A/N: Something silly I started to take a break from writing serious things and things with plot, and also because can these two just get married already please I swear to the seven circles of Hell I will offer up my soul (see fine print for details). Plotless, pointless, ridiculous fluff.

The first thing he noticed as his hazy awareness broke through layers of sleep and fog was the sensation of slender fingers playing with his hair, threading idly through the locks and occasionally catching a strand in a not-entirely comfortable tug. The second thing he noticed was that she wasn't supposed to be here.

"Mai," he stated, pushing himself upright on the couch where he'd accidentally fallen asleep in the middle of reading last night. She was sitting beside him, a brilliant smile on her face—one he knew better than to trust by now. He tried to focus the things drifting around in his mind, still blurry from sleep, into coherent thoughts. "What are you doing here?"

"Naru, you're awake," she greeted, extracting her fingers from his hair and leaning forward to plant a light kiss on his cheek instead. "Don't fall asleep on the couch like that, you idiot workaholic," she murmured, still close enough that he could feel the breath of her words against his skin as she spoke before she pulled back to a normal distance.

"I didn't give you the apartment key so you could barge in this early in the morning," he told her, trying to sound appropriately irritated.

"No, you didn't," she agreed with a sickly sweet smile. "You gave it to me because I wouldn't stop bugging you. But anyways, you're wrong, because it's eleven already."

"So, like I said, what are you doing here this early?"

She snorted and merely answered his question with another question. "Do you know what day it is?"

It was a question with too many pitfalls, and he tried to gauge what her motive for asking was, but nothing in particular came to mind. "You would know if you just looked at a calendar," he said finally.

"I did look at a calendar," she informed him. "I know what day it is. I was just checking to see if you did."

"The nineteenth of September," he said curtly.

She rolled her eyes. "It's not wrong," she allowed, "but Naru, it's your birthday."

He frowned. "And?"

"So we have to celebrate it, of course."

The faintest hint of a crease appeared between his eyebrows, and he looked away. "I don't—" I don't celebrate that day anymore, he almost said before he stopped himself. When there was nothing but silence for a few moments, he glanced back at Mai. The glimmer of guilt in her eyes and the determined set of her face was enough to tell him that she knew what he was about to say, that she had already anticipated it, and that she was going to stubbornly ignore it anyways.

She drew in a deep breath. "Don't be silly," she told him. "You owe me three birthdays. One for the first year, when you didn't tell us when it was," she said, putting up a finger as she counted, "one for last year, when you were away in England…" Two fingers. "… And this year. Three in total."

He scowled. "That doesn't make any sense."

"Too bad." She wrapped both of her hands around his wrist and tugged lightly. "Come on, hurry up."

"If you have time to waste on something like this, then you should—"

"Should be spending it on my studies, right?" She finished with another roll of her eyes. "I know, I know. But it can't be helped. You're important to me, too. As important as my studies. You can't argue with that, can you?" She smiled again, that devilish, honey-sweet smile that said she knew she had him cornered, and he did, too.

He sighed and finally stood up. "No wonder you have the intelligence of a monkey."

She stuck her tongue out at him in reply. "And if I'm a monkey, what does that make you? You've kissed a monkey."

"Have I?" He raised an eyebrow. "Would you even be able to remember it if I had?"

She had to stand on her tiptoes to do it, but she leaned forward, leveraging herself up with a hand resting on his arm, and kissed him lightly on the lips. "I remember that."

"A two second memory span," he said dryly. "Very impressive."

"Oh, be quiet," she said, circling behind him and pushing him in the direction of the hallway. "Hurry up and get ready, or we won't have enough time."

Fifteen minutes later, he met her where she was pacing impatiently just outside the door, an excited spring in her step, and waited for her to explain what kind of harebrained idea she'd cooked up. Instead of explaining, though, she simply took him by the hand, threading her fingers through his, and pulled him toward the station.

He had a bad premonition the moment he saw which line she led him onto, and that premonition proved correct when she tugged on his sleeve at an all-too familiar stop and led him down even more familiar streets.

"Go on," she told him, a suspicious look of anticipation on her face as she urged him to climb the single set of stairs to the SPR office. The decision to install frosted glass on the door finally paid off; he could see the shifting shadows of people peering out from the semi-translucent window, no doubt thinking they were quite clever.

"Ladies first," he said, smiling sarcastically, and he could practically see all her carefully-concocted plans crash around her as her lips twisted into a pout.

"Since when have you been a paragon of etiquette?" She demanded. "You always insist on being first."

"I don't insist. People just naturally follow those with more intelligence."

"Oh, is that so? Then, lead the way, Sir Genius," she said, gesturing up the stairs. "How could a monkey like me possibly hope to compare?"

He raised an eyebrow. "I was under the impression that, insensible as it might seem, you were leading here. Perhaps I was mistaken; in that case, I'll be leading us back—"

"Fine!" She interrupted hastily, grabbing hold of his arm as he turned and took a step back down the street. "I'll go first, okay? Just come."

He had to fight the urge to smile at the reluctant scowl on her face, since unlike certain people, he didn't gloat so openly. She dashed up the stairs and put a hand to the doorknob, hesitating for a moment before she turned it cautiously and pushed it open just a crack.

"Hey, wait—" She tried to say, but whoever was on the other side didn't heed her. The door was flung open from the inside, and a tangled mess of confetti and streamers landed on top of her, making her resemble an insect trapped in some sort of ridiculous rainbow spiderweb more than a human being. She blew stray pieces of paper out of her mouth and swatted blindly at her head, trying to dislodge the heap. So that was what they'd been planning.

Takigawa's head was the first to poke out, a confused look on his face as he looked first at Mai, then at Naru standing a few steps behind. "Mai," he said slowly, trying to grasp the situation, "You weren't supposed to come in first."

"Oh, really?" Naru said, his tone as flat as usual. "Who was?"

The monk laughed weakly and scratched his head. "Well, no one in particular. You know, it was just a prank…"

Ayako's voice sounded from behind the monk. "You let him find out," she accused Mai, who was still fumbling with the paper streamers obscuring her vision and only succeeding in getting them more tangled in her hair. Naru reached out and brushed her fingers aside impatiently as he deftly plucked out the worst offender of the bunch. More than half of the knotted mess abruptly slid to the ground, and the high schooler lifted her face to glare at Ayako.

"It was your fault, not mine. If you hadn't all been standing so close to the door like that, he wouldn't have found out!"

"Now, now," Yasuhara interrupted cheerfully. "There's no need to argue over it. We saw this coming the minute we planned it, right?"

"What's that supposed to mean?" Mai protested.

Masako agreed with a dainty smile. "Playing the fool suits you better, anyways," she said primly, hiding her smug grin behind the sleeve of her kimono.

"I've brought the cake," Madoka called from behind as she ascended the stairs herself, pushing Naru and Mai aside. She beamed as she set it down on the table and lifted the lid of the box, revealing not a cake but a large piece of clear, purplish jelly, molded to look like a cake. "Since you don't like sweet things," she explained.

Naru merely sighed as Mai pushed him into taking a seat on the sofa, though he adamantly refused the conical party hat that she attempted to stick onto his head. Apparently, that was the cue for something, because the entire room burst into the most cacophonous version of "Happy Birthday" he had ever heard—save for Lin, who looked suspiciously like he was only mouthing the words with that stoic face of his. He resolved to hire psychics who weren't completely tone-deaf next time.

"Blow out the candles and make a wish," John urged, setting a cupcake with nineteen lit candles crammed onto its tiny surface in front of him.

"That's a groundless superstition," he said, annoyed, but Mai sank into the seat beside him and elbowed him mercilessly.

"Just try it," she told him. "For fun. What harm could it do?"

"It's a waste of breath," he said curtly.

"You just don't want to look silly with puffy cheeks," she guessed. "Or you're scared you won't be able to blow them all out in one go. The great Oliver Davis, ghost hunter extraordinaire, defeated by a bunch of mere candles."

"Don't confuse me with you."

She scoffed. "I'm perfectly capable of blowing out a few candles." He raised an eyebrow in challenge, and she narrowed her eyes. "If I do it, you have to go along with me for the rest of the day," she told him.

He shrugged. "If you do it."

Without another word, and without noticing Yasuhara mouthing, 'Get. A. Room.' in the corner with a gleeful look in his eye, she sucked in a deep breath and blew at the little flames, the wax from the candles already half-melted and covering the cupcake in a second layer of frosting by now. One last candle simply refused to go down, but with a little bit of strained blowing—followed by a brief cough—she did manage to vanquish the entire bunch in one go, and she turned back to him with childish triumph in her pleased smile.

Just to prove his indifference to the university student making subtle faces in the corner of the room—Naru refused to contemplate the idea that he might simply be playing right into Yasuhara's hands—he leaned forward and kissed the tip of her nose. Whatever Yasuhara's intentions might have been, though, Mai's strangled half-splutter and Takigawa's choked gasp were well worth it, the annoyed jab to the stomach that Ayako gave the monk even more so. "Are you in grade school?" She demanded, and the monk looked appropriately ashamed of himself.

"You pick the worst timing," Mai told him indignantly under her breath.

"You did tell me to make a wish after the candles were out," he murmured back, barely audible even to her, and certainly not at all to the rest of the room.

She scowled. "That's not fair. You can't spew lines like that, with that face, like—like—Yasuhara."

His eyes drifted up toward the ceiling. "I was under the impression that I was much better at it."

Madoka's delicate cough brought their attention back to their rapt audience, and he remembered a little too late that however quietly they might have spoken, Mai's face was practically a loudspeaker broadcasting their exchange. He kept his expression impassive, but he could see her burying her face in her hands already from the corner of his eye.

"You can open the presents later," Madoka told him, a smile on her face as if nothing had happened. "If you don't hurry, you won't have time for the rest of the day."

He wasn't surprised to find out that Madoka was in on whatever Mai had concocted; she'd been the source for half of the tricks the high schooler had learned, he was sure. "The rest of the day?" He asked suspiciously.

"Three birthdays, remember?" Mai reminded him. "This is only for this year." She stood up, taking his hand and pulling him toward the door again. "No complaining—you promised."

"I promised to go along, not that I wouldn't complain," he pointed out, though he followed reluctantly, stepping gingerly over the rainbow mess that had been the confetti trap. She ignored his comment, her grip on his hand absolutely secure as she bounded down the stairs.

Madoka saw them out to the door and waved at them from the top of the stairs, calling, "Be careful, and have fun!"

"But don't have too much fun," Yasuhara added from behind her, a mischievous glint in his eye.

A/N: I think Naru is more openly sweet in this fic than I'd have placed him this early on in their relationship (I would have imagined it at more, say, two or more years in?), but whatever. Life is short, or something like that, right?

Since I'm pretty much just working on this as a side project, I don't really know how often I'll update; it's planned to be something like a three-part short story, but we'll see. Anyways, thanks for reading, and see you next update (I hope)!