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Shintaro wakes up feeling like shit.
His limbs are heavy, lead-like, pressing into the bed. Even though a good night’s sleep should have been refreshing, he’s still tired. Thinking about the rest of the day stretching ahead of him makes him feel exhausted. He buries his face deeper into the pillow instead, choosing to ignore the blaring red numbers on his clock, informing him that it’s past the time when he should be up.
Dimly, he realizes it’s one of those days. Some are harder than others, and depression isn’t something that magically disappears, even when everything works out perfectly. Ayano being back doesn’t erase all the time Shintaro spent alone in his room, regretting and blaming himself. He’s glad she’s here, he wouldn’t trade her for the world, but she’s not the person (or idea) he made up in his head while she was gone. She’s sweet and funny and incredible, but she’s not a cure to his troubles. She’s human, just like the rest of them.
Depending on her for so long had made it hard to realize that, but he understands now. She’s trying to piece her life back together too, and although she loves him, she doesn’t always know the right thing to do. She makes mistakes, says the wrong things sometimes. The first time it had happened had made him feel horrible, like the world was dropping out beneath his feet. It was one of the worst fights the four of them had had, Takane barging in and yelling at him, with Haruka trying to soothe both sides and failing. Ayano had been silent, but concerned. She still worried about him, even though he was the one who had said something terrible to her.
It wasn’t fair to Ayano to force all his troubles on her, to make them her responsibility. But he had grown so used it, during the time without her. He had almost forgotten he had been miserable both before and after she had come into his life. Which is ironic, considering that was one of the reasons he had been so drawn to her. Her cheerful positivity, breaking through his own grim perspective on everyone and everything.
Thinking about how he fucked up with Ayano doesn’t help motivate Shintaro out of bed, either. He doesn’t even remember why he started thinking about it. Then again, if it’s one of his worse days, bad thoughts seem to creep in without him noticing. At least he can recognize that much.
He reaches out a hand, gropes on the bedside table for his phone. Unlocking it, he taps on some mindless matching game. At least it takes his mind off the less pleasant things.
At some point, Haruka comes in.
“You’re up?” he asks, climbing across the bed and peering over Shintaro’s shoulder. “What’re you playing? I wanna see!”
Shintaro mumbles something indistinct and keeps thumbing across the screen. Colored blocks explode into tiny pixels with a cheerful pinging noise.
“Shintaro?” Haruka asks, poking his shoulder. “You gonna eat breakfast? There are waffles,”
Shintaro half-shrugs, as much as he can while lying on his side. Usually he’d make some joke about how there aren’t any left if Haruka already knows about them, but he doesn’t feel much like teasing today. Or talking, for that matter.
“Waffles,” Haruka wheedles. “There’s real syrup too, the good kind. And strawberries. Waffles and syrup and strawberries!”
Shintaro makes the shrugging movement again. “Not hungry,” he mutters, focusing on making a 6-way combo.
“Really?” Haruka blinks down at him, clearly confused. Probably not being hungry is a foreign concept to him.
“Really,” Shintaro assures him, not taking his eyes off the phone. He’s just gotten to a new level, too.
Haruka is silent for a while. Shintaro focuses on trying to max out the double-combo bar, because the bonus block is a nice shade of purple.
“Hey,” Haruka says finally, in a very different tone. It’s quiet, for one thing. And hesitant, which is unlike Haruka. “Are you feeling all right?”
Shintaro squints at his screen. His automatic response is to get defensive, and deny everything. Which always ends up with a lot of arguing and hurt feelings. So he sighs, pushes down his annoyance, and answers honestly. “Not really,”
“Okay,” Haruka leans back a little bit, for a better look at Shintaro’s face, even though Shintaro still isn’t looking at him. “What can I do to help?”
Frustration flares in Shintaro again, but he controls it. He’s getting better at that. If he had a therapist, they would probably give him a gold star. He knows he’s not annoyed at Haruka, not really. Shintaro doesn’t know what would help, because there’s nothing he really wants, at the moment. Except maybe get to the final level of this game. “I don’t know,” he says, trying not to bite out the words the way he wants to.
Haruka considers this, while the Shintaro’s phone makes twinkling noises in the background.
The next level loads, while Haruka gets up and leaves the room.
Shintaro is both relieved and disappointed. On the one hand, he’s not in the mood to deal with feelings and talking. On the other, he wants Haruka around, even if he’s too chatty and asks too many questions.
He only has time to clear three rows on his game before Haruka comes back, carrying a dinosaur plushie. It’s technically Konoha’s, but the two of them are good at sharing things. They have the same clothes, mostly, and their room is covered in a dinosaur theme, even though Haruka doesn’t seem to share Konoha’s fascination.
Haruka plunks down with it next to Shintaro. Luckily, bed is big enough for both of them. All of their beds are doubles, which had cost an ungodly amount of money, but is worth it. They swap in and out of each other’s rooms too often, and none of them can squeeze two to a twin bed any more.
The dinosaur pokes at Shintaro’s face, obscuring his view of the phone.
“Hey,” Shintaro says loudly, batting it out of the way. The game makes a sad noise as his time limit goes out. “You made me lose,” he complains.
“Too bad,” Haruka answers cheerfully, reaching over with a free hand and snatching the phone. “Those games are dumb, anyway. Let’s play something else instead!”
Shintaro glares at him. “Don’t wanna,” he says petulantly, like he’s five instead of twenty-two.
The dinosaur’s three-horned nose touches his. “Don’t be mean,” Haruka scolds. “Dino will cry,”’
“Don’t care,” Shintaro says, in the same tone, shoving the toy away from him.
Haruka starts making extremely annoying wailing noises, waving the dinosaur to make it seem like it’s in distress. Shintaro stares at him, unimpressed.
“Fine!” Haruka declares, scooting down so his head is on the pillow, next to Shintaro’s. “Me and Dino will play by ourselves,”
“Okay,” Shintaro says. “Have fun,” he turns over, so his back is to Haruka. If Haruka wants to be as annoying as possible, Shintaro isn’t going to give in.
“We will,” Haruka tells him, and then starts talking to the plushie like it’s a real person. “Dino, Shintaro isn’t being nice to me,” he whines.
His voice goes up several octaves, to imitate the voice of Dino. “Well, that’s a shame! Why do you think that is?”
“Because he’s mean,” Haruka answers, in his own voice. “If Takane were home, she’d tell him no video games for a week,”
Shintaro grumbles something insulting about Takane, which Haruka ignores in favor of responding with Dino. “Well, what do you usually do when he’s being mean?”
Haruka pretends to take a pause, considering the question. “Well, there was that one time when he didn’t want to go on a picnic with us, last spring,” he says, and Shintaro groans in anticipation of this particular story. “Shintaro was being grumpy, and he didn’t want to go out. But we said, if you go out it’ll be fun! Ayano bought a cake, and made sandwiches, and we were going to sit under the cherry blossoms. But Shintaro didn’t want to go,”
“So what did you do?” Haruka asks himself, in the Dino voice.
Shintaro starts to smile, despite himself. He hates this story, because it’s embarrassing as hell, but something about the way Haruka is telling it makes it seem less mortifying.
“Well, we all got together and tried to convince him, but he just said no!” Haruka says. “So, we promised him cake. And fun! And…it didn’t work. So we had a picnic indoors,” Haruka laughs to himself, remembering.
Shintaro can picture it, too. They had spread out on the floor downstairs, pushed the table out of the way. Ayano had brought out paper plates and cups, instead of using the ones from the kitchen, and served sandwiches and juice. They didn’t use a single piece of silverware, except the knife to cut the cake. It was silly, and Shintaro had been annoyed at first, but there was something infectious about the joy of playing pretend, even though they were all grown up already.
“We even opened the windows and we could see some of the blossoms. We ate the cake and sandwiches on the floor, on the blanket. And afterwards, we went outside and ate ice cream in the park,” Haruka says, still play-talking to Dino.
Shintaro turns over to face Haruka as Dino starts answering excitedly, and smacks the toy out of Haruka’s hands.
“Shin-chaaaaaaaan,” Haruka whines, grabbing for it.
“Don’t call me that, idiot,” Shintaro says, raising one arm to keep it out of Haruka’s reach. “I want waffles,”
Haruka brightens. “Waffles?” he asks, obviously excited by the mention of food.
“You said there were waffles downstairs, right?” Shintaro says. ”Let’s go get some,”
Haruka breaks out into a wide smile. It’s a genuine, open expression, and Shintaro is glad to see it. “Okay!” Haruka yells. “Last one there has to give up the final waffle!”
“No way!” Shintaro calls, scrambling over the bedsheets, but Haruka has already thrown himself off the bed and toward the awaiting kitchen.
Shintaro follows him, laughing.