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A painting to me is primarily a verb, not a noun, an event first and only secondarily an image.
-Elaine de Kooning
It starts with Akira, the way everything always does.
Yusuke is sitting on the floor of Leblanc’s attic, chasing the sunlight filtering through the window while he paints. He’s cross-legged on a dropcloth spread out over the old warped hardwood, hunched over the canvas propped up in front of him using a stack of Akira’s books.
Akira had been lying on his bed on his stomach, studying, but now he makes a soft clicking sound with his tongue and Yusuke looks back at him and realizes he’s folded his arms over his open notebook, elbows resting on his own neat, cramped writing, and has his head turned back over one shoulder to watch.
Yusuke is startled but not bothered; he tends to go into a bit of a trance when he paints, and as a result hadn’t ever learned to be very private about the process.
Besides, he would never mind if it was Akira.
“What do you think?” he asks, oddly self-conscious, angling the painting with blue-stained hands so Akira can see better. It’s been so long since either of them talked, working in companionable silence together, that his voice is raspy from disuse.
Even Morgana hasn’t said anything for a while, though it’s likely only because he’s been asleep in the sunlight on Akira’s cluttered desk for over an hour, tail twitching as he dreams, making no sound but the occasional small, mrr-ing snore.
Akira pushes himself up off his arms and rolls over, maneuvering so he’s hanging over the side of the unmade bed. He tilts his head to one side, really looking at the painting instead of just pretending to do so, the way some people might. At last he nods once, looking satisfied, and Yusuke feels warmth suffuse out through his body, slow and sweet. It’s as good as an ecstatic outburst from anyone else.
The painting is unfinished and on the abstract side, a wash of blues spiraling into bright red. An experiment. Yusuke isn’t sure about it yet.
Akira doesn’t move away right away, like Yusuke was expecting. Instead, he wriggles forward even further on his elbows, leaning in so close to peer at the painting that Yusuke can feel the brush of his hair soft against his cheek.
Yusuke can’t help the faint inhale he makes, so startled he feels rooted to the spot.
He’s no scientist and yet he’s sure, somehow, that he’s acutely aware of each individual atom in the air between them, drifting like the visible dust motes that dance in the sunlight whenever either of them moves.
He was alone most of the time growing up.
Sometimes he’d tried befriending the other pupils who came and went over the years, but they had never stuck around for very long. Yusuke had only understood why, of course, in the last few months. And Madarame was usually off at an exhibition or out on the town, and staying in his other apartment in between it all more often than not.
The school dorms where Yusuke lives now are crowded, but that’s different, impersonal, and his own roommate is barely ever in their shared space at the same time because he works graveyard shifts at a 24-hour cafe across the city.
So Yusuke’s not used to having people around, the way the Phantom Thieves are always around now.
It isn’t unpleasant, quite the opposite, but it’s certainly an adjustment: the way Ann will lean her shoulder against his without even thinking about it, sitting back with him against a rail in the outdoor mall, chewing on one black-polished thumbnail and debating very seriously between fifty-seven different juice options even though she’s going to get the honey mango passionfruit like always.
Or the way Ryuji might slap him on the shoulder, breathing hard and bright-eyed with his bleached hair sweat-damp at the roots, having jogged back over after completing one of his increasingly quick training laps to where Yusuke is sitting under a tree in the park.
Or this.
Yusuke’s not used to being touched, or even being close to being touched—this overwhelming almost-touch that is Akira leaning over his shoulder, nearly cheek to cheek, breathing quietly as he looks down at Yusuke’s painting through his thick glasses.
His eyes are the color of a summer storm. Yusuke can feel the warmth of him, soaked through as he is with sunlight. Yusuke doesn’t breathe. Akira nods again, lips curving up at the corners. Gaze still on the painting, he tilts his head just a fraction to one side.
His nose brushes over Yusuke’s cheek, and Yusuke feels like a stalk of dry wheat hit by a floating spark. Up in flames.
**********************************************
“Your hair is so pretty, you know that?” Ann sighs, something wistful in her tone.
Yusuke makes a mild, noncommittal sound.
They’re sitting on cement steps near Central Shibuya waiting for Ryuji to order ice cream from a kiosk across the way. Ann is leaning back on her elbows, sunning like a lizard with her shirt folded up carefully over her flat stomach and her skirt rolled down a notch on her hips.
Yusuke’s working on detailing a blank card a step below her, carefully lining letters in wet black ink.
He nearly ruins the whole thing when slim fingers slip through his hair and blunt-cut nails scrape faintly over his scalp. “What are you doing?” he asks, once he can focus on anything besides the electric, buzzing sensation of her hands in his hair. He manages to keep the inked pen nib steady, stilled on the downward slope of an ‘S’.
“It’s getting long,” Ann remarks from behind him, seeming not to have heard either the question or his panic. She settles forward, one slim leg appearing on either side of him in his peripheral vision.
It’s odd to hear her say it, it’s getting long, as if she’s known him long enough to know what his hair is usually like.
Odder still is that she’s right; it’s longer than he’s ever worn it, at least since he was very small. It flops into his vision more than normal, and he’s started pinning it back when he’s in the studio or in Akira’s room working. He hasn’t had the time to cut it lately, with everything.
She hums, her hands stilling on his head. “Can I give you pigtails?” she asks, and Yusuke considers for a moment before nodding. It isn’t the hairstyle that makes him pause; it’s the terrifying prospect of having her touching him for long enough to complete it.
Ann makes a pleased sound, bright and beautiful just like she is, and he can’t regret his decision. Not if she’s happy. Never if she’s happy.
She sets to combing his hair around with her fingers, pulling it into different bunches experimentally. She’s only just carefully brushed his bangs up out of his eyes when she pauses, then sighs. “Drat, I didn’t think this through. Hang on a sec.”
His hair falls back into his face, scented faintly now with something floral and sweet that might be traces of her hand lotion. Yusuke isn’t sure what she’s doing, so he blows at the strands obscuring his vision and tries to turn his attention back to the card. He’s not terribly successful.
She renews dragging her fingers through his hair momentarily, pulling it again into the desired arrangement. It’s just as distracting as before. He feels a harder tug, and something snaps around one of the bunches, and then the other. She pats the top of his head. “There!”
He looks back at her, questioning, with a clear field of vision for the first time in — ever, and sees her beam in response. Her eyes are crinkled at the corners unselfconsciously. Her hair tumbles down over her shoulders like cornsilk now, freed from its usual elastics. He reaches up absently to touch his hair and realizes that she must have sacrificed them to secure his own pigtails.
It’s almost too much, looking at her without the usual screen of his own hair. Like staring unblinking directly at the sun.
Ryuji returns, hopping back up the steps. His shadow falls over both of them. He’s balancing three paper cups of ice cream with colored spoons stuck in them, even though Yusuke had—after surreptitiously counting the coins in his pocket—declined Ryuji’s offer to get him one. He pushes one of the cups into Yusuke’s hands, over his faint protest, and raises both his eyebrows.
“Dude,” he says, in a long-suffering sort of way. “You look ridiculous.”
The ice cream is cold in Yusuke’s hands through the paper. It’s colder, sweet and melting, when he pokes out his tongue to lick where it’s dripping over one side of the cup.
“I think he looks cute,” Ann says, and sticks her tongue out at Ryuji. She nudges her knees playfully into Yusuke’s sides, toying with the ends of the pigtails. He doesn’t remember how to move any part of his body. He’s not sure limbs are still connected to other limbs.
“Don’t listen to Ryuji,” she says confidentially, lips near his ear. “You look cute.”
Yusuke doesn’t want to go back to breathing air that doesn’t smell like flowers.
**********************************************
He’s hurt, gripping at the burn on his side and trying not to collapse in the middle of Mementos, and not aware of anything past that.
Then that consciousness morphs to include Ryuji, bright and yellow, Ryuji who appears out of the blackness, ducks up under his arm and takes his flagging weight. “Come on, bud,” he mutters, hauling Yusuke forward a painful step, and then another. “Let’s get you back to the van.”
The pain is so bad that Yusuke is pretty sure he loses consciousness for a few minutes, because the next thing he’s aware of is being manhandled into the high, soft backseat of Mona’s bus, and Ann says frantically, “Get his feet!” and Ryuji says back, “I know, I know!”
A door slams, and then another. Mona’s motor purrs to life, and the bus jolts forward. Someone’s arm goes across Yusuke’s body to keep him from sliding off the seat. Someone’s hand curls around his shoulder.
“My fault,” Yusuke says, or tries to say, with the world fuzzy around him. “Dropped my guard. Very foolish.”
Everything’s been broken up into abstract shapes and bright spots. The dark of the ceiling. The red of Ann’s leather. The glow from what must be the headlight beams bouncing ahead of them, visible in the gap between the two front seats. The blond of Ryuji’s hair. It’s all rather lovely. He tries to focus on that, instead of the pain.
“Fuck, it’s not your fault,” Ryuji’s voice says. He sounds upset. Yusuke doesn’t know why. “I was right there. I was right fucking th—” he goes quiet, and then says, “I should have been able to protect you. Stupid. I was stupid. Panther? Are you—”
“Just one more second,” says Ann, from closer than Yusuke had thought she’d be. Her voice sounds strained. He hopes it’s not on his account. She should never sound like that.
Then the haze clears, and the pain shrinks and dwindles down to a pinpointed area in his abdomen, flares sharp and awful—Yusuke feels his body tremor all over without his consent, feels the hands on his shoulder and side come back to hold him—and then it disappears entirely.
Yusuke opens his eyes to the soft grey ceiling of the van, and to both Ann and Ryuji’s worried faces above him, unblurred and familiar. “Thank God,” Ann says, removing her palms from over the gaping singed hole in his tunic. She leans up to Akira. “Stop for a sec, he needs room. I’m coming up front.”
The van slows obediently, and then stops, idling. Ann hops out, slides the door shut behind her, and then there’s the faint crunch of footsteps circling around before she slides into the front seat next to Akira instead.
He starts driving again. The Mona van meows as it stutters forward. Stations and tunnels begin to flash past on either side as they make for the surface.
“Are you okay, man?” Ryuji asks Yusuke, still looking concerned, brown eyes wide. He’s on his knees on the seat next to him, gloved hands clenched on his thighs.
Yusuke slow-blinks at him, upside-down. He doesn’t know why they’re making such a fuss; they’ve all been hurt before. Possibly the injury was worse than normal, but it’s not like it was Ann or Akira, for Ryuji to be acting like this.
“I’m fine,” Yusuke says. He pats his side with one gloved hand in semi-dazed exploration. It’s true; Ann’s healed everything. The awful burn, the blood and charred skin he’d seen with his own eyes—it’s all fixed. Everything but his clothes. “I apologize for the trouble.”
Ryuji’s face crumples a little bit, and Yusuke doesn’t understand that either. Instead of saying something, though, Ryuji just takes a deep breath and scoots back so that Yusuke can sit up. He meets Akira’s eyes in the rearview and, behind the mask, Akira’s crinkle slightly in pleased acknowledgment.
Yusuke feels a little shaky. All he can see, still, is flames. The afterimage of them licking hungry around his body, sinister and terrible-bright, in the seconds before he’d been able to smother them with his ice. The sight is burnt into his eyelids when he closes them.
Normally he has a positive association with fire, because of Ann. This was very different. Cold, unfriendly. An enemy. “This has given me an idea for an art piece,” he says. His voice sounds oddly distant to his own ears.
“You’re so weird,” Ryuji sighs. He stretches his arm out along the backseat to curl fingers at the nape of Yusuke’s neck, knocking his knuckles gently against the base of his skull. Yusuke’s attention scatters and reshapes around the singular fact of Ryuji’s skin brushing over his. His heartbeat skips, painful, and Yusuke wonders if maybe the healing magic had missed something after all.
“Don’t scare us like that again, okay, pretty boy?” Ryuji says, looking away out the window. His jaw is set.
Yusuke isn’t expecting the blush when it comes, heating his face and neck all the way down to his chest.
**********************************************
Yusuke should have knocked.
“I should have knocked,” he says, trying to back out of the room and down the stairs with his hand still up firmly shielding his eyes. “I’m so very sorry.”
It’s a Sunday morning, and they’d been out late exploring Shibuya looking for a new palace after school the night before. Ann, Ryuji, and Akira had walked Yusuke to the station well past dark, after which he had assumed they had all gone their separate ways.
The tableau before him, and the various sleeping limbs sticking improbably out of Akira’s small bed, makes it very, abundantly clear that they had not.
“Akira,” Ann says, sleep-soft and messy haired, yawning, “Stop him before he hurts himself.”
Yusuke can hear bare feet hit the floor obediently, but he doesn’t dare look back.
“Everyone be quiet,” Ryuji moans from—somewhere, Yusuke couldn’t actually tell which of the lumps in the comforter might be him. “It’s so effing early.”
**********************************************
“You’re acting weird,” Ann tells him bluntly the week after.
It’s Wednesday, and they’re at their Shibuya meeting spot waiting for the others. It’s raining outside, droplets traveling in rivulets down the glass, and Yusuke is not acting weird.
“I’m not acting weird,” he tells her, only a little bit stiff. He’s sketching in pencil in the back of his pad for figure drawing class, mainly for something to do. He traces down the line of Ann’s jaw from memory, the way it looks when she’s turned away thinking hard about something. It’s next to several attempts to capture the curve of Ryuji’s seated back, above a study of Akira’s hands on a coffee cup. “I was merely…” he casts about for the right word, can’t find any that fit, and settles on, “Embarrassed.”
“Why?” she asks, frowning. She had been watching him draw; now she leans back on her heels with her hands curled around the railing, arms braced, like she’s planning to fall.
Yusuke would have expected her to be more shy about the subject, but Ryuji was the one who’d turned bright red and barely been able to meet Yusuke’s eyes that morning, across one of the tables in the closed cafe, after Akira had caught Yusuke by the sleeve and made him promise to stay downstairs until they came down.
He doesn’t know how to answer the question. Nothing about the objective situation would have been innately embarrassing for him, normally. Ryuji had assumed that Yusuke had tried to walk blindly backwards down the stairs because he was afraid they were nude, which, he had whispered hoarsely to Yusuke while Akira brewed coffee, in a tone of utmost urgency, they had not been.
But that hadn’t been it; Yusuke has never been prudish about the naked body, even if those hypothetical naked bodies do belong to his friends. Ann was right. Why was it that he felt the acute not-quite-shame, the nameless discomfort squirming in his chest, even thinking about that morning? He didn’t know.
Because he had intruded on their space, something small and melancholy in the pit of his chest suggested. And was that it? Because he had interrupted something that was theirs, just theirs, the way the Phantom Thieves had been at the beginning?
Because he’d thought, based on nothing—on nothing—that things might be otherwise?
He watches the water chase itself down the glass, collecting and then splitting and reforming.
He can’t say anything like that to Ann. That would be truly embarrassing, for one thing, and it might make her feel bad, like she so easily does, for another. And there’s nothing for her to feel bad for, nothing that’s her fault. It’s not any of their fault.
After all, things are okay—they’re more than okay, because he still gets to have all of them in his life. That thought makes him realize that he is being foolish, after all. It doesn’t matter how they’re there, just that they are. And they are. He’s sure of that.
So he turns away from the rain and flips his sketchbook closed on the drawings of the three people he loves and says, thoughtfully, “I suppose you’re right,” and leaves it at that.
**********************************************
“How is it neither of you can ever remember to bring an umbrella?” Ryuji yells from downstairs in the cafe, where Akira had sent him to look for towels. Akira’s own towel had already been retrieved from where it was carefully folded on his shelf and wrapped around a shivering Ann.
“It wasn’t raining when I left my house!” Ann yells back, unrepentant. “And I don’t think Yusuke owns one.” Her pigtails are steadily dripping water onto the attic floor; she notices too late with a clicking of her tongue and starts to wring them out with the towel draped over her shoulders. Morgana, cleaning his paws too close to her feet, yowls as droplets hit him and races over in a black-and-white blur to leap onto Akira’s bed and glare at them all balefully.
It’s been two weeks since his talk with Ann in Shibuya, and aside from Ryuji’s more frequent blushing when Yusuke’s around, things have mostly returned to normal.
Today’s downpour had caught them when they came out of Mementos after school. As fervently as Ryuji and Akira had tried to shield Ann and Yusuke from the worst of it with their own umbrellas, with the wind the rain was almost sideways and it had been something of a lost effort.
Akira had seen them all to the attic, then gone out with the cryptic explanation that he was going to find them more towels, and Ann and Yusuke had been left to dry off as best they could in the meantime while Ryuji scolded them.
“My socks are wet,” Ann says sadly, and then, in a different, startled tone, “Oh!”
Yusuke, who had just peeled his soaked white shirt off and draped it over one arm, looks up at her, concerned. “Are you alright?”
“Yes!” she says brightly. He keeps watching her, curious, but she seems very focused on her hair. He thinks he hears her giggle as she twists the wet ends around her fingers to get the last of the moisture out of them.
Yusuke is confused, but he leaves it alone. He combs through his own hair carefully, mindful of the dripping and trying to keep it contained. His uniform pants are soaked through as well, and horribly uncomfortable, but after a moment’s serious thought he decides that he probably shouldn’t remove them here.
“Okay, nothing down there except dishrags,” Ryuji’s voice comes as he stomps back up the stairs. “Dirty ones. We’re just going to have to wait for—oh.”
Yusuke turns around just in time to see Ryuji’s expression change from one of annoyance to something else, something Yusuke can’t read. He stares at Yusuke for several seconds, frozen on the top step, then clears his throat loudly and shakes his head like a dog. “For Akira,” he says, finishing his thought. His gaze travels over Yusuke’s face, down to his chest. He blinks, color rising faintly in his cheeks. “Dude, are you like, never in the sun?”
Yusuke sniffs. “Unlike others, I have no intention of exposing myself to dangerous carcinogens or the early ravages of age,” he says. He drapes his shirt over the back of a chair in hopes of letting it dry a bit before he has to head home.
Before either of them can mock him, as they are so clearly poised to do, the jingling of the door downstairs heralds the return of Akira. His familiar quick-light footfalls are audible only seconds before he appears at the stop of the stairwell, smiling triumphantly over the fluffy white towels bundled in his arms.
“Yo, where did you get those?” Ryuji asks, mouth agape, as a towel is pushed into his chest. Akira hands Ann a second towel, then drapes one over Yusuke’s head with a mischievous quirk to his mouth and something alight in his dark eyes.
“He went to the bathhouse,” Morgana answers before Akira can, sounding exasperated. He’s curled up on Akira’s pillow now, one eye open warily lest any of them come closer to him while wet. “You know you’ll have to wash all of those and return them, right? I’m not going to help you.”
Akira only hums and leans over the bed to drop a towel next to Morgana. He scratches behind the cat’s ears the way he always vehemently protests he doesn’t like, even though it makes him pliant and sleepy right away every time. Morgana grumbles something unconvincing and burrows beneath the towel, disappearing from sight save for the lashing white-tipped tail peeking out.
Yusuke startles when Akira appears back in front of him, close and smelling pleasantly of coffee even though he can’t have made any today. He takes hold of the towel and sets to drying off Yusuke’s hair much more briskly than Yusuke had been doing himself.
Yusuke holds still and lets him, the way he’d let him do anything. His mind has only just started to wander when Akira tugs the towel down off his head and wraps it around his shoulders instead.
“Thank you,” Yusuke says, and goes to take it. His fingers brush over Akira’s where he’s still holding onto the ends, and a pleasant buzzing feeling travels up his whole arm. Akira doesn’t let go. He tugs on the towel, just a little. Yusuke gives him a questioning look. “Do you need it back?”
Akira huffs a sigh and shakes his head. His damp hair is shining like obsidian, curling more than usual from the rain. He’d taken off his glasses at some point, Yusuke realizes belatedly. Precipitation always renders them unusable. His grey eyes are huge without them.
He tugs again on the ends of the towel, impatient, and this time Yusuke—who’s still confused but who would never deny a directive from Akira, in either world—gives in to the pull and bows his head obediently.
Akira goes up on his toes to touch his forehead to Yusuke’s, eyes fluttering closed. Yusuke, startled into stillness, keeps his eyes open, even though the details blur at this distance. It’s just colors, the signifiers of a larger whole. Black (hair, eyelashes), peach (skin), pink (mouth).
Their noses brush together, and Yusuke inhales slowly, tightening his grip on the towel. Akira’s fingers are still covering his.
They stay like that for what feels like forever, warm seconds blurring into minutes and hours and who knows how long, lips so close together Yusuke can feel each of Akira’s quiet breaths as easily as his own. And then Akira nudges forward just an inch, shifts only a little, and their mouths touch.
Momentously, they touch.
The wheat, again. The spark, again.
It’s Yusuke’s first kiss. It’s soft, and sweet, and makes Yusuke’s heart ache with wanting. Wanting this, and more, and anything. He’s fairly sure it’s the best kiss he’ll ever have. He can’t breathe, for several seconds, when Akira pulls back to smile at him with mischievous eyes again, his slow, secret smile that’s just for them. Just for him.
Yusuke had forgotten they weren’t alone. He’s reminded when slim arms are flung about his neck from behind. Rain-darkened cornsilk cascades into his vision. Flowers come to mix with the coffee beans.
Ann pipes up near his ear, sounding delighted, “Oh! Are we allowed to kiss Yusuke now?”