Work Text:
“Nana, look! ”
Nana, pointedly, does not look. Looking would be like taking the first step onto an icy mountain and from there it’s just a slippery slope downhill.
“They’re on sale!” Hachi adds. Nana sees a flash of concerningly bright color in the corner of her vision and pointedly turns her head away
“On saaaaaaale , Nana,” Hachi whines, like an insistent chihuahua. She might as well be one with all the care she requires.
Nana doesn’t bother looking up from the faux-leather jacket that she’s studying. She flips one worn-out sleeve to find a row of studded rhinestones on the back. Ugh. Too tacky.
Hachi switches tactics, playing dirty. She wraps her fingers around Nana’s cigarette and honest-to-god pulls. The cigarette slips straight out of her mouth . Nana’s too shocked to protest and the paper scrapes against her teeth on the way out.
“Na- na ,” Hachi whines again, petulant, and Nana finally drops the jacket to look. Hachi lights up at the sight, shaking the plastic hangers vigorously. “Look! Aren’t these the cutest sweaters you’ve ever seen?”
In front of her are perhaps the ugliest sweaters that Nana has ever had the misfortune of laying eyes upon. There are matching googly-eyed reindeer on the two of them, little plastic LED lights sewn into the lining. To top it off, there’s some bizarre green-and-red pattern on the sleeves and a 3D scarf that dangles past the hem. Nana sighs, long and loud.
She starts with the easy part–taking the smoking cigarette out of Hachi’s hands before she burns herself. She fits it back into her mouth and takes another long drag. She’s going to need it if she wants to make it to the end of this conversation.
“Hachi, those are the ugliest sweaters I’ve ever seen,” she replies, brutally honest. Hachi’s eyes, predictably, tear up at the words, her knuckles turning white as she grips the plastic.
“B-B-But they’re so adorable, Nana! Don’t you see? I can practically see the two of us wearing them! They’re matching !” Nana’s eyebrow hikes up higher on her forehead with each word.
“Us. Wearing. These,” she echoes incredulously, lifting one sleeve up in the air like it’s contaminated. She lets it fall back down but the glitter remains on her finger pads and she scrubs furiously at her skin to get it off. “ Matching Christmas sweaters. Do you even have the money to buy these?”
“My parents sent me some money for the holidays!” she says, smiling wide. Nana’s eyebrow twitches with the reminder of an earlier conversation.
“I thought you said you were supposed to be saving more,” she teases. “Shouldn’t you save that money then?”
Hachi turns her face away finally from the god-awful sweaters to face her. This close, Nana can see the cakey splotches in her makeup, the place on her cheekbones where she’d applied too much blush. Her eyes are smudged at the corner with shaky eyeliner but even through it all, she is bright and beautiful.
“What’s the point of saving money if not to spend it on the people we love?”
And how like Hachi to knock her clean off her feet in the middle of this mom-and-pop thrift store. Nana’s left blinking once, twice in the face of her brutal honesty. Hachi never learned to put a filter up between her and the rest of the world, never had to. It’s just her and her dazzlingly naive outtake on the world. (But maybe that’s what the Christmas spirit is all about. Maybe that’s a little of what’s missing in her life right about now.)
Hachi’s voice turns quieter now as something in her face softens.
“Don’t you have someone like that, Nana?”
Her head throbs with the question. Go out for a shopping outing and come back with a migraine. Typical Hachi behavior, if she’s being honest with herself. She’d need both hands and then some to count the times that her world’s been flipped on its axis in the past months.
Do I? Do I have someone I love like that?
She studies the person in front of her. Hachi, in all her imperfections, vain to a point that it’s near pathetic, recklessly impulsive in the face of adolescence, hopelessly, wonderfully optimistic, loyal to an insufferable fault. Hachi, who half-dragged her to a concert in a misguided attempt to give Nana back a fraction of her happiness.
The cashier at the counter is giving the two of them the stink eye. They’re nearly causing a scene in the middle of the clothing racks. Nana grins and takes one plastic hanger with the warm feeling in her gut that only Hachi can elicit from her. Guilt and recklessness all bundled up into one.
“Get the sweaters, Hachi,” she says and Hachi honest-to-god beams. Nana has to squint in the offending light. “I’m wearing them only once on Christmas and then never again.”
“I love you, Nana!” Hachi says, reaching up on her tippy-toes to press a kiss to her cheek. Her glittery lipgloss leaves behind prints and Nana refuses to stain her jacket wiping it off. Hachi bounds off to the register without a second glance backwards, sweaters bundled up in her arms.
“Merry Christmas to you too, Hachi,” Nana murmurs.