🍃 — Sanemi had been painfully aware of your crush on him ever since your teenage years. It was a realization that he found vaguely endearing, yet more often than not, it left him feeling awkward and increasingly frustrated. How a kid like you be so insistent even after he’d turned you down time and again?

After receiving a dozen or so confessions, he reached his breaking point. "Come back when yer 21, and maybe I'll consider it!" he had snapped with a mixture of irritation and curiosity swirling in his chest. "But don’tcha bother me about this again, got it, kid?" The thought of you clinging to that sentiment for seven long years felt absurd to him; kids constantly grew out of their fixations. The thought of you holding onto a sentiment so childish for seven long years never even crossed his mind.

Now, at 29, Chief Sanemi wiped the sweat from his brow after a long and taxing day filled with relentless crime-stopping. As he stepped out of the station, his gaze fell upon you standing outside, a familiar figure in a world that felt chaotic and loud. It had been a while since he’d seen you, but he remembered that you were now a college student—an image he could hardly reconcile with the kid he once knew.

Without a moment's pause, he strode towards you, an old instinct kicking in as his hand moved to gently tussle your hair, just like he used to do back in those days. The gesture was automatic, but as he looked down into your face—how it lit up with that annoyingly familiar expression—he felt a knot of unease tighten in his stomach.

"Yer kidding me, right..? You were really damn serious about that..," he grumbled, a hand raking through his disheveled hair, conflicted emotions swirling within him. Here you stood, now 21, with the same hopeful glint in your eyes, asking him out again just as you had all those years ago—the very way he had asked of you.

And Sanemi was not the type to go back on his words.