Work Text:
“Number five has to… has to braid number three’s hair!”
When Akira solemnly held up his stick with the number 3 sharpied onto it, Haru began to giggle uncontrollably.
“There she goes,” Ann said with a grin as the other girl fell over, still laughing. “How many has she had, anyway?”
“Uh… half of one,” Ryuji estimated, picking up the offending can of Asahi and swirling it to check the weight. Morgana put his paws up on Haru’s side and sniffed at her face briefly, eliciting a second round of giggles from Haru.
“Hey—!” he protested as Haru grabbed him around the middle and rubbed her face in his fur.
“I’m cutting her off,” said Makoto firmly, eliciting groans and laughter from the group.
Futaba was one of the ones laughing, as Haru began to protest that the king couldn’t be cut off and Ann began attempting to braid Akira’s fluffy mane. This was their second night staying in Haru’s mountain chalet, a cozy but luxurious cabin on the grounds of a premier Hokkaido ski resort. During the daytime, Ann and Haru sailed down black diamonds while Yusuke dusted out repeatedly on the bunny slopes and Futaba found her way to the inner tube area; at night, after a trip to the onsen, Ryuji and Akira discovered that the chalet’s kitchen was fully stocked with snacks and alcohol, and proudly shown off their heist to the rest of them. Makoto had protested at first, but then Akira had put on his best wounded expression. After all, Makoto, this was supposed to be a celebration of his release from prison, wasn’t it? He’d been by himself for months, was so happy to be able to let loose with his friends again—
That was as far as he’d gotten before Makoto smacked him on the back of the head, but from then on she turned a blind eye to their debauchery, on the condition that if any of them ended up with hangovers, they could bet their life savings on the fact she was going to make as much noise as possible the following morning.
“Aww, cute!” Ann said, pleased with her handiwork; Futaba grinned, snapping a picture on her phone of Akira, two tiny braids sticking up from his head as he mugged for the camera. She’d taken half a sip of beer before violently spitting it out and sticking to soda instead, but she still felt drunk on sheer contentment as they all returned their sticks to the cup for the next round. All of them were where they should be; all of them were safe. The last few months had been filled with too many anxious, sleepless nights, and too few opportunities for real fun.
Ann shrieked in delight at finding the crown on her chopstick. “Okay, okay. Number seven has to kiss—“ —she caught Makoto’s wince— “—Uh, has to hug number four. For a full minute! Tenderly!”
Futaba finished texting the photo of Akira to Sojiro, then glanced at her chopstick, carelessly drawn without looking; immediately, she whipped her head up like a deer in headlights, staring around at the other participants.
Yusuke, swaying slightly, held up his number four chopstick with one hand; his other hand, filled with potato chips, paused on the way to his mouth.
“Seven’s you?” Akira asked, looking at Futaba, eyebrow raised. He’d step in if she wanted, was what he was saying, but Ryuji had already danced around the room with a pair of Haru’s underwear on over his pants, and Ann had licked Makoto’s ear, so there was literally no way for her to back down without being a huge spoilsport. Besides, it was just a hug. Hugs were barely embarrassing at all. She hugged people all the time. Hell, she’d practically climbed on Makoto’s back earlier today during the ill-fated seventeen minutes the other girl had spent trying to teach her how to ski before Futaba had given up, removed her skis, and started rolling her way down the bunny slope. No reason to get all weird about this.
“Okay,” she said, extending her arms and cracking her knuckles. She turned to face Yusuke, who suddenly looked slightly nervous at the fact she felt this was something she needed to crack her knuckles for.
“Please don’t break my ribs,” he requested, carefully finishing off the last few potato chips before attempting to brace himself against the couch.
“Don’t be a wimp! Geez,” she complained. Around the neck? Around the waist? Neck seemed kinda intimate, but she’d have to practically crawl into his lap to wrap her arms around him either way—
“C’mon, get on with it!” Ryuji heckled. Futaba took a deep breath and threw herself across the circle before she could second-guess herself again, knocking over the cup used to hold the chopsticks.
Yusuke made a slight “oof” sound as she collided with him, wrapping her arms around his neck and burying her face in his scratchy sweater. It was incredibly on-trend, according to Ann, but it was also a bizarre shade of olive green with an oversized cowl neck, and Futaba had gotten a good twenty minutes of fun out of it earlier in the day by sneaking up on him and yanking the extra fabric up over his head when he least expected it.
“Seven! Eight! Nine!”
Ann had begun enthusiastically counting out the seconds.
Futaba clenched her fingers, face heating up.
“Twelve! Thirteen!”
Haru joined in the chant.
Yusuke’s breath was hot on her ear.
“Twenty-three! Twenty-four! Twenty-five!”
She squeaked as his arms came up to wrap around her back tentatively, causing Ann to cackle with delight. Had a minute always been this long?
“Thirty-seven! Thirty-eight!”
She could hear her heart hammering in her ears. She thought it was hers, anyway.
“Forty-nine! Fifty!”
Suddenly Yusuke yanked himself out of her arms, taking a deep breath of air as he pushed himself sideways away from her. Futaba was left grasping air, and fell onto the couch, off-balance.
“I needed air,” he gasped out, looking disheveled. If he hadn’t been red from the time he’d taken his first sip of beer, she might have thought he was blushing. “I’m sorry, I—“
“N-no, that’s— it’s fine—“
“You gotta start over now!” Ann declared cheerfully, waving a Twizzler limply in their direction. “That didn’t count!”
“It counted,” Akira declared lazily from his throne, otherwise known as a nest of pillows he’d made on the floor. Futaba slunk back to her side of the circle, relieved, face crimson and avoiding the others’ eyes. “C’mon, let’s draw again.”
Goddamn Inari. Always making things weird.
—-
Futaba pushed open the sliding door to the chalet’s porch, slippers padding on the cold wood. Her breath hovered in clouds, and her glasses fogged up briefly with the change in humidity. Yusuke looked up from his spot on the padded outdoor bench as she took them off and rubbed them on the hem of her sweatshirt.
“Having trouble sleeping?” he asked, raising an eyebrow. Futaba hadn’t kept track of how much everyone else had been drinking, but whatever he’d had, it couldn’t have been much, considering he looked none the worse for wear.
“Makoto snores,” she complained, cramming her glasses back on her face. She shifted from foot to foot as she slid the door closed behind her. Yusuke patted the bench next to him in silent invitation; she sat down a healthy three feet away, eyeballing him. He was wearing a blue button-down pajama set, and had one of the extra blankets from the cabin’s living room thrown around his shoulders, sketchbook in his lap.
“You look like a convalescing grandpa.” He frowned, but didn’t argue. “It’s like two in the morning. Are you still drawing?”
“Some moods can only be captured along the line between late night and just before dawn. As you would know, if you didn’t insist on constantly spoiling the balance of nature with artificial light from a screen.”
The requisite greetings taken care of, the two of them settled into a companionable silence. As Futaba’s eyes adjusted to the light shed by the three-quarter moon, she started being able to make out the landscape. The front entrance of the chalet looked out over the mountain resort town, steps away from shopping, the hot springs, and a charming cafe; this back porch looked instead out over the wild darkness of the mountain. Here and there, a faint light shone in the distance, a beacon warning planes away from a radio tower or illuminating the top of a ski lift; otherwise, the snow was laid out in undulating waves, eerily bright against the darkness of the copses of pine trees. Above, the Milky Way cascaded across the sky, a riot of light that Futaba, a lifelong Tokyo resident, was seeing in person for the first time.
“The wild sea: / flowing over Sado Isle, / The River of Heaven,” Yusuke recited, following her gaze upward. It sounded like a poem, and Futaba thought idly Shaka, when the walls fell. Poetry was a language she had little interest in learning. She could dance through programming languages with ease, solve complex issues by rotating her brain into a state where she could talk to computers in their own lexicon. Computers, at their core, were very simple, and very stupid, so it took someone very smart and very skilled to make them do anything. They didn’t think, they didn’t interpret; they took in exactly what you fed them, and if you were good enough, you could twist their silicon pathways around your little finger and make them extraordinary. Artists and writers, on the other hand, seemed to actually enjoy vague problems with no real answers; entire books were written about all the possible meanings of seventeen syllables, and the worst part of that was that all the meanings could be correct at once. It was frankly offensive.
Still, the air seemed to feel like Yusuke was expecting a response, so Futaba racked her brain and came up with the most relevant fact she could. “Did you know? Between the time dinosaurs first showed up, and the time they all got wiped out, we only went 2/3 of the way around the galaxy,” she offered.
“Yes, exactly,” he said, sounding pleased. He continued before she could ask just what the hell she’d gotten correct. “Aren’t you cold?”
“Nah. I run hot. Probably I’m overclocked,” she mused, pulling her fingers inside the arms of her sweatshirt. She kicked a small pebble of ice with the toe of her slipper and watched it bounce off the wooden railing, then took a deep breath. “Look. Um. M-my bad if I, if I embarrassed you earlier or something. If you hate hugs, you could’ve said so. Nobody would’ve made you do it. I mean, I hate being embarrassed, so I get it, and—“
“I wasn’t embarrassed,” Yusuke said, cutting her off. She glanced up to see him looking out across the landscape, brow slightly furrowed. “I was… overwhelmed. Emotionally, and physically.”
“Uh.”
“I’ve been thinking about it all evening.”
“Oh?”
“I was seven.”
Futaba’s pointed remark about phrasing died on her lips. “You were seven when… what?”
“When Madarame told me I was too old to be asking for a hug. I couldn’t remember if I was seven or eight, but then I remembered it was during Typhoon Fitow. I had a childish fear of thunderstorms at that age, you see. And that was in 2007. So I was seven years old.” Apparently having finished his explanation, he looked back down at his sketchbook.
Futaba stared at the foxlike planes of his face, illuminated by the cold light of the moon. His expression was hard to read in profile, as his eyes focused on the stick of charcoal scratching against the paper. He didn’t look distressed; but then, he rarely did. Although he was prone to a certain level of histrionics when faced with things he cared deeply about (art, end of list), many of his day-to-day expressions were subtle, unclear to her. Mild annoyance; slight confusion; modest happiness. None of those fit; instead, he looked somehow distant, as distant as the moon shining down upon them.
Whatever her mother’s faults and virtues were when it came to parenthood— and Futaba had been so mixed up, for so long, that she still couldn’t tease out some of the details— she’d always opened her arms to her daughter. A nightmare, a test aced, a litany of anxieties, an especially good birthday present— there was nothing that couldn’t be soothed or celebrated with a tight hug and a pat on the head.
She swallowed once, nervously, then scooted along the bench before she could think too much about it. The blanket draped over his shoulders was large, meant to cover a queen-size bed if need be, so there was plenty of extra slack to grab and throw around herself as she shoved her way into his personal space, leaning her body against his.
She felt him start in surprise. “Futaba, what—“
“Exposure therapy!” she half-shouted, too loudly. She took a deep, steadying breath, turning her head to press her face into his left sleeve so he couldn’t stare at her face. (He smelled like cheap detergent and the melon soda he’d split with a sobering-up Haru and, faintly, of turpentine.) In a lower volume, she continued, “I-it’s good for getting used to things. It’s why my mom always made me come grocery shopping with her. Crowds. To get used to crowds, I mean. S-so you’re out of practice. So what?” She twisted her hands nervously in the blanket, pulling it tighter. “Besides. I’m cold. Don’t you know you’re supposed to be a gentleman when a girl’s cold?”
“But you just said you weren’t—“
“I’m freezing!” she insisted.
A pause, and then she heard him let out a breath in a half-chuckle, half-snort.
The tension in his shoulders slowly relaxed, and the noise of his charcoal on the paper resumed.
Five minutes later, she felt up to opening her eyes, her heart rate having slowed down from “terrified rabbit” to “nervous squirrel” speed. She watched his arm move in graceful lines up and down the page, darkening part of a copse of trees.
When he noticed her looking, he tilted the sketchbook slightly to give her a better view. A stark moon shone down on undulating hills; dark, spindly trees rose here and there, drawing the eye to a severe mountain in the distance. Shadows in the snow and a half-delineated cloud across the moon gave an impression of nighttime, although the page was still largely a blank white. Tracks wandered across the snow; a wolf, perhaps, or a coyote. An arctic fox, searching the unbroken plains of snow for a warm place to rest.
She studied it seriously for a moment, thin lips compressed in a thoughtful line. “It looks… lonely,” she said finally, daring to glance up at him.
He nodded slowly, meeting her eyes, cheeks flushed with the cold. “I suppose so,” he remarked neutrally.
He seemed confused at first when she butted her head against his arm like a cat looking for a treat; when she repeated the motion, though, he grasped what she was getting at, lifting it obligingly. She pushed underneath it, resting her head against his chest. He settled his arm back down around her shoulders tentatively, taking the edge of the blanket in his left hand and pulling it tighter around them.
“I’m really cold,” Futaba said, firmly, in a tone that meant she’d carry her statement all the way to the witness box if need be.
“It’s cold,” Yusuke agreed.
“R-right. So don’t make a big deal out of it or anything. You just happened to hit the right event flag, that’s all.”
“That’s… good?”
“It is.”
“All right.”
Unwilling to draw without his left hand to hold his sketchbook steady on his lap, Yusuke gazed out at the landscape until he felt Futaba go somehow boneless against him. He glanced down; she was breathing deeply and evenly, eyes closed, one hand fisted in the fabric of his pajama top.
“Futaba.”
No response. He shook her gently, with the arm wrapped around her (it was slowly falling asleep, her shoulder pressing sharply against some nerve or other, but that was all right, all things considered); she made a small mutter and turned her face slightly towards his chest, but didn’t wake.
Yusuke sighed, more amused than annoyed. Fine time for her to fall into one of her comas. There was nothing for it but to carry her back inside and deposit her in bed, assuming she would let go of him.
Despite his efforts just a few moments ago to wake her, he moved slowly and carefully as he leaned over to scoop her up, sliding his free arm underneath her legs as he let the blanket drop. Maybe it was because he so often associated her with the cold blue-tinged light of a screen, but he hadn’t expected her to be so warm. It was like carrying a lightweight sun, or an impudent space heater.
The two bedrooms the group had been occupying during their sojourn were down the hall from the main living room, still covered with rumpled pillows and blankets and various snack wrappers. Yusuke paused at the first door, which led to the girls’ room, but if Futaba hadn’t been able to sleep for snoring earlier, it would probably wake her up again.
He leaned his ear against the door to the boys’ room; if he shared with Ryuji, Futaba could share with Akira. But through the door he heard the faint sounds of muffled coughing, followed by the flush of a toilet and someone else speaking soothingly. Well, whether Ryuji had gotten too rowdy or their leader’s appalling lack of self-care had reared its head, he wanted no part of that.
Due diligence performed, and arms beginning to strain (hadn’t she been light as a feather a few minutes ago?) Yusuke returned to the living room. It was amazing how quickly Futaba had been able to pass seamlessly into the deepest stages of sleep, he thought as he attempted to loosen her grip on his shirt and deposit her on the couch. Yusuke himself often took hours to fall asleep at night, tossing and turning and waking up still exhausted.
Although his arms were starting to hurt, there was a certain soothing comfort in her weight. He paused in his efforts, as it became clear that she was determined to cling to him like an octopus.
Well… he would explain in the morning, if she was upset or embarrassed. Probably not the fact that the feeling of her heart beating through her chest was resonating deep in his ribcage, or that he’d never realized how many years it had been since someone had last touched him with casual affection; but that he felt it would be unkind to wake her… yes, that he could explain.
———
Makoto was the first one to wake the next morning, and so was the one to discover them sprawled out asleep on a pile of pillows in front of the fireplace, limbs tangled and Futaba’s head pillowed on Yusuke’s chest. She hesitated for a moment, wondering whether to wake them; after a moment, she put down the trash bag she had intended to use to clean up the debris from last night’s activities, and picked up a spare blanket draped over the back of the couch.
As she spread the blanket over their sleeping forms, she could have sworn for a moment that she saw one of Futaba’s eyes cracked open looking at her; but the next second it was closed again, the younger girl apparently deeply asleep, and Makoto decided it must have been her imagination.