Work Text:
“She takes after you.”
He turns to see what Maki will think of that, but she doesn’t say anything at first. He turns around as if he suspected she might and goes on backing up the car, inching to the edge of the driveway.
Then he reaches the end, shifts gears, pulls back in. Maki finally looks up at him and smiles. “Does she?”
He takes a moment after he switches the gear again to watch them. Maki wears a tired smile like one of her well-loved sweatshirts, warm and inviting but worn to the bone, and she shifts the scrawny bundle of yellow blankets in her arms without really looking at him.
“She knows what she likes,” Yuuta tells her.
“Well, I would hope.”
“Won’t sleep unless the car is backing up,” he chuckles. “Sure didn’t get that from me.”
“Well, if she took after you, she’d never sleep at all.”
“I’m not a teenager, Maki-chan, I sleep plenty.”
“Yeah, right.”
“I mean, not since the babies-“
“Not since ever.”
“I slept good when-“
“You slept good on our honeymoon, probably,” she says drily. “And that’s it.”
“There has to have been some other time-“
“Yuuta,” she says.
“Yeah?”
“Talk about anything but sleep.”
“Right. Sorry.”
She elbows him from the passenger’s seat. “You’ll fall asleep at the wheel.”
“Will not.”
“I can see it in your eyes.”
He lifts his eyebrows and looks over at her. “You drive, then.”
“I can’t,” she tells him.
“Why, exactly?”
“She’ll cry.”
“No, she won’t.”
Maki glares at him. “She’ll cry.”
“I’m not a stranger, Maki-chan. She won’t cry if I hold her.”
“She will. It has to be me.”
“You’re just hogging her,” Yuuta tells her.
“So?”
“If you’re so worried I’ll fall asleep, let me have the baby.”
Maki clutches her tighter. “No.”
“Suit yourself, then.”
“Just don’t crash.”
He shakes his head fondly. “Wasn’t planning on it.”
Then Maki goes back to brooding. She leans over the baby like she’s going to burst into flame if not watched, and she keeps an unmoving frown on her face, as if somehow they’ve both been slighted by the mere suggestion that they should be separated. How it could ever be in question that the baby takes after her is beyond Yuuta’s comprehension.
She ought to, he thinks. Theirs is the ideal arrangement: the demanding baby girl who only sleeps some nights in a car going back and forth like a cradle and the chubby boy asleep in his carseat who is dead to the world as soon as his stomach is full and stays dead to the world until it’s empty again. It wouldn’t be fair if they didn’t have one who took after Maki. He likes to notice the ways her resemblance comes out when he least expects to see it.
“She wants me,” Maki tells him, no doubt convincing herself. “When we do this.”
“Sure.”
“I smell like milk.”
Shinsuke is the twin who cares about that, not scrawny Tsugumi who is more often worryingly unconcerned about eating than she is prone to gluttony. He doesn’t say so.
“Maybe,” he concedes.
“She’s too skinny. She knows she needs to be near the source.”
“The source…”
“What?”
“You’re not a dairy farm.”
“Aren’t I, though?”
“I can’t tell if you’re being serious.”
“I mean,” she says, and it does indeed sound like she’s deadly serious, “every day I’m yelled at until I let two small animals with no fine motor control milk me-“
“Maki, really.”
“-and it only lasts three hours before they start yelling again.” She looks almost proud of this. “I would say I’m doing pretty good business.”
“Milk you, Maki?”
“What?”
“You’re being provocative on purpose.”
She smirks. “Of course I am.”
“Could you not, sweetheart?”
“I’m tired,” she says. “I don’t have self-control when I’m tired.”
“I’m sure you could if you wanted to.”
“But I don’t.”
“Would you not say strange things when I’m too tired to process them?”
“No, I like getting a rise out of you.”
“Then you drive.”
“No, Tsun wants-“
“Tsun wants a moving car, Maki.”
“No, she wants me.” Maki bends her head, touches her nose to Tsugumi’s little one. “Don’t you, little sprout?”
“That’s not fair, Maki, you know that’s not fair.”
“What?”
“Little sprout?” he says weakly.
“Yeah, that’s what I said.”
“You can’t just be sweet every time you want me to stop arguing with you.”
“But it works,” she says.
“Why do you feel so much spite this early in the morning?”
“Brings me joy,” she says, licking her lips. “Barely feel sane, anyways. Might as well not act like it.”
“I’m…I don’t have the energy for this, Maki-chan.”
“Neither do I, really.”
Then she sinks back into her broody silence, and he notices the pallor of her face, the half-moons under her eyes. She holds Tsugumi like a shell around her, curling inwards, and after a while it must be too much, not enough fresh air or room for her to kick her little feet at nothing, because she begins to fuss, and Maki does, too.
“’s fine,” she says in a whisper that isn’t so much soothing as strained. “Just me, Tsun-Tsun.”
But it does little, and soon the squirming and mewling turns to a full-body wail. Maki mutters something.
“Hungry?” Yuuta asks.
“Probably.” She makes a frustrated sound and starts to fumble one-handed with the buttons of her pajama top. “She’s going to wake Shin.”
“He just ate,” Yuuta says gently. “He’s knocked out.”
She looks back over her shoulder, unconvinced, but Shinsuke is curled up like a little pill bug in his car seat, and no noise his sister makes seems likely to change that. Reluctantly, Maki turns back to her shirt, clumsily unfastens the top few buttons, and perhaps—the way Tsugumi suckles as if she will never get another chance—she only needed that.
“Greedy little sprout,” Maki says softly, and Yuuta can’t help but notice that her hand covers nearly the whole span of Tsugumi’s back.
Greedy is the last thing Tsugumi is, oftentimes so fussy she turns away food, and it worries Maki more than she’ll admit. So, if anything, it is an encouragement. Be greedier, she seems to say. Take more. Nothing frightens Maki like the thought that her scrawny baby won’t thrive.
There are many things, Yuuta has learned, that you can’t be certain of with babies as small as theirs. Their ailments are often impossible to diagnose; they are fragile, apt to take a turn at any moment; nobody can say for certain why some grow strong and plump and others—even among twins—look like they’re growing scrawnier every day. It is all either of them can do to rock them to sleep in the car as it drives incessantly back and forth up the driveway and feed them when they cry and hope.
“She’s eating better,” Maki says quietly after a moment.
“She is.”
“That’s good.”
“It is.”
“Yuuta.”
“Yeah?”
“Do you sometimes wonder about them?”
“Wonder what?”
“If they’re right about twins.”
“About them being unlucky?” he asks. “Maki-chan…”
“That they take something from each other.”
Mai had told her that. She’s never come out and said so, but he knows there must be some part of her that wonders if her daughter is so reluctant to put on weight precisely because her twin is so eager, if there is some balance that says they can never be equally healthy or equally strong. Still, it is a heavy thought, and not one he especially wants to confront.
Yuuta places a gentle hand on her arm and says, “Plenty of twins grow up just fine.”
“Yeah. Non-sorcerer ones.”
“I don’t think…” Yuuta trails off, glances over at Maki, realizes it’s futile. “I think she’ll be all right.”
“You can’t know that.”
“No,” he admits, “but look at how she’s eating now.”
“I guess.”
“It’s late, Maki,” he says. “Don’t think too much.”
“You’re one to talk.”
He chuckles, but there’s not much heart in it. Hard to be the one with all the reassurances when he’s barely assured of anything himself.
“True,” he concedes.
“Thinking too much is practically your side gig.”
“I’m getting better.”
“Hardly.”
He sighs. “Maybe I’m not.”
“You watch the baby monitor on your lunch break.”
“So do you.”
“When you know I’m home with them.”
“You’ll do it when you go back.”
“Meh.”
“You will,” he says. This is something he feels he can be certain of. “I have a feeling.”
“Well, maybe your feeling’s wrong.”
“Doubt that.” He can picture it, Maki newly returned to work and anxious, the knowledge that Yuuta is home with the twins for the day not comforting in the slightest. He reaches across the front seat and ruffles her hair. “You will, too.”
“Hmph.”
Tsugumi decides she’s done then, sparing Yuuta another response. Instead he watches Maki take the baby to her shoulder, and how she tucks her a little beneath her chin, and he thinks: how could she ever think there was a curse she couldn’t break?
Because it must be what she thinks. Too many years she’s been told that twins are an ill omen; too often were the things wrong with her attributed to a mistake of her birth. It is a natural worry when one of hers is ailing that they must somehow be inflicting it upon each other.
But she forgets that they don’t sleep when they aren’t near each other. She forgets that she holds tiny, fragile Tsugumi in her calloused warrior’s hands like she’s glass and that when the twins are being passed down the receiving line at a work gathering or a party, she stands at the end glowering at the rest of the guests until they are safely returned to the only person she trusts to keep them safe. Yuuta has plenty of reason to believe in things like family curses by now, more than he’d like, but he has even more reason to believe in Maki.
Maki who never stands in front of an obstacle for more than a couple of seconds before she’s charging at it, convinced—usually correctly—that the sheer force of her anger at its being there in the first place will break through it. Maki who became so sick of being told that her body wouldn’t carry a child that she went and made two. Maki who has never accepted an answer she didn’t like, from life or family or Yuuta or anyone else. That Maki.
Maybe there is something wrong with twins and maybe they’re never meant to thrive together. He doesn’t believe it, but he has learned not to put much stock in what he doesn’t believe anymore. Even if it’s true, he is much more convinced that Maki would simply will it untrue and it would be. That is how she is.
And their girl is so much like her that he cannot imagine, even as a baby, that she would submit to something so stupid as a curse.
She won’t even consent to a stationery bed or the wrong holder or a feeding time that doesn’t agree with her. A curse? He could laugh. She probably could, too, if she had the muscles for it. And then she would grab at Maki for milk and bulk up out of spite.
Please do that, he thinks, watching Tsugumi go limp against Maki’s shoulder, curl up her tiny fist around Maki’s shirt. Please do.
“You can stop,” she tells him. And he does. But for a moment, Yuuta sits there, watching Maki, watching Tsugumi, noticing the golden cast that the dim overhead light throws over both their faces, and thinks: she worries too much.
Not because there are not a thousand things to be worried about, all of them worse than the next. No, it is silly to worry because there is no need for it when Maki will bend the world to her will and make a place for her daughter in it whether she was ever meant to have one or not.
“Maki,” he says softly.
“What?”
“She’ll be fine.”
“You don’t know that.”
“Sure I do,” he says. “She takes after you.”