"Pour me another cup of tea, Tetsu-chan!" Ayaka demands. Misaki rests his chin on his palm and sighs, but picks up the pink plastic teapot and tips its spout to click against the battered teacups his mother lets his sisters play with.

"Me next, me next!" Shuuko chirps, waving her teacup, and Misaki can do nothing but comply. He tries not to let his eyes cross when Ayaka goes back to her monologue about Miss Momo's new spring coat.

"RAADAA!" Miss Momo herself comments. She's lying a few feet away, licking her paws, ears flattened with indignation because the cookies they offered her are plastic.

When the doorbell rings, Misaki is up on his feet and halfway to the door before Ayaka is halfway through saying, "Dear me, another caller!" and prays it is those door-to-door monks soliciting eternal peace again so that he can have a few minutes of respite.

"Yo," Tachiki says, slouching against the doorframe. His eyes flick upwards. "Nice hat."

"What are you doing here?!" Misaki demands, reaching up to rip the white garden party hat off, face flaming because he can't remember whether or not there are yellow Hello Kitty ribbons in his hair still or not.

"Have you come for tea?" Ayaka asks, appearing at Misaki's side. Her charming smile turns icy when she switches her gaze from Tachiki to Misaki. "Put your hat back on."

"STAY FOR TEA!" Shuuko yells from the playtable.

Somehow, Misaki finds himself sitting back at the table again, hat back on his head and plastic cookie in hand, only now Tachiki is smirking at him from across the table. And it would be okay if Tachiki looked just as ridiculous as Misaki does with a ribboned hat and delicate lace gloves on, but Tachiki's gloves are fingerless, and his hat is set at a rakish angle.

The son of a bitch looks cool, and Misaki wants to commit seppuku with his Ham-Ham Heaven teaspoon.

"Don't you think so, Tachi-pi?" Ayaka asks, batting her eyelashes at Tachiki with open adoration, and Misaki would choke to death on his tea if it weren't imaginary.

He wishes desperately that it wasn't, especially when Shuuko grabs Miss Momo by the back legs and drags her over to present formally to Tachiki, exclaming, "PET THE KITTY!"

"What should we play next?" Ayaka asks when tea hour is apparently over. She and Shuuko look expectantly at Tachiki; Misaki and Miss Momo exchange a long-suffering and slightly homicidal glance.

"Why don’t you two go play outside for awhile, hmm?" Tachiki asks. His smirk makes Misaki's blood run cold.

"You aren't playing any more?" Ayaka asks, and Shuuko's lower lip trembles. Misaki can't believe he's actually rooting for his siblings, but then again, the Misaki Pout has never been turned down once during the span of recorded history.

"Me and Tetsu-chan are gonna play a different game." Tachiki reaches over and tugs one of Misaki's ribbons. "Like Doctor."

Three pairs of huge brown eyes stare up at Tachiki; two are glowing with adoration, and the other with terrified lust.

"Tachiki, don't!" Misaki protests when Tachiki grabs his shoulders and shoves him down on his back. His shoulder bangs into a leg of the playtable, and a plastic cookie whacks him in the forehead. "My sisters can see right in here!"

"They aren't looking," Tachiki dismisses his concerns, and they aren't, since Tachiki sent them off to play Flower Show Contest; through the sliding glass doors that lead to the yard, Misaki can hear the girls giggling and shouting about the merits of different flowers.

"You can't be seri—ah!" Misaki nearly bites his tongue off when Tachiki rucks up Misaki's T-shirt and runs a knuckle over his nipple, the rough lace sending goosebumps skittering over Misaki's back. "Don't!" he wails. "Stop!"

"You're such a pretty thing when you beg," Tachiki grins, making Misaki's stomach twist hot and cold, and he reaches up to tangle fingers in the ribbons that are coming loose and gives them a yank.

Then he flips the button of Misaki's jeans open, and Misaki is never ever ever going to explain to his sisters what happened to these gloves.

Much later, Misaki stumbles down to dinner, rumpled and irritable. He flops into his chair, ignoring his mother's tut-tutting about his appearance and need of a haircut. His father's nose is thankfully buried deep in the sports section.

"Where's Tachiki-niisan?" Shuuko wants to know.

"I pushed him out a window," Misaki grunts, wishing it were true. Tachiki actually climbed out himself , shimmying onto the branches of the closest tree and down to the ground like a squirrel, bright-eyed and bushy-tailed, and wearing one of Misaki's T-shirts.

Probably his underwear too, Misaki thinks, and he contemplates the mechanics of drowning himself in his soup. His father and mother are both staring at him, but Misaki plans to just stare at his food until the earliest opportunity to escape presents itself.

"What's that?" Ayaka narrows her eyes and points at Misaki's neck. Misaki scowls and tries to hunch his shoulders up over the mark purpling to the left of his Adam's apple. "You're supposed to get better when you play doctor!"

"I wasn't a very cooperative patient," Misaki snaps.

"Tetsu-chan!" Shuuko is leaning over and yanking on Misaki's shirt until he finally looks down at her. Her eyes are huge and filled with concern. "When is Tachi-niisan coming over to play again?"

Misaki winces when Shuuko's yanking drags the material of his shirt over the rugburn on his shoulders, but resigns himself to the much more serious mental anguish that is sure to come later, because the Misaki pout has never been turned down in the span of recorded history.

Of course the rationalizing doesn't assuage Misaki's mortification at all when his father catches him practicing the pout later that night in the bathroom mirror.