“Tomoya-kun!” Mika barged into the little office, all but slamming the door behind him in his boundless excitement. Tomoya jumped in his seat, staring at Mika with the alarmed eyes of a prey animal.

“Y-Yes? I’m doing paperwork right now, I can’t go investigate with you.” He set his hands on the modestly sized stack of papers in front of him, in some notion of making a point. It was actually just the mess of reports from Mika’s desk, and half of it was empty paper, but it was paperwork and it did need to be done.

“Ngaah, ya don’t wanna see what I brought ya?” Mika said, dropping every front that hid his country roots as he whipped something out of his pocket. It was a makeshift envelope, fastened from two erroneous reports and a smattering of tape. The folding was surprisingly tidy, though the edges were worn, throughly tousled in Mika’s pocket.

Curiosity nipped at Tomoya. Mika was always good to him, bringing him gifts that graced his eyes with sights they were never meant to see. But it was something he typically could save for after work hours, and something Mika was typically discreet about, handing the little treasures to him like any mundane evidence. For him to be so bursting at the seams with excitement, it had to be something very special.

“Okay, okay.” He pushed the stack of papers aside, and Mika dropped the envelope into the vacancy in a playful manner. His excitement was rubbing off on Tomoya, and he couldn’t help the slight tremor in his hands as he opened the envelope.

As expected, it was full of hand-sized photographs with off-center framing and the occasional blurriness. Unexpectedly, it was of a woman. One he knew well—who consistently plagued the halls of their precinct, as paranoid as the ocean was blue and as kind as a starving lion. She sat demurely on a fainting couch, wearing an antique evening gown covered in fine lace and embroidery and regarding the camera with a softness in her eyes.

“Eheh, whaat?” Mika said, breathy and unconvincingly surprised, “How’d this picture of Itsuki-san in her new dress get in here?” He asked, scooping it up to get a closer look at it. Tomoya followed it with his eyes and sighed.

“Couldn’t you do this after work?”

“I can’t help if a picture or two slips on in there by accident.” Mika said, tearing his eyes away from the photo with great effort. “C’mon, I promise I got ya somethin’.”

Tomoya gave him an uneasy stare, before turning his head back to the stack of photographs. The next one was much more pleasant, of the elegant cut of a man who haunted his mind. Ayumu—an old coworker, a terrorist, barely an acquaintance, but through these little photos his.

There was something odd about the picture though. Ayumu’s back was to the camera, his neat suit jacket long gone and a hand pulling his tie off while the other ruffled through his hair. It had all the markings of a candid photograph, but none of the shaky camera work that came with Mika’s renditions of them. More than that, it was a fully competent photo. The lighting was terribly good for what was obviously night, the picture was crisp and steady, and there were no fingerprints along the edges from characteristic mishaps with the negative.

“Kasamai-san made them. Picked out the shots, set everything up and developed them, I just took the picture.” Mika said with an insipid tone as he tucked the picture of his belle into his breast pocket.

Tomoya felt dizzy. He gripped the table in a weak attempt to ground himself as his head filled with some kind of sludge. If Ayumu had spent the time making the pictures, so intimate in subject, did he know of his admirer? He couldn’t fathom another reason for their existence, and in a burst of feverish imaginings he was certain it had to be true. The negatives would have been handled with an exceeding delicacy, like the touch of a lover under the cover of night. This was the only way Ayumu, his Romeo, would be able to send him a loving message.

He remembered he existed on a physical plane when Mika accidentally bumped an arm against his shoulder as he pulled the photograph away. Beneath it was another photograph, the camera looming over a white linen bed and a pale expanse of skin—

Tomoya jumped from his chair with a cry, violent enough to upend it. Ayumu was naked, no tasteful pillow or fabric or fig leaf to hide anything. The expression on his face was cool as ever, commanding the viewers attention in spite of the submissive angle.

He whipped his head around to stare at Mika, in some weak hope that it would ground him and the delusion would fade. Mika smiled at him, his grin curling the dark corners of his eyes into something perverse. His bangs cast a shadow over his face, his expression devilish in every way a nice, well intentioned senior could be.

“Do ya wanna go to a scene with me?” Mika asked, his voice oozing a damned excitement. Tomoya looked back to the picture, and found it entirely unchanged. Still pornographic, still taunting, and still depicting the god of his idolatry.

“… Yes.”