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1.
She says things like: “So, you like dinosaurs,” with a little smile, like she’s cataloguing everything about him—what he likes, what he hates, what makes him happy, what faces he makes. It’s almost computer-like, the little quirk of the head, the distant smile, like he can almost hear the whirring of cogs inside her mind, storing away the precious little bits of information she gets.
It’s almost scientific.
He’s never seen anything like it, never been on the receiving end of such attentive scrutiny. Utsumi has made him her experiment, diligently studying him and learning more and more. He of all people understands the passion of a scientist, but he never would have considered himself a likely candidate for such study. What makes him worth the trouble in her eyes?
2.
He takes her to the museum of natural history and she takes him to a cat café.
Watching her is strangely enthralling. Almost immediately upon paying the entrance fee, she drops to her knees in the middle of a pile of cats, reaching out her fingers to them and giggling as they sniff the tips of her fingers and rub up against her knees.
“I love cats,” she laughs when he comes back with their drinks, and something tugs at Yukawa’s heart because it’s been so long since he’s heard her laugh like that, so carefree and simple. He hangs back, his attention tuned entirely onto her frequency, the happiness buzzing off her like waves of static; the cats going ignored because he’s more than content to just watch her.
“You probably think I’m silly, don’t you?” she grins, burying her fingers in the admittedly rather impressive ruff of a large tortoiseshell cat.
“Not at all,” he says. “In fact, an affinity for cats is highly logical. As you know, cats are not like dogs, and never evolved to live co-dependently with humans. Yet, stroking a cat triggers the same level of oxytocin release as stroking a dog, or getting a hug from your lover.” He thinks he sees her blush a little at this. “Add that to the fact that cats have long since been crucial in biological pest control, it’s no surprise that so many humans, you included, enjoy the company of cats.”
“They’re also really cute, aren’t you, boy?” she coos to the tortoiseshell cat in her lap.
“Boy?” His interest piqued, he peers closer at the cat and discovers that the tortoiseshell is indeed male. “That’s very interesting, you know. A tortoiseshell cat gets its tri-tone colours because the individual genes coding for each colour – the orange and the black – are carried on the X chromosomes. In a female cat, only one X chromosome can be active in any one cell in the body, so what you get is the orange in some places, and black in others, depending on which X chromosome is inactivated in each cell. The fact that this tortoiseshell cat is a male means that he’s carrying an extra X chromosome in addition to his XY chromosomes. Which means your little friend here is an extremely rare genetic mutant.”
“That is pretty interesting,” she says, turning her attention back to the now purring cat. “As always, Professor, you always teach me so much.”
Yukawa is inexplicably struck by the irrational suspicion that she may be mocking him. He’s aware of how he uses his knowledge as a defence mechanism, how he uses all the bits of random facts that he has collected over the years like decoys to deflect attention from heavier matters. It was a habit that started early in his childhood and had somehow stuck. Surely Utsumi, observant as she was, had picked up on this as well.
Yukawa turns to look at her only to see that her smile is genuine – a Duchenne smile, to be precise - judging by the engagement of her orbital and zygomatic muscles. Relieved, he allows himself to relax and smile in return, which he notes with a certain degree of tenderness, causes her to smile even wider.
The more time he spent with her, the more aware he was becoming of this curious mirroring effect in the both of them. How he smiles in response to her smile, how she grows sullen and quiet when he exhibits the same behaviour. He’s familiar with the concept of mirroring behaviour and body language as a way to solicit fondness in the beginning stages of a social contract, but at this point, they had known each other for so long that there was no longer any need to establish initial feelings of familiarity.
Which then leads him to the conclusion that they were undoubtedly exerting some sort of effect on each other; that his feelings somehow influenced hers and vice versa, that their individual existences were so irretrievably linked that they were each capable of influencing the other, like Newton’s infamous action at a distance, or a chemical reaction between two volatile compounds.
3.
“The crux of science is that there is nothing more important than the truth. Not emotions or personal feelings or beliefs or desires. The evidence is all there is, and if it doesn’t agree with the hypothesis, no matter how much we wish for it to be true or how long we’ve believed in it, we have to discard the hypothesis and go with what the evidence tells us. That’s science.”
“So what you’re saying is your own personal feelings come second to what the facts tell you.”
She’s incredibly perceptive, Yukawa marvels, a skill that she seems to be cultivating more and more in his presence. Perhaps it was a symptom of her increased association with him, which he still isn’t sure is a good thing or not. She’s changed in the years that she’s known him; that’s an undeniable fact. He begins watching her from a distance and he’s always amused by his observations. The frown on her face is his; the slow, considered tightening of her jaw, the bunching of her eyebrows, the way she sits back and exhales through steepled fingers, even her choice of words—it’s like looking into a mirror, he finds himself smiling warmly at the realisation.
It doesn’t even surprise him when he realises that he’s begun to regard her with a small degree of fondness – perhaps, if one were to follow the dictionary definition precisely, one could even call it affection.
“So,” she says, her eyes ablaze, her mouth quirked in the way he finds so frustratingly charming. “What are the facts telling you now?”
It was remarkable on its own to think that his mere existence was capable of exerting such an effect on her, but what he found even more remarkable was that she’s had far more of an effect on him, reluctant as he is to admit it. It’s true; she’s affected him more than he ever thought possible. Whether she intended to or not, she’s taught him things and he, whether he intended to or not, had learnt from her.
That there were things that were expected of him, that other people had feelings, that not everyone believed in logic, that the things he said could hurt.
So he swallows what he wants to say and lets it burn on the way down.
4.
If he focused - if he really, really paid attention to her - he’d probably be more appreciative of the fact that she was really quite astoundingly pretty but there wasn’t nearly enough hours in a day to spend on being fixated on particularly aesthetically pleasing arrangements of facial bones and muscle. Yet, it still catches him from time to time, mostly during moments of quiet like now, trapped in a car with her for the next three hours.
The circumstances surrounding and leading up to their sudden unplanned road trip were these: Utsumi had shown up to the lab as usual, waving a considerably thick file of papers around as usual, and had launched into a rather breathless and frantic explanation of the particulars of her newest case which involved a murder, a self-confessed murderer who could not physically have committed the murder, and a conspicuously missing witness that could unravel it all.
Ten minutes of silent deduction had then led Yukawa to the conclusion that if they were to apprehend the aforementioned key witness (and true murderer, if Yukawa had his facts right) on time, they would have to make it to the Shimoda docks before the first morning shipment the next day.
Realising that this was in fact highly time-sensitive, they had piled into her car and left straight away for Shimoda.
4.1
Three hours of driving and what greets them in the only inn that seems to be accepting guests at the time they arrive is a rather apologetic innkeeper.
“I’m sorry, but we only have the one room; will that be okay?”
“I’m not su--”
“That’s perfectly fine,” Yukawa says promptly. Utsumi shoots him a dangerous look, which he decides to ignore.
“Will you be needing two futons or just the one?”
“Two,” Utsumi almost yells.
4.2
The room at least comes with its own private bath, which Utsumi’s eyes instantly light up at. She makes to charge straight for the bath, but some remnant of her childhood discipline must have stopped her because she stops in her tracks and looks up at him, almost apologetically.
"I couldn't possibly--"
He cuts her off impatiently. "You've been driving for three hours straight. I think tradition can take a backseat for once. At the very least, please use the bath first.”
"If you insist," she says uncertainly.
"Please," he says. "Go ahead."
She nods at him gratefully and moves swiftly past him, gathering up her robe and towel in one graceful motion. The door slides open, then shut, and he's left by himself and the unfamiliar room suddenly feels all too quiet.
Utsumi loves her baths. He knows this, the way he now knows hundreds of little things about her. How she likes her sandwiches, how she sleeps through every alarm clock except the one that sounds like an air raid siren, how she blinks a little harder when she’s nervous-- he’s somehow amassed this sudden wealth of data and information about her and doesn't know what to do with it, he’s got nowhere to put it. He doesn’t ask this of her, neither does she offer it, but he learns it gradually and naturally through his association with her, which strikes him as curious because of how naturally his brain registers all this seemingly irrelevant details about her but he’s never really thought too much about it and he’s not going to start now, not when they’re sharing a small room in a small town and the sound of the shower running in the bathroom next door is suddenly very, very jarring.
She returns twenty five minutes later. Yukawa averts his eyes; deliberately avoiding looking at her though he doesn’t know why. Looking at her as she is now – fresh from a bath, clad in nothing but a thin cotton yukata - would mean seeing her in a way he never has before and he’s not ready for that.
He takes his own time in the bath, undressing neatly and scrubbing every inch of his skin before lowering himself into the bath tub. The water is near-scalding, a good forty two degrees Celsius judging by the way it turns his skin a deep red upon contact. He submerges himself neck-deep, revelling in the familiar swell of heat that envelops his body. As he sits there, his thoughts stray and it occurs to him that Utsumi had been sitting in this very bath just before him. The water now lapping gently at his skin had lapped at hers, mere minutes ago. Would it remember the feel of her bare skin, every notch and crevice and secret fold of her?
It's like touching her-- indirectly and by proxy, but it's still an intoxicating idea.
Try as he might - and he’s not trying very hard – he can’t pull his mind away from thoughts of her. Had she sighed like he did as she sank into the hot water? Did her eyes flutter shut in pleasure and did she throw her head back and expose the gentle curve of her throat to the steam of the bath? Did she inhale a little deeper, her breath come a little harder, in the smothering humidity of the steam?
He’s only mildly surprised when he feels the long-forgotten swoop in his stomach and the rush of blood pooling in his loins.
4.3
When he gets back to the room, Utsumi is sitting with her back to him, sipping tea at the table and her legs curled neatly beneath her on the zabuton. He can't explain why the sight strikes him the way it does - if it's the vulnerable nakedness of the nape of her neck exposed to the cool night air, or the way the belt of her yukata sits perfectly above her narrow hips in the cinch of her waist - it hits him solid and square in the chest, taking with it in one fell swoop his breath and all semblance of rational thought. He fills his vision with her for a long minute before she notices that he's there, and she turns to face him. With what feels dangerously like pleasure, he registers the way her eyes widen and her eyebrows raise, the minute sharp intake of breath catching halfway in her pale throat.
She's dewy and damp from her bath, the residual heat of the water still surging beneath her skin. He can't ignore the deep cut of her yukata, plunging below the sweat-slicked hollow of her clavicle and down her chest, revealing a frustratingly tantalising glimpse of soft skin flushed pink. Her hair, still damp and thrown carelessly over one narrow shoulder, clings in gentle little ringlets to the skin of her neck.
It always throws him, knocks him just a little off balance, when she wears her hair down. It’s remarkable how much a simple change could alter her countenance so drastically. He still remembers the first time he had seen her like that, her hair loose around her shoulders, seated unexpectedly in the back row of one of his lectures after the first case they’d ever worked together. He remembers the little jolt that had coursed through him - had damn near stopped his heart - when he met her eyes in that lecture hall all those months ago. Even a scientist was not exempt to the foolish tug and pull of human desire.
A curious itch starts in the tip of his fingers and slithers up his forearms; he has to clench his hands into fists to keep them from moving on their own volition. The strange impulse spreads, building like the tide, gaining in amplitude as it surges through his veins.
He'll never know what makes him do what he does next, what unseen occult force compels him to stride across the room and take Utsumi's face in his hands. His fingers splay across the entire length of her face and he marvels at the minutiae of sensations that immediately begin flooding his system. He drinks it all in, and it’s like time has slowed, like he’s caught in a little snag of a timewarp. Everything is magnified and amplified-- the feel of the proud sharp prominence of her cheekbone cutting into the pads of his fingers, his thumb pushing into the soft hollow under her jawbone sends tremors of something close to unbearable down the length of his spine. The combined sensations - one hard, one tender-soft - are fascinating and strangely sensual, but Yukawa has long since given up questioning his inclinations in the highly irrational matter of human arousal.
Utsumi looks at him with eyes like saucers, pupils dilated and blown wide in barely concealed surprise. She's barely breathing, barely moving under his hands. She exhales a word - his name, maybe - and turns her face away, but the movement causes her lips to catch on his the base of his fingers, right on the sensitive juncture between finger and palm. How can he even begin to explain how everything goes haywire then, how something so simple manages to trigger the entire biochemical cascade that follows—from the sparks that fire behind his eyelids, to the sudden arrhythmia that starts in his chest, the tightening in the hollow of his throat.
He tries desperately to map the neural pathways, tries to chase the electrical charges carrying the memory of Utsumi's skin along every nerve in his body; the sparks of electricity racing through dendrites and axons from the tip of his fingers to his brain and straight to the pit of his stomach, igniting nerve endings like fireworks on their way down.
He wants to do a lot more than just touch her. It’s a stupid, irrational, illogical, impractical impulse but he can’t help it.
Mind over matter, he tells himself. He recites it in his head like a mantra. Mind over matter. Mind over matter.
But a tiny whisper of a voice creeps out from a shadowy corner somewhere deep in the recesses of his brain. But, it hisses, as insidious as it is nearly non-existent. Mind is matter.
5.
Yukawa lies awake and unmoving underneath his futon for a long time after they put the lights out.
How will they explain their way out of this now?
5.1
His fingers still burn with the memory of her.
6.
The drive home is another three hour stretch of them confined in an all too small space, weak attempts to fill the stifling silence with music from Utsumi’s CD collection.
Utsumi doesn’t say anything, which Yukawa is both grateful for and wary of.
It’s two hours into the journey when she shoots him a little shy smile and for some reason – if it’s the mirror neurons firing involuntarily in his brain or the sheer relief that courses through his system – he smiles back.
7.
“Did you notice that Taniguchi was in tears the whole of today?”
The dangerous gleam in her eyes, the angry downward slope of her eyebrows tells Yukawa that they’re in for another unpleasant spat.
“Of course I did. I believe she broke off her engagement. Why do you ask?”
“I couldn’t tell. You didn’t act like you knew.”
“Don’t mistake indifference for ignorance.”
“Indifference?” she repeats incredulously. “What difference does it make whether you know about it or not, if you don’t do anything about it? I don’t care about what you know; I care about what you do! Whether you know or whether you don’t—without action, the only difference it makes is to you, so you know how clever you are.”
She’s not even trying to hide her rage now, and a flare of anger starts similarly in him, uncoiling red-hot in the depths of his chest.
“I find it hard to believe that the anger you are displaying now is due solely to a twenty-two year old girl and her failed relationship.”
Her eyes grow wider, more enraged.
“The anger I am displaying now,” she bites through the words savagely, like each one is a poisoned dart meant solely for his heart. “Is due mostly to your repeated failure to even attempt to display the minimal amount of care for the people in your life that frankly deserve a lot, lot more.”
They hit their mark as she intended. It hurts more than Yukawa will ever let on.
“Are you disappointed?” he says levelly.
“You could say that, yes.”
Yukawa inhales sharply through his teeth.
“If you’re disappointed in me, it is purely a result of your own doing. If I didn’t live up to your expectations, then you are the one at fault for holding me to such irrational standards in the first place.”
It’s happening again. Every word sears his throat; he’s speaking with every intention to wound and cut-- the deeper the better, and he can’t control it. It’s the familiar but long-missed white-hot searing flash of rage, which had always seemed to him like one of those fighter kites he remembers from his childhood in Hokkaido with its line coated in crushed glass; he’s reeling it out and the more string he lets it out, the more slack he gives it, the faster and harder it flies, slashing and destroying everything in its path. He can’t stop it, can’t bring himself to reel it back in before it does any more damage.
“Did I ever do anything,” he breathes, when she says nothing in response. “To imply that I was worthy of your trust or your love?”
Utsumi’s face crumbles. His kite has found its mark. It even feels good for a little while, the destruction soothing in its cruel catharsis. He expects her to leave, to storm out and slam the door in her wake as she always does, leaving him alone to brood and seethe in the darkness.
She doesn’t.
She begins to cry.
In her defence, it’s not so much crying as it is a gradual reddening in her eyes that gives way to a few tears which squeeze their way out of her lacrimal glands and slip down her cheeks. Cheeks – Yukawa can’t help thinking – that he had once touched, and something about that feels oddly and painfully final, like the irreversible part of a non-cyclical chemical reaction.
She seems to recover quickly, swiping at her cheeks furiously with the heel of her hand. Yukawa winces at the rough way she tugs at the tender skin, leaving blossoming tracks of angry red. He wants to reach out and pull her hands away from her face, maybe keep them close and safe in his own, but he finds that he can’t; his limbs have gone leaden, frozen in place by his sides.
“It’s not that I don’t care about how I make you feel,” he says, his voice rougher. “I just can’t help it—I can’t control how you make yourself feel in regards to me.”
She stares at him with steely eyes.
He stares back.
To his surprise, he finds that it is himself who caves first.
“I can only do the best I can for myself. Asking me to keep track of your feelings, when I have a hard enough time keeping track of my own. I just can’t do that. I’m sorry.”
“I understand,” she says coldly, and it hits, deep, because he knows her words mean the exact opposite, and they lodge themselves in his chest, coated with all the venom and ice on their way out from her throat.
7.1
He cannot explain – not for all the graphs and logic trees and statistical tests in the world – why he feels decidedly awful following their exchange. It’s a terrible oppressive feeling, weighing down on him like an unsolved puzzle. But then again, Utsumi has always had the privilege of having this particular effect on him.
He still remembers with startling clarity the very first time she ever lost her temper with him He’d never been yelled at like that before, never invoked another person’s rage like that before, not in his life.
Surprising enough that he had, less than a week of meeting her, managed to make her angry like that. But the bigger surprise was that he had felt something in return.
Continued association with her had proven that it wasn’t just an isolated event. Any emotion he raised in her – negative or positive or otherwise - curiously seemed to be aroused in himself, almost as though he was mirroring her emotional states. And he felt it – keenly – to the point of distraction. This was a decidedly inconvenient development; not least of all for the effect it was having on his work.
But today, strangely enough, he finds that work is the least of his concerns. As he attempts to make sense of the newest set of data on his computer screen, the uneasiness eats at him, a constant reminder that he has done something quite magnificently terrible, although he’s not sure what.
Yes, he knows the biological reason for lacrimation, he knows the chemical composition of tears. Yet he cannot even begin to understand why the mere sight of those very tears in her eyes had aroused such feelings of despair and agitation in himself.
8.
“Sorry,” he wants to say, without knowing what he’s apologising for. For the first time in his life he doesn’t know why he’s doing what he does, guided only by a small niggling suspicion that an apology would soothe Utsumi, smooth the frown lines from her brow and make him feel all the better for it.
When it comes down to it though, he can’t say it. The apology lodges in his throat like a dead-weight; a regret-sodden mass of words and confusion that he can’t bring himself to voice out. He gapes at her stupidly.
What happens next is something Yukawa never would have predicted. The look on her face softens, and she offers him a tiny smile. She brings her hands up to his face and pulls him closer. He follows her blindly, too surprised to do anything else. He’d expected her to make this difficult, had braced himself for more of a fight. This – the softening around her eyes, the tired, sad smile – is not what he had expected at all.
Perhaps he had underestimated her. He supposes he’s done that a lot.
She runs her fingers down his face and along his jawline, from temple to chin, as tender and careful as a palaeontologist cradling the millennia-old skull of a long-lost ancestor. She keeps her touch unbearably light, a mere ghosting over his skin and he leans into it, feeling the tension and the worry seep out of him like water from a saturated sponge. Her hands on him are a wonderful thing, unlike anything he’s ever felt before. She works little circles into the tight throbbing knots of his temples, and the look of combined wonderment and tenderness on her face makes his heart ache.
The effect her touch has is almost hypnotic, his eyes slowly drifting shut against his will. He lets a little sigh escape him and he feels her press her lips against his.
She pulls back before he can even respond. She’s smiling again, that same wistful, terribly sad smile.
His nerves move to pull his lips back into a smile in response, but the look on her face stops him dead in his tracks.
“I’m sorry,” she says, to his surprise. “The things I said to you the other day, about you not caring. I was out of line. I apologise.”
He can't apologise - not yet - so he does what he’s learned from her and kisses the words from her lips.
9.
“Are you familiar with the mirror neuron theory?”
“What do you think?” she says, pointedly.
“I will take your sarcasm as a negative. A mirror neuron is a neuron that fires not just when an organism acts, but when the organism observes the same action performed by another organism, so the neuron can be said to mirror the behaviour of the other. This is somewhat of a reflex reaction that isn’t under our conscious control—sort of like how we yawn when we see another person yawn. It’s not a very experimentally supported theory, but interesting nonetheless.”
She raises her eyebrows at him, a silent cue he’s learnt means she wants him to continue talking.
“My interest in this particular theory is due to some intriguing observations I have made in the past few months.”
“Which is?”
“I believe I am mirroring you. Well, my neurons are in any case.”
He can see that Utsumi is struggling not to smile.
“And why exactly do you believe that?”
“It is quite apparent, isn’t it? You… affect me. Your emotional states in particular give rise to the same emotions in me. At this point I should also probably mention that, in keeping with the metaphor, this is a two-way mirror.”
“I suppose we’ll have to prove it somehow, right?” And with that, she turns and walks away without a further word, striding straight out of the lab.
Yukawa lets her leave as he always does, too tired to stop her. She probably puts up with more of his scientific rambles more than anyone outside the field, and he’s not going to ask any more of her than the patience she already has for him. Her presence in his life, confusing and troublesome as it may be at times, is something he knows he has come to appreciate.
Just then, a terrible scream comes from out in the corridor, and with horror he realises it’s Utsumi’s voice. The sound tears straight to the heart of him, an icy cold dagger of fear plunging through his ribs, through bone and muscle and settling dangerously close to his heart. He seizes up with the terror of it; the thought that something has happened to her and she’s screaming is awful and terrifying and he has no idea what to do except he’s got to mobilise his body somehow and just move and look for her so he does. It’s like swimming through ice—he’s gone cold, trembling, and it’s suddenly very hard to breathe.
He makes it out somehow, clinging to the heavy door frame, barely daring to look for the fear of what he might see.
Which is Utsumi, standing patiently next to some old equipment, a large smirk playing about her face.
Yukawa is too gobsmacked to do anything other than try piteously to catch his breath.
“Experiment over,” she grins, walking towards him.
“What on earth are you talking about? Do you have any idea— ”
She holds up a finger, silencing him. The motion, again, is something he recognises from himself.
“Your mirror neuron theory,” she says. “I believe I’ve just disproved it.”
His pulse slows to something a little more acceptable.
“Explain,” he demands, though he’s quite certain he knows where she’s coming from.
“In your theory, the mirror neurons would only fire when the subject observed the action being performed in front of him, right? Since you could not see me when I screamed, yet you came running and looking as terrified as my scream would suggest I was, can we conclude that the fear you felt on my behalf was not the result of some neurons misfiring, and something else like perhaps… care?”
For the entirety of her explanation, he remains transfixed, breathless from more than just the mild shock he’s recovered from. What a sight she was, her face aglow in triumph, flushed with excitement, and laying down her argument as scientifically and logically he’s ever seen. He moves closer to her, takes her face in his hands, which he notices are still shaking.
“Yes,” he says softly, pulling her to him.
“Yes?” she breathes delightedly.
“Your logic is sound.”
She laughs a little, and he can feel the vibrations travel from the nape of her neck where his fingers rest to somewhere deep within himself.
“Your conclusion is solid.”
“It is,” she agrees, and her face is very, very close to his.
“We might make a scientist of you yet.”
“Don’t be ridiculous,” she scolds, and kisses him.