"Sebastian, what are you just sitting there for? Look at Iori — same new member as you, and he's already baring everything to us without a second thought."
Across the room, Kotobuki and Tokita — both equally and completely naked — raised their cups toward Sebastian in invitation.
"No, no, no — the fact that he adapted this fast is what's abnormal here."
Sebastian clutched his cup with both hands, his face a picture of refusal.
Just a short while ago, the two upperclassmen had dragged both Iori and Sebastian into a drinking game called strip rock-paper-scissors.
The rules were simple enough: lose a round, take off a piece of clothing, until there was nothing left to take off. The catch was that regardless of who won or lost, every participant had to down a full cup before each round could proceed.
Seeing it play out, Sebastian finally understood what had happened to his clothes last time.
This round, at least, his luck had held somewhat. He'd done plenty of drinking, but only two pieces of clothing had been stripped from him — leaving him with one last shred of dignity: his underwear.
Iori, for his part, had started out strongly resistant to this depraved game. But after the first mouthful of alcohol was forced down his throat, something in him lit up. His eyes went bright, as though some dormant attribute had awakened and a door to a whole new world had swung open.
Shame? Dignity? What were those? Could you eat them?
"Ahaha, drinking naked is amazing — Sebastian, you have to try this!"
Iori, visibly well past sober, waved his bottle in Sebastian's direction.
Sebastian watched the three of them careening around the room without a stitch on, his feelings complicated. He was curled into the corner of the sofa, entirely out of place with the uproar around him.
He still couldn't shake the image of himself being obliterated by that truck. Faced with the cup in his hand, some instinct in him recoiled.
Then again — didn't I end up drinking earlier too, when they dragged me into it? Sebastian thought with a wry smile.
But the resistance wasn't only fear of how he'd died in his past life. It also pulled other things up with it. Things he'd rather leave buried.
He settled back against the sofa and closed his eyes slightly, exhaling a quiet breath.
Was he drunk? Maybe a little. The alcohol from noon probably hadn't fully cleared yet, and it had left him in an uncharacteristically pensive mood.
Since crossing into this world, his nerves had been wound tight the whole time. Outside of missions, he rarely let himself think about anything else.
Watching the absurd scene in front of him, Sebastian turned the cup slowly in his hands, and his thoughts drifted back — back to why his past self had started drinking in the first place.
The relentless, high-pressure pace of city life. The helpless loneliness of someone who had come alone to a strange city to make something of himself. The hollow, purposeless grind of a job that meant nothing. And that coiled tension in his nerves that could only loosen, briefly, after a drink.....
Whatever passion had surged through him when he'd first graduated — it had been worn down to nothing in the numbness of one identical day after another.
Not everyone has the strength to carry the kind of weight that life can stack on a person until it threatens to break them. The self he'd been back then had chosen alcohol as his anesthetic, a way to go numb and escape for a little while.
But alcohol only ever brought a moment's warmth. It solved nothing.
In one escape after another, he had in truth come to see drink as the only lifeline he had. Until the truck came, and ended all of it — that half-drunk, half-waking life of his — in an instant.
Alcohol, in Sebastian's mind, was a synonym for running away.
And yet....
Sebastian lifted his head and looked at the three of them, chaos and noise and laughter filling the room.
And yet — they really did look happy.
It wasn't the emotional release of a numbed nervous system. It wasn't the sudden loosening of something long suppressed.
These three were simply, genuinely enjoying the moment in front of them.
"Hey." Sebastian was still sitting on the sofa, head low, when he spoke up.
"Hm? Why are you sitting by yourself? You can't skip the toast." The three naked men heard his voice and came padding over, bare as the day they were born.
The visual impact was considerable, but Sebastian didn't move. He sat where he was, the full cup still held in his hand.
"I have a question for you all. If I get the answer I'm looking for, we can drink after."
When the three of them had gathered around him, Sebastian slowly raised his head — and lifted the cup in his hand up toward them.
The clear glass caught the light and scattered it in fragments of color.
"What I want to know is — what is this thing, to you?"
The three of them exchanged glances, then looked back at Sebastian with mild bewilderment.
"Alcohol... is just alcohol, isn't it? What else would it be?" Iori swayed in place, bottle in hand, genuinely puzzled.
"Right, what kind of question is that, Sebastian? Drink is just what you have at a party." Kotobuki peered at Sebastian — sitting there with his cup, expression dead serious — and found the whole thing rather strange.
Tokita, however, put out a hand and stopped Kotobuki and Iori before either could press further.
"Hold on. I think I understand what Sebastian's actually asking."
He turned to Sebastian, a grin spreading across his face.
"I get what you mean. But even without alcohol — Peek-a-Boo gatherings might look a little stranger than usual, sure, but not one drop of anyone's happiness would disappear."
"Kotobuki and Iori had it right. Drink is just drink, in the end. The question isn't the drink itself — it's how you look at it."
"If you see it as kindling for life, then take it away and your happiness doesn't shrink at all. On the other hand, if alcohol is all that's left in your life... then the drink was never really the problem to begin with."
Tokita looked at Sebastian, a quiet smile at the corner of his mouth.
"Does that answer satisfy you?"
Sebastian listened without a word. The silence that followed stretched on.
Then he brought the cup to his lips and drained it in one long swallow.
"Alright. Now that that's settled — shall we get back to the welcome party?"
Tokita watched him finish the cup and smiled.
"Yes. But first, there's something I want to say."
Sebastian rose slowly from the sofa, lifted his head, and broke into a wide, unguarded grin.
"My name is Sebastian. First-year at Izu University. Joining Peek-a-Boo of my own free will. I look forward to being with you all."
He introduced himself again, formally this time — and as he spoke, a flame that had long gone dark in him, that old passion for the world, quietly rekindled behind his eyes.
The person he was now was called Sebastian. And in this moment, he made his peace with the aimless young man he had been in his past life.