Work Text:
"So," Yoshino says.
The two of them are far enough away from the heart of Osaka that when Shouma looks up, he can see a smattering of tiny lights against the bruise-black sky, blinking satellites mingling with distant stars. The smoke from his cigarette tastes stronger, somehow, as though the night itself has crawled inside his mouth and made a home behind his teeth. In fact, everything feels that way: the crickets' incessant chirping a little louder, the light of the street lamps above them a little brighter, the smell of the perfume that Yoshino has been using since her first day of high school a little more distinct.
"Hey!" Yoshino says, punching Shouma's shoulder. It's not especially hard, though the bruise that Kirishima left there during their scuffle stings in protest, a blooming reminder of why they're here tonight. "Why are you ignoring me? Are you mad?"
Shouma takes the cigarette out of his mouth, watching the smoke rise and dissipate before his eyes. "No."
"You totally are," Yoshino grumbles as her fingers deftly thread the sewing needle through his shirt, in-out-in-out. "Come on, you can tell me."
"I'm not mad," Shouma repeats. He thinks it's true. The moment that Kirishima left with Tsubaki, still with that ridiculous kicked-puppy look on his face from the scolding that Yoshino gave him, Shouma felt all of the fire in his blood evaporate. This kind of thing is nothing new, though: once the adrenaline of a fight fades away, Shouma is always left with a yawning void inside his ribcage, an emptiness that he has only ever been able to forget by throwing another punch. So no, he's not mad per se; now, he just wants to eat a box of takoyaki and flop down onto his futon and sleep for another six months. Is there a name for that feeling, or rather the absence of anything at all? "I just thought you did something stupid."
"You always think that," Yoshino points out. "But it works, doesn't it? You always make up with the people you were fighting… if you put in the effort."
"Not what I meant."
Yoshino pauses, then sighs. " That. Listen, I know you hate Kirishima's guts, but you at least get why I did it, right?"
Shouma does. If there's one thing he's learned over the five years that they've known each other, it's that Yoshino refuses to back down when her pride is on the line. You care about it as much as your own life, he'd told her at the train station, and he believes that. He just wishes that she wouldn't go about it like this. Like a two-faced bastard like Kirishima is worth a second of her time. All of these mind games and attempts at diplomacy… it would be so much easier if Shouma could just—
"I get it," he says. "Doesn't mean that I have to like it, though."
"You don't. Believe me, it's not like I'm having the time of my life, either." Yoshino sighs. "But this is just something we'll have to get through, yeah? It's not like there are many other options."
"Tch."
"Bastard, what did I say about tch ing me?"
"Yeah, yeah…"
They fall quiet, then: two people on a bench in the middle of nowhere. It only feels that way, though; Shouma knows that the darkened houses and the families sound asleep inside them are only a few blocks away, as are yakuza politics and Kirishima's influence and all the other things that make their lives that much more complicated. In time, the dark will deepen, and they'll sneak back into the Somei house hoping to avoid the wrath that comes with missing their curfews, and this night will join the blur of a million like it before.
"You really were going to kill him, weren't you? Before I came."
A younger Shouma might have flinched, but this one answers without hesitation, "Yes. If you had given me three more seconds, I would have done it."
"...Good thing I made it in time, then." Yoshino presses her mouth into a thin line. There's a decision being made there, a question of whether even she might be going too far when she adds, "I haven't seen you that mad since middle school."
His fa— that man. These days, Shouma's hatred towards him feels so distant, albeit never completely gone. Like a thing embedded into every drop of blood in his body that belonged to him. Could the way he feels about Kirishima compare? Maybe. Shouma thinks about the way Kirishima's voice curled around Yoshino's name like she was a thing he already owned and the rush in his veins when he made a grab for the kitchen knife and the disgust he poured into those last words, There is no one in this world who could fall in love with a guy like you.
"I don't think I have been since then," Shouma says.
"Hm… Yeah, probably." Yoshino hands his shirt back to him, the tears invisible and the top button back in place like nothing ever happened. "I'm glad, though. That you didn't actually kill either of them."
Almost inaudibly, Shouma says, "...Why did you stop me?"
Yoshino stares at him, confused. "Uh, 'cause I didn't want you killin' Kirishima, plain and simple. If I wanted him dead, I would've done it myself."
"Back then," Shouma clarifies.
He still has dreams about it even now, his hands tensing in his sleep around a phantom knife raised against that man. Often, the dream ends like it did in the real world: with Yoshino grabbing his arm at thirteen and swearing to do the job for him, at sixteen and telling him that they're going to be late to school so he better get ready soon, at eighteen and reminding him that there is more to him than this, more than anger to fill the hollow inside him. Sometimes, he backs out at the last moment of his own volition, and he watches that man walk away without knowing a fraction of the ruin that he caused Shouma. Once, Shouma plunged the blade between his ribs and woke up thinking it was all an illusion: not the blood on his hands, but everything that came for the lack of it.
"You could have pretended," he says slowly, "to not have seen anything. You didn't have to come after me in the first place. No one would have been any the wiser."
"...Right before I went, Hotei-san told me about you. What happened before you came to us."
"Figures. So it was out of pity, huh?"
"Maybe at first. But at the same time… I knew a lot of people under Gramps who went through similar things. Nobody joins the yakuza 'cause they had a good life." Yoshino frowns. "So I wouldn't call it pity in the end, I guess. I wasn't thinking you were weak, so much as wanting to understand why you had to be so strong."
Shouma considers her words for a moment before he says, "Tokyo really has changed you, Yoshino-san. I didn't know you were such a poet."
"Hey, I'm tryin' to be nice here, you asshole."
Yoshino jabs him in the ribs with her elbow, and Shouma breathes out a little laugh. She scoffs, but there's no real malice in it. This whole song and dance is familiar, even as the world around them has changed in wild and turbulent ways.
"And you?" Yoshino says. "You've changed a lot, too, even in this short amount of time."
"You think so?" Shouma takes one last drag from his cigarette, the bittersweet taste flooding his lungs, before he ashes it and tosses it out. "Feel like I'm the same me as always."
"Yeah, I mean, when we went shopping the other day, you actually remembered to bring your wallet. First time for everything!" She tilts her head to the side, regarding him. "And… I've also never seen you talk so much. Usually you just click your tongue and shrug when I ask you anything."
"Tch."
"Oh, shut up."
Shouma considers her remarks, though. True, he thinks more than he talks, in no small part because life itself is difficult to put into words. How do you put a name to the tightness in your chest that keeps you wide-awake lying next to your fifth girlfriend of the year, or to the feeling on a night like this that the space between them feels wider, too, every centimeter a reminder of how faraway Yoshino feels from him now. A big-city girl willing to kick and bite and carve out her own space in the world, whereas Shouma has just stayed the same: always being driven out of lethargy by anger, always needing someone to reel him back. Always disgusted by the glimpse of himself he sees in others.
Maybe that's it, then, sitting next to the girl who held his hair back while he washed the blood out of his mouth after a particularly brutal fight and wishing that nothing had ever changed from then. But time never waits, he supposes.
"I don't know," he says. "Sometimes I want things to go back to how they used to be."
"You said it," Yoshino mutters. "Everything felt way simpler back then. Hey, remember how we went to that one sushi place after school every Friday and talked so much that the chefs started kicking us out?"
"Yeah."
"Ah, good times." Yoshino leans back against the bench and sighs. "I wish we could have lived like that forever."
Like a mind-reader, Shouma thinks. Then again, she's always had a knack for that, always able to tell what he's thinking before even he knows. What he ends up saying, though, is, "I think it would be nice."
"Hmm?"
"I think," he says, "it would be nice to live with you like that."
When she looks at him, he expects her to burst into laughter. It's cheesy as hell, and he knows it. Yet her expression is contemplative, as though she earnestly believes there is a world out there where they can live like normal people, buying a house in the countryside where the days pass by in tranquility. Shouma thinks he has too much blood on his hands for that, now, no matter how many times Yoshino has stopped him in the past.
"I think so, too," Yoshino says, and she smiles.