Rooftops At Sunrise

6

Damian wishes he could have gotten more time with Aoi tonight. However, after he bravely declared that the two of them would not come home, without having seen at least one little green man during their road trip, Damian's boss called him, and gave his left ear quite a talking to—as a matter of fact, it is currently still ringing, an hour later.

Whilst Damian hops onto a train that will lead him to his apartment, he reaches into his pocket, that is now empty of the pizza place's business card, on which he scribbled his address and directions to get to his place. Although it sucks that he had to leave early, at least he managed to give Aoi his coordinates, he thinks; for something tells him she would not have bothered acknowledging said information, if he'd sent it as a text message instead.

The train's doors open. Then shut as quickly as they'd parted. Because no one gets on. It is too late for that, most the souls around here are old, and definitely not creatures of the night. Damian rests his head against the train's window. He observes the empty coach and sighs. His trip will take another hour; he cannot get Aoi's sullen expression out of his mind.

She confided in him that her parents were fighting.

"Because of me," Aoi had said, and the words were enough to erase any notion of shame that Damian had previously held within his heart. He immediately scribbled his address onto the sun-kissed, yellowing card. He told Aoi, that if she ever needed a place to sleep for the night—or somewhere that could act as a refuge from her current predicament—she could definitely stay over.

"I'm not often home anyway," Damian had muttered, with a shrug and an awkward laugh. "Might as well lend my apartment to you, if it could give you some peace of mind."

"Thanks, but no thanks—" despite saying this, Aoi still took his card, and held onto it tightly during the entirety of the way back to her home.

Inside the train, Damian nods off to the memory of her bidding him goodbye.

When he wakes, he has missed his stop, and everything is dark.

"Shit." Damian curses under his breath. His first reflex is to pat himself down to make sure nobody has robbed him.

Thankfully—he realizes, as he lets out a sigh of relief—all his belongings are still where he'd left them. Though, that still does not make him any richer. And he doubts he could pay for another ticket with the two miserable pieces of lint that linger in the back of his jeans like strange cobwebs would in an old attic.

Damian's head hangs low. If only he hadn't worked so many night and day shifts lately, he thinks, this would not have happened...

With much reluctance in his heart, he exits the train. He grasps at the shape of his phone that protrudes from his pocket like a strange splinter. There is a man that he truly does not want to call, but he takes a deep breath, and then, he dials his number anyway.

The outside world is freezing. It isn't early enough to call this hour morning—the birds have not yet begun to sing—however, it is too late to consider this a night-time anymore.

His phone rings.

The man does not pick up. So, Damian tries with another number. Another chance—a way out; yes, that is all this is, nothing more, he tells itself.

He burns through six different numbers before a man finally picks up. Damian recognizes his voice. They met at a bar two weekends ago. If Damian isn't mistaken, he's twenty-one—only two years older than him. Although Damian knows that this ultimately means nothing in the face of danger, the fact still manages to reassure him.

He forces himself to chuckle, as if he's more interested in the man than he actually is. "I hope I'm not bothering you," Damian says.

To which his acquaintance replies, "Not at all, I was just... working." This, however, is quite the unusual response, in Damian's most humble opinion. Usually, the men he rings up are always eating cupped noodles in front of strange TV shows, or masturbating.

"What do you do?" he finds himself asking, like that's actually what he called for—making chitchat—and he isn't watching the last train of the night retreat into the station like some long, mechanical eel would inside an alcove of rocks.

"Ah!" There is a sigh from the other end of the receiver. "I freelance," he tells Damian.

"Graphic designer?"

Now, it is laughter that Damian hears. "No, no," the man tells him, and Damian imagines him waving away his suggestion. "I'm a recipe developer—or, well, I suppose you could merely say I'm a chef of some sort." He pauses. "You don't happen to want some pancakes, do you?"

A crow caws into the night. Damian raises a brow. He tilts his head. "Pardon?"

The young man snickers again. "I swear I'm not going to poison you! But... I've been trying a few different ways to make them fluffier, and I made the portions too big, so it'd be cool if you could take a few of them off my hands. They're good," as he says this, the word good is muffled by something that has gone into the young man's mouth; Damian has a hunch that his interlocuter is eating said pancakes. "They're just a little," the young man gulps, "well, not as soft as I'd like them to be."

"Uh..." Damian is unsure of what to tell this man. He expected everything, but this—a stranger asking him to take breakfast food off his hands, at two o'clock in the morning. "Sure?" It occurs to Damian that he has forgotten who he is talking to. He briefly takes the phone away from his ear.

Lucas, the contact reads.

On the other end of the line, Lucas lets out a cry of joy. "Really? You don't mind?"

Damian rolls his eyes. "Only if I don't have to come pick them up," he says. "I don't have a car."

"Oh, well that's easy then!" Lucas chimes. "Where are you staying?"

Lucas's question is met with apprehension on Damian's end.

There is a long pause.

Damian huffs. He proceeds to cite the name of the train station he's currently standing in, then listens to the yell of fear and surprise that comes out of his phone's poor speaker. "What?" Lucas blurts. "What are you doing all the way over there!"

It takes him a moment to explain the situation to Lucas.