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It’s been, all things considered, a long and full day. Yusuke climbs the stairs to Leblanc’s attic feeling almost lightheaded; having put on comfortable clothes, having eaten well, having spent an entire afternoon and evening basking in Leblanc’s sleepy atmosphere and the company of friends, he’s starting to feel pleasantly exhausted.
Akira, apparently, is less relaxed. When he sees Yusuke reappear, he startles, hurling the pillow he’s holding across the room and onto the bed with hardly a glance. “Get comfy,” he says, and although his voice is calm he picks up his change of clothes hastily and hurries down the stairs like he has something to prove. Yusuke watches him go in confusion, and then he turns back towards the bed, where the pillow has landed almost next to Akira’s on the turned-back covers.
There’s a clear implication here. He thinks. He’s being shared with—although the clothes caught him off guard, he’s used to the food, the time, the space. Akira must not consider the bed too much of a leap.
Even as he thinks this, though, doubts start to proliferate in his mind like weeds. Isn’t it a leap? He actually doesn’t know, and even though normally getting it wrong wouldn’t bother him, now that the idea is in his head he can’t let it go. The way Akira threw it, the pillow could have ended up anywhere, and the way he hurried out of the room—what was on his mind? As their leader, so often cool-headed and seemingly fearless, he always appears to be working with a plan, but this isn’t Phantom Thieves business. What looks to Yusuke like a near-perfect invitation is just as likely an accident. Isn’t he always trying to see a side of things that others don’t? Framing, drawing out the meaning in coincidence, hunting endlessly for the aesthetic formula that can translate an abstract meaning into something the viewer can grasp. He’s heard often enough from the others about the divide between his inner world and the reality they see. In other words, coming from him, it would certainly be an invitation, but coming from anyone else, even Akira…
Well, shouldn’t everyone be allowed to be a little careless in their own home? He moves the pillow to the sofa. It doesn’t take him long to find a spare blanket—the attic’s only so big, after all, and Akira’s remarkably organized for somebody who lives in one—and it’s easy to push the matter from his mind once he’s settled.
When Akira crests the staircase and sees him, though, he stops dead in his tracks. Yusuke looks up from his phone; he’s already resolved to ask what put him so on-edge in the first place, but Akira beats him to the punch.
“That’s actually not what I meant.” What appears to be genuine surprise has made his voice blunt and his face almost completely blank, like he hasn’t had time to locate the emotion that corresponds to what he’s feeling. His glasses are off, and Yusuke wonders whether he can see the way his lips part as he tries to parse this. Was he wrong? Or—right? Right the first time? It’s not that, going into this, he necessarily wanted to sleep next to Akira; the thought hadn’t even crossed his mind. But now that it has, now that it has a second time, after he dismissed it once…
As the silence goes on and Akira begins to look very slightly uncomfortable, a light sensation pervades Yusuke’s body. It isn’t helping him think. “This is more comfortable than it looks, I assure you,” he says, just to say something. Safe, warm, close—Tell me what you meant.
“Um,” says Akira. He looks briefly away, like he’s trying to collect himself. “You’re way too tall for that thing. It’s not even really meant for sleeping on; it kind of hurt seeing you do it the first time.”
“Oh.” Yusuke has slept in stranger places, but he stops himself from saying so. Instead he sits up slowly, eyes fixed on Akira’s reddening face. A strange fascination is insulating him from the panicked fluttering of his heart; He’s seen Akira surprised before, too many times to count, but the next step always seems to come to him so quickly. Yusuke is struck with the realization that he must have caught him well and truly off-guard. “Then…”
Despite his apparent distress, that natural ability to adjust to anything has already returned his voice to normal—steady, quiet, and sure. “I meant—even with me in it, there’s more room in my bed.” Having said it, he seems emboldened, and approached Yusuke with his hand outstretched, like he means to pull him to his feet. “How about it?”
He seems to have put so much effort into this recovery, Yusuke isn’t sure what to say. He lifts up a fistful of the spare blanket, slowly, pressing it into Akira’s hand as he rises, and addresses the matter at hand. “In that case, we can both use this.”
Akira drops his head a fraction of a second before he bends down to pick up the rest of it, and it’s hard to tell for sure but it looks to Yusuke like he’s beaming. This makes him smile, too. This, and the way Akira spreads the spare blanket carefully over his own; there’s a poetry to it, and to the way the two of them are here in the first place, hiding away together from the looming threat of Shido, and from the cold. He says as much, and the look he gets in return tells him he’s been understood, even if his exact words came off as strange.
The bed isn’t big, and as he’s following Akira into it he finds himself hung up on the question of whether it would be stranger to leave space in between them or not to. He has mere moments to decide, and the words to ask Akira directly won’t come to him, so he gets as close as he dares and hopes his opinion on the matter comes across.
“So?” Akira says. “Get comfy.”
He cocoons them together in the blankets, and everything from their shoulders down is wrapped up and soft and secure, and their hands brush together and Akira’s is hot and Yusuke thinks, yes.
“What the fuck, you’re frozen,” he complains, but instead of flinching away he grabs Yusuke’s foot with his own and links their legs together and Yusuke thinks YES, and he almost doesn’t hear what he says next, but Akira must not notice or mind because he wraps an arm around him as well, familiar and gentle and so warm. All he wants to do is pull himself closer, surrender to sleep with the weight of Akira’s arms and legs holding him firmly in place; this urge startles him, and past the pounding of his heart he only barely realizes he’s been asked a question.
Right. Cold hands. “I don’t really think about it,” he manages, although it must come out a little breathless. “Don’t you get cold? It is November, after all.”
“Not in my own home, come on. What do I have a space heater for?”
There are so many things he’s not even taking into consideration that Yusuke can feel himself getting worked up automatically, but he’s only about six words into saying so when Akira dissolves into laughter, apropos of absolutely nothing. Yusuke’s brow creases in frustration, but a towering storm of affection is building inside him, and it wars with his confusion as he watches Akira’s helplessly happy face.
“Don’t worry,” says Akira, in between several short gasps of breath, “I’m not making fun of you.” He slips a hand behind Yusuke’s head and cradles it against his chest, and Yusuke feels stupid and childish but a powerful sense of comfort melts through his heart nonetheless.
I’m not worried. “I’m not a child,” is what he says, and Akira lets loose a final, quiet huff of laughter.
“Nah, you’re more like an alien.” Yusuke shoves him gently. Alien; eccentric; weird, daydreaming artist. He’s found he doesn’t mind things like that at all, at least not coming from his friends. They come out sounding affectionate, somehow, like something he can be proud of. “Or something,” Akira is saying. “You know, from somewhere with different rules. I love listening to you talk.”
He trails off at the end, just a little, as if he didn’t actually mean to say it out loud. When Yusuke glances at his face in pleased surprise it’s gone blank in what looks like terror. The storm inside him is rapidly approaching critical mass and he leans forward again, back into contact with Akira’s body and throat. This doesn’t help. Akira’s pulse is steady against his cheek; Yusuke slides an arm around his waist, trying to anchor himself, to smother the rush of emotion against something solid.
I love listening to you talk. His breaths are deep and mechanically even as he fights to keep himself calm, but his mind is racing. Akira in Mementos, laughing openly at his jokes even as Ryuji groans ‘are you serious?’. In Mementos, listening to him talk through his art’s purpose with a smile tugging insistently at his lips. At the planetarium, in whispered conversation; pointing out couples near the smoothie stand; kicking a rock along the path at Inokashira, expression thoughtful. Akira in the Palace safe room, pulling a thermos of coffee from his bag, reconfirming the plan of attack, his voice smooth and quiet as it bolsters his tired band of thieves.
Akira’s confident smile and nod in the center of the roulette wheel; his voice over the radio and the shattering of glass.
Shit.
Stop it, but the heart-pounding electricity, the nearly unprecedented terror of splitting up, scattering like birds in the face of shadows too numerous to count, is already in him again. “Hey,” he tries to begin—to explain or to change the subject or anything—but this is a mistake. His steady breaths immediately shatter into an uneven, inadequate defense against the stinging of his eyes. Don’t, he pleads with himself, but the voice is so quiet against everything else, and it’s quickly swept away and dissolved by the torrent of remembered fear.
Akira’s arms go stiff around him and Yusuke balls a hand in the back of his shirt. It’s nowhere near enough. The violent tide of relief he’s been damming back ever since Futaba confirmed Akechi entered the Metaverse has finally proved itself too powerful, and tears well over his eyelashes, wetting Akira’s skin.
The flurry of memory that brought him to this point quickly becomes incoherent. When Akira’s hand lifts from his back, panic shoots through him for a moment, but it comes back to rest in his hair and the sensation is so immediately soothing that he takes in a sharp breath of surprise. He melts into it, crying freely, every other thought washing away. Akira lets him. He holds him patiently, handles him gently, and his gratitude is so strong that it’s quite some time before he starts to feel sense returning to him.
His first feeling, on realizing he’s just cried himself out in Akira’s arms, is not exactly one of embarrassment. It’s closer to relief, and it’s mild; stronger are the physical things, the awareness of his wet face and the heat that’s built up between the two of them. “I’m glad you’re here,” he manages to get out, by way of explanation, thanks, and apology all at once, before the sensation of tears cooling on his skin becomes too much and he has to release Akira to wipe them away. His nose is threatening to run and he stems it against the edge of his sleeve, but after a split second realizes what he’s doing and pulls it away again just as quickly, angry at himself. “I’m sorry.”
The thing he’s expecting the least is for Akira to move closer, but he does, and presses a kiss to his forehead that sets Yusuke alight with something approaching adoration. His eyes flutter closed at the tenderness of it. How is he ever supposed to put a feeling like this down on canvas? Akira touches a tissue to his face and he snatches it, mind reeling with possibility.
“I’m glad you’re here, too.”
Later, what must be close to an hour later, after Morgana has joined them and Yusuke has found a position so comfortable and so tangled in Akira’s limbs he doesn’t think he could move if he tried, he’s trying to answer a question about the dorms at Kosei and finds he can barely make it through half a sentence. He must be falling asleep, because he feels impossibly heavy. Akira strokes a hand down his back and sensation shimmers through his entire body. Yes—yes—is this what it’s going to be like? He tries to say something, but it comes out a sigh, and he slips under, succumbs willingly to the warm and satin-soft feeling of being loved.