At his doorstep is a framed drawing of Hibiya and Hiyori. It's well done, pen lines clean and the coloring filling in the lines perfectly. The artist name isn't on the paper, but there is one thing that may signify the identity behind the gift giver: '9'.
“Huh? This is...” He crouches down to pick up the frame, though he already has a bad feeling — it isn’t from Hiyori, he knows, and he doesn’t need to think very hard to figure out who’s responsible. This kind of drawing, after all... this number, that was stolen from someone else —
He grits his teeth. If it weren’t framed, he would have torn it up on the doorstep, no matter how much doing that to Hiyori’s face would have stung — yet his fingers fumble with unfamiliar latches, and he can’t open the back while his hands shake. “D... damn it!” That that guy would dare show up here, without even having the courage to show his face — well, perhaps he simply didn’t want to see the frame shatter as it was flung to the ground, door closing on it without a backwards glance, even as the tears well up. Hibiya’s bedroom door slams behind him, his mother’s calls ignored. Was that guy trying to ruin his birthday? Seriously, that was just like him.
Hibiya had never seen Konoha’s drawings himself, him having been missing at the time — but he’d been shown the illustration he’d done of him and Hiyori in retrospect, and the similarity of that image and the one in the frame haunts him now. “Konoha...” After the sun sets, with his parents occupied in the fields, he sneaks back out the front to take the frame back inside. He winces, fingers sliced by shards of glass. Yes, this really was like that person.
How foolish he has been.
