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9
Okkotsu Yuuta wants to believe that he is normal. Life makes this irritatingly difficult.
Once, he might’ve managed. He’s been sickly and skittish all his life, but anyone could be. Any nine-year-old boy could have trouble making friends. But now, it is exceedingly difficult to maintain that delusion, no matter how beloved. The simple fact of the matter is that most nine-year-old boys aren’t spirited away after teenagers with prematurely white hair show up at their doors to talk to their parents because apparently they’ve got impressive ancestors, and he…well.
Was.
Most nine-year-old boys aren’t kept under guard, either, or forever attended by tutors, or shoved periodically into stuffy traditional clothes with too many layers in order to be paraded around in front of strangers. Their last names don’t change to match a family they’ve never met a year into middle school. These things are not normal things. His is not a normal life.
Thus, he knows instantly when he makes the acquaintance of a very abnormal girl.
Satoru has wandered off somewhere with the kind of smile on his face that can only mean he wants to murder somebody, which is not at all uncommon at Gojo Clan assemblies. Thus deprived of the only familiar face for miles around, Yuuta stands aimlessly in the spot where Satoru left him, blinking at nothing.
“Yo,” a brash, girlish voice calls from somewhere in the near distance. “Whatcha lookin’ at?”
There is a faint note of mocking in her voice that makes him want to go and hide somewhere. It does not, under any circumstances, permit him to look around and see where the voice is coming from.
“You deaf or something?” she calls again. “I’m up here.”
Yuuta, who thinks later that he must have a death wish somewhere deep inside, looks up. Blinks. Pauses. A pair of legs ending in bare feet dangles from the tallest sturdy branch of a tree. He gapes a little. The girl snorts derisively.
“Take a picture,” she says. “It’ll last longer.”
She must’ve gotten that from a TV show or something, he thinks. He’s never met someone his age who says such impressively brash and grown-up things. Knowing that he doesn’t have any idea how to properly respond to something like that, he opts for silent observation.
The girl is tallish, or at least she seems to be, because her legs, from down here, seem extraordinarily long. They are dangling from the sturdy base of the largest branch of a tree, so, naturally, he notices them first. She’s skinny, with reed-thin legs and the poky kind of knees, but he thinks she must be strong if she managed to get all the way up there. They make him wonder why she was allowed to wear shorts on a day like this, and who she is.
“Oh, ah,” he stammers, reddening, “I don’t have a camera.”
Silence, save for the rustling of leaves. Yuuta winces, and winces harder once the girl bursts out into the harshest peal of laughter he’s ever heard.
It isn’t nice, but he decides quickly that hers is a mean and ugly laugh, and he starts to think maybe he shouldn’t have looked up.
“You’re weird,” she announces. “You that new Gojo kid?”
He still can’t see her face and wonders if he’s even allowed to answer. She could be anyone, after all. She could be one of those assassins the elders are always warning him about. She’s a little young to be a contract killer, true, but one never knows; Yuuta would’ve thought he was too young to be an heir, and look how that turned out.
Probably not, though.
“I’m Yuuta,” he says.
“Thought so.”
The legs disappear for a moment. When he sees them next, they’re shimmying down the trunk to a lower, thicker branch, and when she edges out onto it, it trembles under her weight. Without the blockade of smaller, leafier branches that had hidden her from view before, he can see her face now.
It’s all angles, but her longish bob frames it nicely. She is wearing small shorts beneath a plain green yukata with its skirt hiked up so far he can see almost all of her legs, and her round glasses make her look more inquisitive than her smug expression suggests.
“I’m Maki,” she says. “I’m running away.”
This tells Yuuta nothing, but also everything.
“In a tree,” he says, bewildered.
“Nah, that was just for surveillance.” Close enough to the ground to hop down now, she manages a landing that Yuuta thinks would have broken both his ankles. “Ya know? You gotta know the layout of the place.”
“You don’t live here?”
Maki’s expression shifts quickly from confusion to amusement. “Wow,” she says. “You really don’t know anything.”
This is not news to Yuuta. It is not news at all.
**
Apparently, this had all been explained to Yuuta when he wasn’t paying attention. The Gojo elders are meeting with the elders of the Zenin Clan to discuss what to do about the Kamo Clan, which has too many seats on the Council at Headquarters for anyone else’s liking, and apparently all of these families matter, which Yuuta takes to mean they all probably kill more people who oppose them than most other families in this part of the world. And that means guests. And that means twin girls his age, one of whom is running away from home.
Yuuta doesn’t have a lot of details about this Maki girl. She doesn’t even call herself a Zenin – he has to infer that. She mentions a twin sister who is also, apparently, making a break for it, but she hadn’t been up in the tree because she can’t climb them and that was why Maki had given herself surveillance duty. She isn’t very nice, really, and she keeps informing him that he’s clueless, which is true, but she sticks to him like a louse. Yuuta doesn’t really mind it.
He's known more than a few bullies in his short life. Most of them aren’t half this interesting.
Satoru finds them eventually, and when he does, he seems pleased, probably because Yuuta almost never talks to anyone he doesn’t have to. He thumps his back, which he often does on the rare occasions when Yuuta demonstrates promise as a member of society, and winks, and tells him that he has good taste, whatever that means. Maki looks disgusted and says several choice words that make Yuuta’s eyes widen, at which Satoru laughs.
Yuuta is beginning to suspect that he doesn’t really know what’s going on here, but then, that’s a given.
“He’s an idiot,” Maki’s twin sister bluntly concludes when she forces them to meet up by the tree for the sake of ‘reconnaissance.’
Yuuta does not defend himself.
“I know,” Maki says. “But he’s useful.”
It will be several years before Yuuta realizes that those words meant he would never be able to get rid of her.
**
11
“You didn’t run away.”
Maki hears the words before she sees the speaker, and she whirls on Yuuta with a look on her face that her mother would probably hit her for. That boy is the Gojo heir, she’d hiss, as if she had even an iota of respect for the Gojos or who their heir was. Message clear: powerful men are owed her deference, no matter how much she’s supposed to hate them. That her mother isn’t there to see her glare at him makes said glare all the more satisfying.
“Yeah,” she says. “No thanks to you.”
She expects defensiveness – what did I do? – but doesn’t get any. Yuuta really just looks puzzled. “That’s too bad,” he says.
What?
“Yeah, it is.”
Then they lapse into silence. Clan assemblies don’t really offer them very much to talk about, and Maki is starting to realize that Yuuta isn’t much of a talker even at the best of times. She wonders if somehow he’s gotten even less talkative since they last spoke almost two years ago.
Two years – tch. She doesn’t even know how she remembers him after all that time.
“You got taller,” he tells her timidly.
“You didn’t.”
He wilts in the shoulders. “I know.”
**
Yuuta thinks this Mai girl would stab him if she got the chance.
Her sister is another story. Maki isn’t exactly nice, but she clearly likes him enough to stick around when no one is asking her to. Mai, though, gives him the evil eye every chance she gets. First she tells him that her clan doesn’t permit her to talk to boys. When Maki explains to Yuuta that she’s making that up (though the words she actually uses are a lot more colorful), she claims his smell is giving her a headache. She says that she’s been told to stay away from him. She insists on a game of hide-and-seek, and this, he knows, is a last resort.
Yuuta has never had a lot of friends, and in recent years, he hasn’t had any. He thinks about the ones he used to have sometimes – that girl he met in the hospital, whatever became of her? – but mostly, he thinks about what it would be like to have some now. There are no friends on this sprawling, lonely estate, but sometimes he can’t help but blame himself, as if he’d attract kind outsiders like flies if he had enough appealing qualities. And Mai only worsens those thoughts.
The clan is discussing matters that are probably supposed to mean something to him, and he’s supposed to be out in the great hall, but instead, he crawls into a kitchen cabinet and curls up into the tightest ball he can manage.
They’ll never find him here. Maybe that’s for the best.
“Yo,” a voice calls to him, moments later. “I can hear you breathing in there.”
Maki. His heart sinks.
“Okkotsu.”
He doesn’t make a sound. It’s stupid – he knows he’s been found – but a part of him still desperately wants to stay huddled up beneath the kitchen sink forever, hidden.
“You’re weird,” Maki says, and seconds later, light cuts through a crack in the cabinet door, and Maki crawls into the tight cabinet beside him. “Sup?”
He tucks his head between his knees.
“I said ‘sup?’, Okkotsu.”
“Oh.” His voice sounds shamefully tight and shaky. “Nothing.”
“Mai’s dumb,” she says. “You just gotta ignore her.”
“You shouldn’t say that about your sister.”
“Nah,” Maki tells him. “She’s being dumb.”
“No, she’s not.”
“No, she is,” Maki says. “It’s ‘cause she has no friends except me, and I’ve got a bad personality.”
Yuuta looks at her, incredulous. “You don’t have a bad personality.”
She absolutely does, but this is not something Yuuta is going to say when Maki, as far as he can tell, is making every possible effort to be nice to him. Besides, she’s looking at him like she really is mad at her sister for driving him into hide-and-seek displacement in a cabinet under the sink, and it’s been a long time since anyone except Satoru looked half that interested in how he was feeling.
Maki has pretty eyes, he thinks, finally meeting hers, and a flush creeps into his cheeks. Maki has pretty everything, actually. He’s never really noticed it much before.
“Yuuta,” she says.
“Yeah?”
“’m gonna run away.”
“You said that last time.”
“No, for real,” she insists. “I’m gonna train a ton and go away to Tokyo for high school.”
“Oh.” His heart sinks a little. “That’s…that’s a good idea.”
“And then,” she says, “I’m gonna come back and kick some ass.”
Yuuta looks at his shoes. His mother used to yell at his grandmother for saying words like that in front of him when he was little.
“Whose?” he asks timidly.
“My dumb family. Duh.”
“But Mai-“
“And then,” she says, “I’m gonna get Mai out, and we’re gonna go live in a cabin in the woods and never talk to anyone.”
“Not anyone?”
“People are overrated.”
Maki always sounds so grown-up when she says things like that. Yuuta can’t help but nod admiringly.
“I hope you do it,” he says.
“I will, dummy.”
Yuuta knows just enough about Maki to believe that.
**
13
The makeup brushes tickle. Maki hadn’t expected that – she finds herself biting her lip, trying not to laugh, because that would look too much like pleasure, and she is anything but pleased. Still, the woman who usually dresses and makes up the higher-ranking wives smiles as if she knows something Maki hasn’t told her.
“You must be excited,” she says, approving in a way no older Zenin ever is where Maki is concerned.
If it were Mai, she would have said that she was, smiled like they wanted her to. But Mai’s in another room, and Maki is the one who’d been asked. She won’t give anything but her truthful answer. “No,” she says, blank-faced.
“Oh, but there really is nothing to be so scared of,” the stylist says, clucking her tongue like punctuation at the end of her sentence. “They’re only Gojos.”
Who said I was scared? Maki wants to ask. And what would you know about the Gojos?
Nothing, she knows. This woman is delusional if she thinks that there’s really nothing to fear on the Gojo estate, but she probably doesn’t. Adults never tell Maki what they think. She’s learned to think of it as an honor that they’re too afraid to tell her what’s really on their minds, as if somehow her confidence is a threat. If only it were.
“I know,” she says, choosing not to elaborate on her answer.
“And really, he can’t be as bad as they all say,” she says. “Your parents will be so proud.”
Maki remembers exactly how the head of the Gojo Clan had said the words ‘good taste,’ and she swallows what feels like a rock lodged in her throat. Her parents probably will be proud. What’s less certain is how Maki is going to run from this.
For all that she’s great at running, a direct summons of both twins to the Gojo Estate from the clan head himself is more than even she can get away from, and she doesn’t even want to think about what it’s going to be that she can’t escape.
**
Gojo Satoru is waiting when a plain maid in a plain yukata leads the twins to a reception room, and when he sees them, his face contorts into a confused parody of itself. Maki, whose heart is still pounding, doesn’t know what to make of that.
“Gojo-sama,” Mai says timidly, bowing so low that Maki can clearly see the back of her head. Maki does not follow.
“Okay,” he says, his expression shifting back into something more reasonable. “What the hell.”
Maki wouldn’t admit it, but she’s too scared to make a face. She may not bow, but that, he should know, means very little. She knows whose presence she is in. She’s not going to risk that.
“No, seriously,” he says after a moment of silence from both girls. “Why are you dressed like that?”
Maki looks down at her heavy brocade kimono and feels the dangly ornaments the stylist had pinned into her hair brush her cheeks. Good question. This time even Mai, whose face is demurely turned down, doesn’t say anything.
Probably, she, like Maki, cannot think of any innocent reason that the young head of a rival clan would summon a pair of twin girls half his age. Maki wonders if she wants to be sick, too, or if she’s just too frightened to think about the implications. She really should have run and taken Mai away from here while she had the chance.
He squats in front of them, legs open, and Maki unconsciously backs a few steps away. Their eyes meet, or, at least, she thinks that they must be meeting behind Gojo’s glasses. She can tell from the creases in his forehead that he’s raising his eyebrows, and soon his mouth has a disgusted twist to its corners that is almost as terrifying as it is a relief.
“Of course,” he says harshly under his breath, then swears. She can hear Mai’s sharp intake of breath and knows she probably takes that to mean they’ve displeased him.
It’s okay, she wants to tell Mai, but she’s really not sure that it is.
“I called you here because it’s Yuuta’s birthday,” he says, his tone less ornamented than she has ever heard it. “I just need you to know that right off the bat.”
It’s only when Mai lifts her head that Maki can tell she’s close to tears. She probably thinks their elders will deem this worthy of punishment.
“Yeah, well,” she all but spits, finding her voice, “you shoulda told them that before they got us all done up to come sit around and look nice for some rich guys they’re gonna sell us off to one day.”
She doesn’t think that what the Zenins thought they’d be doing at the Gojo estate was nearly that tame, but even those words make her feel fever-hot. The last thing she wants is to have to say the horrible things she’s been dreading all week out loud.
Gojo Satoru has a reputation. He’s arrogant, inflexible, does whatever he pleases, listens to no one, has an ego the size of a small solar system – everyone knows these things. Every Zenin has been schooled in the litany of his flaws for as long as they’ve been old enough to say the syllables of his name. He is their enemy both by nature and by choice, and they are well-trained to remember that. But his shoulders slump, and his ridiculous squat lacks the confidence of a moment before.
“Yeah,” he says. “Maybe I should’ve.”
**
March seventh is a lonely day most years. Yuuta doesn’t even know who remembers what day that is anymore, but it doesn’t matter much, because none of those people bother to tell him if they do. Still, it could be worse. The maid had brought him a parfait with his favorite brand of yogurt for breakfast. That isn’t nothing.
Neither is the voice that calls “’sup?” from just beyond his bedroom door.
Maki pushes her way through without waiting for a greeting, wearing a yukata that doesn’t quite fit. Her face is red, as if it’s just been scrubbed, and her cropped hair is braided in a way he’s never seen it done before, and…and…
“Maki-chan,” he says, reddening. “H-hi.”
“You shoulda told me it was your dumb birthday,” she says, letting herself into his room and plopping down beside him on his bed. “My family made me put on this gross outfit ‘cause they thought I got called over here ‘cause your dumb uncle was into me.”
Yuuta’s poor face only reddens more.
**
Maki doesn’t really like being someone’s birthday present, if she’s being honest. It’s far too much like something the Zenins would endorse for her liking. And that’s to say nothing of Mai, who’s so shaken-up from the summons earlier that she’s called Yuuta a kumquat four times, a dumbass three, and an incurable dunce twice in the space of an hour.
But Yuuta looks so happy.
A maid brings them tonkatsu for lunch, and when they eat it, clustered together on his bedspread, he looks like he’s been given infinitely more than food. He laughs – she doesn’t think she’s ever heard that sound before – when Mai conspicuously brushes the crumbs of panko that fall off her plate off of the comforter and onto the floor. When Satoru comes in (how does someone so important manage to get a day off for his nephew’s birthday?, Maki wonders) with a pink pastry box and sticks a “13” candle in Yuuta’s slice of the strawberry cake inside, he looks like he’s going to cry. They play some video game with car races – Maki wouldn’t know, she’s not allowed to use the television at home – and he looks amused rather than concerned when she flips her car over on purpose every chance she gets. He takes extra cake.
Yuuta is such a simple person, and so easy to please. Maki, who has made it a habit out of being as hard to please as she can, doesn’t understand that, but she does know that watching his simple happiness makes her feel strange. And not normal-strange. She’s not familiar with this particular kind of strangeness, one that makes her swat Mai when she says something mean.
Today was supposed to be horrible. Instead, it ends with the three of them laying sprawled-out on their backs on Yuuta’s bed, their stomachs sore from laughter and excess cake alike.
That and Maki, wishing this wasn’t probably the last time she’d see Yuuta until their clans have someone new to plot against.
“Maki-chan,” he says, “Mai-chan.”
“Mm?”
“Thanks.”
“It was an order, you kumquat,” Mai sniffs. “We couldn’t say no.”
“You’re welcome,” Maki says flatly.
She thinks that’s the first time in her life that, when given a chance to be mean to a boy, she’s ever chosen to be polite.
Novel thing, that. Maybe she really does like him.
**
14
“You seen much of Maki-chan lately?”
Yuuta looks down into his bowl of udon, even though he knows Satoru will see his blush whether he tries to hide it or not. “Where would I have seen her?”
“Just wondering.”
“Oh. Uh…no.”
“Kids are pretty good at sneaking around.”
“I never sneak anywhere,” Yuuta protests.
“Too bad,” he says. “You’d probably look a little less soggy all the time if you did.”
“Soggy?”
“Dunno, you always look like a wet cat to me.” He reaches across the table and ruffles Yuuta’s hair. “Kinda wish you’d sneak around with your girl a little if it’d make ya look less gloomy.”
“I…her family…”
“I know, kid,” he sighs, resting his chin on his interlocked knuckles. “But…dunno. I guess you just don’t have that many people you like, huh?”
He shrugs. This much is obvious, but it’s sort of Satoru’s fault, tracking down a boy with just a little of the same blood in his veins and making him heir.
“I…never meant for you to be alone, you know.”
Yuuta looks up at him blankly. The sentiment, after so long by himself, gets lost long before it sinks in.
“I kept telling myself, ‘just let him get to high school,’” he says. “Like that wasn’t seven years.”
Seven years is a long time. He loops a noodle over one chopstick, lifts it, and watches it slip back down into the broth with a satisfying plop.
“Pretty dumb thing to do for a guy who’s always going on about letting kids be kids.”
Yuuta finally looks up and meets Satoru’s eyes across the table over his slipping-down glasses. They’re almost sad.
He never thought he’d see that. Satoru isn’t big on vulnerability.
“It’s okay,” he says numbly.
It could’ve been worse. Yuuta is perfectly aware of the sacrifices it took for Satoru to work Yuuta’s upbringing and training into an unrelenting schedule, and he’d done all he could to make sure his heir was left off of the political side of things. He buys him stupid things from his out-of-town missions. He brings Megumi over sometimes, though they’ve never really clicked. He tries.
But he is alone, and that is not nothing.
“There’s been a lot of talk about the Zenins lately,” Satoru tells him. “One of their kids applying to the Tokyo campus without the head’s consent or something.”
Yuuta looks up abruptly. Did she?
“They’re trying to block it,” he says. “But I can promise you one thing.”
“Hm?”
“She’s gonna be in your class, kid.” He smiles, nudges Yuuta’s arm. “Promise.”
“She wouldn’t want that,” he blurts out without thinking. “I mean…only getting in because you pulled strings.”
Satoru doesn’t answer. Yuuta doesn’t know if that’s because he has nothing to say or because he knows that Yuuta wouldn’t like it if he did.
**
Yuuta is supposed to be under guard day and night, kept hidden-away until he’s confidently able to defend himself. He is not, by any means, ever supposed to be awakened by the sound of something hitting his window, or a fist pounding the pane, and yet.
Maki’s face stares back at him from the darkness on the other side of the glass when he pulls back the blinds. He notices with alarm that she’s already removed the screen and, figuring it’s a lost cause to try to keep her out, opens the window for her.
“Um,” he says, so tired he can barely process her presence, “how did you get past the guards?”
“I’m fast,” she says flatly. “Close that, will ya? It’s cold.”
She’s wearing black from head to toe, and much of it is dirty. Yuuta, dazed, looks her up and down and up again before he finally snaps back into reality and closes his window.
“That’s not supposed to be possible,” he says. “I could get assassinated.”
“I’m running away.”
“To my house?”
Maki shrugs. “I knew you’d let me in.”
Yuuta wants desperately to go back to sleep. Maybe if he didn’t, the presence of the only girl he really knows in his bedroom in the middle of the night would alarm him, but those feelings are all crowded out by sleepiness. No contest, really.
Then she takes off her jacket.
“Got ugly today,” she says, matter-of-fact as ever. No mention of the ugly, bleeding gash on her right shoulder, no mention of the fact that she’d managed to get past his entire retinue of guards injured – somehow he’s missed it, this growth that’s hardened the girl he met all those years ago. “Had to cut and run, y’know? Who knows what they might’ve done.”
Then it clicks.
Yuuta has never seen Maki ask for help, but he can think of no other reason that she’d have shown him her wound. It makes him faintly dizzy, if he’s honest, and his hands shake, but he manages, weakly, “you wanna sit down?”
She does, sitting on the trunk at the end of his bed. Gingerly, he picks up the glass of water he always keeps on his nightstand and hands it to her.
“Thanks,” she says quietly after a long sip.
A part of Yuuta is grateful he’s too tired to think much. Otherwise his hands would shake too much to do what he needs to.
“Gojo-san had one of his classmates teach me to do this,” he says, coaxing his cursed energy like the flow of water over her injured shoulder. “It’s…useful.”
Maki shudders at the relief. “Thanks.”
So simple, really. A few seconds and her bloodied shoulder is knit together as if it had never been injured. But still…
“You’re holding yourself weird,” he says. He rubs at his eyes to confirm, and – yes, she is. Favoring her left side. “Where-“
“I’m fine,” she snaps.
“Maki-“
“Where’s your bathroom?”
“I can help,” he says weakly.
“I don’t want it, okay?”
He sighs, slumps. “Down the hall, third door to the left.”
**
Yuuta must get hurt a lot. It seems odd for someone who’s mastered reverse cursed technique, but he keeps a bottle of alcohol and a pack of cotton pads on his bathroom counter, and she’s grateful for that now. She’s half-dizzy, and far too tired to find a first aid kit. At least she’ll be able to clean it this way.
Still, she winces at the sting of alcohol against her wounded hip.
She bites her lip, which does little, then tries to think of distracting things – croquettes, the feeling that follows a good workout, the gentle relief of Yuuta’s reverse cursed technique. The stories Mai would make up about the people at clan assemblies to make her laugh; Yuuta’s smile. Sitting next to him in a cabinet under the sink, four years and a dozen centuries younger, talking about Mai.
Mai, who’s probably sleeping alone in what used to be their shared bedroom.
She wants to feel guilty for leaving her there. For all anyone cares, she is a perfectly fine substitute to punish in Maki’s place, and she should’ve taken her with her. But she’d had to go. Tears well up in her eyes at the sting of alcohol against an open wound, and it’s hard to feel anything except utter relief that she is gone, even for only a single night.
Yuuta is asleep when she pads back to his room, dry-eyed again, and maybe it’s wrong, maybe she’s uninvited, but it’s Yuuta – she doubts it. She pulls the chair from his desk to his bedside and lays her head on the mattress next to him.
For one night, she’s safe, cared-for. That is more than she’s been able to say in longer than she can remember.
**
15
“Your, uh, your output is getting so much more efficient?”
Yuuta can see Maki shoving a huge bite of her sandwich in her mouth to force herself not to laugh and wants to cringe. He does a moment later when Mai gives him a long, hard look full of nothing good.
“Okkotsu,” she says, “you’re an idiot.”
This, he thinks, is bold talk from a girl who spends almost all her waking hours intruding on his time with Maki. It’s sort of stupid, being jealous of someone’s sister for knowing her too well, but Yuuta’s felt pricklier lately when it comes to things that come between himself and the girl he…well…well.
Maybe wants to kiss a little.
“You’re an idiot,” Maki says coolly. “Just shut up and be glad someone stronger than you gave you a compliment, hah?”
Yuuta flushes. There really wasn’t any need for that.
“He’s still an idiot,” she says.
Yuuta, who is quickly getting used to classmates who hear the words “Gojo heir” and immediately begin to walk on eggshells around him, thinks he might know why Satoru is always hanging out with people who hate him now. There’s something refreshing about being insulted left and right by the one classmate who thinks absolutely nothing of his status.
(Truth be told, there’s something about being defended by said classmate’s sister, too, but…still.)
**
16/17
The world is in flames, the Zenin sisters are summoned to their estate, and Yuuta doesn’t trust them for a second.
“It can’t be bad to have backup,” Yuuta says when Maki complains. She reluctantly agrees.
He wonders, watching the scowling faces of the people who see him following the twins through a home where they’ve never been welcome like a dog at their heels, how many of them wish that they’d been more careful not to let their daughters make such powerful friends.
All of them, he hopes. He hopes all of them know that he is never again going to let them force Maki to throw rocks at his window in the middle of the night again in a desperate bid for protection.
Maybe they had been planning something – he thinks they probably were – but no one is foolish enough to believe themselves strong enough to take the three of them at once. Mai, maybe, but not under his protection and her sister’s. Nothing comes of the summons.
They wait an hour and a half for a train home to Tokyo – there aren’t many going these days – and, sitting on the platform bench, Maki puts her burn-scarred hand in his. He squeezes, and hopes she knows what that means.
She squeezes back.
The last thing Maki has ever wanted was protection, but more than anything, he thinks he wants her to know that someone has her back now – that someone always will. Maybe she loves him like he loves her, or maybe she will someday, but it doesn’t really matter; he’ll stick close to her. It’s not really all that selfless, though. It’s for his sake as much as hers that he holds her hand on the bench on the platform at Kyoto Station, waiting for a delayed train back to the smoking embers of what is left of Tokyo.
Maki has always been his escape from loneliness, and these are the kinds of days when he needs that more than ever.
“Maki,” he says, massaging her hand with his thumb.
“Yeah?”
“We’re gonna fix this.”
She presses his hand, firm and sure. “Of course we are.”