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Getting involved with someone like Himiko is dangerous on all kinds of levels, and yet, Jin can’t exactly deny the crush he starts to develop on the younger girl. Getting involved with anyone is dangerous for him, and getting involved with anyone is dangerous given the kind of life they live, but Himiko brings her own kind of danger, and yet, she has a charm to her that he can’t ignore.
He likes to think that it’s just a harmless crush, something to distract himself from time to time, and nothing that he’d ever pursue, and nothing that he’d ever have a chance with. It’s not as if he could have anything resembling a normal relationship as he is, even if he weren’t so immersed with the League of Villains, and even if he could, he knows her type, and he knows that she wouldn’t want what he could give her.
Jin writes off any possibility of there ever being anything between he and Himiko, but they’re still close, and he can still flirt and let his mind wander, and it all feels entirely harmless. She has her little crush on one of the good guys, and he has his crush on her, and life carries on as normal, until the first time she kisses him.
The weirdest part of the kiss might possibly be the fact that it does not occur while they’re alone, but rather, when Atsuhiro is there as well. It comes without warning, while they’re talking amongst themselves about nothing in particular. She inches closer and closer to him, until she kisses him on the cheek, above his mask, and gives him a wide grin when he looks down at her in surprise.
“What?” she asks, like it’s the most natural turn of events in the world. She turns around, cocking her head as she looks to Atsuhiro, as if expecting an answer from him, before she bounds up and kisses him on the cheek as well.
“Now you’re even!” she says, and offers no further explanation to either of them. Though he wants to just pass it off as Himiko being Himiko, Jin can’t shake the strange feeling he’s left with after this.
~X~
“Now we’re even,” Atsuhiro says out of nowhere, a few days later. “Any idea what she was talking about?”
“Beats the hell out of me,” Jin replies with a shrug. “You know how she is!”
“Does anyone really know how she is?” the other man replies. “I know that you have a thing for her, but, as far as understanding Miss Toga, that’s about as much as I do know.”
“I wouldn’t say I have a thing for her,” he mutters, already knowing how useless the argument is. “I mean, don’t you? Doesn’t everyone, at least a little bit?”
“Somehow, I doubt that,” says Atsuhiro, and Jin can practically hear the smirk in his voice. “I’d say the two of us are the only ones in that boat, at least for now. As charming as she may be.”
“The two of us, huh?”
“Like I said, she’s very charming.”
“And are you gonna do anything about that?”
“It’d likely be a disaster.”
“You got that right.”
~X~
Sometimes when she walks between the two of them now, she’ll grab one of each of their hands, and Atsuhiro will remark on how she’s going to get him flustered and Jin will flirt with her, completely playfully of course , and she will say nothing to indicate anything concrete.
~X~
“Maybe she wants to date both of us,” he muses.
“I thought you agreed a relationship with her would be a disaster. We all know what her type is,” Atsuhiro replies with a laugh.
“But if it was both of us-”
“It would be double the disaster.”
“It’d be weird anyway,” Jin says with a nod. “I mean, sharing a girlfriend, or whatever. That’s really what you’re thinking, right?”
“Not at all.”
“Not at all?”
“If I had to share with anyone…”
“Whoa, man, don’t make it weird,” he mutters, but he’s the one who can’t stop thinking about it after the fact.
~X~
Himiko never really lets either of them see what it is she’s thinking, but still, she shows them random bits of affection, always making sure that it’s even. She’s never been easy to read, but the closer she tries to push herself to him, the more Jin wants to try to understand her. He knows that he’s walking into a disaster, and he knows that he should stay the hell away from her.
Life would be a hell of a lot simpler if he could just forget about her.
~X~
Atsuhiro makes things easier, somehow, though Jin can’t really explain why. Things haven’t stopped feeling weird since he first said he wouldn’t mind “sharing”, but still, Jin has someone to discuss this with.
“I think the fact that she hasn’t slowed down to mean that this is more than just a phase,” Atsuhiro says one day.
“A phase, huh?”
“Walking disaster or not, she’s still a teenage girl, isn’t she?”
“Is she? Never got an exact date on her.”
“She’s certainly younger than me. Younger than you, as well.”
“If that’s all I ever go to jail for, it’d be a miracle,” says Jin, earning a chuckle from the other man.
“I’m just as guilty as you are, at this point. After all, she wants to make sure that we’re all even.”
“Mostly,” he says, without really knowing why.
“Mostly? Is there something I don’t know about?”
“No, it’s not like that. Why? Is there something that I don’t know about?”
“No, there isn’t. Now, is there a reason you said ‘mostly’?”
“It’s nothing.”
“Is it?” There’s something in Atsuhiro’s voice that Jin hasn’t heard before, and it’s hard for him to describe the sort of feeling it leaves him with.
“Are we…” He clears his throat. “Are we even?” And there it is, out there in the open.
There is a pause before Atsuhiro says, “I suppose we aren’t.”
He doesn’t seem to mind that, when his mask comes out, Jin can’t return the favor just yet, and they do their best to even things up during that time. And then...things escalate a bit further than even.
~X~
Jin isn’t sure how things got to this point, or how his crush on Himiko lead to what turned out to be a crush on Atsuhiro. Was it her plan to bring them together? Does she even have a plan to begin with, or is that giving her too much credit?
Whatever the case, it’s difficult to talk about things immediately after, but it’s impossible to avoid the other man. It is also impossible to avoid Himiko, but as soon as she takes a look at them, she looks back and forth between the two of them, as if she can’t quite believe it.
Neither of their faces are exposed, so neither of them should be readable at all, and yet, she already knows. “No fair!” she exclaims. “ That isn’t even at all! Now you guys both owe me, got it?”
Things stay consistently complicated, and Himiko is never easy to read, or to understand. But even so, things continue to progress, and the three of them become something , and whether or not it’s a disaster, Jin still doesn’t know.
Well, disaster or not, at least things stay even.