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If Maple had to guess, she’d say Keiji is quite certain that his current demeanour is the poster child of normalcy.
Despite his confidence, he's not at all convincing.
Technically speaking, he does present as is typical. His trademark smirk has yet to falter — not in her eye line, at least — and he's settled into their bed with his usual harrumph. His hair is messy; his jaw is shadowed; he looks like he hasn't slept in a week. One glance at the shirt pulling too-tight across his rigid shoulders, and the stiff arm ever situated in the crook of his neck, scratching, is as telling as it always is.
He’s tense. Noticeably, dreadfully tense.
It's true: these things are all, in all honesty and fairness and logic... normal. This is by no means out of character, it's just that something about it seems… separate. It's detached. Cut off from his routine angst.
She, hesitantly, looks up at him, cocking her head to one side with a pout forming alongside her inquisition.
'Keiji.' She pauses, and it is just as much to note his reaction as it is to prepare herself for the war that is to come. He, as ever, remains stony faced. She braces herself before she continues.
'...What's wrong?'
He shifts closer, leaning down to plant a quick kiss to the top of her head before sitting back up, rigidly. 'Somethin's wrong? News to me.'
With all her experience in dealing with his attitude, she'd seen his deflection coming from further than a mile away. It's instinct, irrefutably, and she'd be a hypocrite if she acted like her own whims were superior. He has a habit of running, and she's got one of staying; both are practicing catalysts of their own ruin. She considers the balancing act they perform something of a favour to the world. Repentance, if you will.
As it stands, however, balancing is a strong word. An agitated glare at him and a gentle, final shush at her later, she finds herself surrendering as she so often does.
Instead, she opts for her refined practice of wordless comfort: nestling as best she can into the chest of the slouching brick wall beside her. She would grumble something about his sly avoidance — should reprimand him for 'being cagey, Keiji' — but he's easily forgiven when he's somehow so, so warm, and she's not really in the mood for an interrogation. Or wordplay.
He breathes softly into the still air of his unspoken victory as he focuses on whatever it is that he's doing on his phone, still half-upright and half-leaning on their headboard.
Whatever he's so immersed in, she'd love to care more about, but her blinks are slowing faster than she'd like. It's an interruption not unfamiliar, though highly unwelcome. She knows something's disquieting him, something unfavourable, something perturbing him just as her sinking eyelids are perturbing her. He's skilled at keeping her awake when he wants to, when she asks, and she too could be so, so skilled in helping him in return, if he'd only let her. Eyes opening with a renewed fire, she rolls herself over so that she is sprawled over him; her chin now meets his chest, right arm in tandem splayed across it. Her left arm is, inevitably, now squished between her body and their mattress and this is, inevitably, uncomfortable.
Oh, well. It's a small price to pay.
Keiji makes a noise as if to query her okayness, to which she shoots him a second, hopefully more intimidating, glare. She's a champion of wishful thinking.
Mercifully, though, and after the briefest of moments, he finally places his phone on the nightstand. It makes the most pleasant thud.
It's exhilarating. In the face of her success, Maple plots. She can't ask him what his problem is again, but what she can do is this:
'Weather app got you hooked?' It's a playful tease, one that lets him know she's not dropping this, but reassures him that she also won't push it if he seriously does not want her to.
(It's balance! For real this time.)
The success of pulling this sort of manoeuvre on her troubled lover is always unpredictable, a fact she is well aware of and has a tendency to prepare herself for, yet she's still very much caught off guard by his reply. A dry laugh, at first. Customary. Then, words follow.
'How'd you know?'
A joking rebuttal in this scenario should be fine, should be comforting, should be a crystal clear indicator of his mood returning to its natural impasse. If only it were. There's no further laughter, no cocky grin. She can tell he's being honest. Isn't that something? Sure, no man his age would be doomscrolling this time at night. She's pretty sure his screentime in particular is in the negatives, and as well as this he's not that old. He's not.
He's young, and he's spritely, and he's, what, thirty four? That's not old, no matter how many times her friends call him it — Nao's best friend (besides Maple herself) is literally her fifty-year-old ex-professor. Keiji being a few years their senior carries no real weight to it in comparison. And, more pressing: no man is so old that checking on the weather is his hobby, not even Mishima, though he's certainly on the right end of quirky for it to not be something she'd bat an eye at if he revealed it as a habit some day. Keiji's behaviour however is both erratic and untoward, and she's just on the edge of a further, more bewildered probing of his brain when it all makes sense.
There's a flash, though briefly, a blade of light slicing through the gap in the drawn curtains, followed by a low rumble in the distance, and all of a sudden the strongest man she knows is barely suppressing a flinch beneath her.
Ah.
Her eyes flick upwards and her brow furrows ever so slightly as she meets his waiting gaze. Of course, he's nothing if not shrewd, she knows this, knows he'd rather die than admit what just happened, knows that he needs her to read between the lines (even if he doesn't want her to). As the next of the lightning cuts into the air, accompanied by the slowly rising crescendo of rain, she frowns at him.
'...Are the windows shut?' she asks, channeling her lingering fatigue into feigning helplessness.
He hums, nods. 'Think so.'
Another wave of thunder rolls in. Maple allows her head to flop dramatically back onto Keiji's chest, curling into him in the exaggerated, almost petulant manner she knows he's rather partial to, whining out a vague complaint about it being too loud with the added effect of a small sniff at the end. Thick arms wrap around her, protective, and his voice lowers as he whispers comfort into her ear. She hopes the ritual of it all is soothing his nerves just as much as it's making her heart warm, wonders if he knows what she's doing. Is it like how he'd foretold her actions before? Or is it that he’s so honed in on her, and on making sure she feels safe, that he's not even stopped to consider the possibility of it all being a ruse?
She decides in the end that, really, she does not care. The squeeze she gets with every growl the storm makes completes her, either way. Whether it's to comfort her or to use her as a grounding tool, a reminder of reality, or some cocktail of both. He's here, and he's alright, and that is all she could ever ask for.
Sharing silences with him might be her favourite pastime. Specifically when it falls over them in moments like this, the softest of blankets after the harshest of blizzards, warming her beyond the heat of his skin, seeping into her heart. As a lover of sappy fiction, romcoms and all, she'd always wanted to believe in soulmates. As a rational adult woman, she'd been ready to give up on that fantasy as she’d approached her mid-twenties.
Then, she met him.
They stay as they were even as the sky finally quietens, tangled up in one another. Keiji settles by then, too, a miracle in itself. As her head is carried by the subtle rise and fall of his chest, she thinks that this is the calmest she's maybe ever seen him. He's far from loosened, sure, but he's even further from the tautness that'd plagued them both mere hours before.
It's nice. He deserves this more often. If Maple had to guess, she’d say Keiji is quite certain that he doesn't. Despite his confidence, she'd travel to the ends of the earth to convince him otherwise.
Or, rather, she'll lay with him in silence til the early hours of the morning, any day. She'll interrupt the quiet intermittently to reassure him that there's absolutely nothing else she'd rather be doing, any day, without him having to ask.
'I love you, Keiji.'
She'll say it a thousand times over, until he believes it.
'...Love you more, Maple.'
When it's not worth arguing, she'll meet him in the middle.
'Go to sleep, Kei.'
And she knows he would, too.