Page 10 of Pandion

The last few that hadn’t outright failed from the start had been nearly unusable. This one was letting him know that Satoru was getting tipsy despite looking about the same on the outside. Theapparent exhaustion masked it somewhat, but Kagesawa had no trouble sensing the relaxed fuzziness in the feedback.

“Do you want to take the bed tonight? I’ll stay on the sofa,” Kagesawa offered. Satoru deserved a proper night’s sleep after he’d done most of the work this week.

“What? Isn’t it too short for you?”

“I’ll manage. I’ve slept on it before.”

“Oh, okay.” Satoru emptied the can and burped.

After a while of them staring at nothing in silence, Kagesawa made an observation. He felt unusually drunk: both to an unusual extent and in an unusual manner. It was easy enough to trace the source to the link, but it made no sense that two beers could cause this—especially when they’d only had one each.

“Are you all right? Do you feel OK?” Kagesawa asked, a little worried that this would be an undesired effect for Satoru, who had probably avoided drinking for a specific reason.

“I’m fine. Can’t you tell?” Satoru slid down to a more comfortable position.

Kagesawa couldn’t discern anything negative coming from him, so it was perhaps safe to assume everything was fine. There had been some annoyance trickling through a little while back, but that had thankfully subsided. It was getting a bit easier to interpret Satoru through the link. The head bumping to his shoulder startled him, though.

Start the um…

Kagesawa waited. Satoru shook himself awake.

It was a little worrying that he was this tired, but at least he no longer seemed to be in a bad mood.

Red, red, red, blue, 256, blue, 280…These were all codes for different types of trash.I should sleep.

“Yes. Yes, you should.”

“It’s not the same.”

“What’s that?”

“This.” Satoru relayed a bit of it through the link. It was recognisable, but yes, it didn’t feel the same as how Kagesawa perceived being drunk. He couldn’t quite say what was different about it, though.

He’d had a few beers with his previous links, but none of that had ever trickled through. In fact, projecting anything other than the few occasional words hadn’t even occurred to them.

“That’s wild that you can do that.” Kagesawa admittedly rather enjoyed this new experience. “What else can you send over?” Besides intoxication and mood corrections, Satoru had probably relayed other things through the link this past week, but Kagesawa hadn’t been paying proper attention.

“Hmmm, well…” There was a heavy sigh and Kagesawa could feel shivers rushing across his back. It was followed by a relaxing sensation of warmth.

“Mmm, that’s nice.”

“Feedback loop.” Satoru dampened the link. A bit of a shame, but probably for the best. “Unless you want the feedback loop?” He leaned over, still dampening the link, but Kagesawa could tell he was aroused.

This was inconvenient and nerve-wracking, but also something Kagesawa had been secretly hoping for ever since the last time. However, the circumstances were far from ideal.

Firstly, he didn’t know Satoru that well. For all he knew, this could be a mistake that would come to bite him in the ass. Maybe he’d been lucky it hadn’t the first time?

Secondly, there was the added moral grey area of the ingested alcohol.

Thirdly, while he wasn’t aware of sex being prohibited, it was probably frowned upon in this setting, and perhaps not the best use of the hundreds of thousands of yen in tax-payer money the link had cost to establish.

And fourthly— what the hell was he doing waffling inside his head like this, when he should have been making a move before he lost the chance?!

He’d long since given up on aiming to be professional! If he could ignore the rest of it, a few beers and a crisp feedback loop sounded exactly like the kind of pastime he fancied on a Friday evening.

He turned to face Satoru, and since Satoru’s head was still resting on his shoulder, they slid quite naturally into a comfortable embrace. This was enough of a distraction for Satoru to either accidentally release the dampening or decide against it, and his arousal became more apparent.

“Let me make this clear: that wasyouinitially,” he said.

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