Canon: Remove if not applicable.As a rule, Kouen hated mornings. Not as much as his oldest younger brother, but he still hated them enough to be annoyed when they came around and he had to wake up. Still half asleep and very drowsy, Kouen rolled over. Only to fall right onto a rug on a floor. He scowled, wondering just when his bed got so small that he would fall out of it. Did Koumei and Kouha crawl in with him again and hog the sheets and space? They did that way too often. Particularly Kouha, who had a tendency to sprawl all over the place. And his head was throbbing something terribly too, and made him want to try to go back to sleep and sleep it off without even making the effort of getting back into bed. He wasn't Koumei though, so he really should take some painkillers and hope they would kick in fast, instead. And he probably had school, too, he wasn't certain at the moment.
"Ah, good morning," he heard someone say, and the voice made him bolt straight up, arms as support, and he was blinking wildly. He stared up at a very tall man with long red hair, who looked vaguely familiar. But before he could figure out who it was, a sharp pain seared through his head, and he clutched it. What...? What exactly had he done? He wasn't sick, was he? He tried to steady himself against one shivering arm. Suddenly a glass was pressed to his lips, and someone, probably the big man, helped him empty it. Somewhere along the line of drinking everything that was in the glass, he realized that it was water. While he drank, he tried to clear his painful thoughts so he could try to try to regain control of the situation. He had gone to a gay bar with some of his seniors and then...
His face went both pale and pink at the same time, and he once more found himself staring up at the man in front of him. He gave him a suspicious look, but the man only looked concerned. Was he acting or was it real? Had anything happened? It didn't feel like anything had happened, beyond the damn hangover. It must be a hangover. But it wasn't like he had ever had sex with another man before, only with girls around his own age and a little older. So he didn't actually know what it would feel like if something actually had happened. But he guessed that he would be able to tell, at least.
"Where am I?" he asked, and the man's concerned frown deepend. "My house. You wouldn't tell me where you live and I couldn't leave a drunk minor at a club like that." Kuen narrowed his eyes at him, both out of suspicion and due to the headache. "I haven't done anything, if you're worried. Although I did need to put your clothes in the laundry..." Kouen looked down. He had been too occupied to actually notice that he wasn't wearing the clothes he wore to the club, but now he saw that he was wearing a very red t-shirt with a faded-out cartoon lion on the front, and a pair of loose pants. It was comfortable, which might have been another reason why his attention had not been drawn to them before. "I'm Mu," the man said after some moments of silence, and he offered Kouen a hand. Kouen looked at it, then took it, giving it a brief shake. "Kouen," he said in return. The man smiled at him. It was an awfully brilliant smile. Was that something that had made him approach him last night? He was still fuzzy on the details. "What t---"
"Brother!" Kouen flinched when he was cut off, and when he looked over he saw a tall but young looking girl with hair pulled up in a ponytail in the door. Her hair was just as flaming red as Mu's. "Asha, please don't shout," Mu said, as he noticed that the girl's loud voice had an averse effect on Kouen. She pouted. "Brother, have you seen Muron's butterfly hairclips? She says she definitely has to wear them today." Kouen noticed that Mu shook his head in a negative answer, but he shut out the voices as best as he could. His mind was getting a little clearer, and he wondered if he was somehow fed any painkillers without even realizing it. If he was fed anything he hoped that it was only painkillers, at least.
"Who're you?" a voice asked, and he opened his eyes to stare right into the face of a boy. He looked around the same age as the girl he had seen before, and Kouen looked up, to ask Mu to please make this child get out of his face, but the man had left the room. Possibly to help his sister find those hairclips. "I'm... Kouen.." he finally said, turning his eyes back to the boy. "Who are you?" The boy smiled, one eye hidden behind thick bangs and the other closing into a near half-moon with good humour. "Yaqut!" he says. "I'm six!" He looked immensely proud about that fact. The boy was only six? He looked a few years older at least. But then he was only a year older than Koumei. "Are you always this loud?" Kouen asked, shifting his hands to rub at his temples. "I'm not loud," the boy protested. "That's Rohroh, he's super loud and screams all the time." He nodded with vigour, as if it would make this piece of information all the more true. "Brother says that you're sick and that we should leave you alone, are you sick?" Kouen couldn't believe that the child kept talking to him if it had been told not to. "Yes, I am very sick. Please take your loud voice and go put on some clothes. You can't be in pajamas on a school day." The boy looked at him with wonder. "It's not a school day!" he said. "Mommy and daddy are taking us to the zoo while brother Mu runs errands." He pouted as he continued. "But it would be much more fun if brother could come too. Everyone except Asha are just babies and Asha is a total girl."
"That's because Asha is a girl," Mu said as he entered the room once more. "What did I just tell you, Yaqut?" Yaqut looked up at his brother with big innocent eyes. "Brush your teeth before sleeping?" Mu sighed. "I do tell you to do that but I also told you to leave Kouen-kun alone. Go get dressed, mom and dad won't wait all day, and if you don't get dressed you'll have to leave in your pj, and you wouldn't want that. It's too cold out." Yaqut huffed, but stalked out of the livingroom. "Sorry, my siblings are all very curious," Mu apologized, and cast a glance toward the door to the corridor. Two young girls, one that had to be only a few years old and one who had to be around Koumei's age just like Yaqut was, was looking into the room with great curiosity. The younger girl had her hair put up with butterfly hairclips, so Kouen guessed that she must be the one called Muron. The bigger girl dragged the smaller with her under the armpits when Mu shooed them away, and he gave Kouen another smile before he followed the girls out of the room. Kouen listened to the bustling in the hallway, and heard the front door open and close several times as people went in and out of the house. As he listened, he slowly remembered something that he really didn't want to remember. "The omiai..." he grumbled, leaning against the couch beside him. Damn… He really didn't want to go. He was too young to get married (he wasn’t, but he didn’t want to get married yet) and he didn't want to marry some total stranger with unknown brain capacity (that last part was the most important part; he really didn’t want a dumb, mindless wife).
"Kouen-kun, would you like some breakfast before I take you home?"
Kouen turned his eyes up, up, up at the tall man, and shook his head. "I won't say no to breakfast, but I don't want to go home. You seem nice, I can stay here." He could take his classes via computer and still graduate at the top of the school, it wouldn't be a problem. Sure he didn't know this guy and they had not exchanged many sober words but Kouen got the feeling that Mu was a really good person. Mu sighed. "Let's discuss this once you have something in you," he said, and offered Kouen help up. Considering the state he currently was in, Kouen was not going to turn down the support either.
His family was more western food than Japanese food, and breakfast was no exception. So it was an experience to be treated to breakfast in the bright, sunlit kitchen. He was surprised to find that raw eggs on white rice was pretty good, and that the miso soup that Mu's mother made was absolutely delicious. Her Italian hangover remedy was less so, but after Mu assured him (and proved to him) that it really wasn't as poisonous as it looked, he had drank it all. At first it had made him feel a little nauseated, but then he had started to feel miraculously better. "I've never had breakfast like this," he let slip as he wiped up the last of the raw egg with a scrambled egg roll. During the meal, while Mu had been having coffee, as he had already had his breakfast earlier, Mu had engaged in a conversation about random things with him, and it had made him feel oddly warm inside. Idle conversations about nothing in particular never happened at his family’s table. "Our meals are always really quiet and cold, even when we eat all together." That didn't happen often. Most of the time he ate alone, mostly because his brothers loved to sleep in, and at the times he ate together with only his father, it was downright chilly in the big dining room. "It doesn't feel as if there's only one person besides me here," he continued, and he noticed Mu giving him another warm smile. "It's because the energy lingers," he says, and Kouen thought that that should sound ridiculous, but he had heard the family earlier, and he could actually believe it. He nodded slowly. "Yeah... You have a big family." Mu's smile turned even brighter. "Yes. I have five younger siblings and my father's mother lives with us as well. It gets crowded and loud, but it's very warm and lively."
"That's the opposite of how it is at home," Kouen noted. "It's big and it's empty and I have several younger siblings but it's not lively or cheerful." Mu watched him, and Kouen noticed that he seemed to be really listening. That was nice, too. This house, this man, were nice. He could probably get used to the kids too. "Can't I stay here?"
"Because you don't want to go to that omiai?"
Kouen made a face at the empty bowl. "I told you about that, huh. Yeah, and because of the cold. It's not that the mansion is cold cold, but it feels cold."
"Kouen-kun, you can't live at a stranger's house," Mu objected. "Your family will miss you." He supposed that was true, but not all of them would miss him for the right reasons, he thought. Mother was dead and father had so many mistresses who couldn't care less, for example. "You seem like a good person," he said. "I think I can trust you."
"I'm still a stranger," Mu protested, but Kouen chose to ignore him. "Could I have another serving?" he asked instead, and Mu watched him in silence with an eyebrow raised for some moments, before he sighed and rose to his feet. "Of course," he said, and Kouen watched as he served him more food. "See, this is one thing," he pointed out. "Mu-san is nice." Mu sighed again, deeply, as he turned and put the plates and bowls down on the table in front of Kouen. "Honestly, Kouen-kun...." He sat back down, picking up his coffee cup. "No matter what you think, I can't let a minor from who knows where stay in my house. We'll both get into trouble."
Kouen considered him for a couple minutes, watching Mu, and he ate in silence. "Yeah...." He knew that. He knew that his father would not look at it with kind eyes. Kouen would not escape punishment. He wondered something that he had to start to consider, as his memories returned even more during the course of the meal. "Are you sure you're not a cop?"
"I never said I wasn't." Kouen was silent, staring at the man, for several long moments. "So you really are a cop?" He received a nod in reply. "I am, yes."
"Okay." So the guy was a cop after all. He had thought that maybe he was. "Why were you at the club? Work?" Mu nodded with a sigh. "I was."
Kouen fired off several more questions, both relating to Mu's profession and to his family, and after a while, he had formed a definite opinion. "Ren," he said. "Ren Kouen, that's my name." Mu choked on his coffee. "Ren?" he asked after he stopped coughing. "As in the Ren family?" Kouen nodded. "I take it that you know of it." Mu nodded an affirmative. "Of course, everyone does." Then he didn't have to explain what his family did. At least on the outside. And if he was a cop, and was as smart as he appeared to be, he might know at least a little of the rumors of what the Ren family was up to behind the scenes. They were a bit shady and not entirely clean, even if no one would be able to find anything with ease, or with just some deep diving, for that matter. And Mu was apparently a very skilled martial artist, and knew a lot about fighting and also knew politics. He wouldn't have too much problem with his father, probably.
"I've decided," Kouen said, putting down the chopsticks. Mu looked over at him with a question in his eyes. "I'm going to go to the omiai, but only to turn it down. And then, Mu-san," he leaned across the table, his weight on his hands and his face close to Mu's. "When I turn twenty, will you become my boyfriend?"
Mu's face was covered in surprise. "I beg your pardon?"