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Night , Yubel thinks, is propaganda to give day time off.
Johan doesn't sleep with them. Sure, they share a roof and food and money and everything else, but he hasn't mustered up the courage yet to ask. There's two bedrooms, anyway, so Johan lies alone in his while Judai snuggles into Yubel's arms and drifts off.
She doesn't sleep that often, but you'd never tell from her face. Yubel is always put together, always cream concealer powdered beneath her eyes and lipstick applied as properly as proper gets, but with her dreads fanned out on the pillow below her head and Judai's breathing matching her own instinctively from where he lies on her hard chest, she feels like discarded building blocks, legos that a child never really cared to build into something other than their base components. She feels like a ripped shirt, or a coat with two buttons fallen off, or a threadbare pair of socks.
She swears she hasn't moved an inch, but maybe that's what wakes him up. Judai's hand crawls from where it's wrapped around her waist up to her neck, where he skims reassuring, blunt, inexplicably human nails across her skin in a faint whisper. "Where are you?" He murmurs, question much too placid and unbrokenly calm for her ribs to bear. Judai's head feels like a weight on her chest, tethering her to reality by thin, brown yarn knit between her bones.
She leans her head up to look at him, and chestnut eyes that glimmer in the flecks of light sinking into the windowpane seem to glow in the night. His lashes, like damselfly wings drooping fairylike around his gaze, make her heart feel tight. Tell me how it feels, Judai, she thinks horribly to herself. I'd give anything to be you if you wanted to be me.
"Here." She whispers in a transparent voice, because to tell the truth to Judai unprompted-- it wouldn't be the first time, and not the last, but Yubel needs to preserve some sense of self. Judai smiles, as gently as he can for someone with half his face obscured by Yubel's nightshirt, and he moves his hand up to sink his fingers into her dreads and scratch lightly at her scalp at the base of her skull. "Come back safe." He says insistently, and retracts his arm to hold his pinky out. Yubel latches it with hers like it's a chore, but Judai knows her better than anyone who's ever lived or will, so he grins like the sun when she purses her lips in a slight pout.
Once he’s dozed off again, Yubel meticulously nudges him off of her and onto the pillow she'd been lying on, tucking their bedsheets around him in the way she knows makes him feel safe and wrapped up and warm the way he loves. He grabs at the pillow, hugging it tightly to himself, and Yubel has to indulge herself for a moment as she runs her fingers through his hair, careful not to let her nails scratch him. His breathing evens further at every stroke, but eventually she has to tear herself away.
She hefts hers and Judai's laundry basket into the living room, letting the door click softly behind her like a promise. Turning on the light that hangs above the kitchenette makes her want to squint and hiss but she perseveres, scooping half the amount of ground coffee she'd usually use into the machine and pouring half the water too. The drip-drip of hot familiarity filling the carafe with slow tears is a boon to her nerves, settling her like a pair of calloused, small hands on her waist, so carefully held she feels she might come apart at the seams if she opens her eyes too quickly. She twists her nightshirt's hem in her hands. there's a hole where one of the threads comes loose.
Like a ghost, or perhaps a panther, when she bares her gaze to the world again, Johan is there, leaning against the wall where the entrance to the kitchenette stands. Good morning he mouths, clearly unsure how easily Judai will be roused simply without Yubel there as his personal body pillow, and he sniffs the air with a small, nearly missable smile. "We've progressed past the need for a barista." Yubel snarks, tone low in permission for Johan to speak quietly. He laughs like a whisper of what she's seen he's capable of (you couldn't really be Judai's roommate unless you could stand rare ticklefights-- a dirty player, that love of hers), and he opens the cupboard to take out two mugs for them, setting them on the counter.
He places hers next to where she's leaning. There's a scotty dog emblazoned on the side with an equally stupid quote. Johan's is a jack-o-lantern's head, and she wants to smash it on the floor. For a moment, when she blinks, she sees purple fog behind her eyelids, and somehow she meets an orange gaze with her eyes closed.
Yubel opens her eyes, the dripping of the coffee machine having ceased as Johan portions it in their mugs, leaving space for cream and syrup in hers. His eyes are seafoam green. The fridge is white and boring. The tiles on the floor are grey, and the cabinets are plain wood brown, and the coffee is black and the sugar he's spooning in is white and the sound it makes as it scrapes the bottom of his cup makes her want to rip his guts out and braid them only to shove them back inside and have them straighten them selves out, and jesus fucking christ she's really panicking in front of the guy she wanted to kill not a year ago, and Johan doesn't say anything. He doesn't say a word, but he squirts in two pumps of vanilla and one spoonful of simple syrup from the bottles he keeps in the fridge for her, and he gives her the privilege of stirring after he tops it with the last of the milk in the fridge. He doesn't open his mouth once, but he hands Yubel her coffee and a spoon, and his fingertips brush against hers, and they are warm and rough and a little beat up and Yubel really, really needs to manhandle him into a manicure.
"Still think you don't need one?" He asks, soft and joking, but there is genuine care to his voice that makes Yubel want to rip her own face off. She settles for tugging at her earrings, small black hoops she wears to bed. "We'll see." She whispers, and it sounds like a confession. He laps it up, balls it in his palms and swallows and doesn't flinch once.
It's still pitch black outside when she instructs Johan to grab his laundry from his room, but he still gives her a two finger salute and goes off to retrieve it, padding on socked feet while his big toe sticks out a fat hole in one. She observes her state of dress for a moment while he's gone (old, woodstained t-shirt with a dive bar advertised in faded font and black, thin pajama pants with neos's face plastered over them like a pattern) and decides definitively that it is too late for her to care about how she looks. She's not even wearing makeup, for god's sake.
Luckily, Johan seems to have the same idea in a grey knit sweater she's 70% sure is hers hanging off his bare shoulders and bright green sweatpants that pool around his ankles. He lugs a cloth bag behind him the size of a pillowcase, bulging with clothes she's absolutely sure he's been procrastinating washing. He gives her a dopey smile when she takes the bag from him and dumps it in her basket, and grabs a handful of quarters from the dish on the counter.
She sits on the washing machine as it tumbles on in the basement of their complex, and Johan hums a song off the album he's been listening to as of late as she swings her flip-flopped feet. Johan hadn't even bothered with shoes, insisting that socks are enough at this hour, and while at first Yubel had thought him lazy, the laundry room was indeed deserted.
He's still lazy, though.
"Hey." Johan's voice is still barely above a murmur, prickling at her inner ear. She doesn't speak, but she does afford him a response; tilting her head to the side as if to ask what? Johan smiles a little, a lopsided and kind of gloomy expression, and slots himself between her legs. His hands rest on the tops of her thighs and she feels like he's burning her through her pj pants. She shifts, and he digs his blunt fingertips in, barely, barely applying pressure. Yubel thinks she's angry from how much she likes it. There is no purple and there is no black, she reminds herself quickly before johan can do anything else. And his eyes are nothing but green.
Kissing Johan is fundamentally different than kissing Judai. Judai is eager sometimes, slow others, and every now and then desperate. Kissing Judai is like baring yourself to him, letting him sink his fingers into all your cracks and tug until you fall apart to pieces in his lap, just so he can put you back together kiss by kiss. Kissing Judai is like peace, or like morning dew when it rained last night, or like germination, peeking your head up and growing and living. Johan is, in a word, the opposite-- it's a slow moving war, a battle where each move is deliberately played out. He presses his tongue to the inside of her teeth and she shivers before nipping at his bottom lip. Yubel feels him shudder through a laugh and she lays her hands on his neck, not pushing but not light either. Just barely imposing, barely reminding him of the threat she can be.
And you know it, too, so why?
Why indeed, she wonders aimlessly, as Johan toys with the hem of her shirt before she shoves him away. "You boys only ever have one thing on your mind." She bites out, hardened and angry and hard, oops and all Johan does is hand her a fox's smile, over and over and over until her stomach is full of fur and it hurts to swallow down. The washer is almost done, so when it dings she grabs the heap and throws it unceremoniously in the dryer.
Johan hands her four quarters to load into the slots, and she takes them without so much as a thank you . Judai knows her best, but maybe there's hope for this other one yet, because he sticks his tongue out at her despite his flushed cheeks.
Yubel wonders if she's blushing, too. The lights above flicker, just barely, shaded in the promise of the sun to come.