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“Asuka,” Fubuki says, a soft sigh in his voice, “have you ever been in a morgue?”
Asuka flicks her thumb upwards and continues scrolling on her phone. “No, Fubuki, I have never been in a morgue.”
Fubuki responds in a tone that is both sad and wistful. “I have.”
Asuka stops for a second, and flicks her gaze from her timeline to her brother. “When have you ever been in a morgue?”
“Back at uni,” Fubuki responds, rolling over, “back when I was still a student.”
“Why were you in a morgue? You studied psychology.”
“Well,” Fubuki folds his hands over his chest. Laid out on their scruffy sofa, it looks like he’s trying to recreate some kind of idealised, fictional therapy session. “Psychology was in the medicine building, a lot. And there was a morgue there. For med students. Do you have a morgue at your university, Asuka?”
“I don’t think so,” she says, turning back to her phone.
“I used to end up in the morgue every time I walked into the medicine building. It felt like death was chasing me.”
Asuka frowns. “Is that why you dropped out?”
“Oh, no, that was depression,” Fubuki nods. “Though the death part did kind of suck too. Killed the mood a lot.”
Sighing, Asuka sinks into her seat. “I can imagine,” she says, trying to put some kind of emotion into her voice, but hears it echo back to her exhausted with her brother’s bullshit.
“Are there even med students at your uni, Asuka?”
She shrugs. “I don’t know. Maybe. If there are, I don’t know any of them.”
“I know a med student,” Fubuki says, rolling onto his stomach. Sticking his head over the arm of the sofa, he winks at Ryo Marufuji, who’s tying his hair back, and chewing the arm of his glasses to hold them while his hands are busy. He glances towards Fubuki, and tries to offer him a smile, but the glasses dangling from his lips makes it hard for his expression to change. Asuka always thinks Ryo’s ponytails are the silliest in the world; his hair is too short and too curly to lie flat behind him, and sticks out in faded blue tufts.
Eventually, he spits his glasses out, wipes the end that was in his mouth on the soft shirt he’s changed into, and slides them onto his face, replying with, “Oh, just one?”
“The only one that matters,” Fubuki counters, making kissy faces. Ryo’s lips can curl into that half-smile, now that his glasses are safely balanced above his nose. To anyone else it might feel small, but Asuka knows Ryo Marufuji well enough by this point to recognise that there’s a tenderness to that smile that is lacking from anything else he offers. There’s an underlying fondness in the smiles he offers Fubuki, one that peaks from that tiny raised corner and glistens somewhere in his tired, heavy eyes. It isn’t in the smiles that he gives others, even if those smiles are bigger or more obvious. Asuka supposes he has to be subtle about the love and care he offers her brother, though, to balance out Fubuki’s dramatic, over-the-top declarations of affection.
“I’ve been in the morgue,” Ryo states, nudging Fubuki’s head off the arm of the sofa, so he can perch there. Fubuki stretches like a cat, before pushing himself up into a kneeling position, sitting almost at the complete over end.
“Well, I mean,” he tilts his head to the side. “Yeah. Of course. You’re the med student I was talking about.”
Ryo raises an eyebrow. “I wasn’t aware,” he says, and he can’t keep the playful smugness from his voice. Fubuki nudges him. Asuka looks back to her phone, and continues flicking through Pinterest.
“Hmph,” Fubuki pouts a little, but they all know it’s performative. “I offer you the high praise of being the only doctor in this country who matters and this is how you repay me? With your cruel and uncaring words?”
“To be fair, he isn’t a doctor yet, Fubuki,” Asuka teases, but Ryo’s face falls grim. He pushes back his fringe.
“Hey,” Fubuki crawls a little towards Ryo, and rests a hand on his elbow. “You’re gonna do it. You’ve worked hard.”
Ryo offers him a wobbly smile, and Asuka grimaces. “You’ll get there!” she tries to cheer. He nods. “You’ve done so much for it! And been top of your class for so long!”
Shaking his head, Ryo says, “It’s just... a lot of pressure right now.”
“I know,” Fubuki tightens his grip, “but you’re doing great right now. And even if you’re not a doctor yet, you’re still the sexiest guy I know who’s touched a guy’s dead brain.”
Asuka bites her lip. “Fubuki, are you- That’s a lot of words to put in the same sentence.”
“What, sexy and dead brains?”
“Yes.”
Fubuki pauses for a second. “Okay, you have a point.”
Ryo laughs. The stress he’s under seems to fall from his face as he allows himself this brief moment of friendship and comfort. Asuka is glad to have helped with it; Ryo has helped bring so much stability to her life, and her brother’s life, and it means a lot to try and bring that back to him. Then Ryo says, “I’ve pretty much touched living brains at this point, actually,” and any fondness Asuka had been feeling leaves her body immediately.
Fubuki’s jaw drops as he asks, “The fucking excuse me?”
Now it’s Ryo’s turn to nudge Fubuki, and he shoves him playfully. “Well,” he begins. “When the brain dies, it goes kind of hard.” Fubuki stifles a giggle, and Asuka glares at him. “But if you die from a stroke, your brain hemorrhages, so it stays soft. Like living tissue.”
“I really don’t want to hear you talk about any more of this,” Fubuki groans. “I take back calling you touching dead brains sexy.”
Asuka, however, has noticed the way Ryo has brightened while getting to discuss this - they don’t talk about university a lot, or at least, Asuka and Ryo don’t really compare their respective courses, so she hasn’t really heard a lot about how university goes for him - and she says, “No, no. I think it’s nice that he’s talking about it. It’s soft-”
“What, like the brains?” Fubuki asks with such force that he loses his seating a little. “Like how the brains are soft?”
Ryo giggles again. “Is it bad of me to be soft, Fubuki?” he croons wistfully, and Fubuki has rolled over in a heartbeat and is laying his head in Ryo’s lap, and looking up at him.
“No,” he immediately gushes, “no, no, no, I love when you say soft things. I love when you’re soft. I just wish it wasn’t about dead brains.”
“Fubuki, you’re the one who brought dead brains into this conversation,” Asuka sighs, and Fubuki cranes his neck out of Ryo’s lap enough to stick his tongue out at her, before collapsing into him again. She rolls her eyes. “But I suppose you can bring them out of it.”
Fubuki yells, “No, let’s not talk about bringing out dead brains. That sounds kind of like an invitation,” and Ryo chuckles lightly, his fingers finding Fubuki’s hair, and playing with it absentmindedly. “I think our flat should be a no-brain zone. Just like, as a rule.”
“Not gonna be a hard rule to enforce,” Asuka says, biting her tongue, and Ryo chuckles again, stifling it with a glare from Fubuki.
“And what, my dearest sister, is this supposed to mean?” Fubuki tries to frown, but the expression doesn’t manage to come across as threatening when his cheeks are pressed up against his boyfriend’s legs, squishing his face a little. “Because it sounds like you are insulting the two smartest people I know, who both happen to live in this house, and are you, and Ryo, of course.”
“I mean, I was actually calling you a dumbass, but go off,” Asuka shrugs. “Thanks for the compliment, though,” she teases.
Groaning labouriously, Fubuki says, “What was the point in it, if it led only to you insulting me? My own baby sister, turned against me like this! Is my life not hard enough as it is? The people closest to me have to wound me constantly too?”
Ryo pats his head a little. “I don’t think I’ve done anything to wound you.”
“Yeah, not yet babe,” Fubuki cuts him off, “but the whole world is against Fubuki Tenjoin, and it will not rest until he too, is a sexy, dead brain.”
Asuka drops her phone into her lap. “Isn’t there a blanket-ban on brains?”
Poking Fubuki in the arm, Ryo says sulkily, “Oh, it’s the brains that are sexy?”
Fubuki rolls out of Ryo’s lap, and lands in a heap on the floor. He jumps to his feet, makes a point of dramatically dusting himself off, and clears his throat. “I’m sexy,” he states, “so of course, my brain must be, and will be, when I die.”
Ryo nods. “Of course.”
“You, Ryo, get to be sexy too,” Fubuki states, “regardless of any brains you do or do not touch.” He pivots on his heel. “Asuka, dear sister, I propose that ban is related to the touching of brains exclusively. Brains that are alive and inside of people’s skulls are permitted.”
Asuka bites her lip, and Fubuki collapses back into the sofa in a fall that almost feels like a bow.
“Glad that’s all settled,” he says. “No one can be mad at me for lamenting my troubles anymore.”
“I mean, no one was mad at you in the first place,” Asuka admits, and Fubuki moves to protest and begin discussing how hard done by he is, but she continues speaking before he can, and shifts her gaze to Ryo, “but I’d definitely like to hear more about the work you do, as a medicine student. It sounds interesting.”
Ryo raises an eyebrow, and the corner of his mouth. “You mean, the brain stuff?”
“Well, I’m sure there are other elements that can be interesting,” Asuka states. “There is a ban, on specifically the handling of dead brains.”
Folding his arms, Ryo says, “That is going to be an issue for me, depending on the way this year’s modules pan out,” and Fubuki is instantly torn between promising he’ll love Ryo forever and threatening to execute him for brain crimes if he ever touches one again, but it’s gentle bickering, and the kind their home is usually full of, and it carries on softly until Ryo makes the informed decision that he should lie down, and Asuka starts trying to organise some kind of lunch for the following morning, and Fubuki finally passes out, because they’re all aware that he’ll talk as much as he possibly can if he has an audience for it. And when Ryo gets home from his lectures the following evening, he gives Asuka what’s almost a wink, and tells her that some kids on an open day had stopped by his classes and asked him if he’d ever gotten to see a brain, and at least one of them had acted the exact same way Fubuki had, and she finds herself smiling and warm for the rest of the night.