his eyes with one hand and fiddling with his cellular phone with the other.

"Tea. Real tea, not another one of your Sunday experiments."

"Two steps ahead of you there, Josh," Hanekoma shoots back with a laugh and a wink and Joshua's too busy tapping away at the buttons of his phone to notice, but that's okay, Joshua best with people when he's pretending not to notice. He looks harmless, almost, when he's not stripping someone down with a single look, not measuring their worth as a piece to throw in between him and rabid Noise, or maybe a speeding car.

Hanekoma tosses the pin and turns away, because it's just occurred to him that he can't remember where he put his china. Joshua doesn't drink from anything that isn't in something expensive. He's particular like that.

"So. How goes?"

There's a glance, a brief flash of violet eyes and an amused twist of lips – the look Joshua gets, when there's something he could say and it'll bite like a bitch because it's one hundred percent truth on the rocks, but he soon decides that it's so much more gratifying just to leave it hanging in the air instead.

"The last round finished yesterday."

"Early."

Hanekoma could be imagining all of this. The counter's far from where he's at, squatting low, digging through porcelain. Things could be perfectly normal, since they do this all the time, like he's not particularly curious about how things are going, like the Powers that Be totally didn't nuke his ass for what he's done and he therefore still has the means to find out how things going in the game himself.

The china decides to make an appearance, and Hanekoma lopes over to the sink to wash it out, saucer, cup and all. Joshua stares at his phone a little longer, loses interest, watches the people and the cars beyond the picture windows instead.

"I'm surprised you stayed."

"Don't be."

As Hanekoma comes around with the tea and takes a good long look at Joshua, there's a flash of something, a pang that comes with almost-remembering – hits him every time, really, every time Shibuya's Composer actually bothers himself with coming to the café in between soul crunching and Reaper toasting. Hits him more often now, since it's been barely a month since Joshua came to his café with a slouchy, pouty kid with earphones. Since someone nearly pulled the trigger on the Composer but couldn't do it and ended up spread out flat and bleeding all over the floor.

Briefly, he wonders where he went wrong, when he stopped being so quick on the pick up, so cutting edge that they coined the phrase just to be able to describe his attitude. He also wonders when this violet-eyed thing stopped being the runaway who saw phantoms at every street corner and started being something closer to a god or a monster, yet infinitely worse than both. Then that look crosses Joshua's face again and Hanekoma figures that really, he's just getting old.

"Your tea is still terrible," Joshua remarks sometime later, right before he walks out the door. Hanekoma only smiles, watches the thin line of that back move away from him and out of sight, and turns away to toss out the dregs.