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Toge plummets to the earth like a meteorite and lands on the ground by Maki, kicking up a fair amount of dirt with him. She glances away from her notebook and wrinkles her nose at him.
“You could’ve dodged that one,” she says.
“Tuna tuna!”
Toge pulls down his collar to stick his tongue out at her and then goes back to the fruitless task of fighting Gojo. This happens every month, Gojo versus the students, and the outcome is always the same. Not that there’s nothing that can be learned from a fight like that, but it’s tedious to watch when Toge is making the same mistake as last time. His speed can’t help him here; Gojo can just run him around until he’s exhausted and then slam him into the ground. He needs more solid strength, the ability to more easily take a hit. Maki will work on it later, probably by beating the shit out of him in training. It’s what friendship’s about.
Maki goes back to her sketch. She’s been looking at her notes, yeah, but there’s nothing wrong with doodling some in the margins. It keeps her hands moving, keeps part of her physically ready for when it’s her turn. And, well, she’s pretty good at it. The lessons she had to go to so that she would be a proper Zen'in lady mostly sucked, but the art lessons were fun. Plus, it’s nice to be able to sketch the same trees as last year, see how she’s improved since then. She gets better, improving constantly, and it’ll pay off for her. All of her improvements will.
A new set of footsteps joins Toge and Gojo’s. Without looking up, she can tell that they’re Nobara’s. No one else walks so damn loudly except for Panda, and Panda at least tries to quiet himself. Nobara doesn’t bother unless she’s on a mission.
“Hey, Maki-san!” Nobara slides down on the bench next to her. Left side, the same one she sat on when they played baseball on this field. She usually winds up on Maki’s right. “What’re you up to?”
“Studying. Drawing. Watching Toge get his ass kicked. The usual.”
Nobara snorts. “You know, Gojo-sensei only does this ‘cause it’s a free excuse to fight.”
“Probably, but that doesn’t mean you can’t learn something while losing,” Maki tells her. One of her trees leans too far to the side; she goes in with her eraser and starts fixing it.
Nobara should be watching the fight. She has lots to learn, and she hasn’t had enough of these days to be bored of them yet. Instead, Nobara’s watching her. Staring, just like always. Maki would be more bothered by it, but Nobara is friendly and pretty and a reliable sorcerer. Maki can deal with her little staring habit.
“Your art is like, really good,” she says. “You should draw me!”
Her request is equal parts presumptuous and charming; or, more accurately, presumptuous and charmed. It leaves Maki with a good opening. “What makes you think you’re more interesting than the trees, huh?”
“Maki-san!”
Nobara shrieks and tries to slap her shoulder. Tries, because Maki catches her wrist before the hit lands. "I’m plenty interesting! Come on, I’ll pose and everything! I’ve been told I’m good at posing. If not for all of this jujutsu stuff, I would’ve been a hell of a model.”
Being asked to draw someone is annoying. It’s the sort of thing that Maki would shoot down, the sort of thing she’s shot down before. She’s refused Naoya a thousand times, told Gojo she’d only draw him if he dropped Infinity long enough for her to give him a good punch, and even said no to Panda the one time he asked. But none of them had ever looked at Maki like Nobara looks at her, like Maki is the earth and she’s a circling satellite, bright and shiny and ever-curious. She wonders where Nobara learned to do that with her face. Maybe she was in her school’s theater club in junior high.
“Sit still, then. Strike whatever pose feels natural.”
Maki steps back and sits down a few feet away, far enough that she has a good look at her while not being too close to the duel. Nobara heard her and has taken what has to be the most unnatural pose in the world. Her shoulders are too far back, legs crossed at a weird angle, and she’s doing something with her face that’s supposed to be a seductive pout and is just not. It’s almost impressive that she’s managed to make such pretty features look so bad.
“Yeah, no. Not that one.”
“What’s wrong with this one?!”
“It makes you look like you’re posing,” she says. “The whole point of portraits is that they’re supposed to be natural.”
“Ugh. Let me try something else, then.”
The next pose is, to her amazement, even worse. “Hold that,” Maki says, if only because she can get over there and fix it.
She gets closer, squinting at Nobara. It’s hard to know where to even start with her. “Drop your shoulders.”
Nobara does it without a fight. It immediately makes her look more relaxed, more settled in their environment. Like she was born to be on the baseball field’s benches while two of the best sorcerers Maki knows duke it out in the background.
“Relax your face.”
To her credit, Nobara seems to try. It just doesn’t work. There’s a lingering tension in her jaw, and so Maki grabs it, digging her fingers into the tensing muscles.
“Relax it more. ”
“It’s relaxed!” Nobara insists, although it comes out ridiculously garbled. A side effect of Maki’s fingers pressing into her mandible.
When Maki laughs at the noise, her face turns a brilliant shade of pink. That’s...interesting. Nobara’s never flushed out of embarrassment around anyone else, not that she’s seen. Maki wouldn’t have even guessed she was capable of it. There’s something almost shy in her expression, but the stubbornness is there, too. She holds out the tension in her jaw for another second—impressive, considering the amount of pressure that Maki’s putting on it— and then it finally relaxes.
“Doesn’t that feel better?” Maki asks. “You’re going to give yourself TMJ if you keep clenching your jaw like that. You’ll be stiffer than Nanami at the rate you’re going.”
“If Nanami has it, it has to be a pretty boring disease.”
“Most of them are. Now, tilt your head to the left. Not that much! Don’t break the thing, you only have one. Closer to center.”
Nobara follows her instructions, and now she’s sitting like she usually does, posture neatly between engaged and casually disinterested, ready to go either way at the tilt of the wind. Maki grabs her hands and arranges them in her lap, folds them neatly into the fabric of her skirt. Her hands are soft; she must use some sort of hand cream. Maki’s loathe to let go of them, nice as they are, but she does it.
She takes two steps back and looks at her new subject. More interesting than the trees, definitely, although she’s not going to admit that. “Perfect.”
Nobara smiles, her usual impish grin returning to her face. She’s always been praise-hungry, but not in the open way that Yuji is. It’s quieter, somewhat more subtle and much more selective. For some reason, it selected her.
“Hold that expression, too,” Maki orders. “It’s a good one on you.”
The blush from earlier returns, giving her another piece of information worth holding on to. She’ll analyze this moment later, when she’s not in the middle of living it. This is all very interesting.
Maki opens up her notebook to a fresh page and starts scribbling down the shape of her. The general structure of her arms, her legs, the uniform skirt that billows ever-so-slightly in the breeze. Nobara is beautiful; Maki’s always known that, in an objective sort of way. Sitting down and really thinking about it is different, though. There’s something devastating about the curve of her leg beneath the tights, the way her uniform jacket settles on her shoulders, the smile on her face as she considers the lines that it makes. Maki aches, although she can’t say for what. She knows enough of her heart to know that it’s not jealousy, to know that it’s more than a simple attraction, but she can’t say what it actually is. There’s something new and nameless blossoming in her chest that she doesn’t know what to do with. She wonders if maybe she’s invented something.
Nobara shifts. And then shifts again. Her expression falters around the eyes, but then Toge goes flying and it returns to its full glory.
“He’s pretty aerodynamic, huh?”
Maki snorts. “You should’ve seen him the first time he fought Gojo-sensei. I think he cleared a few roofs.”
Toge lands on the bench next to them, impressively managing to make it look like he intended to sit there.
“Don’t let him beat you, senpai!” Nobara insists. “You have to prove that you’re the coolest white-haired dude around here! I can’t let him continue to think that he’s the coolest of anyone. It’s insufferable.”
Toge flashes her a peace sign and goes right back to running at Gojo.
“You hurt my feelings, Nobara!” Gojo yells at her. It’s not shocking that he heard her, really. Nobara doesn’t lower her voice for anything or anyone.
“You don’t have feelings!”
“I will have you know that I am filled to the brim with emotions!”
Maki turns to look at him. Gojo is trying so hard not to laugh that his cheeks are puffing out like a particularly greedy chipmunk’s. “Being a nuisance isn’t an emotion, Gojo-sensei. It’s a series of actions that you take daily.”
“No, but enjoying being a nuisance is.”
Toge manages to almost hit him, which forces Gojo to almost pay attention and briefly shut his mouth. It lets Maki go back to drawing in peace, at least.
And then Nobara starts squirming again. Maki looks away from her and in her periphery, Nobara stills.
She knows that it’s rude to experiment on your friends, especially when your friends are kind of gullible. Nobara’s not as gullible as Panda or Yuji, sure, but she can trick her. Maki can do it easily, and more than that, she’s curious about what all of this means. There’s an idea forming in the back of her mind, something that she can only half-comprehend herself, and Maki wants to see where it goes.
She looks at Nobara. Doesn’t even pretend to sketch while she does it, going as far as to put her pencil down. She stares, counting out ten seconds in her head. Nobara wiggles her fingers, twists her ankle a little too far to the left, and then huffs. She’s started frowning, too, but it’s not a frown that Maki’s seen on her before. It’s not pissed or sad or frustrated. It’s something new. She doesn’t know what emotion is lingering behind it.
When Maki looks away, it disappears.
She checks it again, counts to fifteen this time, and sure enough, the same happens again. With enough staring, Nobara goes from posing perfectly to being almost...uncomfortable. Self-conscious. It’s not something she expected of her. Nobara’s never been uncomfortable with eyes on her, not that Maki’s seen. She takes selfies daily, wears flashy outfits designed to draw the eye, talks with confidence that crosses the line over to arrogance at least once a sentence. But has she ever looked at Nobara this long? Has she ever let her eyes linger like this? It’s not prolonged gazes that have an effect on her, no. She’s seen how Nobara reacts to stares in the street. It’s Maki’s prolonged gaze that’s doing this to her.
She checks it two more times, just to be sure, and then puts it in the same file as the blush. They’re connected, surely, and worth puzzling out. Something more is going on here, something more than the fact that Nobara sometimes talks about how shiny Maki’s hair is and insists on sitting next to her wherever they go. That’s just normal, friendly behavior, if not clingy. This...isn’t.
The wind picks up and sends Nobara’s hair flying into her face. For a second, Maki regrets not having any colored pencils with her. Nobara’s hair is a stunning color in the afternoon sun, chestnut brown with faint red highlights. It’s a wonder of the world, really. Then, of course, she realizes that she has to fix Nobara’s hair.
Maki gets up and finds that she’s already in the process of fixing it herself. She could let her do it on her own. Probably should let her do it on her own, if she’s being honest. There’s no reason for Maki to try and do it when Nobara usually has her hair handled.
Maki walks over to her anyways.
“Hold still,” she says, and pulls Nobara’s hands away by the wrist.
When she lets go of them to start fixing her hair she realizes that holy shit, Nobara’s not even breathing. She’s stiller than when she was properly posing, stiller than that time Toge’s stop command misfired and froze her in place. This still, all because Maki got in her face, grabbed her hands, and told her to be.
Now Maki’s the one frozen. Her nerves are electric, singing with something sharp and shiny. She has some kind of hold over Nobara, one much weightier than she had originally assumed. This is raw power with just a word and the move of a hand, a universe-moving thing that she doubts that humans are ever supposed to see, let alone touch. If you bottled this feeling up and sold it on the street, Maki’s sure that you could make the Zen'in family fortune in an afternoon. Maybe this is why Gojo is so intolerable, since he gets to go around like this all the time.
The fact that Maki came here with a purpose comes back to her. She cards her fingers through Nobara’s hair, not necessarily trying to find order in it so much as she’s trying to feel it. It’s soft and smooth, well-cared for. Smells nice, too. It’s cinnamon-and-something, although Maki’s not sure what the something else is. Then, she starts putting it meticulously back in order, cares for it with the gentleness that she’s sure Nobara does. She’s still not breathing.
“You’re going to pass out like that,” Maki scolds, but it’s half hearted at best.
“No, I’m not!”
“Then breathe.”
Nobara tries, but it seems to be hard for her. It doesn’t seem to have a medical cause, either. This is Maki-induced, and that too-powerful feeling tempts Maki again, makes her look at Nobara after she’s fixed her hair and go, “Your skirt rode up a bit, too.”
Before Nobara can protest, Maki fixes it, her hands touching the edge of Nobara’s thighs. They’re just the right balance of strong and soft, and she curses their uniform tights for not letting her touch the skin. Then, before she can do something too reckless, she pulls her hands away. Her skirt is back in order, although Maki’s not sure it was ever even out of order in the first place.
She’s almost done with the sketch. It’s a good thing, too, since it looks like Toge is almost finished with his fight. The glimpse that Maki gets of him is fleeting, but he looks pale and exhausted. He has a few more minutes in him, maybe.
Maki sits down and finishes up the portrait. It’s not bad. Not her best, considering the time restrictions, but it’s good. Nobara grins at her from the page, looking mischievous and charming. Tempting and maybe a little dangerous, but not malicious. No, Nobara isn’t malicious here. She saves that for curses and Mai, something that’s never going to be anything but funny to her.
“It’s done,” she says, and Nobara relaxes.
“Good! My leg was starting to hurt from holding that pose.”
“Poor thing,” Maki works on carefully ripping the page out of her notebook, but she takes a break from it to smirk at Nobara. “Need me to kiss it better?”
Before Nobara can respond, Maki laughs. She wouldn’t mind doing that, not at all, but this is something a bit too new for her to say to her in earnest. She might just go and scare Nobara off, and then where would they be?
Nobara’s mostly recovered by the time that Maki makes her way over to the bench and sits next to her. “Here, have a look at it.”
“Holy shit, you did that?! That took what, fifteen minutes?!”
“Closer to ten, but yeah.”
Nobara tears her gaze away from the sketch to look at her. She gives her a look that’s so obviously strook that it leaves Maki stricken. “You’re amazing, Maki-san. Seriously amazing.”
“It’s not much.”
“Not much? This is better than literally any picture of me! I can’t believe you’re this good of an artist on top of being a great jujutsu sorcerer. What other talents are you hiding, huh? Are you a prodigy pianist or something?”
Maki chuckles. “I bit my piano teacher after two lessons, so no.”
“Well, they probably had it coming.”
From the far corner of the field, Gojo calls out to them. “You’re up, Maki!”
Toge limps away from him, disgruntled and dishevelled. Maki does her best not to laugh at him.
“Well, I have business to attend to,” Maki says. When Nobara goes to hand the sketch back to her, she shakes her head. “Keep it. It’s yours.”
“Really?”
“Yeah.”
Nobara smiles, her whole face lighting up. “Thanks! Now, go kick his ass!”
Maki knows that she probably won’t kick his ass, even though she has her Grade One knife on her to practice with. Still, something about Nobara’s tone makes her think that she has a chance.
She jogs away, passing Toge as she goes. They don’t exchange words, but Maki gives him an encouraging pat on the shoulder. The angle of his eyebrows lets her know that Toge saw what she was up to with Nobara and is probably going to give her his version of an interrogation later. That’ll be a fun time.
Before she’s at Gojo, Maki looks back. Toge is heading off the field to get his injuries checked out, but Nobara stays on the bench. She’s looking at the sketch, and even from a distance, Maki can see that she’s beaming. It’s not a joking thing, either. Maki can’t tell what gives it away, but something about Nobara is genuinely, completely happy. Happy because of something Maki did for her, and it makes Maki smile as well.
With that, it all clicks into place. Everything fits together in a way that makes too much sense, in a way that’s so obvious that it’s amazing that Maki didn’t figure it all out before. It’s almost funny, how clear it all is. It would be funnier if she wasn’t experiencing it. As it is, it’s startling.
“You can do it, Maki-san!” Nobara yells, apropos of nothing but an earnest want for her to succeed. It’s sweet and loud and genuine and for her. It’s all for her.
And Nobara’s kind words surely must have cursed her because for the first time since she was a child, Zen'in Maki trips over her own two feet.