Chapter Text
“Hrm?” Osomatsu greeted the opened envelope next to the front door with a raised eyebrow. Any hopes of it being money, no matter how slim they were, vanished when he opened it and found nothing in it. It looked as though he would still be as broke as he had made himself earlier at the pachinko parlor.
“Jyushimatsu?” he murmured, turning it over to read the address. Looking down at the floor, near the mass of shoes from his gaggle of brothers and his parents, he found a folded sheet of paper. Narrowing his eyes, he lifted it up and skimmed through it, once, then twice.
What happened next was a blur, but he found himself slamming open the door of his bedroom, spooking the four other brothers inside.
“Ugh, autocorrect…” Todomatsu grumbled from his spot hugging a pillow on the floor, pressing a few buttons on the phone to edit his text, while Choromatsu looked down at the torn page of his book with disdain, Ichimatsu relaxed his tense, cat-like posture, and Karasmatsu looked from above his sunglasses with a bit of curiosity.
“Has anyone seen Jyushimatsu?” Osomatsu went about examining the room for his brother, not excluding the underneath of the couch cushions as he did so, ignoring Karamatsu as he lifted up the one he was seated at, rolling Karamatsu closer to the arm of the couch despite his objection.
“…Why? Has he done something?” Choromatsu asked, watching as his slightly older brother lifted up the soda can next to Todomatsu in his continued search. Osomatsu went to move Ichimatsu from his place towards the back of the room, but this was only greeted with a glare, and the older brother gave a light chuckle and backed away.
“He’s not here,” Todomatsu replied, not even bothering to look up from his phone.
“Is he in some sort of trouble, brother?!” Karamatsu rose from his spot on the couch, posing himself immediately in attack mode.
“No! Look!” Osomatsu exclaimed, holding up the paper in his hand. The other brothers gathered around him, Choromatsu pushing up the glasses he had been wearing while reading and skimming over it.
“This feels invasive…” Choromatsu murmured.
“He was recruited?!” Todomatsu gave a gasp, and even the phone-obsessed brother found himself shoving his phone in his pocket. "Wow, I knew he wasn't that bad, but I never took him for the type to actually be considered talented!"
“Mm-hm! A baseball agent!” Osomatsu replied. “For a minor league! He must’ve watched him practicing a few months ago!”
“Wow, that’s pretty far from us… Wait! Isn’t this the same town where those letters from Homura all come from?” Choromatsu muttered. “You don’t think he accepted this, do you?”
“He’d be crazy not to, if that’s the case!” Todomatsu answered.
Karamatsu was the one who felt the darkening aura next to him—A darker one than he was accustomed to. Grinning, he pulled Ichimatasu into an embrace around the shoulders, and gave out a hearty laugh.
“How great for our Jyushimatsu, neh? Finally leaving this NEET life behind! Why, I always knew he'd be the one to—!”
“Piss OFF!” Ichimatsu gave a growl, and shoved away the arm, as well as his brother. The oxygen seemed to leave the room as the rest of the brothers all stopped to stare at the brother in the wrinkled purple hoodie.
“Ichimatsu…” Osomatsu said, barely audible, as he looked up from the paper.
“I’m going out,” was Ichimatsu’s only answer before he closed the door behind himself.
Karamatsu had remained there, stunned, and the three other brothers exchanged worried looks. They all knew to be concerned… Just like they all knew to not follow Ichimatsu in his current state.
The sun was still up enough to head to the park at clear his head, and Ichimatsu found himself seated on a bench, looking out at no one another nothing in particular. He was deep enough in his thoughts to not really need anything to look at.
“If he leaves, who’ll I have then? Crappymatsu?” he said to himself, glaring at the dirt for even daring to exist at that moment. How dare anything exist. How dare even he even exist.
He brought his knees up closer to himself, but was broken out of his attempts to will himself out of existence by a flash or white and black that jutted past him, barely registering itself as a creature. Seconds later it was followed by the sound of the flipping and flopping from a pair of house slippers, and a young, dark-haired woman stopped for a moment briefly to rub the stitch in her side before continuing her chase.
Ichimatsu thought for a moment to let it go, but his eyes followed her briefly as she continued her run in desperation. Her hair was just at her shoulders, slightly wave and black, and her shorts and plain pink shirt let him know that she hadn’t exactly planned to be out running in the chilly weather they had been having. He got up, against his better judgment, and wandered over to a tree that the blur had scurried up, and stopping and looking upwards he could get a better look at the frightened kitten and its wide green eyes. It gave a low, long meow, and Ichimatsu searched through the pocket of his hoodie while the woman next to him looked onward, silent but confused.
Ichimatsu made a clicking noise to get the creature’s attention, and the kitten flicked its tail and watched, cautious, as he pulled out a few dried sardines. The woman’s curiosity turned to a look of shock that someone would just walk around with something like this, and the kitten gave another meow, and attempted to climb down before backing up once more, further now against the trunk of the tree.
“So it’s going to be that, huh? Okay.” He hadn’t worn shoes for this, but after a little bit of struggling he found himself clutching the tree and high enough where he could reach out and grip the kitten by the scruff of the neck. He jumped back down, and kept his grip on the kitten while holding it by its rump with his other hand.
“Hold it like this,” he instructed her, showing her how he had grabbed onto its neck, and she reached out, replacing her hands with his, and he only remembered that he was speaking this comfortable to a woman when the tips of her fingers graced one of his hands. He felt one of his hands shake, but managed to steady them long enough to shove them both back in his pockets and turn away from her. “D-Don’t let him out again if he’s going to bolt like that…”
She didn’t answer him. She only kept her hold on the kitten, cradling it like a baby, while she briefly embraced the cat-loving Matsuno boy briefly with her other arm. Ichimatsu remained there, frozen in place, and not evening thinking to look up from the dirt clod he had been focusing on. His face felt red-hot, and by the time he finally managed to give a squeak and look up, the sun he totally set.
“She… She smelled so nice!” he exclaimed, his eyes wide.