Work Text:
78°: ½♡ 72 Gift = 36
His old, shitty, beat-up board. His and Rhyme's stand-up manzai supplies: fans, umbrella, drum. Boxes of instant curry and canned foods bought in bulk when they scraped together enough cash to afford a big purchase that they'd eat through for the next few months. Old shoes that he couldn't wear anymore but that he hadn't thrown away on the hopes he could mend them. Threads that he'd patched and repatched, having learned to sew better than his middling class parents ever could thanks to his friend Shiki. A pair of nice headphones: a gift Neku'd gotten him before he'd gotten shot in front of his very eyes. Some tees and socks from that little hot guy in her phone that Nagi loved so much, gotten for him supposedly for Nagi's sake. Not his thing, but it'd made for decent clean stuff to wear at home.
And, hey, no one needed to know what was printed on the ass of his boxers. Like Rhyme would advised him, he wouldn't look at gift horse in the mouth too closely, 'specially not when Nagi claimed an ulterior motive.
Some funky-smelling ancient cakes of...soap or something?...left over from the previous tenants. Some prayer beads. Another crack in the friggin' pipe.
The duct tape he used to fix it up. Duct tape and WD-40, his best buds since he and Rhyme had moved out on their own.
And the pins and threads he'd gotten during the Game thanks to their fearless leader Rindo, and Fret's great fashion advice. He hadn't had a reason to say no at the time: they'd needed the stats for the Game, and stacking paper—digitally—on ShibuPay just meant smacking his board into a couple of frogs or chameleons. Man, he'd never imagined seeing those kinds of numbers. Too bad the yen had vanished the moment they'd gone to the RG...but the threads hadn't. A bunch of stuff that fit his broad frame and taste: mostly MONOCROW and Tigre PUNKS, though he could've sworn he'd been a HOG FANG thing or two in there somewhere, and a single Gatto Nero piece Kitty Girl'd convinced him of. Man, he missed WILDBOAR. The new styles just didn't resonate with him in the same way.
Could've done some canned fruit, but the tradition went for something fresh: something that he couldn't really afford, especially with the heat wave forcing him and Rhyme to turn the aircon up at night despite their best efforts otherwise.
Maybe one of the pins. They had some sweet designs. The Top o' Topo one looked too cutesy, the Tigre PUNKS one too Tigre PUNKS-branded with the name running all over the design, the HOG FANG one a solid maybe if not for the giant H and F plunked on the boar's shades, and the Joli bécot one too...whatever the hell Joli bécot was supposed to be, and kinda sexy, which didn't fit her style, anyhow.
Man. Did he really got nothing he could give 'Fro Gramma for ochugen?
She'd more or less supplanted his income the past couple of weeks. A couple of stray delivery requests to croaky panic—the Don'd put in a recommendation for him, it seemed, and man, he had to get the Don a summer gift, too—that he'd nailed, and booyaka, she'd fed him long lines of increasingly steady jobs. After months of scraping by just paying the rent and getting food, he'd finally started earning enough to squirrel away more than a couple yen for Rhyme's college fund every month.
He wouldn't have enough to put her through, but he'd have enough to convince the bank to let him get a loan. Didn't matter to him how long it took to pay it off.
Rhyme didn't need to hear any of that, either.
When Rhyme's next birthday rolled around, he wouldn't have to accept Shiki, Neku, and Eri's 'donations' of the fatty fish Rhyme liked. He'd buy it himself, just for his lil sis, and make her curry the way she loved it, perfect as every hair on her head.
'Fro Gramma called him an idiot and wouldn't go two minutes without bitching about tourists this, tourists that. Yeah, yeah, he hated that they'd ripped up the old MIYASHITA half-pipes, too, but could she give it a rest already? But he wouldn't complain. She'd not only given him a job, even while she griped about his inability to hold down a steady job, but she'd also let him cool off in her storeroom between deliveries, guzzling down pitchers of her iced barley tea where before he'd either gone dizzy from the heat or occasionally bought some vending machine pop, every ching and bleep of the machine packing guilt until the bottle dropped into his palm with the weight of first-degree murder. Too weak to withstand the summer? Gotten so dehydrated he had to waste money? Letting Rhyme down when she wasn't even around to see it?
But not anymore. She'd jeer that he'd keel over halfway to Pork City without her regular infusions, and then she'd have to bother with training a whole new handyman.
And she was right. Didn't matter to him what a damn thing came out of her mouth as long as he could keep himself from conking out midstreet. He thanked her by jimmying the handle just like that, the way she'd shown him, on his way out. Kept the door from getting stuck.
More than that, though: she'd started getting him to deliver fresh snacks to croaky panic, then letting him take home anything that didn't get sold by the end of the day. Asked about his and Rhyme's favourite snacks here and there. Taking advantage of him, she'd called it. Free market research on the youth. Had to buy the snacks that'd get 'em in the door, so she'd put his favourite potato chips and Rhyme's favourite dried shredded squid in the delivery order every day and let him take pocketfuls home most days.
He might've been stupid, but he wasn't dumb.
But the second he asked her about it, they'd have to admit it to each other. Call it what it was. Charity. Naw, he didn't take charity. He could accept the unspoken as payment for his delivery work, his speed on the board, his strength hoisting all those boxes, his reliability every single morning at seven o'clock sharp.
The least he could do was get her something for ochugen.
Something thoughtful. Something that'd appeal to her style. Something that'd show the gratitude he couldn't put in words.
As he thumbed through the threads, he spotted something sticking out of the pockets of some over-chained Tigre PUNKS shorts. Eh? He flicked it out. A little rectangular box, wrapped in reddish-brown noshigami with a simple red-and-yellow bow decal on the top. Huh. Right. What had Fret called it? His lucky item or something? Rindo'd always asked him to shove it in his pocket whenever they'd gone hunting for a particularly rare pin. Couldn't see a brand logo anywhere: perfect. Didn't want to insult her by giving her something screaming Tigre PUNKS or HOG FANG or whatever.
Something about it...something about it kinda reminded him of her. A mystery present. An unexpected gift.
Insides unknown, but something nice, something kind—or they wouldn't make for much of a gift.
Yeah. Yeah, the gift sucked ass, but at least it'd fit her style. Hell, he could see her selling something like this at her shop. The summer gifts she stocked in now for tourists had blue and yellow paper, but the reddish-brown just fit her more, somehow.
Might not have been the most charming gift, but at least it'd carry his well wishes.
Right?
Right. Didn't have a doubt about it.
Like anything else in life, he'd stop overthinking and keep pushing forward instead.