Just about nothing on earth was as cute as a flustered Ohtori Choutarou, Shishido thought, eyeing his roommate. Ohtori was standing in the doorway to Shishido's room, caught utterly while staring at Shishido's shirtlessness. One of Ohtori's hands was holding something behind his back and the other was tugging the hem of his shirt down ineffectually.

As much as it grated Shishido to imagine how Jiroh had managed to get Ohtori into that shirt, whose only goal in life was seemingly to bare the tanned stripe of skin above Ohtori's waistband, Shishido had to admit that imagining getting Ohtori back out of it was completely worth it.

If Ohtori didn't jump the gun, that was.

"Shishido-saaaan," Ohtori whined, tugging harder, but the shirt simply wasn't going down any farther. "Do I have to wear this?"

"Yes." Shishido stepped forward to peel Ohtori's hand away from the cloth—ohgod, was that some kind of velvet?—and smoothed the shirt back down. "Stop that, you'll stretch it out. What've you got behind your back?"

"Oh!" Ohtori snapped his eyes up from Shishido's bare chest and actually managed to blush a little harder; Shishido hoped he was saving some of that blood for other parts later. "It's…uh…close your eyes."

"What?" Shishido raised an eyebrow and started to reach around Ohtori. "We have to meet Jiroh and Atobe in ten minutes, you know…"

"I said close them, Shishido-sempai," Ohtori said firmly, planting a hand in Shishido's chest and pushing him back. Shishido just barely managed to keep the groan down both at the command in Ohtori's voice and the graze of his palm calluses along Shishido's bare skin.

"Okaaaay." Shishido huffed a little sigh, not really intending to let Ohtori know that he'd won. Ohtori's soft snort said that he wasn't fooled.

Shishido twitched a bit when cool material dropped onto his shoulders and slid along his arms, slick and with some weight behind it. He tried not to shudder obviously while he let Ohtori slip his arms into sleeves and twiddle around with the fabric around his wrists, but gave up when Ohtori started grazing fingertips along his skin as he did up buttons.

"All right," Ohtori turned Shishido a little bit, in the direction of Shishido's mirror, "open them."

"Mmm." Shishido didn't even try to stop the growl of pure pleasure as he got a good look at the shirt, which felt lightly textured like raw silk and gleamed dark, dark red, almost black in the poor lighting of his desk lamp. "Choutarou…"

"Hm?" Ohtori ran his eyes down Shishido's reflection, then reached around him to flip the last button he'd done open again, baring Shishido's collarbone. Ohtori let his thumb linger over the sharp point, forcing a small noise out of Shishido. "Happy White Day, Shishido-san."

"You didn't need to do something crazy like this, you know," Shishido admonished, but he was staring at his own reflection and tugging at the lines of the shirt a little. Ohtori chuckled at his vain streak.

"But you look so good," Ohtori murmured in his ear, making Shishido give a slow blink as Ohtori reached down to roll the cuffs of the shirt up just a touch more. "It's almost like getting a present for myself. A little big though, isn't it? I could…"

"Like it this way," Shishido growled, reaching over to wrap fingers around Ohtori's wrist and tilting his head back to kiss Ohtori fiercely. The hell with Jiroh and Atobe, if Ohtori felt like this was a present for himself, then a good sempai ought to let him unwrap it…

"Oi!" Atobe's voice rang out through the apartment, making Ohtori startle backwards out of Shishido's grip. Shishido gave another growl, this one with far less pleasant implications. "Ore-sama does not appreciate waiting!"

Shishido was opening his mouth to yell back exactly what Ore-sama could appreciate, but Ohtori shushed him by darting forward for another quick kiss, then dashed out of the room. Giving a last look to the shirt and his hair, Shishido sighed and trailed along after him.

He scowled a little when he saw Ohtori was already bundled up in his coat, velvet shirt well-hidden, but Ohtori gave him a stern 'play nice with the other children' look while handing over Shishido's leather jacket, and there was no arguing with his Choutarou when he meant business.

"Come ooon," drawled Jiroh sleepily, leaning against Atobe's back with one arm thrown around his neck for balance and chin propped on his shoulder. "I want to get dancing already!"

"You're creasing Ore-sama's shirt," Atobe snapped, shrugging Jiroh off, and Shishido choked on the comment he'd been about to make as he got a good look at Jiroh.

Who was wearing a pink hoodie. Baby pink. Fleecy. Shishido exchanged a glance with Ohtori, who seemed unsurprised, then turned back to Atobe's thunderous expression and swallowed the snickers.

When they stepped outside, a sharp wind was kicking snowflakes into a swirl. Ohtori grinned at the unseasonably late storm, but Jiroh hunched his shoulders and shoved his hands in his pockets.

"Atobe," he pouted, "s'too cold! Fix it!"

"Ore-sama does not have absolute control over the weather, Jiroh." Atobe paused, clearly rolling the possibility over in his mind. "Yet. Put your hood up."

When Jiroh complied, Shishido finally let loose the laughter he'd been repressing.

"Kitty ears?" he howled, leaning against Ohtori for support; Ohtori and Atobe exchanged long-suffering glances. The kitty ears were very cute certainly, pink triangles of soft fabric with fuzzy white centers, especially with some blond curls peeking out around the edges of the hood. "Where did you even get that?"

"M'not saying," Jiroh said smugly, digging his hands even deeper into his pockets and raising a lazy eyebrow at Atobe. "Atobe-buchou said he'd blow the place up if he found out."

"A well-deserved fate," Atobe grumbled, but Shishido just kept on grinning because it was impossible to miss the way Atobe's eyes kept straying towards Jiroh's curls and ears. "Weren't you the one who said we should hurry?"

"Yup!" Jiroh was starting to wake up now, and he pulled one hand out of his pocket long enough to hook Atobe's elbow, before starting to drag Atobe along in a limping sort of bounce.

"Tell me again why we're going out with them?" Shishido leaned into Ohtori's shoulder to ask as they trailed behind.

"I asked Hiyoshi-kun to come with us," Ohtori said, shrugging. "He and Kabaji had a big night planned, if you know what I mean."

"God, Choutarou!" Shishido slapped a hand to his forehead, even knowing that those two's idea of an exciting night involved two knitting needles and a crochet hook. "Don't say it like that!"

"And then Mukahi and Oshitari-sempai were, uh," Ohtori's blush was obvious even under the florescent burn of the streetlights, "busy."

"I just bet." Shishido thought about teasing Ohtori further about how he could casually make it sound like Hiyoshi was involved in some sort of yarn bondage, but then started stuttering whenever their Doubles 2 pair was mentioned, who routinely came onto the court with lube still showing.

At least, Shishido really hoped it was lube.

It wouldn't do to get Ohtori too flustered this early in the evening, though, especially when his only other company was Ruffles the Clown-sama and his amazing napping kitty. Shishido contented himself with bumping Ohtori's shoulder playfully and watching him stare up at the falling snow.

*****

Atobe couldn't dance. Not a step, not a bounce, not a kick-turn-shimmy, nothing. It was sort of funny, in a sad and cruel way, and Shishido hoped fervently that as many members of the Atobe Fan Club were here as possible to witness the carnage.

It wasn't like Shishido was a DDR master or anything like that, but at least he had the sense to keep his flailing off the dance floor and sip his drink, pink and girly though it was. Any amount of girliness was worth the look on Atobe's face when he had returned drinkless from the bar and reported sourly that Ore-sama's face was just too recognizable. Jiroh had laughed, tugged his kitty ears up in place, and grabbed Ohtori's arm to drag him along to the bar.

Nobody was surprised when they both reappeared with a drink in each hand. Grumpy, in Atobe's case, but not surprised.

"The bartender liked my shirt," Ohtori had mumbled, face burning, as he pressed the girly drink into Shishido's hand and took a long drink of his own, nearly getting an umbrella up the nostril in his hurry. Atobe had been busy growling something in Jiroh's ear that he clearly meant as a threat but made Jiroh bounce happily.

"I like it too," Shishido had teased, brushing knuckles up Ohtori's sleek ribs and getting a yelped "Shishido-san!" in return.

"Don't you want to come dance, Shishido-sempai?" Ohtori's voice interrupted Shishido's thoughts, and he turned to find Ohtori watching him over the rim of his cup as he took a slow drink, his chest rising and falling just this side of fast. He had a thick glo bracelet on each wrist, Jiroh's of course. Jiroh himself was in the middle of the crowd doing the thing with his bracelets, where you twisted your wrists all over each other and made rolling balls and figure eights and things, a dazzle of purple and pink that made Shishido dizzy with the beauty and the skill of it.

Ohtori's own bracelets were a slightly more sedate blue, but they lit up the lines of Ohtori's toned arms and shone against the slick fabric of his shirt, caught the cut of his cheekbones and glinted in the dark of his eyes.

Shishido swallowed hard. "Nah, that's okay."

"Jiroh was trying to teach me the thing, you know," Ohtori rolled a shoulder towards the waterfall of glo, "but I'm not very good."

"Looked good enough to me." Shishido gently pried the cup from Ohtori's fingers and sat it down before he drank the whole thing at once and set it on the table. He let his thumb drift just under the shine of the bracelet, brushing against Ohtori's pulse. Ohtori shivered, and Shishido's eyes tracked helplessly the ripple of blue catching the insides of Ohtori's pale curls.

Ah, no good, he thought and released Ohtori quickly, then gave him a little push. "Go on, go dance." Ohtori pouted his name at him, but let Shishido's hands push him back down into the tide of people. He was easy to track with the way the blue of his bracelets smeared against the other shadowy figures as he passed.

"Plebes," Atobe grumbled as he broke free of the crowd and bumped into the table, snatching up his drink and flopping down into a chair to nurse it. Shishido wondered if Atobe knew about the purple ring Jiroh had clipped to his collar, but decided it was wiser not to ask. "Ore-sama had an army of dance instructors before he could even walk."

"Well-paid, no doubt," Shishido couldn't resist, and got the Eyebrow of 20 Laps in return. He tilted his chin towards Jiroh's pulsing. "He's something, isn't he? Where'd he learn to do that?"

"Ore-sama doesn't have time to delve into every single banal idiosyncrasy," Atobe said, which really meant that Jiroh refused to tell him about that as well. Atobe's displeased expression wavered for a second when Jiroh whirled his wrists through a series of loops so fast that an afterimage of his name in English cursive burned in the air for a split-second.

But when Shishido blinked, Atobe's scowl was back in place, and he thought maybe it had just been a trick of the light flickering across Atobe's features.

Shaking his head with a grin, Shishido turned his full attention back to the crowd, wondering if Atobe really knew half as much as he thought he did about what Jiroh got up to. The grin died an abrupt death when he found the two whorls of blue he was hunting for.

It was rather hard to tell exactly what was going on when the proceedings were only lit by the occasional pass of a glo bracelet, but Ohtori was in awfully close quarters with a handful of people, and as Shishido watched, they were nudging him steadily away from the safety of Jiroh's circle of admirers.

When a blue-tinted wrist came up in what was unmistakably a shove, Shishido thunked his cup down on the table with a growl.

"Isn't that Ohtori getting mauled down there?" Atobe asked idly, and Shishido barked a "No!" before stomping down into the crowd like a bamboo-less panda bear.

Most people wisely slid out of Shishido's way, sensing the hostility radiating off him just as surely as Jiroh's pinks and purples, but it still took him a few long minutes to re-locate Ohtori once immersed in the disorienting ebb and swell of the crowd. When he finally caught sight of a flash of blue off to his right, he grabbed first and thought later.

Good thing it was Ohtori then, because as soon as Shishido had a good grip, he gave a yank that popped Ohtori free of the clot of people and brought him crashing against Shishido's side. Shishido grunted at the impact, Ohtori wasn't exactly made of sunshine and fluff, and wrapped an arm tightly around Ohtori's waist.

"Shishido-san!" Ohtori exclaimed reproachfully, but his fingers dug into Shishido's shoulder, and any iota of misgiving Shishido might have been feeling evaporated.

"Oi!" one of the random people in the clot snapped, "who said you could cut in?"

"Back off," Shishido growled, pushing Ohtori in the opposite direction without exactly letting go of him, and when one of them took a few steps forward, Shishido darted out a foot to sweep his ankle out from under him and sent him stumbling back into his groupies.

He tugged Ohtori away before they could right themselves, and it only took half a dozen steps in the confusion of the crowd for them to be out of sight.

"Just what was that?" Shishido asked, still pushing Ohtori in front of him. He hadn't it meant for it to come out mean, but yelling was the only way to make yourself heard over the music and his stomach was still sort of knotted up.

"Dancing!" Ohtori snapped back, turning his head just enough that Shishido caught a glimpse of hurt under the reflection of blue.

"I don't think a dance is what they wanted from you!" Shishido said without thinking and Ohtori immediately turned to unmoving stone underneath his hands.

"It isn't what you want from me either, apparently!"

Shishido's jaw clenched and his eyes dropped to the floor, and since Ohtori wasn't budging any further, he let his hands drop to his sides as well. Okay, maybe he'd been a little reactionary. He raised his eyes just enough to see Ohtori rubbing at his wrist underneath the bracelet, and all the anger melted into guilt immediately.

Idiot, he sighed to himself, and reached out to put hands on Ohtori's hips. Ohtori balked at first, but this time Shishido was pulling him closer rather than shoving him forward, pulling until Ohtori's hips were snug against his own.

"What are you doing?" Ohtori asked, frowning.

"Dancing," Shishido said, shifting them to oneside and then back again, "with you."

"Hmm, I'm not sure about that," Ohtori said, but his expression softened, and he reached to adjust Shishido's hands and body against his own so that they actually fit. He gave a test shimmy that made Shishido's fingers clench against the slick fuzz of Ohtori's shirt, and Ohtori hummed his approval and did it again.

And then he slid his hands into the back pockets of Shishido's jeans, and Shishido forgot about everything but the curl of muscle under his hands and the spark of blue in Ohtori's eyes.

"There they are!" Jiroh murmured, eyes half-closed and cheek pillowed against Atobe's thigh in a way that shouldn't have been physically possible for somebody draped over two flimsy club chairs. Atobe's fingers didn't move from where they were tangled in between blond curls and a kitty ear.

"Finally," Atobe said. "Ore-sama is more than ready to go."

Ohtori's fingers, still in Shishido's pocket, gave him a little pinch to remind him not to laugh when Jiroh straightened up and they saw that the purple ring had moved from Atobe's collar to one of the kitty ears like a piercing.

******

They were kissing, coats thrown to the floor, before Shishido even had the door shut properly, which was stupid, so stupid, but Shishido couldn't say he could have waited a second longer than Ohtori did as his shoulders were slammed up against the wood of the door and Ohtori's fingers flipped buttons through the silk of his shirt with impressive speed. Not feeling overtly cooperative, Shishido grabbed the back of Ohtori's neck with one hand to yank him closer, and slid the other up the back of Ohtori's shirt.

Or tried to, but the simple truth was that there wasn’t anything, and certainly nothing as blunt as Shishido's hand, that was going to slip in between Ohtori's skin and that fabric.

"Up," Shishido ordered, nudging Ohtori's elbows out of the way as he seized the hem of the shirt with both hands and dragged, fighting the urge to stop halfway and drop to his knees so he could lick the pale expanse of stomach he was revealing, the nap of the fabric imprinted across Ohtori's skin.

"Shishido-san!" Ohtori protested as Shishido yanked a bit to get the shirt past the swell of Ohtori's shoulders, but Shishido just kept yanking until the shirt was peeling off Ohtori's wrists and he could toss it aside, smiling slightly at the way Ohtori had locked fingers around the glo bracelets to make sure they stayed put.

He let his shirt slide off his shoulders to the floor before wrapping arms around Ohtori's back and dragging him close, running fingers down Ohtori's spine and running his tongue over the rough tessellation the shirt had left over Ohtori's shoulder. Ohtori buried his face in Shishido's shoulder and moaned, clutching at Shishido's waist.

"Bed now!" Shishido ordered, and this time Ohtori didn't fight as Shishido pushed him forward. They struggled towards Shishido's room, both trying to tug their own jeans and each other's off, and mostly just getting in each other's way.

It was utter relief to tumble against Ohtori's bare skin, and Shishido let out an embarrassingly loud whimper as he bounced a little on the bed beside Ohtori, sliding against him. He was fascinated by the rough texture of Ohtori's chest against his mouth, even as the marks began to fade, and he ran the flat of his tongue along every inch he could reach until Ohtori begged him to stop, arching against the pillow, fingers clutching at Shishido's back.

"Please," Ohtori said, "please, please," and then he just kept repeating it until he got Shishido nestled into exactly the right spot to raise his hips and demonstrate just what he was asking for.

"Yes," Shishido groaned before crushing his lips against Ohtori's, instead of the "are you sure" and "you don't have to" he'd been planning on uttering soulfully at this moment since Valentine's Day.

He never could tell Ohtori no, and certainly not when Ohtori pressed the tube into his hands and gazed up at him with such wide, dark eyes that Shishido had to clench his fists in the sheets and take several open-mouthed breaths before he thought there was any chance he wouldn't totally embarrass himself.

He nearly did anyhow, when Ohtori was tight around his fingers and hot against his tongue, the temptation to just keep on sucking Ohtori until everything went white nearly overpowering, but Ohtori's fingers were firm when he pushed Shishido back by the shoulders and repeated his demand much more explicitly.

No Japanese boy, Shishido thought as he stared down at Ohtori with dangling jaw, should be allowed to look so sweet and good while saying things like that. And he should certainly not be allowed to repeat it slowly and deliberately while reaching down to wrap fingers around himself and stroke.

Ohtori was going to kill him, Shishido was sure of it, and even more sure when he started to slide inside of him, Ohtori whimpering against his shoulder in words that sounded painful but were actually saying "keep going, keep going."

"Don't stop," Ohtori panted against his neck, and Shishido took one of Ohtori's hands to show him there wasn't any further to go. Ohtori shuddered hard, and Shishido cursed and clutched at him and managed to just barely keep from coming right then. "It's okay, Shishido-san," Ohtori said, moving Shishido's hand up to wrap around his length and stroking with his hand over Shishido's.

"Choutarou," Shishido whimpered as Ohtori moved his thumb through the slickness gathering on his tip.

"Move, please," Ohtori begged, mouth against Shishido's ear, and Shishido could never tell Ohtori no.

"Hn, I didn't mean to be rough with you," Shishido said gruffly a little while later, nestled against Ohtori on his side, the sweat drying on both of them. He had Ohtori's wrist between his fingers, the glo bracelet starting to dim, but still casting bluish shadows across the planes of Ohtori's abdomen.

"I liked it." Ohtori shrugged, flexing his fingers a little, making the tendons shift under Shishido's grip.

"I didn't mean your wrist," Shishido said, letting one hand drift down to thumb the ridge of Ohtori's pelvis.

"Me either, Shishido-san." Ohtori grinned, pushed his hip against Shishido's hand a little, then reached over to slide the ring of plastic over his own fingers and down around Shishido's wrist. He felt ridiculous, Shishido thought as Ohtori rolled over and spooned up against him, rear tucked stickily against the curve of Shishido's hips.

But, Shishido ran the plastic in a slow line down Ohtori's side, illuminating every dip and rise of the smooth skin, it looked really fucking good.