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There are several contradictions to Okkotsu Shinsuke that no one can explain. One, which his mother points out at every opportunity, is how such a happy, social baby became a skittish toddler. Another is the fact that he sleeps a decent twelve hours a night and still has bags to rival his father’s under his eyes.
And there is also his love of roller coasters.
No one had known about this until he was, at an unusually tall six years old, tall enough to ride most things. He had been at an amusement park for Naoka’s fifth birthday, and when her older brothers wanted to ride things she was too small for, he had apparently accompanied them. Privately, Yuuta had thought they must’ve lied through their teeth to get him to agree, but he had come back talking a mile a minute about the rides he’d tried and how badly he wanted to go back when he was ten centimeters taller for the ones he couldn’t. Neither of his parents had known what to make of it; roller coasters make Yuuta so sick that the very idea of a child so much like himself enjoying them is baffling.
But he does, and Tsugumi likes chaos, so on the morning of the Okkotsu twins’ seventh birthday, they set off early in the morning for Shizuoka and an amusement park that, a week ago, Yuuta had never heard of.
It was the practical choice, really. It’s a Saturday. Tokyo Disney is going to be packed.
Shinsuke, who doesn’t seem to know what day it is, is asleep again almost as soon as the train’s doors close. He doesn’t even bother to take off his heavy jacket before he slumps against the window, his face partially obscured by his hair and partially by his hood.
Yuuta can only wish he knew how to do that.
Maki, sitting in the middle seat between Shinsuke at the window and Yuuta (Tsugumi, for her birthday, had requested an entire empty row to herself), pushes back his hood. She studies his sleeping face for a moment, brushes his hair out of his eyes; they don’t even flutter. She smiles, small and mostly to herself.
“Out cold,” she says quietly.
“Yeah,” Yuuta says, slightly miserable. “I wish that were me.”
“Could be,” she says. “You could’ve asked for the window.”
This would be unthinkable both because Shinsuke loves the window and because even if he had taken it, Yuuta would have sat next to it, unable to sleep, and thought about how he’d been roused too early for a weekend the whole ride to Shizuoka. But even after years together, Maki doesn’t seem to understand that there really is nothing Yuuta can do to convince his body to knock out on the train when it needs to.
“No way,” he says, and trusts she’ll get enough of his meaning.
They’re being quiet, but Tsugumi hears everything, and she crawls across her empty row of seats across the aisle to peer over at her brother. “Is Shin-chan sleeping?”
“Mmhm.”
Tsugumi wrinkles her nose. “Is he gonna wake up before we get there?”
“Yes,” says Yuuta, followed promptly by Maki’s “who knows,” both of which make Tsugumi frown. It is good, Yuuta thinks, that there are so few people in this car.
He doesn’t, as it happens. Maki has to shake him awake, then buy him a bottle of the peach juice he likes from the vending machine on the platform for good measure. Too much sugar, she usually says when he asks. Now, though, the need to perk him up is greater than her concern. Whether it will work is debatable, of course, but it’s something. A birthday present, if nothing else.
One that Tsugumi promptly steals about a minute later, downing half of it in a single sip.
“Tsu- chan,” Shinsuke says, wide-eyed and mournful. “I was drinking that.”
“I know.”
“But-”
“We can get more.” She looks at him out of the corner of her eye and smirks. In that area, she is, according to nearly everyone, extremely proficient for her age. “It’s our birthday. They hafta let us have however much we want.”
“No, we don’t.”
Tsugumi straightens up and schools her expression at the sound of her mother’s voice. It does very little to create the impression of good behavior with the stolen peach juice still in her hand. “Um?”
“And that one isn’t yours,” she says, pointing to the offending bottle, “so give it back.”
“We were sharing-”
“Tsun-Tsun.”
Shinsuke will not, as his parents have learned on far too many separate occasions, fight his own battles. There is almost nothing it has ever occurred to him not to share with his sister, and Tsugumi, being the low-ranking demon lord Maki is proudly convinced she is, exploits this. She always has some explanation of why they needed to split a snack or why she needed him to do her chores; it’s almost impossible to believe that Shinsuke is the older twin sometimes.
Even if she never means ill, Maki has very little tolerance for Tsugumi’s demon-lord tendencies when they rub up against her gentle brother’s inability to say “no.”
“Fine,” she says, scowling, and hands the juice back to Shinsuke.
It’s not malice that makes her the way she is; anybody who’s ever so much as accidentally snubbed Shinsuke at school knows very well how much Tsugumi loves him. Maki calls her an opportunist; Yuuta just calls her a smaller, angrier Maki. But still. Best to curb the feudal-warlord aspirations early.
Only when they’re on the local train towards the amusement park does Shinsuke speak up, tugging at Maki’s arm.
“Mama,” he says, quiet so he won’t disturb the fifteen other people taking the train into the city at ten in the morning.
She sets down her phone to look at him. “Yeah, Bug?”
“Don’t be mad at Tsun,” he says timidly. “She’s not being mean.”
Maki’s expression softens, and she shakes her head. “I know she’s not, Bug.”
“But-”
“Tsugumi can’t take other people’s stuff,” she tells him, brushing his long bangs out of his eyes. He’s going to need a trim soon, Yuuta finds himself thinking as he watches. “Even if she’s not trying to be mean.”
“But it’s me,” he says.
“You, too.” She thumbs the tip of his nose. “And you need to say ‘no’ to her.”
“But…why?”
“Tsun doesn’t have boundaries.”
Shinsuke cocks his head. “What’s boundaries?”
“Tsun doesn’t listen when people tell her she can’t do something.”
Look who’s talking, Yuuta thinks, smiling to himself.
“But-”
“If you don’t tell her that she can’t drink your juice, she’ll think it’s okay to take whatever she wants from people.” She smooths back his hair again. “And that’s not good, right?”
“She said we can get more juice,” he protests. “‘Cause it’s our birthday.”
“You wanna know something, Bug?”
He blinks up at her, which usually means yes.
“Tsun doesn’t know everything.”
“I can hear you.”
Tsugumi, probably believing that her point hasn’t gotten across, moves a seat over so she can set her chin on her mother’s shoulder. She looks up at Maki with beady eyes and a crabby pinch in the middle of her forehead.
“I know,” Maki whispers, more for show than for privacy.
“I share stuff with Shin-chan all the time,” she argues. “He always forgets erasers.”
Yuuta has to smile at the image of Tsugumi passing her disorganized brother an eraser beneath her desk. Mai would probably have done that before she decided she wanted nothing to do with her sister anymore.
He’s always wondered how much their twins must remind her of her own.
“Okay, but that’s a choice,” she says. “Doesn’t mean you get his juice.”
“But we both share-”
“That’s not how it works, Tsun.”
Except, Yuuta thinks, that it kind of is. Tsugumi should leave well enough alone, yes, but she treats everything they have as shared because it functionally is. They’ve never fought over toys or asked for separate rooms, and Tsugumi picks out the parts of her meals that Shinsuke likes to give to him before he even asks. No wonder she imagines he’ll treat his peach juice the same way.
“You can get your own peach juice, you know,” Maki says after a moment of quiet. “It’s not like it’s expensive.”
**
While Shinsuke likes roller coasters more than anybody would expect, Tsugumi decidedly does not, and it is because of this that Yuuta, whose stomach is much too weak for things like that, becomes her supervisor.
This consists primarily of walking around, eating snacks, and agreeing when Tsugumi points out a ride she thinks would be unpleasant, which is not, all told, a difficult assignment. Even though she’s nothing like him, spending time with Tsugumi never is.
“That one would make me throw up,” she announces, pointing to a ride not unlike a carnival tilt-a-whirl, and Yuuta, who feels green just looking at it, readily agrees.
“Spinning isn’t for me.”
“It’s weird, though,” she says pensively, frowning, “because I don’t get sick doing gymnastics.”
He laughs, though frankly the comparison between a ride that actively tries to fling its riders into space and a back handspring on the balance beam, her latest and proudest acquisition, is not particularly salient. It is sort of funny that someone who likes tumbling so much would hate roller coasters.
“I don’t like that kind of stuff, either,” he offers.
“Yeah, but you get sick all the time.” She frowns at him. “So it makes sense.”
He presses his hand to his chest in entirely earnest shock. “ I get sick all the time?”
“Yeah,” she says placidly. “ Kaa-chan says you have a fragile constitution.” She shrugs. “Except I don’t know what that means.”
“ Kaa-chan said that?” Yuuta frowns. “She said that about me?”
“‘Cause you get sick so much.” She wrinkles her nose. “And you don’t sleep.”
“I do sleep!”
“Not very much.”
“Do you have to be so sassy about it?”
“I’m just saying.”
In all of the ways that Tsugumi takes after her mother, that one is perhaps the most upsetting. It’s one thing to take that kind of flack from the love of his life. Yuuta knows who he married; he signed up for that. But from an elementary school girl whose head doesn’t even come up to his shoulder yet?
Maybe Gojo was right when he had called Yuuta a simp if that’s the crowd he’s getting picked on by.
“I just have bad allergies,” he says peevishly. “You should be nice to people with allergies. They’re going through a lot.”
“I’m not not being nice,” she protests. “And I’m sorry you have allergies.”
Sometimes he forgets that Tsugumi only sounds sassy because she has a terminal inability not to tell someone what she perceives to be true if they don’t show themselves to be adequately aware of it. Bad as it sounds, she’s looking up at him with nothing but sincerity, as if it really does grieve her that her father isn’t as indestructible as she and her mother are.
“Papa,” she says after a moment, blinking up at him with the eyes she always uses when she wants something.
Just the name would’ve been enough, he thinks. You didn’t have to pull out the eyes, too.
“Yeah, sweetie?”
“I think we should have more snacks.”
“Didn’t we just have snacks?”
To be exact: breakfast, and then a peach juice of her own, and Famichiki at the Family Mart next to the train station, and a pretzel, and now she’s pointing at a crepe stand. Just thinking about all of that food makes Yuuta feel nauseous.
“Yeah,” she says, pouting out her lip, “but I want crepes.”
“You’re really still hungry enough?”
“Yeah.”
He gives in only because it’s her birthday, and because she has her mother’s prodigious ability to burn so many calories that she never seems to eat enough, but he doesn’t really want to. Only knowing she’s at a theme park where she doesn’t want to ride anything just to make her brother happy on their shared birthday makes him do it. Really. Just that.
Watching her lick whipped cream off the top of a crepe as long as her arm, the amount of sugar she’s eating makes him feel nauseous.
“Tsugumin?” he asks.
“Mm?”
“Do you actually like these kinds of places?”
“Mm…they’re fine.”
With that, she goes back to eating, even though the question had been half-intended to slow her down before she made herself sick.
“Did you just agree to come because Shinsuke wanted to?”
Tsugumi shrugs. “I don’t care that much.”
“About your birthday?”
“I just wanna eat junk food,” she admits. “So wherever is fine.”
Like mother, like daughter.
“You know you won’t die if you admit you just wanted to make Shin- chan happy, right?”
Tsugumi looks at him as if this is the single most ridiculous thing she’s ever heard. Like mother, like daughter indeed.
**
By the time Yuuta and Tsugumi reunite with Maki and Shinsuke for lunch, Tsugumi is not only decidedly uninterested in lunch, but slightly green in the face. Nobody is callous enough to ask what on earth she ate to end up like this when she doesn’t want to order at the restaurant, but Yuuta quietly does it for her.
“A crepe,” he whispers to Maki. “You know how she gets with-”
“Sugar,” Maki finishes. “Why the hell would you buy her a crepe on top of everything else?”
“She said she thought she’d be fine!”
“She’s seven!”
“It’s her birthday!”
“Look at her, Yuuta, she looks like she’s gonna throw up!”
Normally, Tsugumi would take notice of this conversation and become at least mildly enraged, but not this time. She’s laid her head on the table, and Shinsuke, who is politely pretending he doesn’t hear his parents arguing, is rubbing her back.
“Shin,” she says pathetically. “I don’t feel good.”
**
The problem with twins, though, is that they’ll both try to insist that the show must go on, and that doesn’t work very well when one of them is green-faced and the other can’t stand the thought of riding roller coasters while his sister is in such a sorry state. Tsugumi insists they stay. Shinsuke insists they go home.
The compromise they eventually reach is one final ride, and perhaps out of spite because he ought to have known better, Maki turns the responsibility for accompanying Shinsuke over to Yuuta. She stays with Tsugumi on the nearest bench to the ride’s entrance, and even though half the park seems to pass by every second, she doesn’t mind when Tsugumi crawls into her lap.
“You know you get sick when you eat like that,” she chides her, cradling Tsugumi’s head to her shoulder.
“But it was good,” Tsugumi protests feebly.
“And now you feel sick.”
Tsugumi doesn’t answer that, but her arms tighten around her mother’s neck. Maybe it’s silly to ask for comfort for something she brought entirely on herself, but Maki still can’t help but tighten her own grip in return. Her daughter has never liked to admit it, but she wants to be held close.
Maki knows very well what that feels like. It’s what makes it so easy to love Tsugumi even on her worst days, when she’s most determined to have her own way, when her fledgeling demon-lord tendencies are at their peak—Maki is the same. She used to be the same, but Tsugumi has a mother who is infinitely glad to have made her, and she should never be allowed to forget it.
“It’s okay,” she says softly. “We’ll go home soon.”
**
If there is anything that both of the Okkotsu twins inherited from their father, it’s a constant and unflinching desire to be in bed. Shinsuke is sleepy no matter how much she sleeps, and while Tsugumi has stamina, she’s dead to the world once she decides she’s had enough. And today has worn both of them out.
Shinsuke is still awake, though barely, when Maki arrives to check on them. It’s only six-thirty, but their room has been quiet all night, and she’s thoroughly suspicious; there is nothing afoot, though, only Tsugumi fast asleep, sprawled out in all directions on top of her quilt. Her head is turned to the side, her hair is matted, and a thin line of drool from her mouth inches ever-closer to the bedspread. Classic Tsugumi, always thrashing.
Shinsuke is awake, though, tucked in and leaning back against his pillows; she crosses the room quietly to kiss the crown of his head. He looks up at her so sleepily that it doesn’t look as if he even knows who she is, but after a moment his eyes seem to focus, and his pinched expression softens.
“Night, Bug,” she says quietly.
“Night, Mama.”
For so long, Maki had insistently thought that any future in which she was somebody’s mother was one she had to avoid. First she had felt disgust, then simply fear; once she had warmed to the idea of a baby, it had started to seem impossible. For two years, she’d thought her early intuitions must have been right, if only because they would have kept her from the pain of knowing waht she couldn’t do if she had listened.
But it’s been seven years now since she met this little boy, and Mama is not a name she flinches at anymore, and a life in which there is no Shinsuke and no Tsugumi is an unthinkable life indeed.
“Happy birthday.”