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The twins had a problem.
Sharing space wasn’t the issue, not really. They’d done that since the very beginning, minus those ten minutes before Yuuma was forced to take upon himself the burden of being an older brother.
So Yuuma suffered Yuuho’s occasional slowness and his smelly socks in Yuuma’s face when they happened to pile onto their attic couch uncomfortably. That was all just part of the expected responsibilities.
Sharing friends wasn’t really a problem either, mostly because whatever charisma the twins shared between them was largely reserved for each other. Other people generally made it right up until the whole twin business before either declaring it creepy or subtly trying to warn them it wasn’t healthy to be so attached to one’s sibling. It got old after a while.
The actual problem was that, in spite of shared efforts at occasionally throwing in a curveball and doing something completely different, they always ended up liking the same things, which. Well.
Oomagari Ryuuji, like most people Yuuma and Yuuho knew (bar themselves and, arguably, those younger twins with the hair) came in a limited supply of exactly one. That was the problem.
—-
The problem started with Yuuho, in their first year of high school. Having handed down shared club captaincy of their old middle school tennis club, they’d readily jumped into the high school tennis scene as a formidable doubles pair.
Well, formally Yuuma had been the captain and Yuuho had been the vice captain, but without anyone capable of telling the twins apart that was just words on a piece of paper. Neither of them had been very good at it anyway.
But in high school they got noticed. Somehow, in spite of their team of Aomori farm boys failing to qualify for any national level tournaments, the twins were invited to the under 17 camp.
Which would have been fine, except where they expected a doubles test they ended up at a psychological test instead, and responsible older brother Yuuma agreed to take one for the team.
And while Yuuma felt out their yearmates’ tolerance for ghost stories in the mountains, Yuuho ended up sharing a room with Oomagari. Cue, the problem.
Without Yuuma to fall back on, Yuuho had been faced with the immense task of socialising with people that were Not His Brother. Oomagari, being low energy and surprisingly tolerant of nonsense, had willingly indulged him, up until the point where he was reasonably certain they were friends.
Then the black jersey squad returned. That much wasn’t really a surprise to Yuuho, who had access to, quote, that weird twin thing they did sometimes, and thus had had a pretty solid gut feeling Yuuma hadn’t exactly gone far.
No, the problem was far worse; the problem was that even when faced with both twins at once, Oomagari didn’t confuse the twins even once.
Which, Yuuho thought, means that he should get dibs, really. Sure, Yuuma might be older, but Yuuho definitely fell first.
—
The thing was, where Yuuho fell fast and then spent two years mulling it over before even realising what he was feeling, Yuuma was pretty sure he knew first. That had to count for something.
Oomagari’s ability to tell the twins apart had stayed uncanny even after they bleached their hair, pierced their ears and swept their bangs to different sides depending on the day just to see how long it would take people to start making false assumptions about which twin was which.
Once Yuuho’s head-start on friendship with Oomagari leveled out and the two of them settled in a comfortable routine of occasionally allowing other people to invade their free time, he’d become a fairly regular fixture in their lives.
Sure, he lived somewhere near Tokyo and they were a good three hours further up north, but between the internet, camp and the occasional tennis tournament bringing familiar faces together they were arguably pretty close.
Yuuma noticed in their third year, when Yuuho had been delegated to the front of the bus to let their medical supervision keep an eye on a minor sprain.
Since Tanegashima hadn’t come along on their trip abroad at all, Oomagari had been the most logical bus buddy.
Well, it was that or the weird one with the orange that Byoudoin had thriftSed somewhere, and that really wasn’t much of a competition at all.
So he’d sat down next to Oomagari and spent the entire bus ride explaining the difference between various regional folk stories and how they got confused sometimes, and Oomagari had nodded along and asked just enough questions to make it clear he’d actually been listening.
In fact, Yuuma couldn’t actually think of any times that had explicitly felt like Oomagari hadn’t been listening to whatever inane subject the twins happened to be interested in at the time which, as far as reasons to fall in love with someone went wasn’t really a bad one, he thought.
So, while Yuuho might have been sitting on whatever crush he claimed to have for longer, Yuuma’s feelings had been more decisive. And therefore stronger, probably. Also, he was ten minutes older, and that had to count for something.
—
They realised they had a problem kind of like this:
There’s an old barn on their family’s terrain that fell out of use when their father moved the cattle further south, in some sort of working agreement with another farm.
The twins had, well before they grew into their long limbs and rebellious looks, converted the old hayloft into a hanging spot, complete with obligatory uncomfortable couch, as generously donated by the young couple that used to live a little ways away when they moved to Tokyo.
On this uncomfortable couch, splayed over one another in a tangle of limbs that made their mother uncomfortable and their grams’ facce go kind of pinched, they’d covered various important crises throughout their lifetime, from figuring out how to work a grocery store box of hairdye to whether or not they were going to move to the city or stick it out in the countryside.
The couch had been too small to fit the both of them for a long time, so Yuuma had to cope with Yuuho’s feet in his face, and Yuuho had to deal with Yuuma’s elbow in his side while they stared at the shiny tv installed themselves.
On it, Oomagari played tennis with some sassy teenager they remember agreeing was crazy.
“Date and Ban-” “-shouldn’t be there,” they agreed, just like they did every time the camera passed over either of those two in the audience. Petty, maybe, but as far as the twins were concerned their loss to a middle schooler was purely due to an unfortunate matchup, and there was no reason to exclude them from the final lineup.
“What do you think would have happened if one of us had made it onto the team,” Yuuho questioned, fiddling with the clasp of one of his earrings.
Yuuma blinked and considered that, alongside a particularly interesting ceiling beam. “Well, I’ve got a pretty good singles win record, but with guys like they’ve got on there? I’m guessing whichever one of us made it would end up with that one kid.”
Yuuho made a face. “I don’t want to play with that kid. One brother’s enough already.”
“No kidding,” Yuuma agreed, making a face at the memory. Neither of them had ever considered their twin thing to be particularly sacred until they’d had a sudden rude intrusion to deal with. “You’re the one who brought it up. Might get stuck with any decently versatile doubles player, really.”
“I’d want to play with Ryuu-san,” Yuuho informed him solemnly, which was probably what he’d been working up to to start with, but-
“With Ryuu-san,” Yuuma repeated, reallu emphasising the nickname. “When did that happen?”
Yuuho shrugged uncomfortably, like he’d been caught doing something wrong. “He asked me to use his name. We compromised.”
Which was Yuuho for ‘he asked months ago and I made the decision to call him that literally just now, after overthinking it to kingdom come’. Oomagari had probably waited with extending the offer to Yuuma until Yuuho made a choice, to be polite.
That stung a little bit, but Yuuma files it away under sacrifices an older brother has to make.
“Just spit it out, Hocchan.” Because after eighteen years together, Yuuma wasn’t about to start pretending he didn’t recognise Yuuho’s ‘I want to say something but I don’t want you to disagree with me’ fidget.
“I like him,” Yuuho blurted out, looking kind of like a cat caught regurgitating a hairball; aware he’d done something weird but refusing to acknowledge it.
Yuuma, usually the twin that was quicker twin of the two, gave him a slow, disbelieving look. “You can’t like Oomagari! I already like Oomagari.”
Yuuho looked startled at that, but after a moment’s consideration he stuck out his tongue. “I liked him first.”
—
So the twins had a problem. With their usual methods of problem solving (calling dibs and pulling the older or younger sibling card) overruled, they were forced to try and find another solution.
They both agreed that licking to claim ownership and pulling straws just weren’t going to cut it as far as methods went, and that getting anyone else involved was probably going to end up being more embarassing than helpful. And so, fresh out of ideas, they agreed to postpone their problem until the world cup ended.
—
The problem, as it turned out, ended up resolving itself when Oomagari took a trip up to Aomori after coming back from Australia and, once he was comfortably squished in between the twins on their uncomfortable couch, asked them both on a date at once.
Each holding one of Oomagari’s hands, the twins didn’t have much of a problem at all.