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On the whole, Maki does not like to remember that Yuuta is even distantly related to Gojo. She likes him, no matter how airheaded he is, and she doesn’t enjoy the thought of having to classify him, along with all other things she associates with their teacher, as an idiot. He’s really not, except on the days he consciously chooses to forget that he’s lactose intolerant and then comes to her whining about his stomach. So it doesn’t seem fair to lump him into the same category as their teacher, whom Maki regularly wishes she could drop-kick.
But he does have the legs for it.
Or, at least, nowadays he has the legs for it. Therein lies the issue of the day.
It would be easy to ignore their family ties if he had just stayed a normal height, barely taller than Maki herself. Where Gojo is loud, meddlesome, and can’t take a hint, Yuuta is earnest, skittish, and too anxious to talk out of turn. And Maki doesn’t like that he’s terrified of everyone, but she’d take a mass of overactive nerves over Gojo’s endless inane chatter any day. They are, in almost all circumstances, nothing alike. But now, well.
It turns out that if you feed Yuuta enough and force him to sleep through the night for a couple of months, he grows. Exponentially. At a rate which Maki, who greatly values tallness for its athletic utility and ability to intimidate, envies.
And which rapidly hastens the day on which Yuuta’s legs comprise so much of his body that he starts to remind her, horrifyingly, of his distant cousin, except that his baggy clothes don’t hide muscle (like Gojo’s do) but the fact that he is shaking because he hasn’t eaten in eight hours and, in fact, probably forgot that food existed.
He’s at least sixty percent legs. He’s always hungry. It doesn’t even seem clear whether he’ll ever stop growing or not. And if Maki is honest with herself, the problem—the real problem—is that she isn’t only bothered by it because it unpleasantly reminds her that he’s related to Gojo.
**
Yuuta is eighteen years old. By law, this makes him a brand-new adult, but mentally, she would place him at around thirty for maturity and empathy, eighty for exhaustion, and twelve for emotional regulation. So perhaps it makes sense that those ages average out and leave his body somewhere in the middle.
She liked Yuuta better when he was a boy. The worst thing a boy can do is grow up badly, and it is implied by his hierarchical status that he can easily be trounced in a fight if Maki sees a need. As a boy, Yuuta was good company, a good sparring partner, mildly amusing, fairly irrational, endearingly sweet, and inexplicably suave.
But now, in law and in legs, Yuuta is most definitely not a child, and boys might be safe enough, but men have given Maki every reason to avoid them, and there is a very irrational part of her that desperately believes Yuuta will lose all of those good things if he ever really grows up.
And his legs make it look like he’s really trying to.
It’s not fair to lump Yuuta in with Naoya and the rest of them just because he has very long legs, but Maki is not an especially rational person, and suddenly there is something about Yuuta that she doesn’t know how to navigate.
She tells herself it’s just because adulthood is what makes men a threat. Then he’ll squat to meet a lost child at eye level and look like a spider with an exceptionally kind face, or he will stretch and his shirt will ride up and reveal a sliver of pale, toned stomach, or overnight he’ll be able to run faster than he could before, or he’ll bump his head on a door and laugh sheepishly, and she thinks: maybe she’s lying to herself.
**
And then there are the petty reasons.
Such as: Yuuta is now too heavy to pick up fireman-style and lug around when he eats dairy and won’t get off the couch all day. Such as Yuuta suddenly being able to outrun her, at least in a short-distance sprint where stride length is more important than endurance. Such as Yuuta constantly offering to get things off of high shelves for her when Maki is not short and, on top of that, extremely willing and able to climb.
Height is an advantage. She’s always known this, thanked her lucky stars that for all the unpleasant things her parents gave her, they at least gave her a decent height to sweeten the pot. But this means that Yuuta now has a far greater advantage than she likely ever will, and, as is the case whenever someone has an edge on her, she does not like that one bit.
It makes her antsy. And antagonistic.
“Yuuta,” she announces, hopping up onto the kitchen counter in the common area and raising her spine to its full height, “I’m still taller than you.”
He looks over at her sitting on the counter and craning her neck, and his eyebrows lift in amusement. “You were never taller than me, Maki-chan.”
The gentle self-assurance in his voice, the confidence it shows that he’s able to tease her now—it all makes her sick. Sick like she wants to vomit into the sink but also sick like she wants to grab him and kiss him and she hates that.
As far as Maki is concerned, romance is the native territory of the delusional, attraction is the residue of the biological imperative to make more people and it ought to be suppressed when it’s not useful, and sex is simply a poor man’s workout, so why, when she feels so much disdain, is she having such ridiculous thoughts?
And, worse, all because Yuuta went and turned into this gangly creature with muscles and confidence made up of seventy percent legs?
“Was too,” she snorts.
It is a weak defense, so much so that he looks delighted by it and not chastised. Stupid smile. Stupid fluttery chest-feeling when he looks like he’s happy to be alive in a world that’s given him nothing but pain and awful company (Gojo, a cursed corpse, Maki herself, really?) and...legs. Miles and miles of newly-elongated legs. And arms. And, well, muscles, and big, clumsy, gentle hands, and...
Damn it.
She really can’t be going around thinking things like this.
**
He seems to be gloating. At least, whenever someone a head or more shorter than him needs something off a high shelf, he seems to appear out of thin air, and this is a behavior that Maki can only interpret as gloating. Flexing his height and physical superiority. In other words, exactly what Maki would do if she woke up one morning to find herself a hundred and eighty-eight centimeters tall, except with smugness instead of a sweet smile and a doglike joy at having been useful to somebody.
Naturally, when Yuuta turns this sixth sense on Maki, it is rarely well received. Usually he knows to avoid coming to her aid when it’s clear that she’s already feeling particularly tetchy, but not on this one.
Fushiguro thinks that reorganizing the cabinets constitutes a profound service to humanity, does so regularly, and always shoves Maki’s onion rings (the audacity!) all the way in the back on the top shelf. Real funny, she thinks, when he’s only a few centimeters taller than she is, but any attempt she makes to tell him to stop doing this or suffer the consequences is met with a bovine expression and a blank, dumb stare, so she’s given up. If he’s so determined to hide her food, so be it. She’ll just have to keep fishing it off a shelf she can only sort of reach.
Some days, though, she’s too tired to want to, and she’s finally conceded to the stepstool when Yuuta pokes his head through the doorway.
“Oh, Maki,” he says brightly, perking up at the obvious need for his help. “Did Fushiguro put your food up top again?”
Maki scowls and makes an unspecific noise somewhere between a growl and a hiss that doubles as a yes.
“I can get that for you, you know.” He’s practically vibrating with eagerness. “If you ever need help with stuff like this-“
“No, I’m fine.”
“No, really, it’s no bother, I can get it.”
“I can get onion rings off a shelf without your help!”
Maki’s voice comes out so raggedly that it hurts her throat, and Yuuta, for a moment, looks like he’s been slapped. When his expression relaxes, it’s a little sad, and a little knowing, and both of those things make Maki feel like she’s eaten something she shouldn’t.
“You don’t have to shout at me, Maki,” he says, neither resigned nor angry nor chastising. “I was offering to help you.”
Then it’s Maki who feels like she was tased.
There’s no condemnation in his expression—for her or for himself. There’s no visible sign that he feels ashamed to have upset someone, even though he used to take harsh words square in the chest. He’s composed, almost confident. Knows he deserves better than to be shouted at for trying to be helpful and doesn’t mind saying so.
Yuuta has never had the confidence to do that before. And Maki has never known another man who could defend himself so gently.
She can’t tell if the roiling, ugly feeling in her gut is shame or embarrassment or something else, but it’s left her in no position to want to eat onion rings. She doesn’t even look up at Yuuta as she folds the stepstool up and slips past him into the hallway.
She thought she knew exactly who Yuuta was, and she doesn’t like the thought that he, like the rest of the world, has been changing while she stays the same.
**
Nobara plays her role of “annoying kouhai” quite admirably. She’s incessantly loud, she insists that Maki partake in activities she doesn’t enjoy at least twice a week, and she won’t stop bragging to people about how Maki-senpai could crush you with her thighs, and I wouldn’t have failed if Maki-senpai tutored me, and I wish I looked like Maki-senpai. She alone among all of her peers hadn’t blinked when informed that Maki was the reason that the Zenin Clan was no more, hadn’t breathed a word about Mai, and had never seemed even the slightest bit conscious that Maki might’ve changed. And sometimes, that is a gift.
Sometimes, Maki wants nothing more than to pretend nothing happened, and when she does, Nobara and her impressive obliviousness are exactly what she needs. But other times, she really ought to read the room.
Such as when she thinks it’s a good idea to text Maki you can do better than that every time she sees her hanging out with Yuuta.
As if it was Nobara, and not Yuuta, who put his arm around Maki in Shinjuku and told her he wouldn’t let anything happen to her. As if Nobara hadn’t been in a coma through the worst months of Maki’s life, and as if Yuuta had been. As if the worst thing Yuuta’s ever done to her wasn’t asking to get her onion rings off a shelf she couldn’t reach when Maki wanted to be left alone. As if he hasn’t always been the person who comes closest to knowing what she needs to hear, while all Nobara does is chatter.
She’s not being fair and she knows it, but Nobara sends her usual message after the onion ring affair, and Maki, who isn’t thinking straight, replies could you quit that already?. And then, even worse: no I couldn’t.
Then, of course, it takes every ounce of her willpower not to throw her phone across the room, because she can’t very well go on lying to herself when she’s going around admitting the truth out loud.
Or...in her phone.
Or anywhere.
Apparently the pillow she pulls over her face isn’t enough to muffle her shriek of rage, because a knock at her door and a very concerned, “Maki-san?,” soon follow. And she’s too tired to tell him that he can’t come in.
**
“Are you having a bad day, Maki?”
Yuuta sits down at the end of her bed. She knows how this will go, but right now, in this ridiculous condition, knowing that he’s sitting on her bed makes her feel sick all over again.
“No,” she says, muffling her voice with a pillow.
He touches her calf, lightly, only enough to let her know he’s there. “You’re obviously having a bad day.”
“It’s fine.”
“Are you just mad at me about the onion rings, or is something else going on?”
“It’s not your job to monitor me.”
“No, but I love you, so I’m doing it anyway.”
The nifty thing nobody knows about her physical abilities is that Maki can sense the movements of air through a room, and while usually this is so unimportant that she tunes it out, it is suddenly a useful gift indeed, because it tells her that the moment Yuuta says those words, he freezes.
An understandable reaction when Maki’s own overpowering feeling is one of wishing to cough up a lung and die on the spot.
“That came out wrong,” he stammers. “I meant to say I care about you and I don’t want you to be miserable or die-“
Maki uncovers half her face and looks at him. He freezes. Never before has she seen his face so red.
“I don’t need your pity,” she says slowly, “and I definitely don’t need one more guy who wants to rearrange my guts.”
“Rearr-Maki!”
“What? It’s gotta be one of those!”
“No, no—” he gestures wildly, face reddening all the more, far more cornered than she’s ever seen him in a fight—“Maki, please, it’s none of that, I...I...I blurted that out without thinking-“
“Your face is red, so you obviously meant it.”
“Yes, but not like-“
“So which is it? Pity or guts?”
Except: she knows it’s neither. She desperately wants it to be neither. She desperately wants him not to have said anything so she could go on pretending he wasn’t thinking it, but she knows what he’s talking about because she can see—he always forgets she can see—his heartbeat, the flow of air around his body when he pulls his shirt out in the center of the chest to let air in after she leaves a room, his pupils dilating. And because, if she’s honest, if she’s brave enough to be, she knows a threat a mile off, and Yuuta, however tall he grows, has never been one.
But what to do with the rest of it?
“Can we just...pretend I never said that?”
“No, obviously not.”
He covers his face with his hands. “Maki...”
“Tough luck, bean sprout, you’re the one who said it.”
“But I didn’t mean to-“
“But you did.”
“Would it kill you to have a little sympathy?”
“For what?”
**
She mulls it over after he gets up and leaves. Even eats half a carton of chocolate-cherry ice cream about it; she’s found that helps her think. By the time it’s starting to melt and has to be returned to the freezer, she’s concluded that she’s probably been overreacting.
Hypervigilance is not a strategic trait. It’s one she’s been saddled with by her past, but when she’s not fighting something that wants to kill her, it doesn’t serve her anymore. And Yuuta doesn’t want to kill her. Quite the opposite, actually. Maybe it’s worth considering.
Romance might be a corporate scam, but Yuuta is real. Sex isn’t very good cardio, but no one said anything about that. And maybe he’s tall, but there are other ways to assert one’s dominance. Confidence is hot, and maybe if she says so he’ll get more of it and stop apologizing to inanimate objects when he drops them. It’s not a bad arrangement and it doesn’t take very long to come around to.
Sure, love is a vast and terrifying word, but she’s ninety percent sure that what Yuuta means by love is no different than everything she already shares with him except with making out in corners added. And that isn’t too bad.
It’s not so complicated. He’s said the thing. She’s thought the thing. The next time he pops up in the kitchen, all she has to do is grab him by the collar and kiss him. This, she’s convinced, is the most direct and rational approach.
Except for the part where Yuuta looks like he’s going to catch on fire.
“M...ma...ki?”
She stares up at him. No further clarification is provided.
“Maki, what...?”
Only then does her brow furrow in confusion. “I thought you said-“
“But you didn’t-“
“I didn’t need to?”
“Could you have used your words?”
**
“You know, I honestly didn’t know you liked me.”
Maki looks at Yuuta as if he’s stupid, which is a fairly routine occurrence and a surefire sign of affection.
Given no response, he scratches at the back of his neck and tries again. “You don’t really act like it, actually.”
“That so?”
“Yeah.”
“Well, that’s probably just because you shouldn’t have gotten taller.”
“Huh?”
“It’s annoying,” she tells him. “I don’t like it.”
“Uh...sorry?”
“Good, you should be.”
He’s quiet for a second, then smiles slyly, then looks over at her, and she already knows she’s lost before he even says it: “but at least I can use my words.”
“So what?”
“And not just’—he grabs her arm, shakes it lightly—“grab people and attack them.”
“Please, if I wanted to attack you, you’d be dead.”
“I almost was! You terrified me!”
“So?”
“I could’ve had a heart attack!”
“You don’t even eat enough to clog your arteries!” Which reminds her: “when was the last time you ate?”
And he laughs, and laughs, and she doesn’t know why, but he takes her collar (gently, unlike her, always so gently) and kisses the tip of her nose, and that—and how utterly normal it feels, as if Yuuta was made to kiss her nose exactly like that—must mean something good.
“I thought you didn’t want me growing anymore,” he says, so fond she could be sick if she didn’t want so badly to grab him and kiss him again.
“That doesn’t mean I want you to starve, stupid.”
Because that—a world with no Yuuta in it—would be a terrible thing indeed.