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For a move-out gift, his mom gave him a new pair of headphones.
At the time, he didn't think much of it. The old ones he wore would often be found around his neck, his little quirk with his group of friends (? Acquaintances? ). But even he could admit that they were mostly for show, save for the quick walks to school from his apartment or late night internet videos. He hadn't even asked his mom to buy him a replacement, though her mystic mom powers probably overheard him complaining how they shorted out in one ear, and how one twenty minute walk could leave one ear deaf and the other hypersensitive to everything.
So she handed the box to him, lovingly wrapped and price sticker carefully peeled off. "For the car ride there," she explained to him with a smile, knowing how anxious and saddened he was about the move. And Yosuke was left with this box of seemingly expensive headphones, wondering exactly what else she expected him to do with them.
Of course he loved music, it was a big part of his personality. Posters of idols adorned his walls, next to printed out photos of Western bands and a few autographed napkins. If there were a concert of a band he knew in Tokyo, he would be the guy awake at 3 am looking for cheap online tickets. His father bought him a guitar a months back, and he was slowly working through the most familiar four chords. Haiyashi-san, his elementary school music teacher, once told the Hanamuras how talented their boy was, to not be disheartened by his more average grades in other subjects. His mother looked at her young boy fondly then, and asked him if he liked music.
He loved it, he told her. It brought joy to his day.
He supposed he expected the drive to Yasoinaba to match his mood: despondent, perhaps with a touch of rain or fog. But it was clear and sunny, only fluffy clouds adorned the sky, and the temperature was moderate if only a bit chilly. How ironic. He thumbed his MP3-player absentmindedly, figuring that if the weather wouldn't cooperate, his music would.
He quickly concocted a playlist of varying emotions: sad, slow songs that featured lyrics of heartbreak and loneliness, quick and brash songs with angry singers and screaming guitars, avant-garde songs that spoke of uncertainty. He felt them all...one at a time? All at once? His mood tended to shift with each song, so when one emotion faded it was replaced by another. He chuckled almost, his friends (? Acquaintances?) would've called him soft, having his emotions be caused by some random chords and empty words.
His mother looked towards the back seat and smiled at him. He was putting those headphones to good use.
He was jolted back into reality by a gentle tug and the sound of air filling his ears. Startled, he turned towards who had caused such a sensation, only to be met by the gaze of his mother. "I appreciate that you like your gift, but we haven't been getting a lot of help unpacking from you," she scolded, though her tone was gentle, sweet. Like the song he was just listening to.
"Sorry," was all he said, rubbing his ears where the pressure once was. His brain suddenly felt so empty, full of nothing but the ringing of the air, the white noise of existence. Though he had been listening to that same car playlist over and over for the week that he had been there, the lack of the headphones around his ears made him forget what they were saying, what they sounded like. His mother rubbed his shoulder.
"Just thought you might want to actually unpack your bed, and stop sleeping in your comforter on the floor," she laughed. He didn't. He hadn't even noticed.
She set his headphones on the half unpacked desk as she left. His ears still burned from when she took them off him.
"Why do you always wear these around your neck?" a classmate asked him. Satonaka was her name, wasn't it? He had known her for a month, but couldn't remember her name...nor most of the people in his class for that matter. "Couldn't you just leave them in your shoe locker? It's not like you could wear them during class." Yosuke gave her that million dollar smile, the smile that you saw plastered on the faces of actors faking in commercials.
"What you don't think they look cool?" He had to fake that smile for her, fake that he only wanted them around his neck instead of permanently glued to his ears. She scoffed at him, perhaps mistaking his acting for flirting.
"Yeah right," she snorted, before a mischievous smirk started to adorn her face. "Let me try them on, I wanna hear the sound quality!" Yosuke made an odd choking sound as she snatched the headphones out from around his neck, as if she had actually pulled out his throat.
"Give them back!" He shouted at her, voice suddenly full of raw emotion, and he forcefully grabbed them, clutching them close to his chest. Each breath he took seemed heavy, his eyes wide and unnatural. Satonaka gaped at him.
"Jeez, I wasn't gonna do anything to them. Weirdo." People stared at them as she spoke, whispering to each other words that Yosuke could only barely make out. He shoved the headphones back onto his ears and ran out of the classroom. He couldn't hear their jibes, their insults. He couldn't hear them at all.
The headphones became his only defense to the reality that was slowly coming down around him. With them on, there was no need to worry about what people said about him, his dad, his mom, the company he had to work for. He didn't need to hear about how Junes was closing the family businesses, how because of him some people who he called classmates weren't able to show up to school anymore. It didn't matter. He didn't remember their names anyway.
He didn't need to hear the part-timers all figuring out ways to butter him up for promotions, raises, or time-off. How just because he was the manager's son, that made him in charge even though there were people that were stronger than him, more personable than him, better than him.
He didn't need to hear his dad joking about him, wondering if those cuts on his arms he got from work were because he was pretending to be one of his old ninja heroes and had a few too many accidents with the box cutters. To which he would laugh and agree, rubbing the back of his neck in mock embarrassment, while his mother gazed back at him with concern.
He wished she would stop looking at him like that.
Konishi-senpai was the first one he heard in Inaba. She listened to him, to his woes. How ever since coming here he's felt so empty...scratch that, there had always been a twinge of emptiness, even back in the city. But not nearly as much as it seemed to thrive here. She would pat his shoulder, his thigh, express her sympathies with feeling the same about the world sometimes, how she was always so tired. How her own defense mechanism was to play with her hair whenever there was talk about her in the shopping district.
He supposed he couldn't have fallen in love with any other person right then.
The transfer student was quiet. That was fine with him, much less of a noise to drown out. Though he couldn't help the twinge of anger, sadness, when his classmates flocked to the grey-haired boy. They asked him questions about the city, how hard it must be to transfer to such a small school, small luxuries he was never afforded. A small 'tch' escaped his mouth as he put the familiar safety around his ears.
Not a few minutes passed before he felt a tap on his shoulder. Expecting it to be Satonaka, or perhaps a part-time coworker, he whipped his head around with an expression that could only be described as pure annoyance. Instead he met the calm questioning face of the transfer student (Narukami? Seta? He was still bad with names even after all this time). His new classmate didn't smile at him, didn't make much of anything with his face really, just a pure blank state. Yosuke didn't know what to make of it. He made a motion around his head, pretending there were headphones around his ears, miming taking them off his ears.
He didn't make a move to touch them.
Yosuke obliged, pausing his music briefly to let the white noise into his brain again.
"Sorry, I was just wondering what you were listening to is all." Yosuke blinked. He really didn't know what to make of this new classmate.
A few days later, the same person would rescue him from a trash can. He didn't mock him, rather his eyes were full of concern, he asked if he was alright.
He was the second person in Inaba that Yosuke heard.
In fact, I'm the one who thinks everyone's a pain in the ass!
The words rang around his head like a mantra as he came to, the rush of emotions flooding back as he left the sweet bliss of unconsciousness. That monster, his monster, the representation of his boredom, loneliness, and resentment. It still stood there in front of him, as blank of an expression as he usually gave the world. "You're...you're not me."
The bear, Teddie, gave Yosuke a pitying look, as if he needed something like that to make him feel more pathetic. "That thing came from you Yosuke. You have to accept it, or it'll go berserk again." Narukami spoke calmly to him then, his tone soothing, like a dulcet melody.
"You're still yourself." Yosuke paused. Myself? What was he? The emptiness had consumed him, and his personality became so ingrained with what others thought of him, that he hadn't even thought of what he was really like in a long time. He probed Narukami's grey eyes, as if they could maybe hold the answer. But he merely replied in with self-deprecation.
"Dammit, it hurts to face yourself." Funny, because up until this point he had no idea this was a part of himself. It made so much sense. The need to tune people out. The anguish over both Saki's death and betrayal...and not knowing which was worse. The idea that maybe being a hero would help end his feelings of self-doubt and emptiness.
He accepted his shadow without second thought. Soon after, Jiraiya came forth.
And for the first time in six months, he felt like someone.
Narukami tapped his shoulder as he walked Yosuke home, holding out his headphones in one hand. Yosuke stared at them, puzzled. They must have fallen off when he fainted, though he hadn't noticed them missing. Unlike when his mother took them off so many months ago, or when Satonaka tried to take them, or even the knot that appeared in his stomach when he had to take them off to shower or sleep. The emotions were missing...and he wasn't afraid.
He took them gingerly away from Narukami's outstretched hand, thanked him for everything.
It was the first time he smiled at Yosuke, a small but genuine twitch of the lips.
Yosuke couldn't help but give one back.
The music had found new meaning as the months went by. Songs that once represented the emotions he had tried to repress now played as he fought through hoards of shadows in an unknown world. Those brash, angry songs fueled his adrenaline; those sad, slow songs calmed his nerves. He could remember what they sounded like, what they now felt like. He was even finding himself sick of them sometimes.
So there had to be new songs. Songs to represent new dungeons, hitting a shadow just right. Songs to represent sunny days and cloudy days.
Songs to represent his friends (? ...yes friends).
Yosuke's mother ruffled his hair as he worked on these new playlists with Yu, happy to see her son smile for the first time since November.
There were days where that resentment would return. Days where he thought about his first love, Saki Konishi, the first one he heard. He remembered hearing her words in the dilapidated liquor store, wishing that he could tune them out, but he had already trusted her enough to let her in, to hear her words.
He couldn't stop the tears from falling, especially as Yu grabbed hold of him and held him close. It was a gentle hug, one with an intimate hand around the waist and the other running his fingers through his hair. It felt too nice, too good. He had to ruin it.
"You idiot. That's for girls." Neither of them let go.
His headphones dug into his collarbone.
A few months later, Yosuke was doing the same to his partner. The one person who was so strong needed someone who was so weak to comfort him. How ironic.
He held Yu as he cried softly, lamenting his baby cousin hardly seven years old, his determined uncle ready to sacrifice everything for her. He speaks through quiet sobs, wondering if he did enough for them. Yosuke did the only thing he knew how.
He knew exactly which song to pick, the song that rang through his head all throughout their search for the TV World for her (though he would never admit that, not now), and pressed play. Ginger fingertips grabbed hold of the headphones, his source of safety and comfort, and transferred them onto someone who needed them more than him.
Yu's red eyes looked at him quizzically, knowing how much they meant to him, but Yosuke's saddened glance silenced any words of protest.
After all, it was nice to hold Yu without headphones digging into their skins.
A mystery solved, a killer caught. And Yosuke stood outside the Dojima's, rubbing his hands in the crisp late December air.
As he waited, he considered how much he had changed this year. He wasn't lying when he told Yu that he had come to love the town, for finally the loneliness had subsided a little. Wit and sarcasm came to him easier now, it turned out he could be pretty funny. Though he still had the tendency to put his foot in his mouth when he didn't think before speaking. Something to work on, he supposed.
He had a sharp and quick mind when he did put thought into his speech, and often beat out their leader in terms of deduction (even if he turned out only to be right some of the time). He stood up for himself on occasion, actually putting a couple of part-timers in their place and not being such a people-pleaser to curb his resentment.
Yes...he had grown. And that put a smile to his face that only grew wider as his partner finally opened the front door. As he stepped outside into the cold to meet him, Yu threw an arm around his shoulder at the same time that Yosuke did.
He noticed, but never stated, how different it was when he didn't feel his headphones under his arm.