Archive of Our Own ^beta

Yusuke doesn’t remember his mother. Not really. He doesn’t realize this is strange until he’s seven years old and the class is assigned with drawing family portraits. Yusuke, as usual, puts his heart into it: he draws a magnificent self-portrait that he thinks, based on the scribblings of his peers, is far above what would be produced by the average student.

“You were supposed to draw your parents, stupid,” one of the children tells him.

“What?” Yusuke looks at the drawing. His family -- it’s just him, isn’t it? He knows he had a mother, but it would be dishonest to draw her when he doesn’t remember her. “But I don’t have any.”

“Wow,” the boy says. His drawing is amateur, barely more than stick figures, but his page is labelled: mother, father, grandparents, siblings. “Guess you’re so weird even your parents couldn’t stick around.”

“Satoshi-kun!” the teacher intervenes at the same time that another student elbows Satoshi in the side, a line seemingly crossed. The teacher offers Yusuke a smile; gentle, eyebrows drawn in to convey something he thinks must be pity. “It’s a wonderful drawing, Yusuke.”

Yusuke looks at it and can see nothing but flaws. “I’ve made the eyes too large,” he says.

“It’s fine,” the teacher, assures him, but it isn’t: he’s failed the project by not having a family, and he’s failed to make an appropriate self-portrait on top of that.

He goes home and tries to draw his mother, but he can’t manage more than than the outline of a face. It looks more like a horror movie than a drawing of someone he vaguely remembers as warm, and so he rips the drawing up until it can’t be seen at all.

Yusuke is nine years old, trailing along behind Madarame. Madarame is talking business with the owner of the exhibit: what paintings of Madarame’s to display, what they’re willing to be sold for. Yusuke takes in the paintings with the sharpest eye he can. They’re beautiful, and he can feel the emotion radiate outwardly from each of them, the emotions conveyed by the artists so strong that it could burst off the canvas entirely.

“...such a unique style for this one,” the owner of the exhibit is saying. They’ve come to a stop in front of one of Madarame’s paintings, a realistic portrait of a young girl in a school. It’s hopeful and beautiful, and looking at it makes Yusuke feel like spring might dawn immediately even though it’s the middle of November.

“Yes, well, I find it important to change my style to fit the mood of the painting,” Madarame answers easily.

“And you’re so good at it,” the owner offers, easy compliments spilling from him like they always do for Madarame’s works. “And what about your son? Do you think he’ll follow in your footsteps?”

Yusuke’s head swivels around, wide eyed, to look at the owner, at the straight lines of Madarame’s back where he’s cloaked in layers of linen.

“Oh, he’s my student, not my son,” Madarame says, as though the mistake was a mild and common offense, easily forgiven and correct. “But I expect great things from him all the same.”

That night, Yusuke sits in front of a canvas, pencil posed ready to sketch out the preliminary for an image, but his mind is as blank as the fabric before him. His vision doubles: he sees the white expanse, and then he sees an overlay, himself in the middle of a faceless woman and a man dressed in traditional clothing, and Yusuke feels the bitter ache of missing something he has never truly known.

He titles his next painting Family, an abstract portrait of a single figure alone with a half dozen shadows that resemble the idea of something only half-formed.

He wins an award for it, but it’s a bittersweet victory.

Yusuke is twelve the first time Madarame comes up short for an exhibition.

“You need… a painting from me?” Yusuke asks. His voice hasn’t fully dropped yet; it cracks on his words and sentences like paint scrubbed too thick across a canvas, and it makes him hesitant to speak. “But anything you could produce would be far superior to my own works.”

“Of course,” Madarame says, taking the praise in stride like it’s a fact of life. It is, in a way; it’s a fact that Yusuke’s own material is nowhere as good as Madarame’s, no matter how many childhood competitions he wins and how many teachers praise him. “But it will be a valuable way to get feedback on your own work without worrying that their knowledge of you will color it, won’t it?”

Yusuke isn’t confident of that -- they’ll only be critiquing it as Madarame’s, and he’s never heard anyone speak against Madarame for long, any potential critics retracting their opinions nearly immediately and issuing apologies -- but it’s Madarame saying it, and Madarame wouldn’t lie to him.

“If that’s what you truly want,” Yusuke says, a little hesitant. He’s willing to do quite a bit for his teacher, and this doesn’t seem like much, in the grand scheme of things. What’s one painting in the vast amounts of works that Madarame has already produced, in the steadily growing collection of Yusuke’s own art? It isn’t fraud if they’re both aware of it, is it?

“I’m counting on you,” Madarame says, and claps a hand on Yusuke’s shoulder.

Yusuke feels the phantom touch on his shoulder for hours afterwards, when he spends his time gazing at the paper in front of him and wondering when Madarame will come back home. Yusuke doesn’t know what family is, or what a father is, but surely, this is what it must feel like? To be relied on, to be counted upon.

He paints some of his best work to that point, he thinks, and it gets Madarame no end of praise. Yusuke listens to it rain down on his teacher, watches the way Madarame accepts it as though he truly had been the one to paint it, and feels a twisting in his gut that blackens his canvas for days afterwards.

It’s no matter. Madarame will continue to help Yusuke develop into an artist by his own measure, won’t he? Isn’t that what a -- teacher -- is meant to do?

Yusuke is fifteen when the Phantom Thieves target Madarame.

He resists until it’s futile, until he’s standing in a room filled with countless forgeries and listening to Madarame state his plan as though he were a villain in a children’s cartoon. Yusuke barely hears it, the words falling short of him in the same way that his words fall short of reaching Madarame.

He rips the mask off his face and feels the phantom hand of Madarame, years ago, on his shoulder; his persona blossoms behind him as fifteen years of confusion work their way up through him. He can’t push the feelings down anymore. He won’t push them down. They rise up like an acrid bile, and he thinks he must contaminate everything around him just by speaking, even as his voice shakes.

It is the first time in his life that Yusuke has felt truly alone.

He has no home; he has no familial bond, not even a half-conceived one that was never built on truth or reality. He can see Madarame’s face twisted with derision. He can hear the words of Madarame’s shadow in his ears, gloating and triumphant.

Yusuke has long resigned himself to being thought of as weird. In brighter terms, he would tell himself that it’s simply that his own creativity is too much for others to handle, that his inspiration bleeds out of the edges of his personality and overwhelms them. He tells himself no such pretty lies, now, simply admits that he has no place to go and no one to turn to.

“You ain’t got any friends you could stay with?” Ryuji blurts, sounding almost affronted on Yusuke’s behalf. Yusuke wonders why. Ann elbows Ryuji in the side, a hissed shut up, and Yusuke looks away. Even her features, once so inspirational, are blunted by the strange hollow he feels within him.

“No,” Yusuke says. “I’m afraid I haven’t.” What need for friends did he have when he had art? What need for family, for a father, for a mother? But his world is crumbling around him, and art isn’t enough to hold him up when he has nothing else to lean on.

“You can stay with me,” Akira says.

Yusuke turns. Surprise doesn’t half cover what he’s feeling. It’s an overwhelming sensation that pricks at his fingertips like static, his face flushing.

“I wouldn’t want to intrude,” Yusuke says, automatically. He has been an inconvenience all his life, and if he can’t barter with art to earn his keep, what point is there to his imposition?

Akira just smiles at him, easy and reassuring. “It’ll be nice to have the company,” he says.

“Then that’s that!” Ann says, before Yusuke can even think to answer. Ryuji slaps him on the back hard enough that Yusuke feels his weight pitch forward. It’s nothing like the feeling of Madarame’s hand on his shoulder.

“That’s-- that’s hardly that,” Yusuke tries to protest, but it seems that it’s too late: the conversation has moved on without him, and he puzzles over it the entire train ride home, Akira’s form next to him as he fronts Yusuke the fare.

Yusuke has never remembered his mother’s face, and he has precious little to remember her by, photographs and portraits that never made it into his hands.

Until Sayuri, at any rate.

He hangs it in Leblanc, which feels appropriate, given that he’s been a freeloader for the past several days. Sojiro has stated that he doesn’t mind what Yusuke does so long as he airs the smell of paint out before it can hit downstairs and “ruin the coffee”, which sounds like dubious science, but Yusuke and Akira spend half a day repairing the windows so they can open.

The attic smells fresh, after that, or as fresh as anything can be in the middle of Tokyo.

“I can move into the dorms,” Yusuke says, trying to assure Akira of it. “I really can’t impose upon you any longer when you’ve been so accommodating--”

“I don’t mind,” Akira says, and sets a fan up near the stairwell. It rustles the pages of Yusuke’s sketchbook, and sends the smell of his sealant directly outside, through the windows. It’s nothing like the cramped, stuffy atmosphere of his former residence, and it’s nothing like the cramped, stuffy atmosphere of the dormitories he could be staying in.

“All the same,” Yusuke says, hesitantly, unsure of whether he’s trying to convince Akira or himself. He’s been sleeping on the couch, and surely that isn’t good for anyone involved.

“We can get you a futon tomorrow,” Akira offers.

“I can hardly afford--”

“It’s on me,” Akira says, shrugging a shoulder up and splaying his hand up like it’s an inconsequential barrier. “We’ve got some extra funds from the loot last time.”

Yusuke thinks that money would be better spent in hundreds of ways that don’t pertain to him, but at this point it would intrude on Akira’s kindness to keep refusing.

So he stays, with the portrait of his mother downstairs and his own canvas upstairs and the smell of coffee waking him up in the morning.

Yusuke is fifteen when he develops his first crush.

He’d had aesthetic appreciation for beauty in his life before, of course; Ann is a recurring feature of his inspiration, even if none of his drawings of her are worth showing to anyone. He sketches Ryuji out, here and there, just to practice his skills on drawing people, and then Makoto joins their group and he adds her to the pages, her serious look a challenge compared to the smiles of everyone else.

But he has a crush, this time, or at least he thinks he does. He doesn’t have anyone he can go to about it, doesn’t have a sibling or parent or anyone that can help him sort it out.

It takes him nearly a week to remember, as he’s rolling the futon up to tuck it away underneath Akira’s bed, to remember that he has friends.

“Oh, you know,” Ann says, when he asks her. “It’s like, when your chest feels tight and you really want to spend time with them! Or that’s how it is for me, at least.”

She doesn’t laugh at him, which is what he’d been fearing; the ridicule of others was so frequent that Yusuke barely registers it, these days, but to have it occur when he broached such a terrifying topic might have undone him. Instead, she just offers him a smile over the parfait that Yusuke is fairly certain could feed both of them.

“I guess for you it might feel kinda like inspiration?” She moves her spoon to the side, gesturing vaguely with it as she considers it. “Or something close to it, I’d guess.”

“Yes,” Yusuke says. It does feel like something close to inspiration, though he can’t quite put his finger on what’s different. The feeling reminds him of looking at a completed canvas; of the first day of an art exhibit and the terror of critique directed at him.

“It might be different for boys,” Ann says. “You should ask Ryuji.”

It’s the last thing that Yusuke wants to do, but he does so regardless, because if he is to be sure of anything in life, he wants to be sure of his own feelings. He hasn’t been able to paint in weeks, and it’s starting to wear on him, the feeling dragging him down and folding back in on itself everytime he tries to escape it with a sub-par piece of art.

“You’ve got a crush? Hell yeah,” Ryuji says, looking entirely too engaged in the subject. “Who’s the lucky lady? It’s not Ann, right?”

“It is not,” Yusuke confirms, and does not mention that it is not a lady at all. That topic feels like one that should be broached with even more care. “It’s simply a hypothetical.”

“Yeah, I don’t know what that means,” Ryuji says. It doesn’t seem to stop him in the slightest, which is almost admirable, to Yusuke. “Are you tryin’ to paint a first crush or something?”

“Something like that,” Yusuke says, because it’s true that if someone could coach the subject to him in concrete art terms he might have a better chance at understanding it.

“Then it’s when you reeeeally wanna impress someone,” Ryuji says. “When you wanna look super cool in front of them, so they’ll be like, ‘Oh Ryu-- Yusuke, I think you’re awesome, let’s go on a date’!”

“I see,” Yusuke says, despite not seeing at all.

“I mean, I’ve never, like, been in love with anyone or anything,” Ryuji says, “but it’s gotta be kinda like that for everyone, right? Where you just want them to see you, the way you see them?”

It strikes a chord in Yusuke, but he couldn’t say what.

“Thank you,” Yusuke says. “That does clear things up.” Which is true: it clears things up, even if the entire subject is still buried underneath several layers of mystery.

“No problem, man!” Ryuji says, and offers Yusuke a grin. “Hey, I bet you’re still broke, right? Burgers are on me today!”

“I appreciate it,” Yusuke says, because if there’s one act of charity he will never turn down it’s food, even if he’s been hungry far less than usual thanks to Sojiro’s random acts of curry.

When he goes home to paint, Akira carefully working to make something at the desk, Morgana sleeping on the windowsill in the sliver of sunlight beaming out of the clouds, he finally feels like he’s getting somewhere.

Yusuke is two months out from turning sixteen when he thinks he should have confessed far earlier.

He’d been doing it in small ways, over the course of weeks -- Desire and Hope, after all, was quite the success, and Yusuke had thought that perhaps Akira’s influence on it would have been clear, but he may have overestimated his own ability to convey feelings through canvas.

Yusuke has been learning to make curry, both from Akira and from Sojiro; he has taken to tutoring some enterprising elementary schoolers in the ways of art for extra money to earn his keep. He hopes he’s a better teacher than Madarame was to him while simultaneously thinking that despite all of Madarame’s sins, Yusuke learned quite a lot from him. Yusuke still refuses to sell his art, of course, but teaching seems to be a way to help pay for his consistent intrusion on Leblanc.

Sojiro won’t accept money, of course, maintaining that a second freeloader is hardly that much more of a burden than the first, but Yusuke does his best to keep extra ingredients in the fridge, to find the stalls that have the best produce and return it to the Leblanc kitchen when no one is looking. In the same way, when no one is looking, a newspaper cutout graces the front of the refrigerator: a clipped out story of Yusuke’s win in the art competition, his painting rendered in grayscale and tacked in place with colored magnets alongside the trash schedule and a drawing of Morgana that he’s inclined to attribute to Futaba.

Yusuke has allowed himself to stay up later than necessary talking with Akira; to let Akira watch him paint on more than one occasion. His figure studies all have messy black hair, and his abstracts seem to be a blur of black and red, to the extent that even his teachers have commented on it.

“Is this a phase?” one of them asked, with a polite tone that still managed to convey that he should consider ending said phase sooner rather than later.

“I suppose it is,” Yusuke had admitted, but he had no idea when it would be resolved or if it would be resolved.

So he stands, in November, watching the television program state that the leader of the Phantom Thieves has been arrested and committed suicide in custody. He knows that Akira is safe; he trusts it more than anything else in his life, because the idea that a single element of their plan went wrong is more heart wrenching than anything else he has experienced in his life. He’d experience a thousand of Madarame’s betrayals, a thousand comments from his peers about his lack of family, a thousand lonely nights alone in his room if it means that Akira is alright.

He thinks he should have told him that he has fallen in love with him while he had the chance, and then immediately chastises himself for the feeling, for the mere thought that the plan has gone awry.

He cannot paint. He cannot paint at all, cannot even conceive of an outlet for his anxiety. He stares at the canvas and only vaguely hears the echo of his teacher’s concern, and he lays on Akira’s bed with Morgana with hope and dread in equal measures.

Akira returns.

It’s as though he is the singular object of importance in the room, when he’s there. Everyone is overjoyed to see him, of course; the plan is explained at length and still seems confusing to the adults in the room, but it’s merely background noise to Yusuke, because he’s focused in on Akira.

He sits next to Akira before anyone else can. Ann gives him a look that starts out curious and then turns understanding, and she gives him a thumbs up before she falls into place next to Ryuji. Yusuke’s knee knocks into Akira’s, and Akira doesn’t move his knee away; his hand falls, eventually, down to Yusuke’s thigh in a steady touch of electric current that Yusuke can barely handle.

“There’s something I must confess,” Yusuke says, finally, when it’s the two of them, alone in the Leblanc attic, Morgana still walking Futaba home.

“You didn’t think I died, did you?” Akira asks, the same cheekiness that’s displayed so prominently when he’s acting as Joker clear within his voice. He stands there, in his low-slung sleep pants and his shirt, the dip of his clavicle visible through the collar, and Yusuke thinks he could never paint anything as beautiful as Akira is right now.

“I had the utmost faith in you,” Yusuke says, easily, refusing to acknowledge the dark thread of doubt that had permeated his time without Akira. “But that isn’t what I wanted to discuss. No -- what I need to discuss.”

Akira turns to face Yusuke fully, his gaze curious. He’s been a steady fixture of Yusuke’s life for such a little span of time, objectively speaking, and yet Yusuke feels as though he is the most important thing in it by far.

“Okay,” Akira says, easily, that openness that makes him so easy to talk to managing to do nothing to calm the rattling of Yusuke’s heart.

“I am,” Yusuke starts, and then stops. “No. I suppose it would be more accurate to say that I believe that I, based on all measures I have been able to discover, am -- in love with you.”

Akira doesn’t look surprised at all by this revelation, even though Yusuke can hear the shake in his voice, feel the shake in his hands. Akira only smiles, and Yusuke braces himself for the impact of a rejection, for the feeling of his blood running hot with shame and the world falling away until it’s only him, alone, unable to make any meaningful connections.

Instead, Akira takes his hands. Akira takes Yusuke’s hands into his own, threading their fingers together gently, and Yusuke stares at their hands so that he doesn’t have to stare at Akira. The same feeling of hope and dread is swirling uselessly inside of him, a whirlpool of distortion that makes him worry he’d create his own entire palace of delusion centered entirely around his love for Akira if he isn’t careful.

“I was wondering when you’d say it,” Akira says, and all the air goes out of Yusuke’s lungs. “There’s a reason I invited you to stay here, you know.”

“You can’t mean to tell me that you have liked me since May,” Yusuke argues, weakly. There is very little distance between he and Akira, and Yusuke fixates on the gap, on the wood he can see when his head is bowed down, the grains between their feet.

“Maybe a little,” Akira says, and Yusuke’s head jerks up. There’s no lie in Akira’s face, no deception that Yusuke can uncover.

He doesn’t think it’s like what Ann and Ryuji said at all. More than anything, he wants Akira to know him, to see him more deeply than anyone else ever had and to accept him even so.

“Even though,” Yusuke says, quietly, like he has to defend himself from this, like he has to put up a fight if he’s to accept a gift like affection, “I’m quite odd?”

“It’s part of your charm,” Akira says.

“But,” Yusuke begins, and Akira leans in, stops Yusuke’s doubts and very likely his heart as well by pressing their lips together. It’s a kiss that only lasts a few seconds, but it overloads all of Yusuke’s synapses, leaves him speechless and wanting.

“Stay in the bed tonight,” Akira offers.

They sell the futon a week later, despite Morgana’s complaints about the bed being too crowded now.

Yusuke is freshly sixteen when he draws his family. It isn’t for a project, for a teacher or for anything else -- it’s a small piece of art, hardly the kind of thing he’d enter in a contest or competition. It’s watercolors and pencil, the paper heavy with the weight of the medium as much as the subject.

“So that we’ll be with you, until we can all meet again,” Yusuke says, and presses it into Akira’s hands before he leaves.

“Keep the attic clean for me,” Akira says, and accepts it, looking at it long enough that Yusuke worries he’ll find it inadequate before Akira tucks it away safely in his bag, cushioned between items to be certain that it will be safe until his destination.

“Of course,” Yusuke says.

Yusuke is nineteen, and has found the answers to several things he was so confused about when he was younger.

He doesn’t remember his mothers face, but he knows the feelings in Sayuri; he knows the expression that Sojiro gives him when he’s stayed up too late and fallen asleep at the Leblanc counter. He knows the clap of Madarame’s hand on his shoulder and the feeling of wanting to make someone proud.

Yusuke doesn’t have parents to fill in his family tree, but he’s found something much richer than that. His family tree is a wide series of branches with no relation to each other, the former Phantom Thieves and associates all lined up, orbiting around Akira but no less connected to Yusuke himself for it.

He pays for his half of the apartment with the money he makes helping teach children art. He’s attending university classes with the aspiration of becoming even better as an artist, and he has an exhibit next week. It isn’t exclusively for him, of course, his fame is nowhere near that level, but he has several paintings on display and it’s been a buzz for months now, the rising star of the art world.

“Wow,” Akira says, sitting next to him on the couch, leaning on Yusuke’s shoulders while the news does a spot on the exhibit while Yusuke flips through the syllabus for the next semester and wonders if he can get out of sculpting entirely. “Don’t let the fame go to your head.”

“I wouldn’t dare dream of it,” Yusuke says, automatically. Akira leans up and gives him a kiss, and Yusuke lets the syllabus fall, forgotten, to the floor beside the couch.

It’s a Yusuke Kitagawa original, and it’s never sold to the public: it sits exclusively on a shelf, framed, in front of several cognitive psience books authored by Futaba and the tell-all (perhaps the tell-much) autographed copy of Mishima’s book on the Phantom Thieves.

It’s all of them together, at the height of their youth, the smiles on their faces. Sae and Sojiro are there, the watercolors all faded, Sojiro’s apron blending into the backdrop of Leblanc behind them. Ryuji’s arm is looped carelessly over Ann’s shoulders, and Haru’s hair is blocking out part of Makoto’s torso in a minor error that Yusuke hadn’t had the time to fix, and Morgana is perched on Akira’s shoulders, triumphant.

It’s a moment in time, forever enshrined in their home and in Yusuke’s heart, as the moment he understood what family could be.

He thinks his mother would be proud.