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Here’s what Haruki wants to happen: Midori is dragged out into the public as a disgrace to his profession, revealed as the monster he is. Masamune recovers from the years he had Midori’s claws in him and Tooru is less angry all the time, Hotaru visits her parents every month and Haruka is a bit less terrifying.
Here’s what Yukki wants to happen: Midori dies. His throat is cut, his flesh bruised, his nails torn off his hands from clawing desperately at his killers, begging for forgiveness. Mattsun is free. Haruki is free. Tachibana finally gets the friends she deserves in them. Mattsun takes better care of himself and he starts to enjoy playing survival games again.
Here’s what Tachibana wants to happen: Midori realises what he’s done. He realises he’s a monster, cruel and vicious and that he’s only caused pain. She wants to beat him in fair combat and she wants him to never come near any of them again.
Here’s what Matsuoka wants to happen: they forget about it. It never happened. They carry on with their lives exactly as they had before, keep entering competitions and training together, one day they win the TGC, and eventually he can sleep through the night again.
Here’s what actually happens: they go home.
Matsuoka’s hopes are crushed within hours, because Hotaru can’t look at him and Yukki can’t look away. Haruki tries to balance the line but every time he looks at Matsuoka his eyes are wide and panicked and he looks away too soon. The three of them refuse to leave his apartment so when he goes to bed he leaves them in his living room, Yukki drinking black coffee and Hotaru sitting rigidly on the sofa and Haruki slumped, defeated.
He’s still awake an hour later when Yukki slips into his room quietly and gets under the covers with him. Matsuoka doesn’t react but Yukki doesn’t touch him.
“Tachibana and Haruki are asleep in the living room,” Yukki tells him. “I thought you’d be awake.”
He doesn’t want to talk about it. He doesn’t. But he might be able to tell Yukki something, anything at all.
“It wasn’t the only time we had sex,” he says to the ceiling. He’s not addressing Yukki, not really, just saying the words aloud where Yukki can hear them. “I told him I wouldn’t go home with him that evening.”
Yukki never had a problem with invading his personal space before. He doesn’t move now.
“I knew,” Yukki says quietly. “Tachibana didn’t, and Haruki suspected.”
“Yukki,” Matsuoka says, refusing to let his voice break. It does anyway. “Come here, please.”
Yukki curls around him, wraps his arms around Matsuoka’s back and presses up so Matsuoka’s head is tucked under his chin. It’s very awkward and slightly uncomfortable but Matsuoka relaxes into him and lets Yukki’s heartbeat soothe him into sleep.
He wakes up to Hotaru at his back and Haruki cooking breakfast. He forces his heartbeat to calm before getting out of bed.
Hotaru borrows his casual clothes and spends all of the time she’s not at school at Matsuoka’s. Matsuoka won’t let her come to work with him but he’s pretty sure she follows him there anyway. He knows Yukki does. He doesn’t call her out on it because then he’d be forced to admit that he feels better with her there anyway, and that he doesn’t want her to stop.
He comes home to find her asleep on his sofa wearing his old hoodies. She usually smells like the soap he keeps in the shower. They’re way too huge on her and she looks adorable and tiny in them, despite being as tall as Yukki, despite being stronger than he is. The dent is still in his wall from where she issued a letter of challenge to him. She wakes up when he comes in at three in the morning smelling of perfume and looks sad, and he tells her off for being up late on a school night.
“I wasn’t up late! I was asleep until a minute ago,” she points out. Yukki is probably awake as well, probably hasn’t eaten for eighteen hours, is probably still hunched over at his computer drawing pornographic manga he doesn’t really want to.
“Go to bed, Hotaru,” he tells her, and she follows him into his bedroom and curls up to his back and doesn’t move when he tells her to leave. She’s gone when he wakes up, but he sleeps better with her there. He sleeps with her there.
They train together, and it’s such a slow process that he doesn’t notice it at first but Hotaru’s aim is getting better, little by little. She stops hitting everything but the target and when he comments on it to Haruki he looks so guilty that he can only assume he’s been taking her to practice. He denies it vehemently. Hotaru flips over a wall and shoots them both.
Yukki and Hotaru go running together. Hotaru forces Yukki to keep food in his house and to eat it regularly. Haruki helps. Hotaru runs and trains and she’s still the student council president, still attends every lesson and after school sessions, still chases down doers of injustice in her spare time. Matsuoka isn’t sure where she’s getting the time. She sleeps plastered to his back or curled on top of Yukki or against Haruki when he sits still for five minutes and eats ravenously, eats and sleeps enough that Matsuoka is sure she’s not wearing herself thin. But she does so much and sometimes he sees her staring at him, staring at him with such a righteous fury in her eyes that he has to go and touch her before she burns herself out.
He puts his hand on her head and tells her she looks scary, and she forces herself out of it and smiles up at him.
They don’t see Midori once.
They enter a tournament, long enough after the last one that whispers had spread and died down, rumours that Toy Gun Gun had vanished old news by the time they return. They annihilate the competition, all four of them coming out unscathed. Matsuoka sleeps through the night alone sometimes now, though more often he goes to sleep or wakes up with Yukki or Hotaru there. He has no doubt that Haruki would share a bed with him but he doesn’t, and Matsuoka doesn’t press it.
They order takeout after their win, and watch shitty action films until they fall asleep on Yukki’s floor. Yukki points out the similarities between Hotaru and the stupid brash protagonists of the films until she’s steaming from the ears and Haruki is nearly crying with laughter.
Matsuoka goes to the slightly further away hospital to get his head checked out after six months. He’s recovered from the blow. There’s a scar on the back of his head, a shiny white patch beneath his bright blond hair. Hotaru pokes it gently and Yukki presses his forehead to the back of his neck. Haruki washes his hair again, after another tournament, dirt this time instead of blood crusting beneath his fingernails.
When he comes home from work two days later he finds Haruki on his sofa with Hotaru, and he sits next to them to sleep instead of going to bed.
Hotaru starts leaving her pyjamas at his flat and Yukki stares at her bare arms until she scowls at him. “What?”
“You’re so muscled,” he says, and reaches up to touch. “You’re more muscled that Mattsun.”
“Hey!” Matusoka protests, but Yukki is right and Hotaru is preening, proud of her strength training. Matsuoka isn’t sure how much time she’s spent getting stronger but she still looks straight past him sometimes, to the place she thinks she should have been. She isn’t strong enough to be comfortable yet.
Haruki is stronger too. So, surprisingly, is Yukki – Hotaru had convinced him that being able to move quickly would only be an asset for a sniper, and if he got caught in hand-to-hand he’d need to defend himself. Matsuoka had taught him. Yukki had learned willingly enough.
He thinks Yukki used to want to have sex with him, but isn’t sure about it now. Matsuoka has never flinched away when the three of them touch him but he doesn’t like it when anyone else does and he knows Yukki has noticed, because Yukki knows everything about him and then some.
Yukki won’t push it. He likely never would have. They were content with what they had and they are working back towards that again, though they won’t ever fit together the way they used to – just the two of them, fractures of a whole.
Hotaru beams at Yukki (so bright, blindingly bright) and flexes dramatically. It’s kind of funny and it’s definitely impressive, but Hotaru has always been kind of funny and definitely impressive in almost every way.
They go to practice matches, reconnect with old acquaintances. It’s fun – it’s genuinely fun again. He takes a hit from an enemy team on the third game they play and sits the final six minutes of it out; Hotaru joins him halfway through and they stare at the trees until Haruki and Yukki emerge with the flag, grinning. Hotaru shrieks and jumps around them and Yukki whines at her to calm down and they tell each other what happened to them and what they need to work on for next time.
There is to be another game between them and the team that wins the next match. The four of them sit and chat with the other teams that have braved the grey sky and cold wind to come out and play. It soon devolves into raucous laughter and cheerful threats, and Hotaru leaps onto the bench and declares that they will have victory. She overbalances and sends them all sprawling, and they go home that night with bruises on their backs and the flag from the final round.
Winter approaches and they train in the cold now, hands freezing around their toy guns. Hotaru slips on ice wherever she finds it and Yukki becomes a bundle of clothes with a man trapped somewhere inside. They swap barbeques for hotpot and celebrate Matsuoka’s birthday, and when the time comes they ring in the New Year together.
Matsuoka doesn’t quite know what to pray for, but he thinks retribution will do. Hotaru prays for justice.
They’re putting it off.
Hotaru is almost good at aiming by the time spring comes, and Yukki is almost in shape. They’re a real team now, not just a quartet of strangers. Haruki is still reserved and unfriendly and Yukki still doesn’t look after himself and Matusoka still hides behind his blinding smile but between them they make a whole person, albeit a dysfunctional one.
Hotaru is their beating heart, keeps them alive and focused and cheery and Matsuoka hugs her until her ribs must ache.
He loves her. He must.
It had taken him a while to figure out what he felt, and he had taken longer than he perhaps should have because he’d felt this way when he’d thought Hotaru was a boy, but he knows now that it was love then and it’s love now.
And he doesn’t know if his revenge against Midori is worth risking exposing Hotaru to him again.
“It’s not just revenge for you, Matsuoka. It’s closure,” Hotaru tells him when he voices this. She leans over Yukki, who shoves at her weakly but not enough to shift her off him. “And it’s our revenge too.”
And that’s the end of it.
They win another survival game. They lose another, because Haruki is sick, and spend the next week smothering him in chicken soup and blankets and affection. He grumbles the whole way through until he’s well enough that he can justify kicking them out of his apartment and they wait another two weeks before they play again.
And then it’s time for TGC, and they get the customary black envelopes through their doors. Hotaru shrieks when she gets hers, sprinting into Matsuoka’s room where he and Yukki are curled up in bed together, and she dives onto the bed with them and waves it around excitedly.
“It’s time!” she yells. “It’s time for our revenge, and to claim our title!”
Matsuoka takes the envelope from her and reads the invitation inside, swallowing his suddenly rising stomach. It’s just a survival game. It’s not real, and they’re strong now.
They’re very strong now.
Yukki tips Hotaru off the bed. “Tachibana, you should knock,” he whines. “What if we were busy?”
Hotaru tips her head and Matsuoka tries not to turn red like a teenager at that statement. They’re not – he’s not involved with Yukki, not like that, and Hotaru knows it –
Probably.
“Doing what? You were just sleeping,” she says, and Matsuoka turns over, plants his face in his pillow, and tries not to scream loudly.
They face Hoshishiro in the third round.
When the confrontation happens, it happens so fast that it takes the four of them half an hour to sort out exactly what had happened.
Haruki shoots his brother in the side five minutes in. Haruka calls hit and leaves, and Haruki sighs with what feels like cowardly relief.
(It’s not cowardly to be afraid of something dangerous)
Midori then shoots at Haruki, who had exposed himself taking out Haruka, but misses because Yukki fired on him at the exact same moment.
Akabane shoots at Yukki from almost directly opposite him a split second afterwards. She misses too.
Matsuoka shoots Midori in the side of the head.
Hotaru appears from apparently nowhere, the very earth shaking with the force of her landing. “You had better say hit, Midori,” she says coldly. The rage pouring off of her is unmistakable, terrifying, enough to freeze everyone else in the game. “You had best say it fast.”
Midori stands frozen for a long second, and Hotaru doesn’t hesitate. She raises her gun and fires, unflinching, with half a foot between the end of her gun and the middle of Midori’s chest. She hadn’t needed to bother practicing aiming, not for this.
Yukki fires as well, and his pellet hits Midori in the ribs. Haruki’s gets his side.
“Hit,” Midori says.
They win the third round.
They win the whole competition, and Matsuoka kisses Hotaru and then he kisses Yukki, and then he kisses Haruki on the cheek. Matsuoka has loved these two for what feels like forever and is really only a few months but it’s long enough, and the three of them tangle themselves up on Matsuoka’s too-small sofa, and Hotaru had grabbed Haruki when he’d refused to join them.
They spend hours talking through the competition. The first thing they do is talk about the third round, where they’d beaten Hoshishiro at last, talk about it for nearly an hour.
“Did anyone see him afterwards?” Hotaru asks. She hadn’t let go of any of them for more than ten seconds at a time once the competition was over. She knew the answer to that question.
“I,” Matsuoka decides, “will be very happy to never see him again.”
“Don’t you want to know why?” Haruki wonders. Matsuoka shakes his head.
Yukki answers. “Who cares what he thought he was doing?” he says, measured, even. “It’s not going to be our problem anymore.”
And the conversation moves on naturally, in a way that talking about Midori never let it do before.
They watch two stupid action films and a romantic comedy, order takeout twice, because Hotaru eats most of the first one they get and the other three are still hungry after, and talk for hours.
“So what now?” Hotaru wonders. “What’s our next plan?”
Matsuoka wonders. So does Yukki. So does Haruki.
“Who cares?” Matsuoka eventually decides. “We’ll see.”
Here’s what eventually happens: they make a home.