Aoba slept well into the early evening, his natural lazy tendencies compounded by his multiple sources of stress and exhaustion (some of which he was more aware of than others). There were soft, grumbling noises from him as he began to stir, confused at first by his inability to see before he remembered the compress and tugged the now-dry cloth off his face.

He looked rather pathetically bedraggled as he sat up, his bangs crinkled in odd directions from having been moistened by the compress and then drying again, and his ponytail was bedhead-afflicted, too. Aoba’s face was almost zombielike at first, but then something a little more like clarity seeped in and the eyes looking out at the world were hazel.

He smelled cooking. His stomach gurgled tentatively.