Archive of Our Own ^beta

Chapter Text

FUTABA. Inari! I have a business proposition for you.

FUTABA. Meet me at Leblanc!

YUSUKE. I’m afraid today doesn’t work for me.

FUTABA. Liar! You don’t have any plans.

YUSUKE. I didn’t say I had plans.

FUTABA. ???

YUSUKE. I don’t have any fare left on my subway card.

FUTABA. Oh for Pete’s sake.

YUSUKE. Normally I would walk, but I forgot an umbrella.

FUTABA. Well where are you? At school still?

YUSUKE. Shibuya. A fascinating array of people move through the subway station.

YUSUKE. And as an added bonus, I remain dry.

FUTABA. Hold on.

FUTABA. Okay, I’ve sent you a bank transfer for the HUNDRED AND SIXTY YEN you need to take the train TWO STOPS.

FUTABA. You’re a disaster of a person.

YUSUKE. Why do you know my bank account details?

YUSUKE. Futaba?

YUSUKE. Futaba.

YUSUKE. Hello?

————

Yusuke jogged through the backstreets of Yongen-jaya, holding his schoolbag over his head in a futile attempt to stay dry in the torrential spring rain. By the time he made it to the door of the familiar cafe, the top of his head was dry, but his shoulders and arms were drenched, and his shoes looked like he’d just forded a river crossing. He stopped a moment under the cafe’s awning, shaking as much water as possible off of his bag and onto the ground before opening the door.

Sojiro looked up from the counter as the shop bell chimed, and snorted at Yusuke’s sopping wet appearance. “Are you here for Futaba, or for food?”

“I was summoned by one, but would by no means turn down the other.” The older man went into the back for a moment, then returned and tossed Yusuke a dish towel.

“She’s upstairs. Hang out until dinner if you want, just take your shoes off by the door there, I don’t want you tracking water all over the place.”

“Thank you.” Yusuke removed his loafers and set them by the counter, then squelched his way towards the back stairs in his equally sopping wet socks, using the dish towel to dry his face. Sojiro watched him go, a resigned expression on his face, before reaching for the mop.

After climbing the wooden stairs at the back of the shop, the first thing Yusuke saw was the back of Futaba’s head. She was sitting at the desk in the corner of the room, and as he mounted the top step, she spun the chair around slowly to face him, a wicked grin on her face.

“I suppose you’re wondering why I called you here today.”

Yusuke narrowed his eyes. It was the first time he’d seen Futaba since school had started two weeks ago. They had all gathered outside of LeBlanc that morning so Sojiro could take a commemorative photo of Futaba’s first day of high school, but they had all been wearing their school uniforms to regulation standards, as was required for the opening ceremony at both schools. Even Ryuji had looked smart, although the effect of his buttoned jacket and full-length trousers was ruined somewhat by the devil horns he insisted on throwing up in every shot. Futaba had been anxious and fidgety, but had looked quite polished in Shujin’s uniform, especially after Ann had helped her tie her hair in two neat braids. But now…

“How garish,” he murmured, before he could stop himself.

“What was that?” Futaba snapped, drawing her legs up onto the chair. The slick color palette and smooth lines Yusuke had always admired the Shujin uniform for were nowhere in evidence. She was wearing the skirt and suspenders correctly, true, but in place of the uniform jacket she was wearing an offensively bright, lime green zip-up hoodie at least two sizes too big for her. Combined with her hair and the bright red on her uniform and headphones, she looked like she might be able to glow in the dark.

“Complementary colors must be wielded delicately and with a goal in mind, not like a sledgehammer,” he continued, looking away and using the dish towel to pat at his arms. “I would suggest a red or yellow cardigan, but I’m willing to compromise on a light blue, if you insist on a modified triad.”

“I like green! And that’s—“ Futaba, with a great effort of will, took a deep breath, let it out, and dragged her hands down her face, rolling her eyes heavenwards. “Okay. Whatever. I need that stupid pedantic artist’s brain, actually. So, down to business—“

“Did Akira leave any shirts behind?”

“Dammit, Inari, you’re ruining the flow! I had a whole thing planned! And I dunno, check the shelf! What do you need one for, anyway?”

In response, Yusuke held out the soaked dishtowel and gestured to his shirt, still dripping on the floor. Futaba sighed and pointed towards the metal shelves next to him, which still held a few cardboard boxes. As he pulled one out and dug through it, Futaba spun around in the chair aimlessly.

Akira had left very little behind when he’d left for his hometown, promising to come back for Golden Week. He’d packed up most of the trinkets and prizes he’d decorated with over the course of a year, and all that was left to make the room seem like home was the large Phantom Thieves flag hanging on the wall and scattered glow-in-the-dark stars on the ceiling. The chocolate fountain as big as Futaba was sitting unplugged and cleaned in the corner, ready for a special occasion. He’d left his CRT and game console, too, and Futaba had promptly moved in a more ergonomic chair and started using the workbench to do the little homework she couldn’t dash off in between classes, punctuated by hour-long breaks to play retro games. Sojiro never commented when she went upstairs, so she knew he felt the same way that she did— that as sad as it was for Akira not to be in the attic, it would be worse if nobody ever used the room at all.

She saw flashes of Yusuke as she spun in the chair, kicking off the desk with one leg. Unbuttoning his shirt; draping it over the banister; digging in the box; holding up Akira’s old convenience store uniform shirt with an appalled look on his face. She dragged her heels on the ground at that, stopping her spin and laughing out loud.

“I will remain shirtless,” Yusuke said, staring at the green and pink monstrosity.

“Oh no you won’t,” yelped Futaba with alarm. “Put a shirt on!”

“Put a shirt on!” bellowed Sojiro from downstairs in agreement.

Yusuke sighed as he buttoned up the shirt.

“Are you done?” Futaba demanded, leaning back and crossing her arms. “Any more sidebars, or can I finally get to the point?”

“I’m all yours.”

She leaned back in her chair, spreading her arms wide with a flourish. “Doujinshi.”

He rubbed his chin, frowning. “You mentioned those once, in Mementos. Some first years had attempted to get me to join a group, but with everything going on, I never followed up…”

“It’s a genius plan!” Futaba said with her trademark devious grin. “You’re an art prodigy, but you’re off in cloud cuckoo land most of the time. I’m the ideas woman, and I know the culture, but I’m barely level one at drawing. Together, we fight crime!”

“What crime?”

“We’ll split profits fifty-fifty,” Futaba went on, refusing to be derailed by trying to explain the saying. “I can handle printing costs— I’ve been doing some freelance app development on the side. All you have to do is draw kinda anime. Here, I brought you some of my collection as style references.”

She shuffled through a stack in front of her on the desk; Yusuke had originally thought they were magazines, but now saw they were thinly bound comic books. She got up and walked a selection over to him. He took the most interesting-looking one, a Phoenix Ranger Featherman comic with a cover that showed a decent grasp of design sense and an astute use of color.

“I read manga as a child like everyone else, you know. Pen and ink isn’t necessarily my preferred medium, but the style seems easy enough to duplicate,” he said, paging through the booklet. “Exaggerated facial features, few concrete backgrounds. I’ve never used screentones before, but the concept is simple. Oh. And now his penis is out. Lovely.” He looked up, looking somewhat less than amused. “Are you commissioning me to draw tawdry smut?”

“A few things wrong with that!” Futaba replied, holding up a finger. “One, it’s not a commission, it’s a straightforward profit-share. Two, that one’s actually more heartfelt than tawdry, if you know the canon. And three, sex sells.” She shrugged. “If that’s a deal-breaker, no prob, we can keep it PG.”

Yusuke arched an eyebrow and looked back down at the book. Any embarrassment that might have come on as a result of looking at the subject matter was overruled by his automatic impulse to criticize the anatomy, and Futaba looked with poorly-concealed impatience as he pointed out several panels with frankly improbable arrangements of limbs.

“I don’t promise anything,” he said finally, closing the volume and handing it back to Futaba. “I’m not accustomed to commercializing my work, and projects for school may take priority.”

“But?” she replied, leaning forward eagerly.

“But I’ll entertain the idea, for now. At the very least, it shouldn’t be particularly difficult.”

————

“This is impossible!” Yusuke howled, throwing his sketchbook across the room.

“What are you talking about? It looks fine!” Futaba said, scurrying off the couch to retrieve it. “I’d buy it!”

“You have no artistic sensibilities.” Yusuke refused to take the sketchbook back, instead leaning over to drape himself over the backrest of the couch.

Futaba threw her hands up in the air and paused the DVD. It was a week later, and they had been watching Phoenix Ranger Featherman Victory for two hours, at Yusuke’s request. He had claimed that hearing her descriptions of the characters she wanted him to draw wasn’t enough— if he was going to bring forth their true essence, he needed to feel them. Futaba wasn’t convinced, but she wasn’t going to turn down an excuse to spend a lazy Sunday in her living room rewatching a favorite show.

Flopping back down onto the couch, she flipped through the sketchbook. Some pages were filled with style experiments, attempting to capture the actors’ faces in a more simplistic way; others contained loose, fluid sketches of battles between sentai-suited warriors. All of it was, to her admittedly untrained eye, quite good.

“I still don’t get the problem here.”

“I feel nothing for these characters!” Yusuke exclaimed, running his hands through his hair, the quintessential Tortured Artist Bemoaning Lack of Muse. “This show is positively infantile!”

“Hey! I don’t make fun of your interests!”

“You make fun of me all the time.”

“Not the point. Anyway, it’s not like I’m married to the idea of drawing for this show, but you barely watch or read anything at all! What do you wanna do, comb through my fandoms for weeks until you find something you can tolerate?”

Yusuke made no reply, staring stony-faced up at the ceiling. Futaba huffed, and fiddled with her hair. Why did he have to be so ornery? It wasn’t her fault that nothing got him going except for, like, early 20th century surrealist movements with melting clocks or whatever. High art was one thing, but sometimes you had to crack a few eggs to make a buck, and if he wasn’t willing to compromise, then—

She froze.

“Inari! Hey, Inari!” She launched herself over to his half of the couch, grabbing onto his arm, kicking her feet a little bit with excitement. “Hey! Hey, I’ve got it!”

“Got what?” he replied dolefully, turning a disinterested glance her way.

“We need something popular enough to make a buck. It’s gotta be fictional. And it’s gotta be something that you’re into. So what’s inspiring to you, that basically everyone was talking about for like, the whole past year, but has total plausible deniability when it comes to being fake?”

Yusuke’s eyes widened.

He sat up.

“The Phantom Thieves,” he breathed.

Futaba began to cackle.

Mission Start!

Days until Summer Comiket: 110

Chapter Text

”The curry goddess has arrived!” Futaba sang out, bursting through the rooftop door. Ryuji raised his hands in the air and genuflected, grinning. “Bow to me, peons!”

“What is it today?” Ann asked eagerly. Three weeks into the school year, Tuesdays had already been designated Boss Appreciation Day. On Mondays, the quietest day for the cafe (not that that was saying much), Sojiro had started setting aside some time to experiment with LeBlanc’s menu. Any successful leftovers, after the taste-testing by himself, Futaba, helpful cafe regulars, and any of the erstwhile Phantom Thieves who happened to be in the neighborhood, he sent to school with Futaba the next day to share.

“Curry bread,” Futaba answered, sitting down on one of the abandoned desks and rifling through her school bag. It was the same bag used by everyone at Shujin, but she’d decked it out with keychains and pins from her favorite games, and they jingled as she pulled out a paper bag. “I had some last night, they’re not soggy like the last ones were.”

“Soggy or not, they still tasted great.” Ryuji took the bag from her and began sharing out the crispy fried bread. “Man, how do you not weigh three hundred pounds, eating this stuff all the time?”

“Ryuji! Don’t ask girls about their weight!” Ann said, smacking him lightly on the shoulder.

“I didn’t say she is three hundred pounds! Just that she should be!”

Futaba leaned back, letting the bickering wash over her like an area-of-effect heal as she ran a fingernail over some old graffiti carved into the desk. Besides Yusuke, she had only occasionally hung out with the other Phantom Thieves without Akira around, and she’d worried about that a little bit as she added Shujin to her list of high schools to apply to. What if, outside the pressure cooker of trying to reform society, Ann and Ryuji thought she was boring, or too annoying to hang out with? She’d taken and passed Kosei’s entrance exam, and had even briefly considered attending just to have someone to talk to, even though their mathematics track was nothing to write home about. But Akira had been right when he pointed out that she’d have to face two years of Kosei without Yusuke after he graduated, and if the way the other students treated him was any indication, she might have a hard time making friends in that school if she wasn’t willing to conform. In the end, even though she easily passed the exams for all six schools she’d applied for, she settled on Shujin after all— it wasn’t as academically rigorous as a couple of the others, but it was perfectly respectable, and besides, she’d never really relied on school for the bulk of her education anyway. And Akira could serve as a resource and strategy guide to tell her the really important things, like how not to get lost between classes, the best bathrooms for having breakdowns in, and exactly how far she could push the dress code without getting in trouble. She’d professed optimism about going back to school while steeling herself for the worst, that Ann and Ryuji might start drifting away from her, even when she was right there. Instead, they had showed up at her classroom during lunch the first day of school with smiles and Haru’s old roof key, and Futaba started thinking she might just make it through this year after all.

“All right, down to business!” Ann said with a sudden clap, dusting off her hands. “That bread was a real buff!”

“Plus two endurance for afternoon classes,” Futaba said, taking out her phone with a grin.

“I’ll need it. The teachers sure aren’t holding back this year,” Ann said with a grimace, doing likewise. Ryuji was still contentedly munching on a third curry bread. “By the way, Futaba, weren’t you wearing loafers before? Are those new shoes?”

Futaba stretched out her legs and wiggled her feet, displaying her new high-top sneakers. They were neon green, and she’d replaced the laces with bright orange ones. “Yep.”

“Funky. I like it. Now…” Ann scrolled on her phone with one finger. “‘Dear Phantom Thieves, my bike got stolen the other day…’ Ugh, we can’t do anything about that! This one— no, that’s in Hokkaido…”

“Hey, listen to this!” Ryuji said, swallowing the last bite of his lunch. “‘This girl sent me some racy photos, and now her dad says she’s in high school and I have to pay up or he’ll sue’… man, that sucks.”

“Oh, that’s a pretty popular scam,” Futaba said dismissively, propping her chin on her hand. “It’s always some guy in a basement with a bunch of photos ganked off facebook. Want me to look into it?”

“Sure. We can at least bring it up when we all get together next week,” Ann said with a shrug.

“Man…” Ryuji said with a sigh. Futaba followed his gaze to the planters, sitting empty except for soil and a few dead leaves. “Looking at the site just bums me out these days. This ain’t the same.”

“I know, but it’s better than nothing!” Ann punched him in the shoulder gently. Although they’d agreed to disband, they were all reluctant to let the Phantom Thieves go entirely, and eventually had all begun to find their own ways to improve the world. Haru was consulting with a lawyer on a method to provide small business loans with reasonable interest rates to young entrepreneurs; Makoto had a part-time job teaching self-defense classes to middle-schoolers; Yusuke had briefly dabbled in street art, which he described as ‘providing inspiration to the beauty-deprived masses’ and Ryuji described as ‘Yusuke finding out illegal shit is fun’. “Hey, chin up. It’s almost Golden Week! Let’s collect a couple real good ones to take a crack at before then…”

They all scrolled down the Phan-site on their phones in companionable silence for another thirty seconds before Ann shrieked and dropped her phone.

“Shit! What is it?” Ryuji yelped.

“Look at it!” she screeched, scrambling off her chair and retrieving her phone before shoving it in Ryuji’s face. Futaba darted around behind him, peering over his shoulder.

THREAD: Which of the Phantom Thieves do you most want to see get it on?

“Oh, hell no!” Ryuji exclaimed, jumping off the desk and slamming a fist into his other hand. “Where’s Mishima? He’s in class 3, right? I’m gonna go kick his ass!”

“Wait!” Ann said, grabbing his arm. “Keep reading!”

”anyone/leader!! hes so hot lol”

“3 boys right? 3some”

“eww”

“I want catgirl to step on me”

“admin wtf”

ADMIN. Guys, please ignore this thread, I think we got hacked again! I’m trying my best to delete it!

Ryuji and Ann turned around.

Futaba laughed nervously.

“H-hey, was that the bell? Guess it’s time to make like a tree and run!”

She raced for the doorway, grabbing her bag and leaping over a stray watering can, the other two in hot pursuit.

————

“It was that calling card,” Futaba explained, as she turned around her laptop for Yusuke to see. “You know, the one for Shido. Once people could see our silhouettes, they went nuts with the fanart. Only took ‘em a couple of months to get the designs pretty solid.”

“Fascinating,” Yusuke murmured, flicking his fingers delicately on the trackpad and taking a sip of his milkshake. Haru had told them all that it was silly to keep boycotting Big Bang Burger, especially with the wage and overtime reforms the company was implementing in a desperate attempt to regain their reputation, and although Futaba’s preferred junk food was noodles, she wasn’t going to risk broth on her laptop. “What are all these numbers?”

“Well, they don’t know our names, right?” Futaba grabbed a couple of french fries from the tray in front of her. “So they just numbered us by our place in the row, starting with Joker. Panther’s Niko, you’re Go, etc., etc. That makes Mona Hachiko,” she said with a snicker.

“Oh, like the dog. I can’t imagine him seeing the humor in that.” He continued to scroll down the page, clicking occasionally to bring up a full-size image. “Ann’s design is fairly accurate, barring the colors… I suppose her bodysuit has no alternative interpretation. A shame about Makoto, though.”

“I know, right? She’s a super badass Mad Max heroine, and they’ve got her in some kinda sentai getup!”

“I’m surprised at the quality of some of these. Perhaps I’ll make an account. Pixiv, correct?” Futaba nodded. “Hmm. Akira is quite popular. Oh, and there they are. The genitalia.”

“Yeah, prooobably not a good idea to scroll too far in public,” Futaba said, reclaiming her laptop and shutting the lid. “I dunno why you’re so surprised, though.”

“Despite years of life drawing lessons, I—“

“No, no, about the quality!” Futaba said, rolling her eyes and finishing off the french fries. “Didn’t I tell you? There’s gonna be thousands of people selling at Comiket. They’re not all gonna suck.”

Yusuke rested his chin on one hand, looking at her oddly. “Why wouldn’t I expect amateurish work from amateurs?”

“God, you are so pretentious! Do you ever listen to yourself? People aren’t gonna bust their butts and spend a bunch of money just to show off something they’re not proud of. You ready to go?”

They both picked up their trays and made their way over to the garbage. “So there is passion in this kind of art, as well.”

“Natch. What is it with you and that word, anyway? Gives me the heebie-jeebies.”

“Passion? Why?”

“Dunno. Reminds me of a crappy romance novel or something, I guess.” As they exited the fast food restaurant, Futaba pulled her headphones up over her ears. She tended to wear them around her neck these days, especially as she was already skirting several uniform violations at school. In public, though, they still helped her shut out the most intrusive noises of the crowds. She’d come far in the past half year, but a car’s sudden backfire or a pushy barker’s shouts still weren’t exactly her idea of a good time. “Anyway, let’s talk pairings.”

“I’ve been thinking about that,” Yusuke said, walking half a step ahead of her, either to give her a convenient shield from the crowd or because his legs were the length of most of her entire body. “As, ah, amusing as it would be to attempt to render a heartfelt and sensual tryst between two of my friends…”

“Hey, it could be you! You’re pretty popular in the rankings,” Futaba teased, poking him in the side and making him jump. “Point taken, though. Sloppy makeouts only. Maybe some over-the-pants action.”

“I’m popular?” Yusuke said with faint wonderment. “I can’t imagine why.”

“It’s the silhouette! You look like some kinda 90’s anime bishounen. Girls go nuts over that. ‘Course, they’ve never heard you talk.”

“Hmm.” Yusuke had a faint line between his eyebrows, like he was trying to figure something out. But before he could ask whether he should be flattered or insulted, she was on to the next topic.

“Anyway, all the boys are getting loads of action. You and Joker, Skull and Joker. Not so much you and Skull, but there’s some good stuff out there. Panther and Queen is a big one. But mostly, it’s Joker with everyone.” She paused, and clarified. “Individually. Not all at once. Although I’ve seen that too.”

“Just how much time have you spent researching this?”

“Probably a whole lot more than I should have!”

Yusuke shook his head, not having expected any other answer. “In any case. Joker…” They were stopped at a crosswalk now, and Yusuke brushed his hair out of his face as Futaba bounced on her heels. “Our choice seems obvious, but I wonder how our illustrious leader will react to being immortalized in inks of dubious morality.”

“He never has to know,” said Futaba firmly as the light changed and they stepped off the curb. “Not until it’s done, anyway. Keep it on the DL, okay?” She stopped as they made it across the street, holding out her pinky. “Pinky swear!”

“People do that?” Yusuke said, with mild doubt in his voice.

“They do!” Futaba said, a girl whose entire experience with pinky promises came from her mother and anime.

“All right, then.” They linked fingers for a brief moment, his hand dwarfing hers. “I’ve rarely had the opportunity to make a promise with a friend.”

“Huh.” She glanced at him out of the corner of her eye as they continued walking towards the station. She knew bits and pieces about his history, no more; Madarame, plagiarism, a solitary lifestyle. She’d been too focused on her own problems when she’d joined the Phantom Thieves, and besides, she rarely had any interest in other people’s personal stories. She found herself wondering, not for the first time, if there might be some uncomfortable similarities in their upbringing. Another glance, and she caught Yusuke looking at her with an inscrutable, uncomfortably intense manner. Didn’t he ever just look at things, without trying to take them apart from the inside out? she thought, irritably.

“Got something to say, Inari?”

“You don’t have a problem with portraying Akira in this way?”

“What? Why would I?”

“Ah… my mistake.” Yusuke averted his eyes, staring with sudden intense interest at a standee outside a bookstore. “Goodness, Murakami’s new novel is out already?”

“Whoa, whoa!” Futaba darted around in front of him, sticking her hands up and stopping him in his tracks. “What exactly do you think is going on with me and Akira?”

“Nothing. Merely…” He rubbed the back of his neck with one hand, a habit he’d picked up from Ryuji. “Well, it’s not unusual, even these days, for a family with no male heir to marry their daughter to someone who is willing to carry on the family business and the family name. And Sojiro would be delighted to have Akira become a part of his family. I thought perhaps… ah, but it does sound improbable, now that I say it out loud,” he added with a hasty chuckle that darted around the street, looking for a hole to crawl into.

Two or three responses warred in Futaba’s mind.

A. What are you, an idiot?

B. I’m telling Sojiro what you think he’s getting up to!

C. T-that’s embarrassing! Talking about marriage…

She put down her hands with a sigh, although she immediately ruined the conciliatory gesture by planting them on her hips and rolling her eyes.

“Geez, when you said you read manga as a kid, I didn’t think it was the shoujo stuff. That’s a total cliche!” she said. Yusuke was still leaning back slightly, as though bracing himself for an onslaught, but he was surprised when she added, “You might be more helpful with writing this thing than I thought! Nobody who reads this stuff actually has any romantic experience, you know, so cliches are where it’s at.”

He looked momentarily pleased with himself, until she added with a menacing grin, “Now let’s go tell Sojiro what you just said.”

“I’m going home.”

“Oh no you’re not!”

Days until Summer Comiket: 108

Chapter Text

Lying awake at night, Yusuke wondered if he was comfortable with this. Not because of any pedestrian concerns about embarrassing his friends— no, his concerns were more material. The fact was, here he was, making art for money.

After some deep soul-searching, he came to several conclusions.

One, this was not art. Or, it was art, but it wasn’t Art. Art-with-a-capital-A came from fits of inspiration, from long nights in the studio sweating blood over the delicate play of light upon a single maple leaf. It was displayed in galleries, pregnant with meaning, and when it sold, it was to a collector with a rare eye for beauty who could see the passionate soul in its depths. This kind of Art could be easily tarnished, a facsimile of emotion churned out for the highest bidder, a last gasp of originality being strangled by the golden leash of commission. Art-with-a-lowercase-a was the billboards and manga and magazine illustrations of the world. Requiring skill and finesse, to be sure, but lacking the power and the vulnerability of throwing one’s emotions bodily onto canvas, and existing, like cave paintings, to convey simple ideas and representations. Doujinshi was firmly in the lowercase-art category, and so that was fine.

Two, they were unlikely to actually make very much money off of it at all. If Futaba was correct, there would be thousands of artists purveying their wares at Comiket; they were likely to sell a few copies to the odd Phantom Thieves fan, and that was all. (And that was fine, because art-with-a-lowercase-a required no emotional investment, and therefore no risk of pain upon rejection. Or rather, the mild sort of pain experienced when a teacher criticizes the balance of your line weights; minor frustration, followed by a resolve to do better.)

Three, if he didn’t stop thinking and drift off soon, his plan of having sleep for dinner was not going to work out very well.

Four, the occasional weekend job handing out samples of free candy or holding a place in line for someone who wanted a new phone model the day of its release was both demeaning and provided not nearly enough pay to replenish his oil paints. Wasn’t something even tangentially related to art a better option?

Four-point-five, that one may be in direct conflict with Two.

He rolled over, and flipped the pillow to the cool side.

Five, Futaba paid for his food when they spent time together.

Six, Futaba had bought him inking pens and screentone sheets.

Seven, Futaba had gone to the art supply store with him to buy inking pens and screentone sheets, chattering away the whole time, instead of ordering them online. She grabbed his arm nervously once when an enthusiastic saleswoman emerged suddenly from behind a display, but besides that, she had seemed to be enjoying herself.

He had agreed to her harebrained scheme in the first place partially because Akira had messaged each of them privately, asking them to keep an eye on Futaba. Not to babysit her, or to protect her— just to encourage her, and spend time with her when they could. It wasn’t an onerous duty, he admitted to himself in his heart of hearts. She could be downright engaging when she wasn’t spouting obtuse computer nonsense or deliberately pushing his buttons. He’d spent most of his life aloof for one reason or another— lack of interest, and then, lack of confidence, and then too much confidence, the false pride of someone who has decided: fine, then. I have much more important things to do than sully my time with the insipid nonsense of those people who worry more about television shows and celebrities than true meaning. Now, dismantling his ivory tower stone by stone, learning just how poisonous of an outlook life with Madarame had instilled in him, he felt out of practice, like friendship was a skill he’d missed out on learning. The genuine gratitude he felt towards the people he now called friends was too overwhelming for him to express; he continued to stumble, as Akira patiently accompanied him on his sometimes frantic quest for life’s meaning, Ann forgave him his improprieties and bought him crepes to soften the long talks they had about controlling what she called “Yusuke-isms that come off as really creepy even though I know you don’t mean them,” and Makoto did her best to introduce him to the concept of what she called “a budget that makes any kind of sense, seriously, just please think about your purchases for more than five seconds, stop going to underground antique markets instead of eating lunch”. Around Futaba, though, he was able to relax in a way he usually didn’t around anyone but Akira; they squabbled and called each other names, but behind what seemed like enmity was a deep sense of a kindred spirit.

He still wasn’t a hundred percent sure what she was getting out of all of this. Despite her fervent denials of any sort of special relationship between herself and Akira, Yusuke couldn’t help the nagging suspicion that he was serving as a stand-in for the other boy. He remembered how she had seemed to look to him uncertainly for guidance any time they were out as a group, and how much time the two of them must have spent together in Leblanc over the months. But if that was what had made her draft him into being her playmate for the time being, so be it; a ridiculous vanity project that gave him an excuse to leave the dorms and stretch his creative muscles wasn’t near the worst thing he could be spending his time on.

An eighth thought bubbled up into his mind as he drifted off, kicking the blanket off of his feet. Perhaps he wasn’t giving her enough credit. Sometimes, in Futaba’s enthusiastic tirades and blatant disregard for what even he could tell were accepted social norms, he saw a small sideways reflection of his own icy, lonely core, like light reflected through a prism. Perhaps she, too, saw a kindred spirit in him, and was searching desperately for a way to connect with him, to ensure they wouldn’t drift apart in the absence of supernatural crime sprees forcing them together. (It was a ridiculous notion, if that was what she was thinking. Having finally found such important friends, did she think him capable of letting them go so easily?)

Either that, or he was reading too much into it, and she was doing this entirely for the look on Ryuji’s face when he saw what they were creating.

————

After a twenty-minute squabble on what constituted “research”, Futaba and Yusuke had agreed to approach it from their own directions. Futaba was easily able to corner Ryuji at school, while Yusuke was assigned to Akira, a task made much easier by the impending Golden Week. After all, Futaba had declared, might as well give the people what they want first off, and tackle rarer pairings if they had time.

Akira had arrived late on Saturday evening, to great fanfare; Ann and Haru had hung a banner over the door of Leblanc, and had prevailed on everyone to wear festive hats. Futaba and Ryuji had hidden behind the door, ready with party poppers. There had been hugs and smiles all around, and plans to meet later in the week for a real party. Sojiro had kicked them all out around midnight, and Futaba had dragged Morgana back to her room with her, overruling his halfhearted protests and hugging him as she fell asleep.

And now it was Tuesday, and things had fallen back into their old familiar rhythm. Yusuke was sitting in the attic paging through a book on comic paneling, while Akira flipped through a novel on the sofa. Morgana laid on the table snoring slightly, one leg dangling off the edge.

Yusuke sighed.

“The problem is that I need practical kissing experience,” he commented, seemingly out of nowhere.

Akira opened his mouth. He closed his mouth. He realigned his internal satellites to pick up Radio Yusuke.

“With me?” he asked carefully.

“No. Well…”

Akira held his breath.

“No, thank you. I wouldn’t expect that to be very helpful. It was kind of you to offer, however.”

Akira let his breath out.

“Something on your mind, Yusuke?” he asked, keeping his eyes on his novel as though it could possibly be more interesting than whatever his friend was going to come up with next.

“It’s a matter of expressing feeling,” Yusuke said, a small wrinkle between his brows. He unfolded himself from his position on the floor, where he had been lounging with practiced carelessness, and propped his arms on his knees. “The precise balance of emotions when one crosses that final, invisible barrier… so much is expressed in the tension of shoulders or the exact position of hands. Are they quaking by one’s side in tension? Or lunging forward, eager to conquer a lover’s form? And then, how much is deliberate, and how much due to an overwhelming emotion?” He sighed, and shook his head. “Surely you have some input on this.”

Morgana had one eye cracked and an improbable smirk on his feline face, and Akira was tempted for a moment to mention the afternoon Ann had spent in his room last summer. They’d been bored and full of pent-up stress, and one thing had led to another, right up until the moment she’d sat up, face red, and blurted out “I can’t stop thinking about Shiho!”. He’d picked her shirt up off of the floor and given her a sympathetic pat on the back, and he’d been very, very glad that Morgana had had the good manners to make himself scarce that day. No, better not tell that particular story.

“Honestly, it seems like you understand what you need to,” he said instead, running a hand through his hair and puffing out his cheeks briefly. “It sounds like an art problem rather than a personal one, right? So as long as you understand where the people you’re portraying are coming from, and how they’d express their feelings in their own way, the emotions will come across.”

Yusuke was nodding, far more enthusiastically than Akira felt he deserved. “I see! What I would do in a situation matters far less than what my subjects would do.”

Akira shrugged. “Sure. What are you working on, anyway?”

“It’s a secret,” said Yusuke smugly, returning to his book, romantic angst apparently settled.

Akira and Morgana shared a nervous glance.

————

“The cavalry has arrived!” Haru announced cheerfully, coming through the door of Leblanc, Futaba close on her heels.

“Thank goodness the grocery store was still open,” Makoto said, shaking her head. She was standing behind the counter, wearing one of Sojiro’s spare aprons, and as the two girls came in, she scooped up a handful of freshly chopped green onions and dropped them into a bowl.

“Thank Futaba-chan! I’m almost certain we were undercharged for the meat once she explained to the shopkeeper what happened,” Haru said, setting the package of thinly-sliced meat on the counter. “It seems he knows her quite well!”

Futaba grinned, pushing her glasses up her face. Sojiro purchased all of the rice, potatoes and seasoning anyone could ever need from the restaurant depot, but recently she’d insisted on being the one to make the twice-weekly trip to the local grocery store to buy snacks, incidentals, and ingredients for home-cooked meals. After all, she’d explained to her guardian with a serious expression and a pointed finger, if Sojiro ate any more curry he was going to turn into a block of roux.

“It should be all cleaned up,” said Akira, as Makoto began to plate the meat. “Watch out for shards, though.”

“I said I was sorry!” said Morgana from his perch on top of the refrigerator.

“You and Ryuji just had to roughhouse around the piece de resistance,” Ann said, shaking her head. She gave the hotpot broth a final stir, nudging Ryuji in the side as she did. “You better not forget to buy Boss a new plate!”

“Yeah, gotcha,” he replied; she turned, surprised at his lack of a comeback, to see him hunched over his PSP.

“You’ve been playing that every spare minute lately!” she said, scooting into the booth next to him. He’d been ordered out of the cooking area along with Morgana, so it wasn’t like he shouldn’t be amusing himself with a video game in the corner; it was just unusual to see him being so quiet about it.

“Futaba loaned it to me,” he replied. “Hold on, let me save. There we go…”

Ann leaned over his shoulder to see him return to the title screen. A title screen with pink, curling font. A title screen with an abundance of handsome boys.“Holy shit, are you playing an otome game?”

“Okay, I’m gonna need you to cut the judgment,” he retorted, turning the system off and shoving it into the pocket of his cargo shorts. “I dunno why she pushed it on me, but it’s just… it’s legitimately good, okay? I’ve already finished like three routes, and I think this one guy might be a demon or something?”

“Close!” Futaba chirped, scooting into the seat across from him with a stack of bowls. “Just wait until you hit his bad end.” Ann eyed her speculatively, a look which Futaba missed entirely as she looked around the room. “Hey, where’d Inari go?”

“Upstairs. He got a phone call,” said Akira with a shrug, pulling over an extra chair for the end of the booth. Futaba pulled out her phone to eavesdrop in what she thought was a casual gesture, but sighed and put it back in her pocket when Akira raised an eyebrow and shook his head.

They had been seated for five minutes with the table set, sauce bowls ready, and Ryuji kicking his legs in impatience by the time Yusuke came back downstairs.

“Oh! Are you all right?” Haru, sitting on the end, was the first to see him, and she half-rose from her chair, hand over her mouth.

“Perfectly,” said Yusuke flatly, walking over and taking a seat in the booth next to Akira. He was always pale, but now he looked almost deathly, apart from two high spots of color on his cheeks. Makoto and Akira shared a concerned look. “Shall we begin?”

They began to pile food into the boiling broth, but a pall had descended upon the group. It was Ryuji who broke it, slamming down his chopsticks in exasperation. “Dude, this is supposed to be a party! C’mon, get it out! If you can’t tell us, who are you even gonna talk to?”

“Hey, that was pretty smart for once!” Futaba said, holding up her hand for a high five. Ryuji made a rude gesture in return. Yusuke looked from one to the other, and shook his head with a wry chuckle.

“Of course. How silly of me. Well, to clear the air… you’ve been following the news, correct?” Makoto nodded. “Then you know that a sentence was pronounced on Madarame last month. I thought it was over and done with, but… it seems that even after his debts and reparation payments were settled, there was a small but not insignificant sum left over from the sale of his estate. I just received a call from his attorney, and it seems that rather than retain his liquidated assets, he chose to entrust the balance to me.”

“And… what did you say?” asked Makoto, tone carefully neutral.

“I’m afraid I lost my temper,” answered Yusuke, ducking his head slightly to avoid her piercing stare. “Not to be vulgar, but I… told him where he could stick it.”

“Aw, man!” Ryuji groaned. “Of all the times to take a page outta my book! Dude, aren’t you starving half the time?”

“We’re all about to be starving!” Morgana groused, jumping down from the back of the booth to Akira’s lap and placing his front paws on the table. “Meat! Give me meat!”

The mood lightened from there; there were a couple of good-natured gibes at Yusuke when he balked at Akira stealing his taro root, Ann and Ryuji got in a heated discussion about whether or not tomatoes were an appropriate vegetable for hot pot, and Makoto and Haru spent so long offering each other the last piece of meat that Morgana snatched it out from under their noses. The conversation was deftly steered towards lighter topics, and if Akira noticed that Futaba was being unusually quiet, he didn’t point it out.

They lingered over the rice and noodles, sipping broth from their bowls and chatting about inconsequential things; then they lingered over the dishes, Haru washing the same plate three times, repeatedly insisting that she’d missed a spot. Eventually, though, they left in ones and twos, reluctantly, demanding repeated promises from Akira that they’d see him promptly on the first day of summer vacation, come hell or high water.

And then there were three: Akira, hanging his apron on the hook behind the counter; Futaba, chin in one hand as she played a game on her phone; and Yusuke, perched on a stool, staring pensively at the Sayuri.

Akira looked from one to the other, and considered.

“Yusuke… are you okay?” he asked. When the other boy looked up in surprise, as if startled out of a reverie, and nodded, he added, “Would you walk Futaba home? I have to lock up, and I have an early train. Morgana’s already upstairs, howling about me getting only six hours of sleep.”

He leaned across the counter and ruffled Futaba’s hair. She grimaced, and batted his hand away. “I’m fine! I’ve been having a ton of fun without you, you know!”

“Sure,” he replied with an affectionate grin, as she hopped off the stool. “Don’t show up the teachers too much, okay?”

He extended his hand and gave her a fistbump over the counter, then followed her to the door. He waved one last time through the glass before locking up; she and Yusuke both waved back, then Futaba swung around firmly and shoved her hands in her pockets, determined not to look back.

It was a short walk to the Sakura house from the cafe, but Futaba found herself dragging her feet, forcing Yusuke to slow his pace to match. “You must be thinking the worst of me,” he said finally. “Making up for my lack of funds as often as you do.”

“Eh, whatever,” Futaba said with a shrug. She nibbled at her thumbnail as they turned the corner. He’d given her an opening, now she just had to figure out how to take it. She normally left the heart-to-hearts to Akira; she had enough trouble sorting out her own emotions half the time, let alone comforting others. She’d seen something familiar, though, in the quiet way he’d been staring at the painting, something unidentifiable that tugged at her own memories. “You wanted her opinion, didn’t you…? Your mom, I mean. Sayuri.”

Yusuke hesitated. “I suppose… I did.” They had reached the low wall surrounding Futaba’s house, but she made no move to enter the gate, and Yusuke crossed his arms and leaned against it. “Would she urge me to forgive him, and accept the olive branch? Would she be practical, and want me to take the money for its own sake? Or would she tell me to hold fast to my principles? The attorney urged me to think it over before committing… I could call him back now, if I wanted, and change my mind.”

“You can forgive him without taking his dirty money,” Futaba said so hotly that Yusuke began to laugh. “I’m serious! Whatever you think about him, it doesn’t have to be on his terms. If it’s messing you up this bad— stop laughing at me!”

“Forgive me,” he said, covering his mouth with his hand. “I’m not laughing at you. I was merely struck by the way you so succinctly cut to the quick of the matter.”

“Yeah, well…” Futaba looked down, kicking at a stray stone on the pavement. “All I’m saying is I know something about dwelling on stuff. And if you take the money, you’re just gonna get stuck on it. So forget about it. Or take it and donate it somewhere. Treat it like buying your freedom. Worked for me. Okay see you later bye!”

She whirled around and plunged through the gate, bright hair streaming out behind her like a flame.

————

ANN. Haru. haru I gotta share this but i need you not to tell a SOUL

ANN. Your romantic heart is like the ONLY one I can trust this with

HARU. Goodness!

HARU. I’ll do my best! I hope it’s good news!

ANN. well it sure is a thing

ANN. it’s pretty weird but also. pretty dang cute??

ANN. ok so. Futaba’s been acting preeeeetty suspicious lately

HARU. Is she ok?

ANN. yeah

ANN. in fact

ANN. I think she has a crush

HARU. Really???

ANN. yeah she’s spending a ton of time with him lately

ANN. she started cornering him to talk about weird stuff

ANN. I mean I guess i see the appeal if I squint a bit

ANN. no accounting for taste lol

HARU. Ann-chan, please spit it out quickly! Who is it??

ANN. you’re never gonna believe it but

ANN. I’m like 90% sure

ANN. Futaba has a crush on Ryuji

Days until Summer Comiket: 97

Chapter Text

Futaba perched gargoyle-like on the desk behind Ryuji, peering over his shoulder. “Interesting,” she commented in a meaningful tone of voice. Just what it did mean, Ryuji wasn’t sure, but that was par for the course while talking with Futaba. “So you went for the bad boy type!”

“I guess?” Ryuji said, tilting the screen of the PSP as the sun came out from behind the clouds and cast its glare on it. The roof was a great place to eat lunch, but not the best for video games with poor backlighting. “This is like the sixth ending I’ve gotten. How many are there, anyway?”

Futaba counted on her fingers briefly. “Thirty. Twelve good ends, sixteen bad ones, two hidden ones.”

“Shit. Okay. Do I ever find out what all of Tsubaki’s dreams are about?”

“Stable time loops. Now, about—“

“Duuude, I didn’t want spoilers, I just wanted to know if I would find out!” Ryuji groaned. He was glad that Ann had told them to go off to eat lunch without her, even if her excuse about meeting with her homeroom teacher was so transparent birds could kill themselves flying into it. He seriously didn’t need her laughing at him for getting so into this game. Sometimes a dude wants to shoot aliens, and sometimes he wants a touching human drama with a couple weird plot twists. Ain’t nothing wrong with that.

“That’s not important right now,” Futaba said, waving a hand dismissively. “I wanna know what made you go for Hikaru’s route!”

“Uh, I’m not using a guide or anything, I just picked answers and ended up there,” Ryuji said. He looked over his shoulder to see Futaba scowling. Well, it wouldn’t hurt to humor her. What answers did he pick, again…? “I guess it kinda bummed me out, seeing him trying to take on those oni by himself. Like, dude, I’m right here! Let me back you up!”

“Right, right. What about when he rescued you from the underworld?”

Ryuji wrinkled his nose. “Ugh, that scene was so corny. Nobody’s that suave!”

“I dunno…” Futaba mused, jumping off the desk and meandering around in front of him, snapping the lid back on her bento box. “Joker’s got some pretty good one-liners.”

“Man, that’s different! He’s not tryin’ to pick up chicks with them.”

“But what if he was?” Futaba insisted. “Scale of one to ten! One is super cringy, not your thing, ten is a total panty-dropper!”

“Dude, I’m not rating how much my best bro gets me goin’! Where do you come up with this stuff?” Ryuji said, laughing and rubbing the back of his neck. “C’mon, time to get to class.”

“Ryuji! Come on! One to ten! It’s vitally important!”

He walked her to her classroom, Futaba still grumbling to herself, and checked his phone on the way down to the first floor.

ANN. Sooo, Ryuji, how was lunch?

He rolled his eyes. Girls.

RYUJI. what are u up to

RYUJI. im not a TOTAL idiot

ANN. nothing!!!

ANN. incidentally

ANN. do you have… a thing for anyone??

RYUJI. lol

RYUJI. youre gonna tell me someones got a thing for me rite

ANN. no!!!

ANN. maybe

RYUJI. dude i’m not blind

RYUJI. futabas bein super obvious

ANN. and?????

RYUJI. i dunno man, never thought about it before!!

RYUJI. its kinda heavy

RYUJI. this is pretty new

RYUJI. give me some time ok? no meddling

ANN. who, me???

Ryuji put his phone in his pocket with a sigh as he entered his classroom. Despite what everyone seemed to think, he wasn’t a total moron. He could pick up a dropped hint as well as the next guy, and probably better than some other guys, Yusuke.

He had to admit, it was kinda sweet of Futaba, to try and play wingman for Akira like this. She’d been talking him up for a couple of weeks now. She’d been taking notes. But not only was Akira his best bro, he was his best bro. Did that matter? Should it?

It was a weird thought, but… maybe not a bad one.

Maybe.

————

“…And this sense of reality did not come so much from observation of the experience of others removed from himself, as from his own experience.”

FUTABA. I’ve stolen many hearts, but the next one… shall be yours!

INARI. How embarrassing.

FUTABA. You do better, then!

INARI. I want to eat breakfast with you every day.

FUTABA. *vomits*

INARI. Don’t vomit on tradition!

“Stop there, Inoue-kun. Sakura-san, if you would continue.”

FUTABA. This is Joker we’re talking about! He wouldn’t make a weird old-fashioned marriage proposal, he’d say something cool to sweep Skull off his feet!

INARI. Surely the rescue will stand on its own as a declaration of love.

FUTABA. Ooh, good point. Adrenaline can carry the mood!

“…Sakura-san? Are you paying attention?”

The girl sitting behind Futaba kicked the back of her chair, startling the girl out of her reverie. She hastily shoved her phone inside her desk and looked up. “What?”

“It’s your turn to read.” The teacher looked over his glasses at her, as a few of the students muffled giggles.

“Oh. Right.” She stood up hastily, her chair squeaking on the floor, and picked up the book on her desk, scanning the page for the last thing she remembered hearing. “Um. ‘Was it, I would ask myself, the result of a coldly impartial scrutiny of his own inner self—‘“

“I believe we’ve heard that paragraph already. The next one, please, and do try to grace us with your mental as well as your physical presence.”

Futaba felt heat rush into her cheeks, and pushed her glasses up her nose compulsively. She didn’t dare look around, but she could just feel the mocking eyes of her classmates on her. “ ‘Such specimens’— sorry— ‘speculations, however, added little t-to my under…’” The characters on the page swam in front of her eyes. “—My understanding of Sensei. S-sensei, as a matter of tact— fact!— had already given me…’ “

“That’s enough, Sakura-san. Minami-san?”

Futaba sat down with a thump as the girl behind her rose gracefully to take her place, then sank further, until her legs stuck out the front of her desk and she was able to retract into her oversized hoodie like a turtle. Maybe if she just kept sinking, she’d clip right through the floor to safety.

————

Sojiro looked up from his paper as the bell over the shop door rang. “Oh, it’s you. Futaba hasn’t been by yet. Take a seat.”

Yusuke slid onto one of the stools at the counter, placing his schoolbag next to him. “My thanks. I don’t suppose I could—“ The older man pushed a cup of coffee across the counter. “Goodness. A psychic now as well.”

“It’s not hard,” Sojiro said with a snort. “It’s the third time this week you’ve stopped by after school, and it’s only Thursday.”

“Ah, of course. How silly of me.” Yusuke took a slow sip of the coffee. One sugar, a splash of cream. Just sweet enough to bring out the complex undertones of the roast. Exquisite.

Sojiro eyeballed him across the counter, drumming his fingers on the wood. The cafe was empty besides the two of them. The only noises were the gentle humming of the ceiling fan and the tinny sound of some daytime talk show on the television.

Yusuke’s cup clinked on the saucer as he put it down.

Sojiro sighed.

“So… you sure have been coming around an awful lot lately. What’s that all about?”

Yusuke looked at him with surprise.

“Am I taking up space meant for customers? It never looks that busy this time of day, but I would be happy to wait upstairs, if you would rather.”

“Look, that’s not— I don’t mind you being in here. Cripes, what do you take me for?” Yusuke had begun to look slightly wounded, but perked up at that. “It’s just that, well… aren’t you spending a lot of money to get here?”

“Not at all. Futaba took my metro pass for a couple of days, and now I always seem to have unlimited trips.”

Hoo boy. Sojiro was going to have to have a talk with his daughter about sticking her fingers in city infrastructure. Again.

Yusuke sipped his coffee, and checked the time on his phone.

Sojiro pinched the bridge of his nose, a taciturn man so far out of his depth the lifeguards would never get to him in time. “What I’m saying is… well, you’re a decent kid. Don’t know how I got myself saddled with the lot of you even with Akira back with his parents, but here we are. So just, if you’re trying to keep something on the down low, don’t be afraid of me coming after you. Futaba, she… well, she lights up when she’s around any one of you, and I can’t complain about that.” Sojiro looked at Yusuke with no small amount of desperation. Yusuke looked bemused. “Look, can you at least try to pick up what I’m putting down, here?”

Yusuke glanced at the countertop, and raised an eyebrow.

Sojiro turned around, put his head in his hands, and dragged his fingers down his face with a groan.

A hundred and eighty miles away, Akira felt his phone buzz in his pocket as he walked home from school.

SOJIRO. That Yusuke is going to give me an aneurysm.

AKIRA. You get used to it.

For the next twenty minutes, Sojiro busied himself with the crossword and leaving well enough alone. When the clock struck four, though, he put the newspaper down, frowning.

“Did Futaba mention stopping anywhere after school?”

Yusuke shook his head. “I’ve texted her twice, to no avail. Might she be at home?”

“Huh. Maybe. She probably just got distracted by one of her games, but…” Sojiro rubbed his chin. “Go check the house, would you? Come let me know if she’s not there.”

“Understood. And if it’s locked?”

Sojiro paused, allowing for an internal tug-of-war to run its course, then he went and dug in the junk drawer under the television. He pulled out a key and tossed it to Yusuke. “I want this back when you’re done. Don’t get any ideas.”

————

As a matter of fact, when Yusuke tried it, the door swung open easily. He couldn’t imagine Boss neglecting to lock it, so it was likely that Futaba was in the house after all. He slipped his shoes off at the door and padded down the dim hallway, leaving his bag by the entrance. Sure enough, a crack of light shone from under Futaba’s door.

Yusuke knocked.

“Go away!”

“I brought the thumbnails we were discussing earlier.”

“Just go away!”

Yusuke frowned. Futaba hadn’t locked herself up like this in months, and as much as he understood the need to draw away from human contact when upset— how often had he locked himself in the studio after hours to methodically cut an entire sketchbook into strips?— he wasn’t sure he could face Boss to return the key without at least setting eyes on Futaba.

“I’m coming in.”

Futaba’s door was, at the very least, unlocked, a heartening sign. He twisted the doorknob and pushed it open. A Futaba-sized lump of blanket was hunched on her computer chair; the girl herself was completely obscured by the fluffy green material, except for the slender arm extending to grasp her computer mouse.

“Jerk,” she said listlessly. “Just leave the thumbnails.”

“What are you doing?”

“Looking up correspondence courses.”

Yusuke narrowed his eyes. At least she was responding to him, he thought to himself, as he shoved a pile of laundry over to make space to sit down on her bed. He crossed his legs, resting one ankle on the opposite knee, and settled in for the long haul. “Oh?”

“I beefed it,” Futaba said flatly. “KO. Fatality. I’ve got a negative defense modifier when it comes to school as it is, and it landed a critical today. I’m done with it.”

“I haven’t the faintest idea what any of that means.” Yusuke hesitated, wondering if it would be gauche to pull out his phone and ask Akira for advice.

“You wouldn’t understand. You don’t care what other people say, or how they look at you.” The blanket slipped off of Futaba’s head as she leaned forward, stretching her arms out and resting her chin on the desk. “Besides, I know you’re just being nice to me because Akira told you to.”

“Am I?” Yusuke said with such genuine surprise that Futaba raised her head, peeking backwards at him.

“I do read your texts, you know,” she said acridly. “Or I used to, anyway. Certain people get a real bee in their bonnet over privacy. You’re free from Alibaba’s watchful eye, for now.”

“Shocking. And Akira asked us to keep an eye on you as your friends, not to coddle you.” She was still looking at him suspiciously. “In any case, I didn’t think my manner towards you had changed.” Had it? They’d become more comfortable with each other recently for sure, but he couldn’t recall making a conscious choice to treat her gently or withhold criticism.

“You’re drawing tawdry smut for me.”

“I’m spending time with a friend, stretching my artistic muscles to express a touching courtship,” he replied solemnly, thinking with relief: if she’s able to sass me, it can’t be that bad.

She fixed him with the same sharp stare she gave when analyzing an enemy shadow; then, apparently having ascertained that he was being genuine, she sighed, lying her forehead on the desk again. “I just… thought I was fixed, you know? I can take the subway, I can shop in a crowd. Going to new places still makes me a little nervous, but I actually like seeing what I’ve been missing. Like I’m collecting achievements or something. Trophy earned, made small talk with the grocer! But school…” She turned her head sideways, staring at the wall. “My mom never understood why I hated school so much, when I’m so smart, you know? I just… never really figured out how to fit in there. And so I got all full of myself, when the first month or so went so well. I kept texting Akira practically every time I walked into the building without tripping over my own feet. But today I got embarrassed by the teacher, and everyone was probably thinking about what a loser I am, and the more I messed up the worse I felt. I just turned into a freaking mess, and at such a little thing, too! I thought the questline was done, but it turns out there’s DLC.”

“That last part aside…” He uncrossed and recrossed his legs, rubbing his chin. Akira would know the perfect, succinct advice to give, but all he could do was say what was on his mind. “Never having had them, I certainly can’t give you advice on making friends at school. Boss might see online classes as less valid, but I doubt he would make too much of a fuss. You’re intelligent enough not to need much feedback from your instructors, and you’re socializing quite well around the neighborhood. You probably don’t need to attend school, as such…”

“…But?” Futaba said suspiciously, peeking over her shoulder when he trailed off.

He fixed her with a cool stare. “But are you going to let them win?”

Her face contorted, and he thought for a moment that he’d gravely miscalculated, but then she sat up, letting out a sudden bark of laughter. “That’s the weirdest pep talk anyone’s ever given me! Jeez, Inari…” She laughed again, and took her glasses off to clean them on her shirt. “‘Do it just to show them who’s boss!’ Who am I even fighting? How ornery can you get?”

“That’s what the Phantom Thieves are all about,” he said with a smile, standing up as she shoved her glasses back on her face, only for them to immediately slide down her button nose. “Sticking it to the man, as Ryuji says. What man, I’ve always wondered. Why only one of them?”

“That Ryuji. What a weirdo,” she agreed, then looked down at her hands, twisting in her lap. “You know… I probably wasn’t gonna actually drop out. I’m pretty sure. No way I could look Akira in the face if I did. But… thanks for letting me vent.”

He remembered how Akira had tousled her hair when they had parted the last time. He wasn’t in the habit of being physically affectionate with his friends; Futaba, surprisingly, was, but where she’d hug Makoto or hold hands with Ann, the only way she and Yusuke ever touched was on the level of a poke in the side or a teasing punch to the shoulder. But even though she’d perked up a bit, she was still looking unusually vulnerable, wrapped in her blanket cocoon. He looked at her red-rimmed eyes and felt a small unexpected jolt in his stomach, realizing she had probably been crying. He reached out one hand towards her, although Yusuke being who he was, the closest he could manage to a tousle was a gentle pat to the top of her head.

Futaba froze.

She suddenly leaped up; her wheeled computer chair flew backwards and crashed into her bookshelf, toppling a small cascade of knick-knacks. Futaba herself fell victim to physics and careened forward, slamming her knees onto the ground.

“Are you all ri—“ Yusuke began, alarmed. Futaba flew to her feet and stuck her arms out, bodily shoving him towards the door, catching his stomach instead of his chest and eliciting an “oof” as she spun him around.

“Fine! Fine! I gotta. You go! School’s good! We done? Okay later bye!”

Yusuke stumbled into the hall, and the door slammed shut behind him.

He blinked in the sudden gloom, and looked at his hand.

That was not the right thing to do, he thought, and ambled towards the door to retrieve his school bag.

————

Futaba turned around, pressing her back into the door, and sank slowly to the floor.

Her heart was tap dancing in her ribs, cartwheeling impudently against her sternum. She felt like a lightning rod, her head still tingling where his hand had been.

She covered her burning face with her hands, and drew her knees up to her chest.

Oh, no. Oh no no no no no.

Days until Summer Comiket: 85

Chapter Text

Futaba paced back and forth outside Leblanc, compulsively clasping and unclasping her hands. When had it started? When had she stopped wanting to smack his stupid face and started wanting to kiss it instead?

Okay, that wasn’t entirely true. She still wanted to grab his shoulders and shake him whenever he went on one of his rambling tangents, merrily skipping down a path ninety degrees off whatever he was actually supposed to be talking about. Or when he artfully brushed his hair out of his eyes and said something so painfully pretentious she wanted to puke. He had this supercilious way of raising one eyebrow right before he said something especially off-the-wall, too. In fact, she’d spent so long today thinking about every single minute gesture he made, and how much each one individually infuriated her, that a classmate had asked her if she had a fever and needed to go to see the school nurse, since she was looking so flushed.

As she’d lied on a cot in the nurse’s office, because an excuse to skip class was an excuse to skip class, she’d tried her hand at denial. No way she had a crush. Probably just indigestion. She’d heard about butterflies in your stomach, and always thought it sounded vaguely pleasant and sweet; this felt less like butterflies, and more like fire ants. Besides, why him, of all people? He was irritating, and purposely ornery, and a total space cadet, and talked with her for hours about the most inane things, and sometimes looked at her like he understood her, and had a jawline she kind of wanted to eat—

Yeah, nope. She’d rolled a critical failure against the charms of a boy who had once tried to take seaweed home from the beach to grill for dinner.

How was she going to be able to keep it together the next time they talked about whether Joker or Skull was going to be the one to push the other boy up against the wall and lick his tonsils?

She’d shoved her face into the pillow and groaned.

What a disaster.

She paused next to the door and pulled her phone out of her pocket. She was already twenty minutes later than usual, but as she’d approached the cafe, she’d found herself going over and over every one of her mannerisms. It was normal for her to greet him with a grin, but what if that was coming on too strong? What if he took her usual teasing for flirting? What if she stopped teasing, and he noticed that? She’d get railroaded into a bad end for sure. She’d just have to watch herself very carefully and try not to give him any hints at all about anything whatsoever.

When she finally opened the door to the cafe and saw that Yusuke wasn’t alone in his usual booth, she breathed a sigh of relief. A tutorial mission before she had to be alone with him was just what she needed, and if anyone was up to the challenge of creating a gentle, soothing atmosphere, it was Haru.

“Futaba-chan!” she said with a smile and a wave. Yusuke half-turned around to glance at her as Futaba tried to remember how to say hello like a normal person.
“What’s kickin’, chickens?” she blurted, cringing immediately upon hearing her own voice. Did brains have a little drawer they kept absolutely asinine things in just for this kind of moment? Some kind of emergency shame button? A case reading ‘break glass in case of uncontrollable hormones’?

Haru giggled, in a way that implied she thought the greeting absolutely charming. God bless her fluffy soul.

Yusuke stared at her blankly. Jerk.

“Anyway,” he said, standing up, “shall we begin? Haru was kind enough to offer her body today.”

“Phrasing.”

“I’m sorry?”

“I was wondering what you were doing here,” continued Futaba, ignoring Yusuke completely as the trio climbed the stairs. “Figured you were maybe just in the neighborhood.”

“Actually, Yusuke asked me if I would help him with some pose references!” Haru said, depositing her purse at the top of the stairs. “He explained that he’s been sketching at Leblanc lately as the surroundings put him in the right frame of mind, but…” She lowered her voice and stage-whispered to Futaba behind her hand. “Just between us, I think Boss has been feeding him. I swear his collarbones don’t protrude like they used to.”

“Mmhmm,” Futaba forced out in a strangled tone. Damn it, Haru, I trusted you! Don’t make me think about his collarbones! Is this how normal, boy-crazy teenage girls feel all the time? How do they ever get anything done?

“I will admit, my caloric intake has increased recently,” Yusuke interjected, with a solemn nod at Futaba.

Come to think of it, they did hang out at some fast-food restaurant or another a couple of times a week. Even when they worked at Leblanc, she usually stopped on her way home from school to pick up some instant noodles or potato chips. And Sojiro was indeed feeding him, on top of that— as much as he complained that he didn’t pay the mortgage every month just to have a gaggle of teenagers eat his profits, there was somehow always curry at the end of the night that wasn’t going to keep and needed eating up. Judging from Yusuke’s abysmal spending habits and offhand comments about the flavor of the tap water in different neighborhoods, she wouldn’t be surprised if she was the only one feeding him some days.

Paradoxically, the thought of his absolute inability to take care of himself calmed her down. That’s right. She had forgotten one very crucial thing about Yusuke: despite all of his artistic talent, despite the graceful way he eliminated shadows with a pithy comment, despite his honesty and loyalty towards his friends, he was at heart a human dumpster fire with the emotional intelligence of a concussed ferret. The only way he was going to notice anything was different about her was if she grabbed his face and screamed a confession into his ear, so she might as well just go about her business. No reason anything had to change. None at all.

“Why Haru?” Futaba said to Yusuke as she dumped her bag on the workbench, hoping he’d understand her real meaning of ‘Aren’t you drawing two dudes?’

“I originally asked Ryuji, but he said he was, and I quote, ’going through some heavy stuff right now’,” Yusuke said with a shrug. “I chose not to pry further.”

“Weird,” Futaba commented. She looked up to see Haru looking at her unusually intently, and furrowed her eyebrows. That… was also weird.

Haru had shown up in a chunky sweater and flowing skirt, and as she pulled the sweater over her head the already-rattled Futaba had a moment of sheer panic, because Haru was just unpredictable enough that if Yusuke asked her to model nude, she might have done it. She was wearing a tank top underneath, though, and smiled reassuringly at Futaba’s nervous expression as she pulled her skirt off to reveal running shorts. “Yusuke asked me to wear clothing that allowed for an uninterrupted line of form. How about you? Do you need to stop by your house and change out of your uniform?”

“What?” Futaba squeaked.

“Oh! I just assumed—“ Haru frowned slightly as she folded her street clothes neatly. “When Yusuke said he was waiting for you, I thought perhaps you were modeling for him, too…?”

“Her uniform is fine,” Yusuke interjected smoothly, as Futaba shot daggers at him with her eyes, just daring him to make that excuse for her presence. “She’ll be taking photos for me to reference later, while I capture the essence of your poses in quick gestures.”

“I will? I mean, yeah, I will,” Futaba said, hastily and with considerable relief.

“Now, all we need is…” Yusuke cast his eyes around the room searchingly. Eventually, after sending Futaba downstairs to search in the back room, Haru ended up holding a detached broom handle like a baseball bat.

“There are a few specific poses I’d like, but for now, just pose as you would move in battle,” Yusuke said, flipping open his sketchbook, all business. “Place, say, sixty percent of your weight on your left leg at all times. I will adjust you as needed. Take breaks when necessary, and move as you need to prevent stiffness. Futaba, the camera.”

Ten minutes passed. Haru repositioned herself several times, at one point mentioning offhandedly to Futaba that it was a shame that Ryuji couldn’t make it, wasn’t it? Futaba moved around her, taking photos with her phone from different angles that seemed interesting, although she wasn’t sure if Yusuke really needed them or if it was just an excuse to account for her presence. Haru changed position again, raising the broom handle over her head as if to cleave a target in two. “I think I’m getting the hang of this!” she said cheerfully.

Yusuke didn’t reply, though he was looking straight at her, shooting only quick glances at his sketchbook as his arm moved in graceful arcs. Haru glanced at Futaba, and the other girl shrugged.

“I get like that when I’m programming sometimes,” she explained, taking another photo. “It’s like tunnel vision. I can’t see or hear anyone else, practically not unless they shake me. Any work I do like that tends to be bonkers good, though.” She circled around Haru, taking a picture from the back, then paused. Haru couldn’t see her phone screen from back here, so…

“So we should leave him to it?” Haru asked.

“Yeah, he’ll snap out of it when he’s done,” Futaba answered absent-mindedly, pinch-zooming on her phone screen to center the viewfinder on Yusuke. “Keep moving around however you want. If he’s anything like me, he might not even be drawing you right now, just pulling inspiration outta nowhere.” A strand of hair fell over Yusuke’s eyes, not that he noticed. His posture was awful, too, his back hunched and his shoulders tense. The sleeves of his shirt were at least two inches too short, exposing the bony prominences of his thin wrists. He looks like an underfed scarecrow, Futaba thought, disgusted with her own taste even as she snapped a picture for posterity.

“You and Yusuke-kun… you have a lot in common,” Haru said with a smile, turning to look at Futaba and shifting into a one-handed swing.

“We do?” Futaba tucked a strand of hair behind her ear, not meeting the other girl’s eyes as they followed her around.

“You haven’t noticed? I think you understand each other very well,” Haru said dreamily, idly swinging the broom handle. “Oh, I’ve missed this feeling. Isn’t there a batting cage around here?”

“I have what I need,” Yusuke blurted suddenly, making Futaba jump. “I’ll see you tomorrow.”

“That’s it?” both girls asked at once.

“Yes,” he replied, standing up and closing his sketchbook, as if surprised they even needed to ask. “I see now what I’ve been misunderstanding about weight distribution. This sequence is only a very small part of the overall narrative, but I found myself fussing over the particulars. With your help, I will be able to move forward. Naturally, I will call upon you again should I require more references.”

“Aren’t you going to stay and eat dinner?” Futaba blurted.

“No need. If I don’t get this down now, I may lose the moment.”

“But I told Sojiro—“

“Besides, I still have half the bag of gummies you bought me the other day. You told me they were made with real fruit, so they should sustain me for the night.” Shoving his sketchbook into his schoolbag, he nodded at them both. “Goodbye.”

They both watched him walk smartly down the stairs, already looking as if he was in another world. Futaba took a half-step forward, her brow wrinkling. Her face was usually an open book; right now, it looked like the kind of Victorian novel where at least three people died of consumption.

“Guess I gotta text him the pics,” she grumbled, looking down at her phone. Haru took the opportunity to sidle closer, trying to peer over her shoulder at the album; Futaba just as quickly sidled away, drawing the phone closer to her body.

Haru beamed.

“Yusuke is very handsome, isn’t he?”

“Hah!” Futaba scoffed, a little too emphatically. “More like… blandsome. No, no, wait. demandsome, since he’s always so demanding!”

“You two are spending a lot of time together lately.”

“Yeah, cause he needs a babysitter!”

“Are you working on a project?”

“He’s always doing something weird.”

“How long have you had a crush on him?”

Futaba dropped her phone on her foot.

Haru smiled beatifically as the other girl cursed and crouched down to rub her toes.

“It just came to me,” she said brightly, clapping her hands together, “that it’s been quite a while since our last sleepover. If Yusuke isn’t going to be staying for dinner, I don’t think Boss would mind having one more around, would he?”

“You’re sadistic,” Futaba groaned. “What are you planning on doing, putting me on the rack? Waterboarding me? Pulling out all my fingernails one by one?”

“Just a little bit of girl talk!”

Futaba recoiled.

Maybe, if she asked nicely, Haru would let her volunteer for the fingernail thing instead.

Days until Summer Comiket: 83

Chapter Text

”I don’t know what to do!” Futaba groaned, wrapping her fingers through the protective chain-link fence and sagging against it. “I’m a hot mess right now. Sooner or later I’m gonna slip up and he’s gonna figure it out!”

The pitching machine shot a baseball towards Haru, who swung too late and missed. It crashed into the fence behind her, but such was Futaba’s mood that she barely even jumped. Haru straightened up, tucking her hair behind one ear and shaking out her arm. “Would that be so bad?”

“Yes!” Futaba wailed.

“But wouldn’t it be lovely if he felt the same way?” Haru popped the next ball up into the corner of the batting cage, then glanced over her shoulder at the other girl. Futaba just stared at her blankly, before shaking her head furiously, a blush rising up her face.

“I can’t even— I don’t— I haven’t even thought that far ahead! And even— no. No way! That’s way too next-level for me!” Futaba spluttered out, beet red. Haru smiled as she turned back to the ball launcher.

“This is your first crush, isn’t it, Futaba?”

“Of course it is!” Having fervently agreed, she then shifted uncomfortably as Haru hit the next two balls, sending them high into the protective netting. “Well… don’t tell anyone this, ‘cause then I’d have to kill you. But I thought I had a thing for Akira, for, like, a week.”

“We’ve all been there,” Haru said sympathetically.

“But then he said we were teammates, and I started thinking… well, he’s the first boy who’s ever been so nice to me. So no kidding I’m gonna get all attached!” She shook her head, tightening her fingers in the chain link. “Once I rationalized it to myself, those feelings just kinda went poof! He’s still really important to me, but I stopped thinking about him like that basically right away.” Her shoulders slumped further, and she added morosely, “But I’ve been trying for days to explain this one away, and it’s not budging. Oh, and raise your bat. You’re hitting the ball too low, that’s why it keeps popping up.”

“That’s our Oracle!” Haru chirped, nearly hitting the home run disc on her next swing.

“And I know I should probably talk to Ann about this, since she’s the only one of us who actually has any experience, but…” Futaba trailed off, looking at the ground.

“Ann-chan is… very action-oriented,” Haru finished diplomatically.

“Exactly!” She slammed her fist into her other palm. “Like, she’s gonna want me to go full-on special event CG with homemade chocolates or something. I’m just not ready for that kind of thing!”

Haru hit the last ball straight-on, sending it bouncing off the netting and ricocheting back towards her. “Well, that’s that. Are you sure you wouldn’t like a round before it gets dark?”

“I’m good,” Futaba answered as Haru removed her batting helmet. Standing still while a robot shot hundred-mile-an-hour projectiles at her head wasn’t exactly her idea of stress relief. They resumed their conversation as they walked down the narrow stairs to street level, the owner of the batting cages calling an enthusiastic farewell to the girls (and particularly to Haru’s black credit card, which she’d used to purchase twenty rounds right off the bat).

“About what you were saying, I think, right now… you may not have to do anything,” Haru said slowly as they emerged onto the street. “If this is new for you, I don’t think there’s anything wrong with taking every day as it comes.”

“Setting aside some time for grinding before the next mission, huh…?”

“Maybe?” Haru said, with a shrug and a smile. “I just don’t want to see you being too hard on yourself over this. You enjoy spending time with Yusuke, don’t you?”

Futaba looked down at her feet, encased in the eye-popping shoes she’d bought specifically because she’d known it would annoy Yusuke, and muttered something.

“I’m sorry?”

“I said I guess so!” Futaba said with a scowl, shoving her glasses up her nose. “Ugh, it’s so embarrassing to say!”

“I don’t see why,” the older girl said as they reached Futaba’s front door. “He may have his eccentricities, but he’s truly a good friend and teammate. And he has such broad shoulders, too!” she teased, as Futaba shoved her key in the lock. Futaba narrowed her eyes and shot her what she thought was a vicious scowl, but judging from Haru’s gentle expression, the other girl had a +4 against halfhearted defense mechanisms.

“It just makes me feel so… I dunno. Vulnerable?” Futaba sighed, throwing herself down on the couch and dumping her bag on the floor. Haru took a moment to remove her shoes and place them neatly in the entranceway before following.

“I meant what I said earlier in the afternoon, you know,” she said, taking a seat on the arm of the couch. “I feel like you two really do understand each other, on some level. I might be wrong, but…” she tapped her chin, trying to find the right words. “You have your difficulties connecting to people, but so does Yusuke. I don’t really know if it’s a matter of “can’t” or a matter of “won’t” for him, but he does hold himself with a certain level of aloofness. Isn’t it only natural you’d be drawn to each other?”

Futaba propped her chin on her hands, tilting her head as she let that one roll around in her brain. She was pretty sure that what Haru actually meant was that they were both total nutjobs, but it was nice of her to put it so kindly. “So what you’re saying is… ?”

“Mmm, maybe… that feeling vulnerable and a little bit out of your comfort zone just means you’re growing. It might feel scary, but it’s kind of exciting, too, isn’t it?”

Futaba chewed on her fingernail. Mostly she just felt kind of nauseous, but in a way that wasn’t exactly unpleasant. She peered up over her glasses at Haru speculatively. No matter how close they were, this wasn’t the kind of thing Akira could help her solve with a promise list, but without anyone to help her interpret this, she knew she would probably just get in her own way. Maybe it wouldn’t be so bad to have a fairy companion to explain menu items to her.

“Oh!” Haru interjected suddenly, clapping her hands together. “I have an idea. When I was planning my Beauty Thief introduction, I took inspiration from the comics I loved as a child. I still don’t think there’s anything wrong with letting things happen naturally, but if you need an extra boost of confidence to handle a difficult situation, why not take inspiration from one of your video games? There must be some that deal with romance.”

“That’s… not the worst idea I’ve ever heard,” Futaba said slowly. “I wasn’t sure it would work, but if you think it’s an okay plan…”

Haru beamed.

Somewhere in southern Miyagi prefecture, Akira felt a shiver go down his spine.

————

“Thanks, man. I owe you one, for real.”

“It’s not a problem, but…” Yusuke looked around the Sunday crowds clogging the arcade, furrowing his brow. “If you wanted to spend the afternoon playing video games, surely Futaba or Ann would have been happy to join you.”

“Nah, dude, I needed some bro time. You feel me?” Ryuji said, rubbing the back of his neck.

“I see.”

“Oh, yeah? Nice.”

“Ryuji, with Akira out of town, am I your only male friend?”

“No! Jeez,” Ryuji grumbled as he scooped his coins from the change machine’s slot. “You’re makin’ me sound like some kinda loser! We just haven’t hung out in a while. On our own, you know. Man to man.”

Yusuke considered this as he stepped forward to change a bill. He wouldn’t have normally reacted to a friend inviting him out with suspicion, but so far Ryuji had used the phrase ‘bro time’ six times, and that was enough to put anyone on their guard. Ryuji’s denials weren’t making this any less suspicious, nor was the crumpled 1,000 yen bill the other boy shoved into the machine for him.

“Thank you,” Yusuke said, taking his change. “What do you want?”

Ryuji slumped. “Man…”

“If it’s a commission, I’m afraid I’m busy with personal projects at the moment. However, I have recently met several artists online who—“

“Okay, okay, enough! I don’t want you to do anything for me. I just wanna blow off some steam. Okay? That cool? Come on.” Ryuji stomped off towards the fighting games, hands in his pockets.

Yusuke followed, only slightly less confused. “Is something wrong?”

“No! Maybe! Can we just beat each other up and let this happen, like, organically and shit?” He rubbed the back of his neck, sitting down with a thump in front of a fighting game. Yusuke slid into the seat next to him and inserted a coin, scrolling through the list of available fighters before settling on a man with an elegant sword. It wasn’t like Ryuji to be so cagey, but then again, it wasn’t like him to use Yusuke for a sounding board, either. Was it about college, maybe? Makoto had been badgering all three of the third-years recently, reminding them that they had a limited amount of time left to make a decision. He hadn’t heard much from Ryuji, but Ann was considering a program in acting at a local junior college; as for Yusuke, he had been studiously avoiding Makoto’s texts and e-mails containing scholarship listings and apprenticeship postings. She meant well, he knew, but financial concerns aside, thinking about practical plans for the future when art was involved often felt like standing on the beach, watching fish gasp on the sand as the tide receded ominously past the shoals.

“You suck at this,” Ryuji commented when, after twenty seconds, he’d won the first round. “Don’t just slam the buttons, dude. Let me show you some combos…”

Ten minutes later, Yusuke had won two rounds out of six, and Ryuji clapped him on the back in congratulations. “All right! He can be taught!”

“Of course I can be,” Yusuke said absently, looking around at the other machines, choosing a drumming game when Ryuji told him it was his turn to pick something to play.

As he rejected the game’s offer to give them a tutorial— how hard could it be?— he sensed Ryuji shifting his weight next to him, repeatedly adjusting his grip on the wooden drum sticks. He noted in the back of his mind Ryuji’s tendency to fidget when he wanted something. True, the comic Futaba had outlined was a fairly straightforward “rescue by a knight in shining armor” plot, but in the unlikely event their work found success, he might have the opportunity to develop their characters further. Small details bring life to a work of art, after all. Yusuke wondered, as he scrolled through the song list, if it crossed some kind of line to be bringing real-life details into a supposedly fictionalized rendition of—

“Dude, pick a song already! You distracted by art again, or somethin’?”

“Yes,” Yusuke replied honestly, if not truthfully. Oh, well. It was probably fine. Ryuji should be honored to be included in such a skillfully crafted tribute.

He recognized few of the song titles, so picked one at random; the difficulty was easy enough to allow for conversation as they hit the large drums, and Ryuji took advantage of that.

“You ever, like… realize you’ve been totally fooling yourself?”

Yusuke, just happy Ryuji had stopped fidgeting, thought about the question carefully, figuring he deserved an honest answer. “Yes. But you should know that already, after Madarame.”

“Right, right. But besides that. More like… I dunno. Way less life-shattering than that? Not like it feels less important, but…” Yusuke risked a glance sideways, to see Ryuji’s eyes firmly focused with desperate, laser-like intensity on the game screen as he fumbled for words. “Aw, forget it.”

“All right,” Yusuke said with a slight frown as the song finished. Ryuji insisted on trying the hardest difficulty for the next round, and predictably, after two minutes of wild flailing, they received a game over at the end of the song.

Ryuji was out of coins, so the two of them set off back to the change machine, until Yusuke spotted something and stopped in his tracks.

He made a sharp right turn; Ryuji stumbled over his own shoes in his effort to follow. “Dude, what the hell?”

Yusuke stopped in front of a UFO catcher game; the prize was a large colorful cushion shaped like a cat’s face. He made a quick mental calculation of the amount of lunch money he had brought while digging in his pockets, and decided he could go without a beverage, pulling out a hundred-yen coin and dropping it in the machine’s coin slot. Ryuji shook his head and leaned against the side of the machine, watching the pincer descend and grasp the pillow weakly, lifting it barely a centimeter before dropping it back in place. ”Try shoving it instead, this thing’s rigged to be weak,” he suggested as Yusuke pushed another coin into the machine’s slot.

“With the arms?”

“Yeah. Here, like…”

He demonstrated, aiming one claw at the ear of the cat plush, shoving it slightly down and off of its stand. He slipped another coin into the machine to make up for his stolen turn, and crossed his arms as he watched Yusuke’s next attempt. Yusuke leaned back, then around the glass corner of the machine, judging the angles as he moved the controls. Ryuji was jiggling his foot again, and Yusuke wished he wouldn’t; it was upsetting his spatial reasoning.

Ryuji cleared his throat. “So, uh. You’re all, sensitive artist man and shit. You ever have feelings you just… don’t really know what to do with?”

Yusuke considered the vagueness of that question as he managed to shove the cat pillow further out of place over the course of the next four rounds. “To give a vague answer to a vague question, I suppose everyone does, at one time or another,” he said finally, just when Ryuji had resigned himself to not getting an answer. “These feelings… are they positive, or negative?”

“Uh… both?” Ryuji watched Yusuke dig in his pockets for another coin. “Or… more positive, I guess. But kinda freaky. Pretty new.” He rubbed the back of his neck as Yusuke worked the controls, then let out a groan in tandem with the artist as the pillow was pushed almost, but not quite, into the hole.

“As a, quote, ‘sensitive artist man’, when I need to process something, I do find myself drawing more often than not,” Yusuke offered, narrowing his eyes. The pillow seemed to be only one or two pushes away from falling into the hole, but he couldn’t be sure exactly how many more, and he was already out of lunch money. “To define something is to understand it… or at least, to clarify why you’re finding it so impossible to define. Is it your bizarre notion of masculine pride preventing you from asking for romantic advice from Ann, or is she the object of your desires? Also, do you have any more change?”

“What? Dude, no, I… it’s not like— aw, hell. Okay, okay. Be right back.”

Ryuji loped off towards the change machine, ears red. Yusuke shook his head as he remained to guard the nearly-won prize. People were always so surprised when he read them correctly, to the point it would be insulting if he didn’t see where they were coming from. True, he preferred to regard the world cooly, observing the foibles of man from a distance and tucking them away in his head for later inspiration, but he would be an imbecile to try and claim indifference towards the mannerisms and emotions of those few people who were closest to him. If his time with Akira had taught him anything, it was that it was a fool’s errand indeed to try and depict things you refused to experience. Coming down from his ivory tower to help his friends grapple with the vagaries of life was a slow process, but an immensely rewarding one.

“Here,” Ryuji grumbled as he slouched back over, handing him another pile of change. “No, it ain’t Ann. Jeez.”

“I have no practical advice to offer you, not having any experience with love, requited or otherwise,” Yusuke commented, as if there had been no break in their conversation. “But I imagine that whoever the object of your affections is, they would have nothing but respect for you, if one day you are able to be honest with your feelings.”

“Stop, you’re gonna make me blush,” Ryuji said with a grin, punching him lightly on the shoulder. Aggressively masculine affection is a mystery, Yusuke thought, sighing inwardly as his hand was bumped off the button and he watched the claw descend ineffectively. “…Thanks, man. Guess all I wanted was a pep talk.”

It took six hundred more yen before the pillow fell through the slot and Yusuke was able to collect his prize, smiling slightly with satisfaction. “Probably coulda gotten that for cheaper online, but congrats,” Ryuji said, with a congratulatory slap on the back as Yusuke stood up. “It’s kinda cute, I guess. Never took you for a plushie guy.”

“Oh, it’s not for me,” Yusuke said with mild surprise, as if he couldn’t believe Ryuji could ever make such a ridiculous assumption. “It’s for Futaba.”

“What.”

“She had a similar one, but she spilled coffee on it last week, and couldn’t manage to wash the stain out completely.”

“Dude.”

“She’s been bemoaning its loss, saying she can’t nap on it any more, since it smells so strongly of coffee now.”

“Dude,” Ryuji said again, with a sigh. He opened his mouth, then shut it, deciding instead to clap Yusuke on the back once more, sympathetically, earning a raised eyebrow. “Let’s… let’s go play some more fighting games, okay? I’m rootin’ for you. Good luck, man.”

“Why would you root for me when you’re fighting against me?”

“I didn’t mean the… look, don’t even worry about it.”

————

MAKOTO. Have you heard from Yusuke lately?

MAKOTO. I’ve been texting him, but he hasn’t been responding. I thought you might know what he’s up to.

MAKOTO. He isn’t sick, is he? I’d feel awful for bothering him.

Futaba looked up from her phone at the boy sitting across from her at the living room coffee table. “Makoto wants to know if you died.”

A slightly pained expression crossed Yusuke’s face as he looked up from the page he was inking. “I didn’t think I’d let her messages sit for long enough to worry her.”

“Want me to throw her off the trail?” Futaba offered. “What’s she been texting you about, anyway?”

Yusuke shook his head, looking back down at the page and resuming his inks. “Merely the inevitable fact that one day, those who fight adults will be forced to turn into them. I’ll contact her later tonight.”

FUTABA. Barrier spell activated! ( #`⌂´)/┌┛

FUTABA. I have him in my clutches! Mwahaha

MAKOTO. I’m sorry?

FUTABA. He says he’ll get back to you but he looks kinda constipated about it

MAKOTO. Maybe I was coming on too strong.

MAKOTO. I just kept finding scholarship opportunities… if he’s planning on attending college, I’d love to help, but I can’t get a straight answer out of him.

MAKOTO. Has he said anything to you?

“Are you still texting her?” Yusuke asked, sliding the finished page to her across the table. “Her concern for me is admirable, but…”

FUTABA. I try to talk and think about school as little as possible so that’s an NG

MAKOTO. Oh, well. I guess… let him know that I’ll back off for now.

MAKOTO. Are you with him now? Doing anything fun?

FUTABA. Secret.

“Futaba, can you please put that away and focus on the task at hand?”

FUTABA. Gotta jet ε=ε=ε=┌(๑ʘ∀ʘ)┘

MAKOTO. Where do you find those smileys…? Is it a separate keyboard?

Futaba put her phone down on the table with a sigh, picking up the eraser as slowly and carefully as she would a fifty pound barbell. Five inked pages were in front of her, which seemed to be a frankly ludicrous speed for him to work at.

“Don’t make that face,” he said, glancing up at her with a stern expression. “You were the one who asked if there were any tasks I needed help with. Have more respect for the art.”

As Yusuke had moved forward with the actual drawing work, he’d needed her input less; this past week, he’d been closeting himself in his dorm room to work, and no amount of texting had been able to convince him to work at Leblanc, or even to distract him for more than thirty seconds. She was pretty sure that even today, he’d agreed to come work at her house not because he really needed help erasing the pencils underneath his completed inks, but because it was unseasonably hot for early June, and her house had central air conditioning. She’d been irritated about it all week— not that Yusuke wasn’t spending time with her, but that she’d wanted him to so much. She was used to relishing the hours of solitude between school letting out and bedtime, using the silence to relax by gaming or programming and refueling her “willingness to socialize” gauge, not wishing for some boy to text her back or show up at her door. She’d even blown a match in competitive the other day, her text tone distracting her from dodging a telegraphed ultimate, and if Yusuke had blown her chances at Grandmaster rank with a two AM question about Pixiv tags, he had a big storm coming.

She erased slowly, partially because she didn’t want to rip the paper, and partially so she could take a closer look at what he’d drawn. The first two pages were a straightforward fight scene, before an unusually muscled Skull was thrown to the ground, at the mercy of a shadow (Futaba wondered if Yusuke had borrowed one of her JoJo volumes when he’d poked through her manga shelf for references). There was a full-page spread of Joker coming in to rescue him, and by the seventh page, slid over to her before she was done erasing the first, Joker had the other boy pinned against the wall, both of their outfits artfully torn.

“You’re working pretty quickly, huh,” she said with a sigh.

“Yes, it’s going very smoothly,” Yusuke responded proudly. “I was hit with a burst of inspiration three days ago, and have been drawing steadily ever since. I seem to have finally become comfortable enough drawing in this style to—“

“Hold on, three days ago?”

“With occasional breaks for sleep,” he continued, sighing regretfully, potentially at the very fact he possessed a mortal form with such base needs. He had unfairly good skin, for a boy, especially since Futaba doubted he washed his face with anything besides water and a bar of cheap soap, but she noticed the dark circles now that she was looking for them. “Despite my best efforts, I seem to be incapable of functioning without at least three hours of sleep per night. A regrettable weakness, I know.”

Futaba, a girl incapable of functioning without the occasional light coma, gaped at him in horror. “You don’t have to— You can slow down, you know!”

“And lose inspiration?” he retorted, eyebrows raised. “You of all people should know what it’s like to be carried on a wave of productivity. At this rate, I will be done well before summer break, and we won’t have to pay extra for a rush order at the printer.”

“Yeah, but…” She curled her legs up under her, resting her chin on her knees, and scowled as she ran through potential dialogue trees.

A. ”But I like hanging out with you like this! Even after you’re done drawing, can we still spend time together?

>You don’t have enough Courage to say that.

B. ”Take better care of yourself! I’ll come by every day to make sure you sleep and eat!”

She scoffed even before she finished that thought. Treating him when they hung out was one thing, but she didn’t have the discipline or the cooking skills to fill the ‘Bossy But Kind Classmate’ trope.

C. ”What do you mean? We’re not nearly done yet!”

Yeah… that one could work.

“We’re not?” Yusuke asked, head tilted to the side quizzically as he looked up in response to her outburst.

“Right,” Futaba said with a firm, confident nod. “The comic itself is only half of it. There are thousands of artists there! We gotta stand out! There’s internet promotion, art trades with prominent fanartists, setting up a twitter feed… You started a Pixiv, right? I’ll help you cross-promote. If you’re working that fast on the art, we can do a B-side comic. Ooh, or doujin goods! Charms, acrylic stands, a limited-run print of the cover illustration…”

“I see… that kind of thing hadn’t occurred to me,” Yusuke said with a slow nod. “I’m not used to thinking in terms of marketing. You truly do care about this project,” he added with a crinkling of his eyes and a sudden smile that made Futaba jump to her feet clumsily, banging her knees on the lip of the coffee table.

“Are you all right?” he asked, half-standing.

“Fine!” she squeaked, hunching over, rubbing her knees. “Fine. I’m— phew.” She patted her cheeks and stood straight up, waving him back into his seat. “I’m gonna run and get us some coffee. No slacking while I’m gone!”

She took her time on the way back from Leblanc, holding the two to-go cups, one warm and black, the other iced with cream and sugar. B+ on keeping it together today, she decided, giving herself extra points for reacting like a normal human being when he’d brought her a replacement pillow for the one she’d ruined recently. He’d expounded on his newly found skills with the arcade machine, and she’d scolded him for being so careless with money before mumbling a “thank you” and going to place it carefully on her computer chair. Seriously, he was lucky he had her around to make sure he ate, if he was going to keep spending all his money like he was banking on finding the real-life console command for unlimited funds. Stupid Inari.

“I’m back!” she sang out, letting herself back into the house. There was no response, and she went to the living room to see that Yusuke had not only ignored her teasing command not to slack, he’d done the exact opposite. Apparently having finally given in to the demands of his body, or perhaps soothed by the white noise of the air conditioner, he’d put his head down on the table and fallen asleep.

Futaba tiptoed over, placing the coffee on the table quietly, and knelt down beside him, gazing at his sleeping face. He was breathing quietly and evenly, and as she watched him, his long lashes fluttered once, briefly, before stilling.

“Hey, you’re gonna get stiff,” she said quietly. When she got no response, confirming his deep sleep, she bit her lip. This was her opportunity. She knew she shouldn’t, but it was something she’d wanted to do for so long, and how often would she be in this situation? She had him completely and utterly at her mercy.

She reached over to Yusuke slowly, carefully, so as not to disturb him.

She picked up his thickest inking pen, and uncapped it.

“You’ll never see it coming,” she sang quietly under her breath, a small grin on her face as she went to work.

Days until Summer Comiket: 68

Chapter Text

[ 6/4/17, 8:29 PM ]

YUSUKE. How do you remove permanent marker from skin?

AKIRA. …soap?

YUSUKE. I tried that.

YUSUKE. This is humiliating. Every time Boss comes in to give a suggestion he just starts laughing and leaves again.

AKIRA. Dare I ask?

YUSUKE. Do you need to? You must know there’s only one person whose fault this could be.

YUSUKE. I refuse to walk the streets like this. I will be staying at the Sakura residence until the skin cells on my face turn over.

YUSUKE. It could take weeks.

AKIRA. Yeah, don’t… don’t do that.

[ 8:32 PM ]

AKIRA. Do you know how to get permanent marker out of things?

MAKOTO. Rubbing alcohol should work. At least, it did when a sharpie burst in my pencil case.

MAKOTO. What happened?

AKIRA. Futaba.

MAKOTO. That must have been why she was so cagey when I asked what she and Yusuke were doing.

AKIRA. Oh?

MAKOTO. She said it was a secret.

MAKOTO. Hold on. Let me google something.

MAKOTO. ¯\_( ◉ 3 ◉ )_/¯

AKIRA. lol

MAKOTO. That was supposed to convey confusion.

MAKOTO. Did it?

AKIRA. It sure did something.

[ 8:38 PM ]

FUTABA. [img_2095.jpg]

AKIRA. Nice.

AKIRA. I like the whiskers.

FUTABA. My fav’s the Naruto headband!

AKIRA. Yeah?

FUTABA. Haven't you ever watched him run?

AKIRA. Not really.

FUTABA. Oh, you are missing OUT.

[ 8:42 PM]

AKIRA. [img_2095(copy).jpg]

RYUJI. hahahahahaha

RYUJI. isn’t that in Futaba’s house

RYUJI. oh man what a sucker

RYUJI. he’s got it bad

AKIRA. Got what?

RYUJI. shit

RYUJI. nevermind uh

RYUJI. i gotta go wash the dog bye

AKIRA. You don’t have a dog.

AKIRA. Hello?

AKIRA. Ryuji?

[ 8:56 PM ]

AKIRA. Is something up with Ryuji?

ANN. Maaaaaaaaaybe

ANN. ;)

AKIRA. Be straight with me or I won’t show you what happened to Yusuke

ANN. what

ANN. OK all I’m gonna say is… young love is in the air

ANN. it’s cute AF

ANN. don’t tell him I told you

AKIRA. That didn’t really clear anything up but

AKIRA. [img_2095(copy).jpg]

ANN. omg LOL

ANN. ugh I can’t wait until you’re back in town!!

ANN. we’ve gotta make the most of it!

AKIRA. Oh right. Thanks for reminding me, I have to talk to Haru about something

ANN. Destinyland again??? pleeeeeease say Destinyland again

[ 9:10 PM ]

AKIRA. So about this list of summer plans you sent me

HARU. Yes!

AKIRA. Did you… write it?

HARU. Oh, no. Futaba-chan wrote most of it, so I thought I should send it along comments intact.

AKIRA. That explains a lot.

AKIRA. I was kind of wondering about “Summer Festival (unlockable yukata CG)” and “Beach episode”.

AKIRA. Not to mention “Avoid time loops”.

HARU. She’s very excited about experiencing everything summer has to offer!

AKIRA. Me too. Glad you’ll be with us this year.

HARU. :)

AKIRA. Have you two been hanging out a lot?

HARU. Yes!

HARU. I think she’s been helping Yusuke with an art project, too.

AKIRA. Really?

HARU. Yes, although when I ask for details, all she’ll say is “It’s classified”.

HARU. Isn’t it wonderful that she’s expanding her horizons?

Akira dropped his phone onto his chest with a sigh, staring up at his bedroom ceiling.

“Maybe I should go down there for the weekend,” he muttered.

“Feeling left out?” Morgana said sympathetically from his spot next to Akira on the bed, lifting his head. “You’ll be back soon enough for summer break!”

Akira shook his head, poking Morgana in the stomach, making him squeak in protest and roll over. “You’re getting fat. Has my mom been feeding you table scraps again? And no, I’m not feeling left out.”

“Then why the sigh?”

Akira narrowed his eyes. “Remember last week, when you dove under my bed just before that little earthquake we had?”

“You mean when my finely honed reflexes alerted me to danger moments before it struck?” Morgana replied smugly, raising himself onto his paws and arching his back in a graceful stretch.

Akira refrained from mentioning that the quake was a paltry 4.2, and the only casualty was a precariously stacked pile of novels on his desk. “Yeah. It’s kind of like that.”

Chapter Text

Yusuke leaned back on his stool and stared at the canvas with a critical eye. His painting class was spending this first semester on impressionism, and he had lingered at his easel long after his afternoon studio classes, practicing the techniques of the style. The rote movements of his hands as he experimented with impasto application had soon imparted inspiration, and he found himself now nearly done with the end-of-term assignment, not due for another six weeks. Tasked with showing his skill at a signature thematic aspect of impressionism, he had selected effets de soir, the peculiar lighting of twilight. The depth of the shadows was not yet satisfactory, and he was having some trouble conveying the exact balance of reflected light that he was searching for, but the emotion on the canvas was starting to emerge, and he nodded, satisfied for now. A dimly lit side street just past sunset, in monochrome hues of blue and purple, backlit by the descending sun; a warm glow coming from a cafe’s door, illuminating a cat sitting on the doorstep.

As he came back to himself, he frowned at the silence. Had he forgotten to loop the song he’d pulled up on his phone, an hour-long recording of a Dvorak symphony? He stood, rubbing his hands on a dishcloth to remove the worst of the oils, and walked over to the studio’s ancient stereo. He picked up his phone, plugged in via a paint-splattered aux cord, and tapped at the screen, only to discover it had run out of battery.

“I must have worked longer than I thought,” he murmured to himself, digging in his school bag for his charger. He plugged in the phone and collected his brushes before turning to the studio sink and giving his full attention to cleaning his tools. He treasured this set, made with natural sable. Well, not sable, really; that was a blanket term, and technically incorrect. This style used fur from a particular species of Siberian mink which had over the years evolved possibly for the express purpose of bestowing upon artists the finest of brushes. Neophytes were often taken in by advertisements insisting that one required dozens of different brush head shapes and styles if they were going to create anything of note; either that, or they tended to use one or two standard brushes of poor quality, becoming frustrated at the constant need for replacements. It was a poor craftsman who blamed his tools, and any true artist could, if necessary, create a masterpiece with a child’s art kit, but there was something to be said for investing in a small selection of quality brushes which could last for a decade or more if treated with care. Yusuke had explained all of this and more, patiently and at length, to Akira, when he had questioned the wisdom of spending nine thousand yen on a set of four brushes.

He was just beginning to rinse the second brush when his phone regained consciousness and began repeatedly pinging missed notifications. He raised his eyebrow, but didn’t stop to look at the screen until all of the brushes were methodically cleaned and set out to dry. It was likely nothing pressing; the Phantom Thieves chat was often as active as ever, with Ryuji and Futaba periodically getting into phases of sending silly images they called “memes”. Yusuke had taken The Selfish Gene by Dawkins out of the library, but mysteriously, neither of them had been particularly interested in his take on the theories of information transfer and cultural evolution contained within.

When he finally made his way back over to his phone to catch up, he found a grand total of thirty-two notifications. Thirty-one were texts from Futaba; the last was a slightly exasperated text from Akira, asking him to contact the girl. He skimmed her messages briefly before sighing and hitting the call button. She typed so much faster than he did that this was probably the only way to get a word in edgewise, with the mood she’d apparently gotten herself into.

She picked up on the second ring, immediately launching a barrage of words. “Okay, so I know I might have gone kinda overboard, but I seriously just wanted to be funny, and you’ve got a free pass to draw on my face if you want, so—“

“I’m not angry with you,” Yusuke interrupted, setting the phone down on the table and turning on the speakerphone.

“You’re… not?”

“No,” he replied patiently, sitting down and flipping open his sketchbook. He had long completed his quota of sketches for class, but any spare moment was an excuse to occupy his hands with a pencil. “I was fairly irritated last night, but after all was said and done, I began to see the humor in it.” It had helped that the ink turned out to be removable by rubbing alcohol, rather than an industrial-strength exfoliant or a month of wearing a mask.

“So you weren’t ignoring me when you didn’t text me back?” Her words were slower, no longer spilling out of her with nervous speed.

“Of course not. My phone ran out of battery.”

“Your phone ran— are you kidding me, Inari? Who just lets their phone run out of battery?” she exclaimed, sounding positively scandalized.

“Not all of us are as chained to their electronics as you.”

“You sound like an old man. And I can tell I’m on speaker. You know who uses speakerphone? Old men.”

He could picture her face; she was probably pushing her glasses up her nose, scowling in that way he’d come to learn meant embarrassment, not anger. He smiled to himself as his pencil moved idly.

“I think I’m going to take you up on that offer.”

“What offer?”

“To draw on your face.”

“Nu-uh! That was only when I thought I owed you something! Offer expired!”

He laughed, a sudden peal echoing in the empty room. A moment of startled silence, and then she joined him, tinny giggles emanating from his phone’s speaker.

“Did you get wrapped up in art again? You’re not still killing yourself over the comic, are you?”

“No. I’ve been in the studio painting for…” he looked up to check the time on the wall clock. “Seven hours now? Goodness.” He furrowed his brow as he tapped his pencil against his chin, before returning to his sketch. “Today in particular, I felt the need to throw myself into the vast seas of creation and lose myself in the riptide of inspiration.”

It slipped out without him meaning to, but he felt no irritation as she ignored the carefully crafted metaphor and asked, “Why today?”

“It’s June fifth.”

“What’s so special about June fifth? Is it national Picasso day or something?”

He snorted under his breath, a quick puff of air that the phone wouldn’t pick up. “Hardly. Last year, on June fifth… Madarame confessed his crimes to the public.”

There was silence, punctuated by shuffling. If Yusuke had to guess, he would say that she were tucking her legs up under her, hunched over in her signature way that would one day pay for a chiropractor’s second house. “Oh. Well now I just feel like a big old jerk for pestering you.” A beat. “I can hang up, if you want.”

Yusuke shook his head.

“… You still there?”

“—Ah. Sorry. I shook my head. You don’t have to go. I don’t mind,” he clarified, finding with mild surprise that he didn’t.

An exasperated sigh; the creaking of a computer chair.

“You wanna… I dunno, talk about it?”

“There isn’t much to talk about,” he answered after a moment, picking up his eraser to discipline an errant line. “I haven’t spoken to him in nearly a year; the sting is no longer as fresh. Nevertheless, I suppose I closeted myself in the studio today in an attempt to channel my self-pity into something productive.”

“Did it work?”

“It’s hard to say,” he admitted, lifting his gaze from his sketchbook to the canvas sitting five feet away. “Capturing pure beauty, no matter how lofty the goal, is somehow easier than capturing the tangle of emotions that truly define self-realization. I’ve captured… sanctuary, perhaps.” A familiar back street; a cafe warm in ways that had nothing to do with temperature.

“Oh. That’s good.”

“Yes.” They were both silent; Yusuke tightened his lips and wrinkled his brow unconsciously as he put a similar expression on the figure on the page. “Oh. I solved my problem, in case you were wondering.”

“Which one? You have so, so ma— sorry. Not the time.”

Two apologies, in five minutes? What a day. “The money. Madarame’s money, that is. I accepted it, and donated it in turn to a local arts foundation. I requested it be earmarked for education. It seemed… appropriate.”

A low whistle. “Whoa. That’s pretty smart. Didja tell him what you did?”

“No. I…” Yusuke hesitated. This was treading dangerously close to territory he was loath to discuss aloud. He’d revealed much of it to Akira, over time, in bits and pieces. Akira was that rare breed of person, though, who could take in another’s pain and apply words like a balm. Futaba, on the other hand, handled words like a race car driver handled a vehicle: at best too quickly, with little regard for who she outpaced; at worst, prone to spontaneously exploding. Also, Yusuke didn’t really understand how cars worked.

On the other hand, if anyone was likely to understand the strange, contradictory feelings within him, it was probably her. Both of them used like tools by those who should have known better; both of them somehow off-kilter from the world; both of them searching for ways to recover some measure of faith in others. That being said, she had climbed out of a darker place than he could even imagine, and yet still managed a determination stronger than any he had expected. He didn’t see himself ever admitting to her how admirable she could be (especially if she pulled any more pranks like yesterday’s), but honesty about his personal turmoil… yes, he could manage that.

“If making a voluntary reparation payment towards me soothes something within him, I would feel petty to deny him that,” Yusuke said slowly. “I wish I had it in me to forgive him. I do not. I wish I had it in me to despise him. I do not. Overtly scorning his gesture, whether it was honest or manipulative, would give me only the most hollow of satisfactions. Therefore, why not do my utmost to bring good into the world? You were right, when you said it didn’t have to be on his terms.”

“I said that?”

“You did.”

“When?”

“In early May,” Yusuke said patiently. “When Akira visited last. I’ve been thinking about it a lot.”

“You have? I— um.” Her voice took on a certain squeaky quality that he couldn’t quite define. Probably poor reception. “Well, uh. You done good, kid. Thinking about. What I say and stuff. For a whole month. Cool. Cool cool cool. And, I’m glad. I mean, that you’re doing OK with it.” A pause; an embarrassed clearing of her throat. “Oh, so totally off topic, but before I forget, Akira says he’s gonna try and come down next weekend? His school doesn’t do Saturday classes, the lucky little shit, so we were thinking…”

They spent a further few minutes discussing plans for the weekend; it seemed that Haru had offered the use of her country club membership, should the weather be nice enough to spend a day at the pool. Yusuke marveled, as the conversation took on a lighter tone, at the truth of an aphorism he’d often heard but rarely had a chance to put into practice: a burden shared is a burden halved.

It wasn’t until after Futaba said goodnight and hung up that Yusuke remembered he’d wanted to ask her if she thought Sojiro would appreciate a gift of a couple of sketches he’d done of Leblanc last week, as he’d nursed a coffee at the counter. He rifled through the past few dozen drawings, looking for the sketches on his mind.

His eyes narrowed.

He flipped through the pages more slowly.

He returned to the most recent page, doodled from memory as he talked on the phone. It was a sketch of Futaba, sitting as he’d imagined her during their conversation, hunched over at her desk. Last year, after an obsessive crustacean period, he’d done so many observational drawings that he retained to this day a knack for drawing a shockingly realistic sea creature without so much as a glance at a reference photo. It was a similar feeling that he had now, looking at how sure his lines were as they delineated the tension in Futaba’s shoulders and the way her hands rested on her keyboard.

One by one, he paged backward through the sketchbook. His professors were often at a loss to offer any meaningful critique of his work, and tended to set him more rigorously specific goals than they did his classmates. When he’d mentioned offhand to his life drawing teacher that he was having trouble capturing a particular mood, she’d pounced on his comment, suggesting he devote the next weeks to pushing his comfort zone by focusing not on shape and form, but expressions.

There were the usual sketches done as he meandered around Shibuya after school: a businessman, captured in quick gestures as he raced with desperation towards the JR platform. A woman at a coffee shop, eyes widened and lips parted as she raced through a novel. A stray cat, warily staring from behind a store’s signboard, back arched.

Those sketches, however, made up barely a third of his oeuvre. When it came to capturing minute details which required long periods of observation, he preferred to use his friends as models; all of them were fairly accustomed to his habits, and as long as he made no discomfiting requests, seemed to treat his propensity for staring at them and sketching with the same benevolent indifference one would treat the background music in a convenience store. As a result, his sketchbook was filled with familiar faces. The light in Haru’s eyes as she coaxed a string bean tendril up a trellis; Makoto with her chin resting on one hand, finger tapping and eyes narrowed as she edited an essay with laser-like focus. Sojiro with his eyebrow raised skeptically as he glanced at the television, hands busy drying a mug. Ann and Ryuji were both startlingly easy to capture, their emotions writ large in expressive mouths and sprawling gestures. Futaba, a wrinkle in her forehead, staring at her phone. Futaba, shoving her glasses up her nose compulsively, looking away. Futaba, hands laced behind her back and shoulders tense as she waited on the subway platform. She was everywhere in his sketchbook, appalling posture and busy hands intruding upon unrelated subjects like an invasive species of weed.

Something flitted around the edges of his mind like a small silver fish in a pond, sun reflecting off of a bright spray of scales before it darted back into the depths. It was difficult and slippery, squirming out of his hands as he made a grasp at it.

He turned back to the most recent page, gazing at the image in front of him with a furrowed brow.

He felt a momentary swooping hollowness in his stomach.

“Ah,” he announced to the empty studio at his sudden epiphany, snapping the sketchbook shut. “That’s it. I missed dinner hour in the cafeteria. How foolish of me.”

Shaking his head, he resigned himself to a midnight dinner of his last packet of instant noodles as he placed his sketchbook carefully into his bag.

Days until Summer Comiket: 67

Chapter Text

Makoto sighed as she took a seat next to Akira, smoothing her swimsuit’s skirt underneath her.

“Worried about them skipping school?” he asked, sliding a lemonade over to her across the glass tabletop. It had a pink umbrella in it, equal parts cute and kitschy. The cocktail sword speared through three chunks of pineapple and laid delicately across the rim of the glass was definitely overdoing it, but she supposed that was just what country clubs were like.

“What? Oh, no,” Makoto answered. “You don’t think I’d be that uptight under the circumstances, do you? It’s only one Saturday, after all, and with you only down for the weekend, I don’t think I could have stopped them if I wanted to.”

Akira eyed her furrowed brow. “So… what’s up?”

“It’s hard to tell,” Makoto admitted, ripping open a straw and slotting it into the drink between the pineapple and the umbrella. “Futaba seemed almost as nervous as last year, which doesn’t make any sense to me. First she wouldn’t come out of the changing stall, then she started complaining about her stats not increasing… it’s the same swimsuit she wore last year, and there are fewer people around, so I don’t understand the problem.” It was warm enough for June, but the pool area was still nearly deserted. A few children splashed around in the shallow end of the pool, their mothers sunning themselves in lawn chairs; a couple of college-age dual-duty lifeguards and waiters were watching a television behind the bar. Haru was floating on a pool float, and Ryuji had done a cannonball into the deep end the moment his eyes had fallen on the crystal clear water. Yusuke was crouched over looking at something through the fence, sketchbook out. Makoto’s eyes fell on Futaba and Ann; the latter girl was rubbing sunscreen into Futaba’s back and shoulders. Ann said something that made Futaba stick her tongue out, then laugh. “Oh, well. It might just have been my imagination.”

“Trust your gut,” Akira said succinctly, the effect ruined somewhat by the frothy smoothie he was holding. “That’s what you told me a thief should do, right?” he asked, nudging Morgana with his foot.

“Gut, schmut,” the cat said, opening one eye and lazily shutting it again before stretching, content in his pool of sunlight. “I’m on vacation!”

————

“That should do it!” Ann said, patting her hands on Futaba’s shoulders one last time to get rid of the last smears of sunscreen. “Your skin is so pale! Make sure you reapply, ‘kay?”

“Uh-huh,” Futaba replied, scooting forward to dangle her legs in the cold pool water. Ann crouched down beside her, unfolding her legs into the water and squeaking at the temperature.

“You should have just told me what the problem was!” the blonde said with a friendly eye roll. “I totally woulda gone shopping with you for a new suit.”

Futaba shuddered. “Thanks, but no thanks. I’m gonna stick with ordering clothes online. Besides, no way I could pull off… that,” she said, with a sideways glance at Ann’s chest, currently clad in a red halter balconette top that was just straight-up unfair. “Don’t have the skill tree unlocked for that one.”

“There’s a lot of tops with subtle padding. Heck, some of them you can even insert your own chicken cutlets—“

“Oh, are we having grilled chicken for dinner? A summer barbecue sounds lovely.”

Futaba and Ann both turned around, matching frowns on their faces, as Yusuke settled on a reclining chair behind them. “Shoo. We’re having girl talk!” Ann said, flapping her hand at him dismissively.

“Please, continue. I have no interest in eavesdropping,” Yusuke assured them, flipping his sketchbook to a new page.

Ann rolled her eyes, then turned back to Futaba as he began diligently sketching. “Anyway, that aside, pool games! We gotta play some pool games. I’ve been thinking…” She poked Futaba in the side with a grin. “Chicken! You ever played chicken? No? Oh, it’s super fun. You can ride on Ryuji’s shoulders, and I can… actually, Yusuke’d be great for this! How about it? You think you can hold me, noodle boy?”

“You know I can’t swim!” Futaba protested, at the same time as Yusuke narrowed his eyes and said stonily, “I will have no part of any roughhousing.”

Ann folded her arms and huffed. “C’mon, Futaba! You have to seize your opportunities where you find them! Really use your womanly wiles!”

“On what? Besides, are you kidding me? I wouldn’t know a womanly wile if it bit me in the—”

Ann ignored her protest, calling across the pool to Ryuji, who had joined the children in the pool playing with a ball. “Hey, Ryuji!” she called, cupping her hands around her mouth.

“What?” he yelled back over his shoulder.

“Doesn’t Futaba look super cute in her swimsuit?”

He shot a cheery thumbs up at them before rejoining the game.

“See?” Ann said, nudging Futaba with her elbow as the other girl covered her face with her hands and groaned. “Was that so hard?” Man, she was killing it today. She still didn’t remotely see what Futaba saw in him, but she sure was glad to help.

“Ugh. That’s like, super easy mode. Ryuji’d go gaga for any girl in a swimsuit. Not that I’m trying to pick up guys or anything,” she added hastily.

“Nuh-uh!” Ann protested.
“No, he would,” Yusuke added helpfully. Ann turned around and made a shooing motion, to which he replied, “You were the one who kept including me in your conversation.”

“Fine, then. What do you think of—“

“Mggghhh!”

“—of Futaba’s—“

“Ngghghhhh!!”

“—swimsuit? What are you doing?” Ann said, sounding exasperated as she turned back to Futaba, who was either having a seizure or trying to communicate a secret message to Ann entirely through strangled whines and bizarre hand motions.

Yusuke looked from one to the other of them cautiously. He could be abrasive and obtuse sometimes, but between Ann’s cheshire cat grin and Futaba’s anguished groans, a rare flash of instinct was telling him he had been unceremoniously shoved into a minefield.

Well, there couldn’t be any harm in staying as neutral as possible. “I… nothing in particular,” he volunteered, with a look in his eyes like that of a man on the Titanic scrambling for a lifeboat.

Ann threw up her hands and scoffed; Futaba shot an omni-directional glare at everyone involved before standing up and stomping away. Yusuke shook his head and turned his attention back to his sketchbook, going back to his study of light reflecting on the water. Oh, well. Back to his peaceful afternoon.

————

“—I asked Haru, and she said that there aren’t any explicit rules banning water pistols. And then she smiled at me.”

“That’s rough,” Akira said with patient sympathy, pushing his sunglasses up his nose and looking out over the pool. Ann and Haru were tossing a beach ball around in the water, laughing at their own awful aim. Makoto was swimming laps. He saw a small flash of orange from behind one of the reclining lounge chairs, but made an executive decision not to mention it.

“It’s a peculiar expression,” Yusuke continued. “She has smiles that are like running into a brick wall.”

“I know the ones you mean,” Akira said, opening the laminated drinks menu as a waiter approached with a plate of delicately organized pineapple shrimp skewers. Yusuke took three, and began to look somewhat mollified as he carefully ate them one by one. (“Ahem”, came a small throat-clearing noise from under Akira’s chair; Yusuke politely handed a shrimp down to Morgana.)

“I would confront her, but I can’t seem to get close enough to get a word in edgewise. So for now I’m forced to merely stay as far away as possible.”

“You really don’t have any idea why she’s stalking you with a super soaker?” Akira asked, watching from the corner of his eye as Futaba approached, slinking behind an awning like a lion tracking a wounded giraffe.

“I can only assume I said something to give offense,” Yusuke grumbled, eyes firmly on the appetizer. “She’s unusually prickly today.”

“You two are good at riling each other up,” Akira commented with a raise of his eyebrow.

“I won’t say you’re wrong, but I haven’t been particularly trying to, not today.”

“You sure? No riling going on? Haven’t committed a single rile?” Akira offered.

“Not on purpose. But as you all are so fond of telling me, that often doesn’t mean much.”

Akira chuckled. “You make it sound as though it sometimes is on purpose.”

Yusuke shrugged and raised his hands to frame the pool, narrowing his eyes as he scanned the view. “I wouldn’t say you’re wrong. But our feuds hold little malice, and her quick thinking makes her an excellent verbal sparring partner.” He then added, with tactless fairness, “Although, all things considered, she’s the instigator more often than not.”

“Uh-huh,” Akira said, readying the menu.

“In any case, this too shall pass. I’m inclined to stay out of her way and enjoy the appetizers, for now. The tingling sensation that pineapple creates in one’s mouth is truly—“

Akira whipped the menu up in front of his face just in time. The sudden blast of water hit Yusuke squarely in the side of the face, but the menu protected Akira from the worst of the backsplash. Yusuke yelped in an undignified way; Futaba thumbed her nose at him and ran off.

Akira lowered the menu and looked at Yusuke. The other boy was gritting his teeth; water dripped off his chin as his soaked hair dribbled rivulets over his face.

“Akira.”

“Yes?”

“Where are the water guns?”

“Ryuji found a pile of them in the pool shed.”

Yusuke unfolded himself from the chair with angry dignity, and stalked off.

————

“Target acquired. Preparing to snipe.”

“Futaba…” Ann sighed. “Aren’t you being a little tough on him? You know he doesn’t know his ass from his elbow when it comes to normal conversations.”

“Ann, are you going to give me backup or not?”

“Fine, fine,” Ann said, rolling her eyes as she readied her squirt gun. The two girls were crouched behind a rack of pool noodles. Yusuke was facing away from them, sitting sideways on a lounge chair, looking at the pool, his hoodie in a pile on the chair next to him. Futaba pumped the plunger on her super soaker as she peered through the foam toys.

“Besides, it’s not like I care what he thinks. Maybe I just wanted an excuse to play with squirt guns! How about that, huh?”

“Fine, fine. Whatever you say. Ready?”

“Yep. Three, two, one…”

Several things happened very quickly. Futaba leapt around the side of the rack with a battle cry; Akira, across the pool at a table, put his arm up; Yusuke leapt up and turned around, pulling his own hidden super soaker out from under his sweatshirt. Months of training in the cognitive world bore out, as he managed a hit before she even pulled the trigger. He got her square in the shoulder, and she screamed; Ann had only a moment in which to think that her reaction was out of proportion before Futaba shrieked “My phone!”

Yusuke pulled the trigger again, and Futaba dropped her own gun, spinning around so the stream of water hit her in the back. After a moment of fumbling, she pulled her cell phone out of her swimsuit top and threw it to Ann, shouting “Protect it with your life!” before taking off at a run down the pool deck.

Ann fumbled the catch, but managed to save the phone with her foot, kicking it sideways and bouncing it off of the foam pool toys a few inches off the ground. “Please don’t be cracked, please don’t be cracked…” she chanted, her life flashing briefly before her eyes as she nervously crouched down to pick it up. Futaba would have it under warranty, right? She’d have it backed up, right? Maybe if Ann offered to buy her the new model coming out next month, she’d be able to avoid being blocked from the entire internet in revenge—

“Oh, thank God,” she sighed, as she picked up the phone and flipped it over to see a perfectly flawless screen. Trust Futaba to have a shock-proof case. She hit the home button to make sure the thing would still turn on.

It did, and she stared at the screen, eyes wide.

She looked up, watching Futaba run shrieking down the pool deck, still being relentlessly pursued.

She looked back down at Futaba’s lock screen. She had been expecting it to be some anime character, or maybe one of those cool green and black hacker backgrounds. Instead, it was the photo Akira had sent her a couple of weeks ago, a picture of a sleeping Yusuke with marker all over his face. It was funny, sure, but not lock-screen funny. Unless…

Ann jumped to her feet, rapidly scanning the pool for her target. “Ryuji!” she screeched, upon spotting his blond head emerging from the water, breaking out into a run over to him. “Ryuji, drop what you’re doing right now!”

————

“Traitor.”

Akira shrugged, and pushed his drink over for Futaba to sample. It was a coffee-based smoothie that was an offense to the very concept of coffee. He’d been amusing himself so far by ordering one of everything off the menu in succession. (Haru had instructed them all to take full advantage of the Okumura open tab.) It had whipped cream and chocolate shavings on top. Futaba took it, and aggressively slurped through the straw.

“Not as good as Sojiro’s,” she complained.

“Sojiro would burn the place down before serving something like that.”

“Point.” She kept drinking anyway, staring daggers across the pool. After his previous narrow miss, Akira had designated his table a safe zone and stripped her of her weaponry when she’d come to join him; in the meantime, Ryuji had jumped in the fray, and he and Yusuke were keeping each other occupied.

Akira was just starting to consider joining the fun, since Futaba didn’t seem particularly forthcoming about the reason for her dark mood, when she took a break from muttering to herself under her breath to ask “Akira, do I look cute in this?”

“What?”

“Just answer the question!”

“Sure. It suits you.” Akira pushed his sunglasses up his face. “What’s up?”

“Nothing!”

Akira frowned, gazing into the middle distance as he let the events of the day float in the background of his mind. (In the far distance, across the pool, Makoto was caught by a mis-aimed snipe attempt by Ryuji. Yusuke immediately turned a hundred and eighty degrees and attempted to pretend he wasn’t involved, only for Makoto to shoot a hand out and snatch his sweatshirt before he could make his escape.)

“Whatever Yusuke said…”

“He didn’t say anything!” Futaba snapped.

“Did he say you weren’t cute?”

“No!”

“Did he say you were, but in a weird way?”

“No!”

“…Did you want him to?”

“No!”

Akira raised an eyebrow as Futaba made a frustrated noise and drew her legs up onto the chair.

“This is so dumb!” she grumbled, resting her chin on her knees. “I should be way better than this! Right, Akira? Like, when did I trip and spill all my chill?”

“Are you sure you had any to begin with?” Akira said, reaching over to tousle her hair.

“Shut up, Sassmaster 3000,” she shot back, swatting his hand away. Together they watched Ryuji and Yusuke both squirt Makoto with water and run off like bats out of hell. Futaba snorted, and held out her hand. Akira handed her super soaker back.

“Thanks. Gonna go see if I can get Makoto on my side. Brains over brawn, or whatever.”

“Sure. I’ll be over in a minute.” A beat. “Want me to tell Yusuke he has to tell you you’re cute?”

Futaba turned around and squirted him in the face.

————

“Mayday! Mayday!” Futaba shrieked, shooting wildly behind her. Makoto had abandoned all pretense of attempting to break up the fight that now involved the whole erstwhile Phantom Thieves team (Morgana was sitting on a table, calling out strategic warnings solely to Yusuke and Akira, who had been the only ones to feed him shrimp); she was now fully committed to scoring as many headshots as possible, and Futaba was realizing that battle experience in FPS games in no way translated into real life.

Luckily for her, Ann careened in from the side, wildly dual-wielding squirt guns and distracting Makoto long enough for Futaba to seize her chance. Still looking over her shoulder, she jumped behind an overturned patio table to safety, only to trip over something and go sprawling on the concrete with a yelp.

A hand enclosed her upper arm, helping her up to a sitting position. “Are you all right?”

“Yeah… ugh.” Futaba did a quick inventory of her status; the palms of her hands were skinned, and her chin was stinging where it had hit the ground, but everything else felt like it was in one piece. She squinted upwards at the dark head hovering over her. “You’re blurry.”

“That’s not my fault,” Yusuke said as he picked her glasses up off the ground and handed them to her. She snatched them from him and shoved them back on her face. He caught one of her hands as she went to put them back down, frowning slightly. “You’re bleeding.”

“I’m? Nope, that’s— didn’t. I d-didn’t need that blood anyway,” she babbled, trying to pull away. He ignored her half-hearted attempts, but when she winced, he paused in his attempt to brush the flecks of gravel off of the abrasion.

“Sorry. Does that hurt?”

“No, I just sound like an idiot.”

Yusuke opened his mouth, then closed it.

“You were going to agree with me, weren’t you.” Futaba sighed, shoulders slumped. “It’s okay. Trust me, I heard it too.”

“I don’t think it would be wise to say anything while you can still reach your water gun,” Yusuke said seriously, looking down at her hands again. “The lifeguards should have bandaids…”

“Ugh… it’s fine,” said Futaba with a sigh. “All of it’s fine. You didn’t even do anything, I’m just a colossal moron.” What had she expected, anyway? Thinking of Yusuke acting like a normal teenage boy (frame of reference: Ryuji) gave her the heebie-jeebies. It wasn’t like she’d put the suit on thinking of getting his or anyone else’s attention in the first place; she thought it was a good color, it was basically still brand new, and it was nice to wear something her friends had picked out for her, and that was all the thought she’d put into it. Sure, she’d been a little self-conscious about being flat as a board, but that was only because she was comparing herself to Ann. Yeah, it was all Ann’s fault!… was a comforting thought, but that wasn’t right, either. She’d just been being her silly, fun self. And Yusuke was just as likely to wax poetic about the aesthetics of an unexpected mushroom growth on a tree stump as he was about a person, and with the same tone, too. Nope, this was just her accidentally stumbling into a level 70 boss’s aggro field with a level 10 set of equipment.

“Hm…” Yusuke muttered.

He put two fingers under her chin, and lifted her face up.

“Fzht?” Futaba said.

“You skinned your chin as well,” he commented, brow furrowed, as he tilted her head this way and that. “You really should put ointment on it, at least. Scars may add interest in character design, but in this case, I can’t imagine one would improve upon such delicate features.”

It was at that exact moment that Ryuji burst onto the scene, aiming his super soaker over the edge of the table with a triumphant yell of “Got you now, suckers oh shit! Oh shit my bad! Sorry—“

He vanished, taking his gun with him, the sound of his wet feet slapping on the concrete pool deck receding at full speed.

“What on Earth—“ Yusuke said, letting go of Futaba’s chin and dropping her hand, thereby ending the longest minute and forty-seven seconds of her life. He looked at Ryuji’s receding form, then glanced at her sideways, a smile on his lips.

“I still think you should get that treated, but…”

“…B-but let’s get him,” Futaba finished with a grin.

At least if they were running around, she wouldn’t have to answer any uncomfortable questions about her face being so red.

————

Akira sat at the edge of the pool, a towel around his wet hair, legs dangling in the water. Around the time Haru had gotten Makoto in the face with a full bucket of water, causing the other girl to stumble and knock Yusuke into the pool, the head lifeguard had come out to ask his very valued guests if they would kindly consider ceasing their roughhousing, to ensure a peaceful and safe environment for all of their patrons. All of them had reluctantly surrendered their water guns and were recuperating in various states of exhaustion around the pool deck.

“Yo,” came a voice from next to him; Akira shaded his eyes and looked up to see Ryuji’s face leaning over him, blond hair backlit by the sun like a halo. He patted the ground next to him, and Ryuji obligingly folded himself up, dunking his legs into the water with a splash. “Havin’ fun?”

Akira nodded with a slight smile. “Glad we didn’t get kicked out.”

“Eh, I think Haru basically owns this place,” Ryuji said with a grin. He looked away, fidgeted with the drawstring of his trunks, then ran a hand through his hair.

Akira knew him well enough to know what his fidgeting meant. Sometimes it made him anxious, made him want to grab Ryuji’s hands and hold them still. Sometimes it made him want to hold his hands for another reason entirely. “Something on your mind?”

Ryuji glanced at him, then away, then back, then down at his lap, rubbing the back of his neck with one hand. “Jeez, man,” he said with a half-smile, half-grimace. Akira filed away in the back of his mind a note to remind Ryuji to reapply sunscreen; the back of his neck and the tips of his ears were already pinking up. “How d’ya always know?”

“Third eye,” Akira said, wiggling his fingers. “What’s up?”

“I, uh. Well…” Ryuji still wasn’t meeting his eyes, which was making Akira a little concerned. It wasn’t like Ryuji not to blurt out the first thing on his mind; it was one of the things Akira, who lived behind a ten-foot thick wall of introversion and calculation, admired about him.

Akira leaned back on his hands, patiently waiting. Ryuji mimicked his pose, kicking at the water a bit with his legs. If he’d had any doubts, being in such close proximity with Akira now thoroughly squashed him. Ryuji was usually aware of very little, but he sure was aware of a lot right now. He was aware that they were sitting exactly thirteen inches apart; he was aware of the bitten cuticles on Akira’s nails; he was incredibly uncomfortably aware of how soft the other boy’s hair looked, and how much he wanted to touch it. He was normally all about the casual touches— a supportive hand on the shoulder, a clap on the back after a victory, a casual arm slung around the shoulder. But for some reason even the notion of touching Akira right now was setting his face aflame, and oh shit, now he was talking, into the bargain.

“What?” he said, voice strangled.

“I was saying, is it something serious?” Akira looked worried, head cocked in the way he had of inviting confidence. “Is your mom OK?”

“What? No, dude, it’s nothing like that. Nothin’ serious. Just…” Gah, this was going nowhere. He’d practiced in the mirror last night like some kinda middle school girl, he had his whole game plan set, and then right before their water gun fight Ann had pulled him out of the pool to babble incoherently about how she had been totally wrong, and forget any conversation they’d had about Futaba’s scheming, and forget this conversation too, while he was at it. And then she’d run off, leaving him standing there alone to realign his whole worldview. Again.

Did she mean Akira didn’t have a thing for him, after all? Well that’s just great, Ann, thanks for the help! He’d gone to Akira anyway, because that’s what he did when things were tough, that’s what he always did, and now here Akira was, pushing up his sunglasses to look at Ryuji with genuine concern, and if he didn’t say something in the next five seconds he might as well just drown himself now—

“I’m gonna go to college,” he blurted out.

“Oh. Really?” Akira replied, looking nonplussed.

“Y-yeah,” Ryuji said. Well, it was a truth. And it was better than his other option, which was to tell Akira that he’d caught Futaba and Yusuke getting way too cozy behind a table. Bros don’t snitch on bros.

“I thought you hated studying.”

“I did. I do. But…” Ryuji rubbed the back of his neck, looking across the pool. “Makoto and I talked through some stuff, and… I might wanna try to get into a physical therapy program.”

“Your leg?” Akira asked.

“Kinda,” Ryuji said with a shrug. “I mean, the PT guys really helped me through that whole thing. Dunno what I woulda done if they didn’t make me get my ass moving and outta the hospital bed. But more than that, Kamoshida…” He snorted, disgust on his face. “Kids shouldn’t oughta feel that way ‘bout sports they should love. Y’know? So I figured, hell, I been there. I know the pressure. Maybe, if I can work with kids with those kinda injuries… you get me?”

“I get you.” Ryuji was sure he did, even though even to his own ears he sounded like a vague moron. Putting emotions into words wasn’t his strong suit, but him and Akira were so often on the same wavelength that even his dumb babbling got the point across. Now if only he could just beam ‘Hey, I think about you basically every minute of the day and I wanna put my face on your face,’ he’d be sorted. Once he’d sat down and thought about it, his feelings for Akira had hit him all at once like a ton of bricks, crushing the breath out of his lungs. He wasn’t quite sure he’d gotten it back yet.

“Might take a year off first, dunno. Depends on how studying goes, and how good Makoto is at teaching morons like me. Plus if I get a job for a bit, Mom won’t have to worry so much about tuition. …I dunno. Sounds kinda dumb, now that I say it out loud.” Ryuji rubbed a hand through his hair, and looked back at Akira for his reaction.

A slow smile was breaking across the other boy’s face; he apparently hadn’t taken his eyes off Ryuji the whole time. “Nah. You can do it. Something you feel that strongly about… yeah, definitely. Besides, I’ll be right there with you.”

Ryuji stared at the smile on Akira’s face. Whatever cool response he’d had ready closed up in his throat in reaction to the sheer amount of honest, unconditional support being beamed his way. Faced with the sudden urge to lean forward and kiss Akira, Ryuji instead did the only thing he felt capable of doing in that moment.

He shot his arm out, and shoved him into the pool.

Days until Summer Comiket: 55

Chapter Text

It had taken three days of badgering, up to and including cornering Futaba in the girl’s bathroom at school and threatening to draft her as an extra model for her magazine gig that weekend, for Ann to wrangle the truth out of her. After the denials, protests, and grudging, red-faced admittance, however, Ann was informed she was now a party member, and if she was going to be all nosy about it she was going to have to report for duty after school that day and start pulling her weight.

”A list?”

“A strategy guide,” Futaba corrected, handing Ann her notebook across the cafe table. “Hours of research went into this baby. Never was super into the genre before, but six gigs of shoujo manga can’t be wrong, right?”

“Uh… sure,” Ann said, eyebrows raised, as she flipped open the notebook. Each scenario was ranked according to probability of occurrence, effectiveness, and relative level of guts necessary. “I thought you were into those dating sims, though.”

“I mean, everyone’s played a couple, right?” Futaba said, digging a spoon into their shared shaved ice tower. They’d gone all-out, selecting the summer special, a strawberry monstrosity which featured two flavors of ice cream and a whole slice of cheesecake on top. “But Ryuji raided my collection and won’t give ‘em back. Anyway, they’re mostly historical fantasy. What am I supposed to learn from seducing the Shinsengumi?”

“Point,” Ann agreed. “This is actually super thorough… wait, hold on, why does ‘take care of him through a summer cold’ have a five-star probability? You haven’t been messing with bioterrorism, right…?”

“Of course not,” Futaba said with a wave of her hand. Then she paused. “Although… no. Well… do you know any toddlers?”

“Futaba, I really wanna help you with this, but you gotta stop giving me the heebie-jeebies.”

“It was just a joke!” the younger girl said with a roll of her eyes. “Jeez. With his nutrition, he’s bound to come down with something. And it’s the rainy season, see?” She gestured out of the cafe window at the downpour. “That’s why I linked it back to ‘sharing an umbrella’. It’s a branching fork there. If I don’t share, he’s way more likely to come down with something!”

“Are you trying to date him, or kill him?” Ann said, wrinkling her nose. She looked up from the notebook to take another spoonful of ice cream, only to see Futaba had gone red and was shifting in her seat. Ann grinned, poking Futaba’s nose with her spoon. “Oh my God, you are so cute about this!”

“Shut up!” Futaba whined, covering her face with her hands. “What am I supposed to do when you just say it straight out like that?”

“Okay, okay!” Ann said, laughing, as she looked back down at the notebook. “‘Festival Fireworks Confession’… sure, as long as it doesn’t rain this year. ‘Stuck in an elevator together’… wouldn’t that be claustrophobic?”

“I like small spaces. They’re cozy.”

Ann pored over the rest of the list, including such gems as ‘Gorgeous makeover’ (two-star effectiveness), and ‘Research school legends? Confession spot? CURSED spot???’

“Mmm… there’s definitely a few ideas that seem okay, but…” Ann chewed on her lip. When she’d made that first terrifying confession to Shiho, it had been like running down a hill— easy and natural, and equal parts wild and thrilling. Futaba, on the other hand, seemed to be trying to talk herself into climbing Mt. Fuji. “You know, you could just tell him how you feel. Do you really need to set up all these complicated situations?”

“Yep,” Futaba said firmly, with a nod of her head. “Get the mood right, and he’ll be so swept along he won’t even realize what’s happening until it’s too late.”

“Wait. Are you trying to trick him into dating you or something?”

“Not exactly! Just…” She shrugged, poking at the dessert. “I mean, you know him. You know me. He’d probably just laugh, or wouldn’t get it, and I’d definitely mess it up if I went for the straightforward approach. I wasn’t even really sure I was gonna do anything, but you kinda forced my hand, so…”

“Hmm…” Ann said, resting her chin in her hands and reflecting for a moment on how far she should push. The younger girl acted so winsomely cheeky around her friends that it was easy to forget the still-shaky foundations of her self-esteem. “How about we make a deal?”

“…I’m listening.”

“You give doing it my way one chance!” Ann said, holding up a single finger. “You just call him up like usual and see if he wants to go on a date somewhere. The aquarium, the amusement park, wherever! If that’s a no-go, I’ll help you with whatever crazy scheme you want.”

Futaba made a face and laid her hands down on the table. “Counter-offer. I text him, I don’t call it a date, and I keep you on speakerphone in my pocket the whole time in case I need help.”

“Counter-counter-offer. No speaker-phone, texting is fine, and you don’t have to call it a date but you do at least have to try and hold his hand.”

Futaba rubbed her chin with her hand, then nodded firmly. “Okay! You’ve got yourself a deal. Wherever we go is bound to be crowded, so I can sneak that last one in totally n-normally. Right?”

“Right!” Ann said cheerily, beginning to demolish the cheesecake. “That’s the spirit. So, where to after this?”

Futaba wrinkled her nose. “After? What, you want another dessert? I’m getting pretty full…”

“No, silly. We need to go shopping! You don’t have anything close to a date outfit, right? …Futaba, one day your face is going to stick like that, you know.”

——

FUTABA. Wanna go somewhere Sunday?

After hovering over the send button for a full minute, Futaba abruptly jammed her finger down onto the screen. She flung the phone to the other end of her bed like it had scalded her, following it with two of her pillows, then buried her head under the comforter, trying her best not to pass out from hyperventilation.

When her text alert chimed, muffled from underneath a foot of stuffing, she peeked one eye out cautiously. She snaked an arm out slowly, then snatched up the phone, as if she were trying to ambush it.

YUSUKE. Why?

“Oh, for Pete’s sake—“ she complained, sitting up fully and drawing her knees to her chest as she typed her reply.

FUTABA. Because I wanna go somewhere!

YUSUKE. Outside?

FUTABA. Yes outside!

YUSUKE. You do?

YUSUKE. Why?

Futaba covered her face with her hands and groaned. Okay, okay. What had Ann said? If she was going to insist on not just straight-up asking him to hang out for the fun of it (Courage still not high enough for that), whatever excuse she came up with had to be simple and plausible.

FUTABA. Sojiro is cleaning for the food inspector that day, and if I hang around he’s gonna make me help!

YUSUKE. That doesn’t sound so bad.

YUSUKE. He’ll probably have a lot of barely-expired food to get rid of.

YUSUKE. I’m coming over to help.

Shoot. How could she have forgotten about his one weakness, questionably edible free food?

FUTABA. NG

FUTABA. It’s just scrubbing corners and grimy pots and pans.

FUTABA. My fingers will get pruny! I hate when they do that!

YUSUKE. It seems underhanded to abandon him in his time of need.

FUTABA. UGH

YUSUKE. Don’t be childish.

YUSUKE. I’ll come help and we’ll be done in half the time.

YUSUKE. And then eat some curry, yes?

FUTABA. Never mind

YUSUKE.. I heard from Ryuji that his curry bread is quite good.

YUSUKE. Or perhaps takeout, so as to not dirty the kitchen?

YUSUKE. I am not picky.

FUTABA. Oh my God I said never mind!!

FUTABA. I lied!

YUSUKE. ?

FUTABA. I wanna go see the Gundam at Odaiba before it gets taken down

FUTABA. But there’s gonna be too many people there and I don’t know the way and I don’t wanna go alone!

FUTABA. Happy, you vulture!?

YUSUKE. Why didn’t you just say so in the first place?

FUTABA. Because it’s embarrassing!!

FUTABA. 凸(>皿<)凸

YUSUKE. How rude.

She stared at her phone, heart in her throat, as she watched the three dots on the screen appear, then disappear, then appear again. “What the hell is he typing…?” she mumbled, thumbs hovering over the keyboard anxiously.

YUSUKE. Nevertheless, I will accompany you.

YUSUKE. I’ve heard wonderful things about the lighting on the bridge at night.

YUSUKE. And it sounds like a good opportunity to study merchandising. I have some sticker designs to run by you, in any case.

Futaba took a deep breath and dropped her phone onto the bed, punching the air with her hands in silent victory. Futaba 1, crippling anxiety 0.

Now the only thing left to do was to decide exactly how much of a progress report to send Akira about this.

————

“Isn’t there some saying about foxes and rain?”

“Not that I’m aware of.”

“There should be.”

Futaba made a face at the ground as she narrowly avoided a puddle, stumbling a bit with the extra-long step she’d been forced to take. At least she wasn’t wearing her sneakers. It was a blessing in disguise that Ann had talked her into buying these stupid strappy sandals; they might suck for arch support, but at least they wouldn’t be soaked for hours when she stepped in a puddle.

Ann had talked her into buying a lot of things on that after-school shopping trip, like a pushy shopkeeper in an RPG who kept insinuating that the enemies up ahead were weak to fire, and look at that, she just happened to have a flame scimitar that you’d be boned without. Futaba had held her ground at first; for every lacy skirt or flowery hair clip Ann had pushed at her, she’d tried on an oversized sweatshirt or a t-shirt with a cheeky slogan. In the end, she’d managed to bargain Ann down to the aforementioned sandals and a comfy mint green short-sleeved romper, and felt very proud of herself up until the moment she’d thought that, like a champion haggler, maybe that was Ann’s plan all along.

“At least there are no crowds,” Yusuke observed as they approached the sculpture of the popular robot towering sixty feet over the rain-drenched plaza. “It really is massive, isn’t it?”

“I want a pic!” Futaba declared. She closed her umbrella and handed it to him, commenting that it was only drizzling right now, and it would interfere with her posing. He juggled it and his own for a moment before holding out his hand; she stared at him blankly.

“Your phone,” he prompted.

“Take it with yours!” she scoffed, with a wave of her hand, as she traipsed over to the statue. “I don’t trust you with mine!”

He rolled his eyes heavenwards at her lack of faith, but did as she commanded, pulling his own phone out of his tote bag as she tried out a series of poses, each one more ridiculous than the last. Yusuke hid a wry smile in spite of himself; the plaza being empty of anyone but a few employees and the most dedicated tourists seemed to be encouraging her exuberance.

“Done,” Yusuke said, once he’d judged he’d taken five or six acceptable shots. Futaba dropped her pose and bounced over to him, only to change her mind halfway and bolt for the nearest door as the rain shower suddenly intensified. Yusuke opened the chat app to text her the picture as he followed; seeing a missed message from Ryuji asking what he was up to today, he sent the photo to him, too. On a whole, he was probably more likely than not to be into giant robots as well.

RYUJI. Dude!!! sweet ride lol

RYUJI. smh ann’s on a date too. guess its another sunday of sittin at home with my thumb up my ass

YUSUKE. What?

RYUJI. its a saying im not literally sticking my thumb up anywhere

YUSUKE. I’m not on a date.

RYUJI. oh

RYUJI. you sure?

“Hurry up, slowpoke!”

Yusuke looked up in the middle of typing his response to see Futaba jumping from foot to foot impatiently, holding open the door to the indoor portion of the exhibit. Looking back down at his phone, he tapped his foot with a furrowed brow, eyeballing the half-typed message in the text entry field. [ Of course I’m sure, don’t be ] was as far as he had gotten.

“Ugh, you’re gonna ruin your phone! What are you doing?”

“Coming,” he called over the downpour.

He hesitated a moment longer, trying to put a finger on the vague sense of disquiet that was upon him. Then, with a purposeful lack of acknowledgment of what he was doing, he deleted the half-formed message and shoved his phone in the back pocket of his pants, striding towards the door.

Days until Summer Comiket: 47

Chapter Text

“Dammit, Arios again.” Futaba made a face as she closed the gashapon capsule and tossed it like a basketball into the shopping bag Yusuke was patiently holding.

He reached into the bag and pulled it out, peering at it closely as Futaba put another coin into the machine and twisted the crank. “What are you going to do with all the extras?”

“eBay,” she responded absent-mindedly, crossing her fingers as she watched the next capsule roll down into the slot. Yusuke untwisted the capsule he was holding and removed the bag inside. “International fans pay big bucks for Japan-exclusive merch.”

“Then doesn’t it follow that you could instead purchase the specific toy you want off the internet as well?” he asked, poking a hole in the plastic bag that contained the small model’s individual parts.

“That’s not the point!” Futaba said firmly, as she opened the new capsule, sighed, and handed it over before cracking her knuckles for another try. “It’s the hunt that’s the fun part. Otherwise you’re just waving money around. Anyone can do that.”

“You’re spending the amount of money it would take—“

“Shut up.”

Yusuke snorted as he began to slot the parts together, then jumped, dropping them all, as Futaba let out a whoop.

“Yes! See? I knew it would pay off!” she crowed, waving an open capsule under his nose. “00 Raiser, super rare silver color variant!” She capped it carefully and hugged it to herself as Yusuke knelt down and began to pick up the pieces of the model he’d dropped.

She suddenly felt her stomach drop as he stretched his arm under the machine, searching for an errant leg. Crap. If he had started messing with the spare models, he’d probably gotten really bored, right? She’d thought this whole thing would feel easier if she was somewhere that could be called her home turf, but instead she’d gotten so distracted she’d forgotten that the entire goal of the day was to kinda sorta hang out in a way that maybe could be considered a date, if you squinted. She didn’t know much about this kind of thing, but she did know that this probably wasn’t date behavior.

“Aha,” he said with satisfaction, finally grasping the errant piece and standing back up, placing it carefully back into its plastic bag. “Seeing as this one is no longer mint condition, I don’t suppose it would be an inconvenience for me to keep it…?”

“What? Oh, sure,” she said distractedly, racking her brain. “I got like six of those.” She shifted from foot to foot as he dropped the bag of parts into his tote bag, then perked up at the idea he’d inadvertently given her. What was the one surefire way to increase the affection meter? Gifts, duh. And what gifts would a stomach with legs appreciate?

“Hey, I’m basically done here, so…”

“You don’t want to go into the exhibit?” Yusuke asked, surprised.

“Nah. It looks pretty crowded, and the statue was the main thing,” Futaba said dismissively. “And there’s an indoor theme park down the street that has way more fun stuff to do. But let’s go to the Gundam cafe first, okay? My treat!”

“Lead the way,” Yusuke said, almost before she finished speaking.

———

RYUJI. so youre saying you cancelled plans to hang out with her then

YUSUKE. Not exactly.

YUSUKE. The supermarket by my dorm gets the bulk of its fresh shipments on Mondays, so on Sunday, they have flash sales to rid themselves of near-expired stock.

YUSUKE. I don’t have much storage space in the communal refrigerator, but root vegetables keep very well in the cupboard.

YUSUKE.. Can you believe that some people throw out an entire bag of potatoes when they begin to mold, rather than cutting off the inedible parts to extend shelf life?

RYUJI. ok that sure is a statement you just made but anyway

RYUJI. my point is you had somethin to do

RYUJI. but when futaba was like hey i’m bored you dropped everything asap

RYUJI. you get me

YUSUKE. I don’t think that’s unusual behavior. We spend a lot of time together.

RYUJI. yeah thats. kinda my point dude

———

“Gimme your stuff,” Futaba said, wiggling her fingers, then elbowing Yusuke in the side when he failed to respond. “C’mon, gimme!”

“What? Oh,” he responded, jolted out of his reverie. He put down the frame he had been making with his fingers as he scanned around the— arcade? Theme park? There were console games aplenty, but this wasn’t the sort of arcade you could find in any shopping district; signs advertised the newest in VR technology, and off in the distance he could see rows and rows of brightly colored crane games. An entire roller coaster zoomed by overhead, its riders shrieking in delight. He slipped his tote bag off his shoulder and handed it over.

“To think that human innovation has proceeded far enough to create entire virtual worlds, and then used them for mere entertainment," he commented, gazing around, the interest in his eyes belying his dismissive tone. “They could be used to see the view off of the summit of Mt. Everest, or train surgeons in delicate procedures. Instead, they give us a burst of adrenaline and fleeting escapism.”

“Hey, don’t knock escapism ’til you’ve tried it,” Futaba shot back, slotting some coins into the locker and opening the door. “Besides, they do use it for surgeons and stuff. Microsurgery is done with cameras anyway. You watch, the next big thing is gonna be convincing hotshot kids with gaming reflexes to go to med school. Stay here a minute.”

“Hm?”

“Bathroom. BRB!” She put his tote bag in the locker and closed the door, removing the key.

In the bathroom, she sighed in relief that he hadn’t noticed her purposely not putting her shopping bag in the coin locker with the rest of their things. She deposited it on the counter and pulled out her small folding umbrella. It wasn’t the one she normally used, a nice full-sized one with polka dots; instead, it was a cheap 500 yen one she’d picked up at the convenience store this morning just for this purpose. She idled at the sink, washing her hands slowly as a woman walked in and entered a stall. Once there was nobody to look at her strangely, she took the umbrella and dropped it into the trash can.

Sometimes, you have to make your own CG event triggers.

————

YUSUKE. In any case, if this resembles a date, it’s purely by coincidence.

YUSUKE. Futaba asked me to come along as a favor, that’s all.

YUSUKE. Unless you believe that was subterfuge?

RYUJI. imma let you in on a secret

RYUJI. i know fuckall about any of this

RYUJI. im not even sure why youre having this convo with ME of all people

YUSUKE. Akira hasn’t responded yet.

RYUJI. cant you just ask her

YUSUKE. No.

RYUJI. cmon you blurt out weird shit all the time she won’t even notice

YUSUKE. That’s not what I meant.

YUSUKE. This complex has an indoor roller coaster.

YUSUKE. We’re in line for a second ride.

YUSUKE. If I open my mouth, I will vomit.

RYUJI. why are you riding it AGAIN??

YUSUKE. Futaba looked very hopeful when she asked.

RYUJI. stop texting me

————

Futaba paced back and forth in front of the entrance to the men’s bathroom, biting her nails. She looked up at every set of footsteps she heard, but it was a busy day, and there were quite a few false starts before Yusuke finally dragged himself back into the land of the living. She darted up, then ground to a halt uncertainly in front of him, hands clasped nervously in front of her.

“A-are you okay?”

“I wasted my lunch. And after they went to the trouble of drawing a Gundam on it…”

She risked a glance up at his face; he was still looking pale, and had a faraway look in his eyes. Gingerly, she grabbed onto his sleeve and tugged him over to a nearby bench; he followed her, sitting down in apparent relief.

A. ”Here! I bought you some ginger tea while you were puking your guts out.”

B. “I’m sorry, I should have remembered you get motion-sick easily.”

C. ”Why didn’t you stop after the first ride??”

“You were the one dragging me onto the ride repeatedly,” he shot back, narrowing his eyes. Futaba winced, looking down at her lap. What had seemed like playful concern in her head had come out sounding more like a scolding.

“I just meant… if you weren’t having fun, you should have said something,” she mumbled. “I forgot you get carsick, so…” Why didn’t real life have a quicksave function? She could feel his confusion. They could trade barbs back and forth like nobody’s business, usually; he probably hadn’t meant anything by his comment at all, and here she was getting all morose. It was only her who was thinking too much about everything she said. To him, this was just a normal day.

After she’d been silent for a long minute, just enough time to get good and uncomfortable, he leaned forward, resting his forearms on his legs and clasping his hands together. She could see him glance at her out of the corner of her eye, and then look forward again.

“Forgive me if I misspoke,” he said neutrally.

Futaba stared at her hands twisting in her lap, at the chipped black nail polish and the shredded cuticles, victims of her bad habit of anxiously chewing on them. Would she ever learn not to get in her own way?

“You don’t have to— to baby me,” she mumbled. She appreciated everything her friends did for her, she really did, always making sure she was comfortable and encouraging her to take baby steps, but more and more these days she was starting to worry she was going to exhaust their patience, become a burden.

“I wasn’t,” Yusuke said, sounding slightly surprised.

“So why?” Futaba shot back, unable to meet his eyes and so looking instead off to the side, watching a shrieking group of girls on a VR ride.

“Why did I apologize…?”

“Why did you ride the roller coaster? Why did you put up with spending like an hour buying Gundam toys? Why did you come?” If it was only to humor her, she wouldn’t be able to take it, she really wouldn’t.

A glance over at his face saw him looking unusually perturbed. She had been expecting ‘exasperated’, since that was what she deserved and the expression he wore a good 40% of the time they were together, but he looked very nearly uncomfortable, turning his phone over and over in one hand as he opened, then closed his mouth. “Why is that even a question?” he said eventually.

Futaba could have pressed him, but there was something odd and charged in the air between them, and in that instant she wasn’t sure what would be harder to handle: hearing something she didn’t want to hear, or something she did. Instead she leapt up, turned to face him, and pointed a finger.

“You might have high INT, but your WIS is the worst I’ve ever seen!”

There it was, the familiar, comfortable exasperation. “Futaba, what—“

“Now you. Roast me! Come on!”

He rolled his eyes, then looked her up and down. She noticed that he didn’t have very far to look up, and apparently, so did he. “I can see why you usually wear those ridiculous platform boots.”

Futaba let out a huff. “Weak! Is that the best you can do? I know I’m short, c’mon!”

“You’re incorrigible,” Yusuke said, shaking his head.

“And you talk like you’re trying to win a scrabble tournament.” Futaba held out her hand. “C’mon. There’s a big room with like a hundred crane games. I’ll win you something, since you suck too much to get anything in less than twenty tries.”

Yusuke took her hand (Achievement Unlocked: Suck it, Ann) and pulled himself to his feet with a wry grin. “Lead the way.. Far be it from me to deny you the chance to crow superiority with such an eminently practical skill.”

“Ooh, backhanded. Good one, Inari.”

———

YUSUKE. [ img_0413.jpg ]

RYUJI. looks like morgana lol

RYUJI. futaba win that for you

RYUJI. ?

YUSUKE. As a matter of fact, yes.

YUSUKE. But I think she meant it as an insult.

RYUJI. date

YUSUKE. Stop.

RYUJI. lmao

RYUJI. serves you effin right comin to my dumb ass bout this.

RYUJI. im out

RYUJI. also mom says shes making beef stew tmrw if you wanna come for dinner

YUSUKE. I would be honored.

————

“It’s not here!” Futaba complained, in a reasonably convincing facsimile of distress, as she dug through her shopping bag for the third time. Charisma might be her dump stat, but she’d put enough points into subterfuge to pull off this low level of acting. Ann should take notes on her build, she thought irreverently.

“Your umbrella? Are you sure?”

“Yes I’m sure! This thing doesn’t exactly have secret pockets. Oh well, I guess we’ll—“

“Think back to the last time you had it. Can you remember putting it down anywhere?”

“I— uh, maybe when I was buying the tickets?” Futaba slid her gaze sideways from his concerned look. “You know, I had to dig for my wallet, so I guess I might have put it down without realizing. Guess we’ll just have to share—“

“It might still be there. Shall we ask?” Yusuke turned around to head back towards the ticket booth; Futaba darted around in front of him, half of her touched by his concern, the other half frustrated by his refusal to play along with her gambit.

“No! No,” she said, arms stretched out to block his path. “I mean. I-it’s embarrassing! Beside, it’s just a cheapo corner store one. We can—“

“I don’t mind asking for you—“

“Wecanshareyourumbrella!” she blurted out, mushing the words together but sparing a thought to congratulate herself on not stumbling them over entirely.

Yusuke blinked at her.

“No we can’t.”

“I— what? W-why not?” she responded, stomach dropping.

“I lost it.”

Futaba stared at him. Belatedly realizing her arms were still outstretched, she dropped them to her sides, then placed her hands on her hips.

“What do you mean you lost it? How could you lose your umbrella?”

“It must have been when we first entered. I took a moment to frame the sight, which requires empty hands. Perhaps I put it down without realizing?”

“Well…” Thinking back on it, there had been that moment by the lockers. “Okay, so we go back in and grab it…”

“No need. I can see the location from here. The janitor must have come by, or else another patron seized the chance for a free umbrella.” Yusuke lifted a hand and pointed; indeed, the locker area just beyond the turnstile was quite free of any dropped possessions. “Perhaps there’s a lost and found…?”

There was, but there wasn’t an umbrella to be had. Yusuke asked the girl at the ticket booth while Futaba crept back to the bathroom, but he was met with a shrug and an apology, and Futaba was met with a clean, empty trash can, the product of an efficient janitorial crew.

“You know…” Futaba began, as they stood in front of the large plate-glass windows in the lobby of the building. “It’s not raining that hard, and the ferris wheel isn’t that far. You wanted to see the bridge, right?”

Yusuke raised one eyebrow as he looked at the torrential downpour outside, the gathering dusk made darker than the hour would suggest by the clouds. “I did.”

“Right. And you can’t sketch standing outside. So…” Futaba removed her phone from her pocket, dropped it in her plastic shopping bag, and tied the top tightly. “Ferris wheel’s covered. Let’s go!” If the umbrella was a no-go, a ferris wheel ride wasn’t a bad second choice. Besides, wasn’t this a staple CG, too? The shot from behind of some cute girl, whirling around, hand outstretched, looking unusually fresh and pretty as gentle raindrops shone on her hair? The player character inspired to a rush of protective, awed adoration as he glimpsed her in a new light?

Yeah, that sounded about right.

Before she could change her mind, she flung the door open and raced outside. “Wah! It’s cold!” she yelped, as the rain which was definitely closer to downpour than shower descended upon her. The ground was littered with puddles from the day’s rainstorm, and she jumped over one, narrowly avoided another as she jumped around.

Expectation:

Her hair cascaded out around her in a gorgeous fan. Raindrops sparkled in a sudden shaft of sunlight piercing down from the heavens. Twirling around on one dainty foot, she shot a beaming smile back towards the boy still standing in the doorway, awakening something unexpected in his heart.

Reality:

Paving stones get slippery in the rain. And cute strappy sandals, technically waterproof as they may be, don’t have much in the way of traction. As Futaba attempted to pirouette around one the ball of one foot, her sodden hair swung gracefully behind her, and did what objects in motion do best. As she stopped, her hair kept going, smacking her in the face, the surprise unbalancing her. Her sandal skidded on the ground, and she yelped as she fell backwards, landing squarely in a puddle.

Muttering some words under her breath that would have given Sojiro a stroke, she pushed herself up into a crouch, rubbing her hip and looking up only when she heard an unexpected burst of laughter.

To her surprise, Yusuke wasn’t watching her cooly from the lobby, shaking his head at her folly; instead, he was standing only a few feet in front of her, bent over with his hands resting on his thighs, convulsing with laughter.

Her face went bright red, but she was unable to stop the laughter bubbling up in response. Even though it was at her expense, his laughter was contagious, maybe because she so rarely heard anything more than a dry chuckle from him. He extended a hand, and she took it, laughter dying on her lips as she stared up at his wet hair plastered against his face, the crinkles at the corner of his eyes. Why did he have to look so— so cool all the time?

She ducked her head as she stood, letting go of his hand and beating a few friendly punches against his chest, trying to hide her sudden awkwardness. “You jerk! Don’t laugh!”

“You looked ridiculous.”

“Your face looks ridiculous.”

“It most certainly does not. See?”

Futaba risked a glance upwards at the face in question. Yusuke had arranged his face into an expression of perfect solemnity, belied only by a slight quirk at the side of his lips, a small twitch of his eyes.

“Y-you’re still laughing.”

“I’m not.”

Belatedly, Futaba realized that her hands had stopped their gentle assault, coming to rest on his chest, still balled into fists. She looked up further, meeting Yusuke’s eyes, her stomach lurching as she realized he was looking back down at her. A single second was all she could handle; then she darted backwards, shoving him away unintentionally, turning around before calling over her shoulder, “Come on, enough standing around! It’s pouring!”

Yusuke was left standing in the rain, hands half-raised to do— something, he wasn’t sure what.

He pushed his sopping hair out of his eyes with one hand.

Letting out a small, self-deprecating chuckle, he took a deep breath, and then followed Futaba at a slow, thoughtful trot.

————

YUSUKE. Ryuji

RYUJI. yeah

YUSUKE. I realized something

RYUJI. what

YUSUKE. I would walk the entire length of Japan barefoot if it would mean seeing her smile.

RYUJI. i know dude

RYUJI. thats what ive been sayin

————

Futaba wrung out her hair for a third time, adding to a spreading puddle on the floor of the ferris wheel cab. She stole a glance at Yusuke, sitting across from her; it didn’t escape her notice that in the spherical cabin, he was sitting as far away from her as possible, or that he was looking slightly dismayed as he assessed his sketchbook for damages.

“D-did it get ruined?” she asked, clasping her hands together in her lap.

“Hm? Oh… no,” he answered, peeling apart two damp pages, brow furrowed. “Actually, the markers ran in an appealing pattern. If I could figure out how to purposely create the same effect… I’ve often thought that city lights at night, seen through the prism of rain, inspire almost ethereal feelings. Where… oh, that’s right. The planetarium, there was an exhibit…”

Futaba’s shoulders relaxed as she let Yusuke’s disconnected ramblings about atmospheric perspective and chiaroscuro fill the cabin. (She didn’t have the faintest idea what that second one was, but it sounded tasty.) His irritated and thoughtful expressions often looked similar, and if she wasn’t such an oversensitive dunderhead, on edge because of a thousand things, she’d have realized that.

Heart beating rabbitlike in her ribcage, she came to a conclusion: if she didn’t put her cards on the table, she was going to die of cardiac arrest.

A. “I had fun today. Can we do this again?”

B. “I really like you.”

C. Say nothing.

Her hands twisted in her lap, as Yusuke waxed poetic about an ambulance he had once seen in a snowstorm, and the way the sirens had cut through the snow.

A. “You know this was a date, right? I mean, you must have picked up on it, right?”

B. “I have your face set as my phone background, and only sort of because it’s a funny photo.”

C. Say nothing, you coward.

Yusuke could go on at length about things that interested him, as much as she did, but he didn’t usually babble like this. He must be picking up on her discomfort.

A. “I want to hold hands for more than five seconds. I want to hug you. I want you to call me at three in the morning because they unearthed a new Van Gogh painting in some attic in Paris, because I don’t care about art but I could listen to you talk about it for hours.”

B. Not that I’ll ever have the right to do that.

C. I’m just going to sit here and let my fears get the better of me, the way I always do.

He trailed off, finally, flipping to a dry page in the middle of his sketchbook, the cabin silent now, except for the drumming of the rain on the roof.

A. Say nothing, because it’s easy.

B. Say nothing, because it’s too frightening to do otherwise.

C. Say nothing, because you don’t think you deserve this.

Futaba took a deep breath.

D. Try anyway.

“Yu—“

“Oh!”

Yusuke was looking at her, awed— no, not at her, she realized, turning around.

“Whoa!”

They had risen high enough over the buildings that Odaiba’s Rainbow Bridge was in full view. Despite the rain, it was lit up in a riot of color. The mist rising up from the rain-pelted bay made it look ethereal, diffusing the bright, colorful lights like spray from a waterfall creating a rainbow. Futaba turned around completely, kneeling on the seat and resting her chin in her hands.

“Looks like where you’d fight a final boss,” she said, gazing out the window. “Neat! You know, Inari, you can get a way better view from this side of the cabin…”

“I have the perfect view.”

Futaba looked over her shoulder; Yusuke had his hands up, one eye closed, framing the bridge.

“Suit yourself,” she shrugged, turning back to look.

Once the cabin had risen over the apex of its arc and begun to descend, she asked to see his sketch; to her surprise, he shook his head firmly. He was usually fairly amenable to her paging through his sketchbooks, albeit grousing all the while that in-progress sketches were of inconsistent quality, and she should forbear from making critical comments or her privileges would be revoked.

“It needs refinement,” he explained hastily, as she opened her mouth to protest.

“That churro salsa thing?”

“Chiaroscuro,” he corrected, looking pained. “And yes, in a way. The scene I want to capture cannot be properly conveyed with a mere sketch. It would be doing it a disservice to… to reveal it before it has been properly rendered. Hasty pencil can capture gesture, but it’s a poor medium for subtleties of lighting, and neither can it adequately portray the depth of field… Ah, but rest assured,” he added hastily, “that once I have completed the painting to my satisfaction, you will be the first to see it.”

“It’s a deal,” Futaba said with a firm nod, writing a mental note to herself to think of at least six more ‘accidental’ mispronunciations of chiaroscuro before that happened.

He did join her on her side of the cabin, then, to show her several sketches of merchandise ideas (damp but not too damaged, thankfully), but by now that tense, expectant mood had passed. She found herself quite able to carry on a normal conversation about acrylic stands and Mona stickers, the pros and cons of finding a supplier for pencil bags.

Something had changed inside of her, though. Haru’s gentle advice and Ann’s bull-in-a-china-shop schemes hadn’t quite been able to goad her into it, but if she was her own worst enemy, she was also her own best one. After all, she’d fought herself and won before, hadn’t she? She could do it again. And the next time her limit break gauge charged up, she was going to release a Renzokuken like the world had never seen.

Except, you know. Romantically. A big old romantic sword, raining destruction upon the masses… or… something.

Hoo boy.

Days until Summer Comiket: 47

Chapter Text

Makoto knocked on Yusuke’s door for a fifth time, fist thudding impatiently against the wood. She had been surprised to find that it was actually wood, and not cheap particle board, but Kosei was a high-class school. If they could afford to feed and house a peacock which added absolutely nothing but aesthetic beauty and a certain amount of terror to students’ morning walk to class, solid construction materials were a given.

“This is your final warning!” she shouted through the door, then winced. She hadn’t meant to sound so much like a police officer.

When even that elicited no response, she compressed her lips into a thin line, then dug in her bag for the small packet of tools she’d brought along for just this eventuality. Akira may have had a talking cat familiar to walk him through pipe bombs and lockpicks, but Makoto had a library card, a set of tumblers purchased off of Amazon, and the kind of determination that only comes from a supremely anxious mind. After all, if their leader were to become incapacitated, someone had to be able to carry the team through the cognitive world. (She’d felt foolish when she realized that Akira’s lockpicks were approximations, only real enough to fool a world built on cognition— at least, until she’d arrived at Leblanc one morning to find Sojiro standing outside the door, grumbling about keys dropped down a storm drain and the exorbitant cost of a locksmith.)

Less than a minute later, the tumblers clicked into place. Makoto, almost disappointed that it hadn’t put up more of a fight, stood up, slipping the packet of lockpicks back into her bag and pushing open the door slightly.

“Hello?”

When that got no response, Makoto furrowed her brow, biting her lip for a moment. At first this whole trip had been her indulging Futaba, after listening to the younger girl try and convince herself for two hours yesterday over a slowly cooling plate of curry that this wasn’t a big deal, Yusuke was probably fine, it was just that he hadn’t been in the group chat for days and every time she pinged his phone it was in the same spot, what if he has the flu? Or a stomach bug? Or was kidnapped? Or abducted by aliens?

When she’d suggested to Futaba that she should just go stop by and see, Futaba had rolled her eyes.

“Sure, Makoto. I’ll just waltz across the whole city, to someplace I’ve never been, to a building I’m not supposed to be in, and bang down a door while a bunch of beautiful rich smart people stand around and laugh at me. Easy.”

Not that she was entirely absent.

FUTABA. Is he there???

MAKOTO. Hold on.

“Well… I’m coming in,” Makoto announced, slipping off her shoes just inside the door. She found herself in a short entryway. A small alcove to the left held a hot water dispenser, as well as a few miscellaneous packets of instant noodles and boxes of tea; to the right, a door opened onto a small bathroom. The whole place was unnervingly silent, and she frowned, worried despite herself that there actually was something wrong.

The room opened up at the end of the entranceway; it was small for an apartment, but large for a dorm room, at least as far as Makoto knew. She peered back and forth, inventorying the contents with a detective’s eye.

One (1) bed, neatly made
Four (4) sketchbooks, scattered on top of the covers, as well as miscellaneous loose sheets of paper
One (1) closet, sliding door open, revealing six (6) shirts on hangers. —Six, really? Was it coming up on laundry day? If not… huh.
One (1) corkboard, layered with pages torn out of magazines (reference images?), scraps of paper with interesting textures, ticket stubs, etc.
One (1) standing lamp, lampshade partially held together with duct tape
One (1) inexplicable Rococo-style ivory chair, slightly worn
Two (2) wooden African masks, mounted on the wall

It was at this point that Makoto’s eyes started to cross as she attempted to make sense of the decor. The room was actually quite clean; the rug which covered most of the floor looked as though it had been vacuumed just recently, and the only garbage to be seen was contained properly in a small trash can by the closet. It was just that the room also looked like where a flea market went to relax and unwind for the holidays. Why was there a set of cherubic Russian nesting dolls on top of the bookcase, their eyes seeming to follow her around the room? Why were they next to a Greco-Roman style bust of a man who appeared to be, against all odds, Colonel Saunders? Where did the ram’s skull tie into it all, and was it real? And if it was real, was that legal?

She gave her head a quick shake, and tried to focus on the important things.

Seven (7) volumes of manga, stacked at the foot of the bed. Unlikely find. Borrowed, maybe?
One (1) large easel, taking up easily a third of the room, covered in a dropcloth
One (1) desk, with the requisite mug of pens and pencils, sticky notes, ancient laptop, stacks of paper, etc.
One (1) Yusuke, seated in front of the desk, slumped over with his head resting on the surface, snoring faintly

Makoto stood for a moment, brow furrowed, hands on her hips.

MAKOTO. He’s here. Looks like he just tired himself out, maybe?

FUTABA. Low batteries! Plug him in!! ∑(ﾟﾛﾟ〃)

“Ahem.”

Yusuke must have been a light sleeper, because all it took was one slightly embarrassed throat-clearing from Makoto to take him from a dead sleep to sitting bolt upright, looking around the room like he wasn’t quite sure what decade it was.

Makoto, staring, inventoried one more item.

One (1) paint-covered palette, previously resting on the desk, now plastered to one side of Yusuke’s face but slowly losing its battle with gravity

As Makoto stood, torn between concern and inappropriate laughter, the palette slid down and landed on the desk with a clatter. Yusuke looked down with mild surprise, then touched a hand to his face, his fingers coming away sticky with reddish brown paint. He frowned at it, then looked back up at Makoto.

“Can I borrow a thousand yen?”

She blinked.

“What?”

“That was my last tube of burnt sienna, and my stipend for next semester’s supplies won’t be arriving until mid-August. I’ll pay you back,” he added, a concept Makoto found both unlikely and unnecessary.

“That— you wake up to someone in your dorm room, and that’s your first impulse?”

“Of course! How rude of me,” he said, slapping his forehead with his hand (and spreading the paint even further.) “Would you like some tea?”

“Go wash your face, please.”

While he was out of the room, Makoto sat down in his vacated chair, trying to focus on the optimistic fact that there was no lobster tank in sight. She locked eyes with a stuffed cat, a black and white one that looked like Morgana, perched precariously on the windowsill. Well, that was all right. She herself had a panda, tattered and missing an eye, that she would never admit to a single living soul still had a place with her at night.

What she wanted to do, very badly, was take a look under the dropcloth to see just what kind of painting had been monopolizing his attention over the past couple of weeks, but somehow that seemed even more invasive than breaking into his dorm room. When Yusuke came back, with two mismatched mugs full of tea, he handed her one then sat down on the bed, crossing his legs and turning his head to follow her gaze towards the canvas.

“As loath as I am to admit it, I’ve been struggling,” he admitted, before she could ask. “I’ve been overflowing with inspiration, and yet when I put paint to canvas, what comes out is never true to what I see in my mind. I’ve burnt through three canvasses already.” He paused, then clarified, “Well, for accuracy, I’ve only burnt one. One went into the dumpster, and the third I cut up into very small pieces and let drift away in the wind. And that was after resurfacing each of them several times.”

“No wonder you’re out of money, if that’s the speed you go through supplies,” Makoto said, furrowing her eyebrows.

“I’ve considered dipping my toes into the digital art world, but the initial investment of both a drawing tablet and a half-decent computer far outweigh the slow trickle of paying for disposable supplies. Although Akira did say once that—“ He suddenly jerked to attention, sloshing some of the tea out of his mug onto his trousers as he stared at Makoto with an appalled look on his face. “What day is it? Don’t tell me that’s why you’re here— I can be packed in five minutes, as soon as I find—“

“Relax! You didn’t miss it,” Makoto said hastily, waving him back to his seat before he could get too flustered. “We’re not leaving until Friday, and it’s only Tuesday. The eleventh. Of July,” she added, although he probably hadn’t gone so far as to lose track of the month. “I’m only here for a welfare check. People do tend to get worried when you drop off the face of the planet for days at a time. —Hold on,” she said, frowning. “Have you been attending class? Shouldn’t you be in finals this week…?”

“Your concern is appreciated, but misplaced,” Yusuke explained, smoothing his hair, still damp from his attempts to scrub out the paint. “Academic classes ended early last week. The last days of the semester are generally given over to studio hours or independent study projects, depending on your concentration. It’s why I’m painting here, despite the cramped quarters. It’s impossible to focus when half the class is crammed into the studio, trying frantically to finish projects they should have started weeks ago.”

“What are you working on, anyway?” Makoto asked, seizing the opening. “Is it a new technique, or…?”

Yusuke chuckled. “Nothing so pedestrian. Technique is just a matter of devotion and practice. No, my struggles are at once unique to me and, perhaps, common to all mankind. More fool I, that in the past I thought I could truly capture such an emotion from the position of a mere aloof observer.”

“Uh,” said Makoto, who wasn’t sure she liked where this was going.

“Tell me, Makoto,” Yusuke said, flinging his arms wide, splashing tea onto his bedspread. “Have you ever been in love?”

“Is that the time? Sorry, but I have class in half an hour, I didn’t realize—“ Makoto fumbled with her phone, looking at it upside down before stuffing it back into her pocket and standing up as abruptly as if she’d been bitten by the chair.

“It’s invigorating! It’s a sensation not unlike touching an exposed plug, when the tingling pathways of your nerves are set aflame—“

“— We’re meeting at LeBlanc at 10 AM on Friday. I’ll call you at nine to make sure you’re awake. Please don’t touch exposed plugs.” He was still continuing his soliloquy as he followed her to the door, apparently completely unaware of Makoto’s sudden visceral embarrassment. Part of it was that even now, she preferred to approach any deep, personal matters with a healthy dose of planning, reticence and logic. She usually quite liked talking to Yusuke, who was generally thoughtful, measured, and eloquent, but she was never quite sure how to react to his occasional release of wild, scattershot emotional outbursts. Most of it, though, was that the answer was “Yes, with Akira, for about a week, until I watched him eat a five pound burger, quote, ‘To test my abilities’, and then throw up in a trash can on the way home,” and Yusuke was far too perceptive to let him anywhere near that embarrassing episode. (If she had said something, he would have said “Yes, well, we’ve all been there,” not that it would have helped. Akira, the Phantom Thieves would have agreed had they ever actually sat down and talked about it, was far more charming than he had any right to be; the worst part was that none of them were quite sure if he was doing it on purpose.)

After successfully extricating herself from that unpleasantly emotional situation, Makoto headed back towards the station on a long, meandering route that took her through the better part of Kosei’s campus. As she walked, one eye on her GPS app, glancing from side to side at elegant sculptures and elegant students sitting on elegant wrought-iron benches, she found herself relieved that she hadn’t forced Futaba along after all. No doubt the other girl would have taken one look at these people, run a quick comparison, and begun digging a hole to hide in. (Futaba was, of course, worth ten times more than any of them, as far as Makoto was concerned, but confidence can’t be built in a day.)

Taking a detour down a winding gravel path to avoid Kosei’s very opinionated resident peacock, she found herself pausing on an old-fashioned wooden bridge, trying to figure out where the sudden smell of salt was coming from. She looked down to see that what she had at first glance taken to be an ornamental koi pond was instead some kind of man-made tide pool, because apparently there was nothing better for a private school to spend its endowments on. Sea urchins and starfish clung to whitish pink rocks; seaweed undulated in the slight current. And as she watched, first one, then two lobsters perambulated along the white sand, going about their lobster business.

“Huh,” Makoto said out loud, then pulled up her text app.

MAKOTO. He didn’t eat the lobsters.

MAKOTO. If I remember right, Ryuji now owes you ¥500.

AKIRA. hot damn

————

“Make sure you stop and take a break if you feel like you’re drifting off. And call when you get there, or if you run into any trouble. I gave you my number, right?”

“Yes, sir,” Makoto said with a nod, as she took Futaba’s backpack and loaded it into the back of the van with the rest of the luggage. “Sae just had the van serviced last week, so I don’t expect any trouble, especially now that I’ve driven the route before, but thank you. And thanks for the food, too.”

“Relax, Sojiro, it was fine when you let me go last time!” Futaba said breezily, handing the family-sized picnic bento through the open van door to Haru as Makoto closed the back doors.

“I didn’t let you go anywhere,” Sojiro retorted. “As I recall, you said you were running an errand, and I get a call two hours later that you’re halfway to Akira’s hometown and you’d probably be back that night. Would have jumped in the car and gone after you myself, if there hadn’t been that accident on the expressway snarling traffic north of the city.”

“You probably wouldn’t have found us,” Yusuke volunteered, leaning back between the two front seats. “We made several detours to stop at scenic tourist locations. Some of them were even on purpose.”

“My navigation was fine on the way back,” Makoto hastily reassured Sojiro as Yusuke took a sip from his thermos, staring blandly at the man’s narrowed eyebrows and scowl.

“So anyway, we’ll be back Sunday afternoon, with souvenirs!” Futaba said breezily. “Mainly a big four-eyed nerd to eat you out of house and home for all of summer break.”

“And Akira, as well,” Yusuke volunteered with impeccable comic timing, earning a glare from Futaba and a guffaw from Ryuji. She turned around and hugged Sojiro firmly before climbing into the van and settling herself comfortably between Ann and Haru in the backseat.

“All right. Everyone ready? Did you forget anything?” Makoto called, climbing into the driver’s seat and starting the engine. “Tell me now if you did, because I’m not turning around.”
“I vote we start a betting pool!” Ryuji volunteered, sticking his arm in the air as Makoto pulled away from the curb, and the girls in the backseat waved cheerfully out the window at Sojiro’s receding figure. “How long until we gotta pull over to let Yusuke puke? A thousand yen says twenty minutes!”

“Half an hour.”

“He’s pretty prepared… an hour and a half?”

“Thank you for your support,” Yusuke said, looking over his shoulder and raising his eyebrow at Ann and Haru’s prompt responses. “Sorry to disappoint, but between the motion sickness bracelets, sitting in the front seat, and the ginger tea, I do not plan on giving in to my weak stomach today. This trip is too—“ he clamped his mouth shut as Makoto drove over a pothole, taking a deep breath.

“Ooh, can I change? Ten minutes!’

“Come on, he’s trying!”

Ryuji turned around in his seat to stare at Futaba’s uncharacteristic defense; Haru poked her in the side and giggled, and Futaba felt herself turning bright red. Okay, razzing Yusuke was basically her number one hobby, but dogpiling was barely even a sport! It wasn’t like she was getting possessive or anything. She tried to stammer out an explanation, but between Ann’s grin and Haru’s giggles she was getting nowhere fast.

“I just— well, fine! One hour before he pukes his stupid guts out! Ryuji just makes too many stupid bets, that’s all!”

“I changed my mind!” Makoto called from the driver’s seat. “I absolutely will turn this around if you don’t settle down back there!”

“Yes, mom.

“Sorry, mom.”

“Shut up.”

In the end, nobody claimed Ryuji’s prize; whether it was the ginger, the bracelets, or sheer stubbornness, Yusuke lasted two hours and fifteen minutes before Makoto had to pull off the highway and into a small mountanside town so he could run, green-faced and clutching his stomach, into the nearest convenience store bathroom. Nobody made too much of an issue about it, considering that by that point, they all felt the need to stretch their legs a little; Makoto let them off in the parking lot of the convenience store, before driving across the street to refill the van’s gas tank. Besides, it was one thing to make fun of someone when he was fully capable of arguing back; it was another thing to kick him when he was down.

“Here.”

Ryuji jumped as Ann pressed the cold metal of a canned soda against his cheek. “Hey, thanks,” he said, taking it with a grin and popping the tab open. “Whaddya want?”

“Nothing! God,” she protested, elbowing him in the side as she sat next to him on the rickety wooden bench next to the vending machine. “C’mon, selfie! Shiho wanted an update.”

Ryuji obligingly threw up devil horns, flashing a sideways grin at the camera. After she took the photo, she spent a moment selecting stickers, while Ryuji started on his orange soda. Across the parking lot, Yusuke emerged from the convenience store, still looking nauseated; he sat heavily down on the curb, head between his knees, trying to wave away the concerned hovering being inflicted on him by Haru and Futaba.

“Cat ears, or bunny ears?”

“Maan, I don’t care. That’s girly shit.” He took a thoughtful slurp. “Cat ears, though.”

“Gotcha. I’ll send it to Akira, too.”

“Oh? Okay, cool.”

“Wanna say anything to him?”

“Nah. Texted him this morning. We’re gonna be there soon, anyway.” Ryuji avoided Ann’s eyes, taking a long drink from his soda. She’d been nudging recently, bringing up Akira at every opportunity and watching for Ryuji’s response, and Ryuji was starting to be pretty sure she was onto something. He didn’t really mind, kinda wanted to hash it out with her, anyway, after he managed to get over the absolute pants-shitting terror involved in talking about this kinda thing to anyone. When it came to confidences about this particular problem, Akira was out, obviously. Yusuke would be supportive, but he was even dumber than Ryuji was about this crap, not that Ryuji could really get a word in edgewise during Yusuke Is Awake At 5 AM For Some Godawful Reason And Texting Me About Planning Grand Romantic Gestures Power Hour. He wasn’t really close enough with the other girls to go spilling his guts, not when he held onto the faint hope that they thought he was at least 20% cool. That left Ann, who was as subtle as a brick but would only make fun of him for a few minutes before kicking him in the butt and telling him what he already knew— that if he didn’t spill his guts to Akira soon, he’d regret it. Once he figured out how to broach the subject with her—

“Gotcha. Heart emoji, eyes emoji, heart emoji, from Ryuji—“

“Hey! Cut it—“ Ryuji grabbed at the phone, but stopped as soon as he saw Ann’s twinkling eyes and shit-eating grin. “Aw, hell no. You— how long have you known?”

“A while!” Ann sang out, showing him the phone screen to reassure him that no gushy message was in fact being sent. “Kinda got a feeling the way you’d tense up every time he got mentioned! When were you gonna tell me? I’m a great wingwoman!”

“Great wingwoman my ass,” he grumbled. “Didn’t you already try to set us up?”

“What?”

“Whaddya mean, what?”

“You know, the whole ‘ohhh, someone’s gotta thing for youuuu’ shit. Wasn’t that about Akira?”

Ann wrinkled her brow, then gasped, covering her mouth with her hand. “Oh my God, I totally forgot! No, that was totally different. It’s a funny story, actually, I thought Futaba was into you—“

“What?!”

“She’s not!” Ann said, waving her hands frantically. “She really isn’t! But, you know, you don’t have to look that relieved,” she said, with a bit of a frown, taking offense on her friend’s behalf. “I mean, she’s cute, and she kinda makes you wanna take care of her. Loads of guys are into that.”

“It’s not… never mind,” he groaned, putting his head into his hands.

“Aaaaanyway,” Ann said, leaning back and swinging her feet, “back to the main event. You and Akira, huh?”

“I… guess?” Ryuji dragged his hands down his face, letting out an explosive sigh. “I dunno, I’m pretty sure now, but for a while it was like— what if I just really like the dude, y’know, like a friend, and I just got all mixed up ‘cause I barely see him any more?”

“Hmm…” She finally opened the bottle of her own strawberry soda, and took a thoughtful sip. “Well, think about it like this. Do you wanna hold hands with him, give him a hug, maybe a lil smooch, or do you wanna push him down and stick your hands down his pants?”

“Ann!” Ryuji sputtered, choking on his soda. She pounded him on the back as he coughed.

“Well, I’m just saying— oh, hey, Futaba!” Ann said brightly, spotting the other girl out of the corner of her eye, walking towards them with her hands in her pockets.

“What’s up over here?”

“Ryuji’s dying,” Ann said. Ryuji kept his head down, face still bright red.

“Oh. Well, better here than in the car,” Futaba said with a grin, kneeling in front of the vending machine next to them and poking at the selections.

“I know, right? How’s Yusuke?”

“Getting there,” Futaba said as the bottle thumped into the bottom of the machine. Ann looked over to see Haru crouched beside the unfortunate boy, holding his hand as though she were trying to read his palm. “Haru’s doing some acupressure thing. Hope it works better than the bracelets. Do you know how much he spent on those? What an idiot.” She rolled her eyes as she pulled out the bottle and stood up. Ann watched with a grin as she traipsed back across the parking lot and thrust the bottle at Yusuke, standing with hands on her hips as he took a cautious sip.

“So,” Ann continued brightly, as if there’d been no interruption, “when are you gonna tell him? You are gonna tell him, right?” she added, in a voice that brooked no argument.

“Yeah, yeah, I will!” Ryuji said, rubbing the back of his neck with his hand. “Shit, you know who you’re talking to, right? Can you see me actually keeping quiet about anything? Trust me, I’ll probably blurt it out at the worst time. At least it’ll get it over with.”

“No you won’t!” Ann said, patting him on the cheek encouragingly. “I’ll set it all up for you! Get you two alone, set a great mood… I’ve already got loads of ideas!”

He swatted her hand away, already grinning a little easier. “Man, that doesn’t encourage me. You, thinking? You’re gonna get one of us in trouble—“ She aimed a smack at his shoulder, but he jumped away, laughing.

“You idiot! Do you want my help, or not?”

“I do! I do.” Ryuji smiled at her sheepishly. “Thanks, Ann. Really. I’m kinda outta my depth with this one.”

“You’re out of your depth with most things,” she said kindly, tousling his hair. “That’s why you’re so lucky to have me around! It’ll all be worth it, you’ll see. He’s a really good kisser.”

“—Wait, what? Wait. Did you and he— Ann, get back here! You can’t say that and just run off— hey, wait up!”

————

“I see they took my advice,” Yusuke said with a satisfied smile as Makoto pulled the van into the driveway of the Kurusu house. “The balance of the front garden is much better with the hydrangea bush on the left.”

“And that’s why you’re staying in the car,” Makoto said sternly. When they had dropped Akira off at the end of the school year a few short months ago, showing up unexpectedly and tumbling out of the van in a pile of squabbles and empty potato chip bags, Yusuke had thrown Akira’s father for quite a loop by standing on the front walkway, arms crossed, and immediately telling him everything that was wrong with the aesthetic sense of the front garden. “All we’re doing is letting Akira know we’re here, greeting his parents, and going to check in at the inn. We don’t need an entire brigade.”

“I think Ryuji should go!” Ann said, shooting her hand up into the air like a student hoping to be called on.

“Fine. Ryuji and Haru and I will—“

“Why does Haru get to go?” Futaba grumbled, propping her arms up on the back of the middle seat. “I wanna see Akira now!”

“Because,” Makoto said with a sigh, “Akira told me about the four recording bugs he found planted around his house.”

“Jokes on him, I planted seven,” Futaba muttered to Haru, who giggled despite herself.

“Don’t you think you should stay here, Futaba?” Ann piped up, elbowing her in the side and making her jump. “Those three can handle it. Me, I’m just gonna take a walk down the street a bit, see what’s good!”

“I’ll come with you,” Yusuke nodded. “My stomach has settled, but I’d still appreciate a break from the stagnant van air.”

“Nah, man, you’ll get lost or something! ‘Sides, you know…”

“Ryuji, why are you winking? Is there something in your eye?”

“Can we please just get going—“

A knock on the side of the van interrupted the conversation. The team looked at each other, and then Ryuji leaned over and slid open the side door. Standing outside was Akira, hands stuffed in the pockets of his slacks, school bag slung casually over one shoulder, eyebrows raised.

“Were you guys planning on coming in, or…?”

Ann was the first one to react; she shoved Ryuji bodily out of the door. He yelped and stumbled, colliding with Akira, who planted his feet and slung an arm around Ryuji’s shoulder, laughing.

Morgana stuck his head out of Akira’s school bag to shout “What the hell, you big oaf—“ but was cut off by Futaba launching herself from the van with a cheer, leaping with complete certainty that Akira would catch her, too. And then they were all tumbling out despite themselves, chattering and laughing, too happy to have Akira back in the flesh to stick to the plan. Ryuji kept his arm slung around Akira’s shoulder while Ann lamented the uncoolness of his new-old school uniform. Makoto had to catch Yusuke’s collar as he attempted to amble along to the side of the house to check on the status of some incredibly poorly positioned azaleas; Haru leaned down immediately to scratch Morgana’s ears, and when Akira put a hand to his chest and pretended to be wounded, she stood up on her tiptoes and, laughing, patted Akira’s head as well. Akira ducked his head, grinning in that half-hidden way he had, and reached up to push his non-existent glasses up his nose, a tic he hadn’t quite gotten rid of in the four months since he’d stopped hiding behind his reading glasses. Futaba laughed at him, and in retaliation, he snatched the glasses off her face and shoved them on his own, crossing his eyes and exclaiming at her high prescription. He laughed out loud at Yusuke’s irritated haranguing of his family’s decorating sense, agreeing with him about the azaleas and recognizing that the other boy would have found his house wanting if he lived in a mansion, as long as it was situated some three and a half hours away from the cluttered cafe in Yongen-jaya. He bumped his head into Ryuji’s shoulder like a cat, and Ryuji responded by tucking him into a headlock and giving him a noogie so enthusiastic he saw stars.

Home, Akira thought, was other people.

Days until Summer Comiket: 28

Chapter Text

The first night after their arrival saw the team traipsing down to the wide, grassy banks of the shallow river that meandered through town, right around dusk. Futaba had done her research and informed Akira last week that they were too early for the Perseids, but the Delta Aquariid meteor shower should be slowly ramping up activity by the time they all arrived, and he was legally obligated to take her to see them. After all, she’d explained, you could barely see normal stars in the light-polluted Tokyo sky, and as someone who was basically allergic to being out in the wilderness, this might be literally her only chance to ever see a meteorological phenomenon, ever.

She was walking next to Akira now, her arms wrapped around the old fold-up telescope Sojiro had found in his attic, humming some theme song absent-mindedly. On his other side was Haru. She met his eyes when she saw him glance over at her, and smiled.

“It was nice of your parents to let us use all this,” she said, indicating the tote bag she was carrying, full of bug spray and flashlights. Yusuke, walking behind them, had an armful of blankets, while Ann’s arms were filled with snacks from the convenience store, paid for by a generous donation from the First Bank of Mr. and Mrs. Kurusu.

Akira smiled back, eyebrows raised only a little sardonically. Even on this, their second meeting, his friends continued to be comically surprised that his parents were, on the whole, not monsters. Oh, Ann had been too loud and friendly with them, trying to hide her nerves, and Futaba still hid behind Akira, fixing them with a suspicious stare while they asked her polite questions about how Sojiro was getting on. They’d never met the man, although they’d spoken on the phone several times; a business partner of his father’s had set up the whole arrangement. Akira had given them the broad strokes of Futaba’s relation to Sojiro when he’d returned, when they’d asked him in guilty voices full of false cheer to tell him about the friends he’d made in Tokyo. He’d given them the broad strokes of everyone’s situation, in a way that they could understand. One a model, one a promising artist, one the student council president. If he’d told them how he thought of them, how brave they were, how determined, Futaba’s tenacity in pushing her own limits and Ryuji’s devotion to defending the weak, Makoto’s quest for her own justice and Haru’s kindness in the face of everyone who tried to grind her down to dust— they would have nodded, and smiled, and his father would have said “That’s nice. Do they know what they’re going to study in college yet?”

In short, the worst sin his parents had committed had been being content to live small, normal lives in a small, normal town where everyone knew their place. It wasn’t their fault they’d ended up with a son so unable to keep his head down.

Once they reached an acceptable spot (chosen by Yusuke, who spent a great deal of time arguing that twenty feet further down the bank would frame the lights of the town in a pleasing manner above a bend in the river, and Futaba, who wandered around with her star chart app pulled up examining the horizon until Akira had to snatch her back from the shore before she fell in), Haru and Ann began spreading out the blankets as Makoto unpacked the food from the convenience store. Yusuke took charge of Sojiro’s carefully packed bento, exclaiming with delight as each new tier was revealed. Morgana, eyes wide, darted under one of the blankets as he chased a bug, eliciting teasing from Ryuji.

“Cut it out, you guys,” Ann said with a roll of her eyes as the two of them squared off, ready for a fight. “You are such children! Ryuji, if you’re not gonna help, go skip some rocks by the water or something rather than getting in the way!” She then gave him such an exaggerated wink that Ryuji was surprised none of the others seemed to notice it, and he nodded hastily and jogged down to the shoreline before she could inflict any more poor attempts at subtlety on the world at large.

He was thirty yards downriver when Akira caught up to him, to Ryuji’s absolute lack of surprise. “She kick you out too?” he asked, nearly keeping his voice steady, almost dreading to think of what incredibly obvious gambit Ann had used to get him to come spend time with Ryuji alone.

“Yep.” Akira shrugged, the neutral expression on his face betraying nothing. “Don’t tell anyone, but that’s not the first cicada Morgana’s eaten, and it won’t be the last.” He turned to look over his shoulder, back at the rest of the group.

Ryuji followed his gaze down the riverbank. Back at the blankets, a squabble had broken out. Futaba had apparently stolen Yusuke’s potato snacks, and was engaged in a lively game of keep-away; her shrieks echoed down the bank as Yusuke finally lost his patience with her game, picked her up off the ground with one arm around her waist, and snatched them back.

“So… that sure is happening, huh?” Akira asked, turning back to Ryuji and raising an eyebrow.

“Man, don’t even get me started,” Ryuji said with a snort, rubbing one hand through his hair impatiently. “See, this is the shit that happens when you’re not around to keep an eye on everyone. I woke up to like fifty texts the other day about his research on flower language. Apparently that’s a thing?”

Ryuji wasn’t a very perceptive person, but Akira was an open book. To him, anyway. He’d never understood how people could call him inscrutable; expressions flitted over his face quickly, but he wasn’t as good at hiding them as he thought he was. Or maybe it was just that not many people had watched him for as long as Ryuji had. Akira had hunched his shoulders slightly, and tilted his head away, and Ryuji knew exactly what he meant.

“Look, man,” he said with a sigh, clapping a hand on Akira’s shoulder, feeling the tension in his muscles. “You can get why he didn’t go out of his way to mention it to you, right? I mean, you basically treat her like a little sister. You know the weird shit he talks himself into. Probably has himself convinced you’ll challenge him to some kinda samurai duel to the death for her honor.”

Akira’s mouth quirked in a slight grin at that. “Maybe I will.”

“Cool, go for it. At least it’ll keep him from calling me at ass-o’clock at night. Or you could just sic Boss on him. Probably end up the same way.”

“That’s too cruel even for me. Besides,” Akira added lightly, taking a step towards the bank and stretching his arms over his head, “I know exactly what Futaba’s capable of, and I like not having embarrassing photos of myself floating across the Shibuya billboards.” He knelt down, eyes focused on the ground as he searched the stones scattered on the dirt, picking up and then rejecting those that weren’t smooth enough or flat enough. “You should be careful. Keep complaining about Yusuke, and I’ll start to think you actually mean it. Actually, I’m glad you guys are getting closer.”

Ryuji glanced back over at the rest of the group. The snack war had drawn to a conclusion, and Makoto was helping Futaba set up the portable telescope she’d brought. Morgana was polishing off a box of convenience store sushi. Haru said something that made Makoto laugh, then look over her shoulder at Yusuke, struggling with the dim light, his face six inches from his sketchbook. He looked back at Akira, standing alone a few feet away from him, facing towards the river. Akira tossed a stone with an expert flick of his wrist, and watched as it skipped six times across the smooth water, the sound echoing off the riverbank as it faded.

Ryuji squatted down, leaning his arms on his knees, chin in his hands. “We miss you, man,” he said bluntly. “I miss you. Yeah, we get by okay, but it ain’t the same. So you don’t gotta worry, or anything. About us movin’ on or whatever.”

“I’m not worrying.”

“Bullshit,” Ryuji shot back kindly, standing up with a handful of rocks and taking the few steps needed to close the distance between them. “You’re a worrier, bro. You start messing with shit with your hands, and your shoulders get all stiff, and you get real sassy.” Akira frowned and rolled his shoulders as Ryuji skipped a rock across the water. “Betcha you’ve been sleeping way too much again, too. I know you, dude. I watch you all the time.”

Akira had drawn his arm back, another stone at the ready, but fumbled his throw as Ryuji spoke, throwing the stone straight into the water with a loud “bloop” noise that perfectly matched the “bloop” feeling in Ryuji’s throat as his heart tried to leap out of his body via his trachea.

“I mean—!” he half-shouted, cursing his big mouth. Why don’t you just grab his collar and plant one on him, dumbass! It’d be just as obvious! “You know, you— once you’ve seen a dude plan to take down the government, you kinda get a sense for when he’s freaking over something, y’know? Not like you ever freak freak, not like me, but Akira-freak. Like, man, here’s a dude who seems mega chill, but actually he’s stressed AF and that’s why he bought five hundred ice packs off the home shopping network and reorganized his snack cabinet by ‘mouthfeel’ at 3 AM!”

“Ryuji.”

“So it’s not watching like, stalking-watching, I’m not takin’ notes and shit, but when you’re around someone, you watch ‘em, right? Like it’d be rude as hell to just, just not look at them, cause—“

“Ryuji!”

Ryuji sunk back into a crouch, looking up at Akira with a hangdog expression. “What?”

Akira looked down at him, head cocked, and ran a hand through his hair with a flourish. “It’s because I’m so handsome, isn’t it.”

As Ryuji watched, he waggled his eyebrows.

Ryuji let out a snort, then a weak chuckle. “Yeah, bro. That’s it. You’re just way too handsome.” Now would be a real good time for a river monster to leap out of the water and carry him off. Not that he didn’t appreciate Akira’s attempt at diffusing the tension, but the fact that there was tension at all just meant that he was, as usual, totally incapable of saying human words in a way that didn’t make him sound like an idiot and a half.

“Stylish, too.”

“Yeah, you could be a model.”

“Devilishly charming.” Akira crouched down, so that he was eye to eye with Ryuji, and gave him a wink. Ryuji groaned and shoved him over; Akira sat down hard on the grass with a laugh.

“Don’t push your luck,” Ryuji shot back at him. “Your ego’s big enough already.”
“Impossible. I don’t have an ego. I’m just really handsome and stylish and charming, I can’t help that.”

They were both laughing by then, Ryuji with a certain amount of relief. He knew Akira’s bravado was always at least 60% horseshit, but he still preferred it to Akira acting withdrawn and out of sorts, holding him at arm’s length as he pretended to be fine.

They sat in silence for a moment, Ryuji fiddling with the stones around his feet; then Akira stood up, brushing sand and dirt off his dark jeans. “Almost dark enough by now,” he said. Ryuji hadn’t been paying much attention, but it was true he could barely see the opposite bank of the wide river. The light had faded quickly, once the sun had disappeared below the mountains.

“We should probably get back,” Ryuji agreed. Akira held out his hand, and Ryuji took it, pulling himself up as Akira planted his feet.

Once he was standing, he tried to release his grip, only to find, with a swooping feeling in his stomach, that Akira was still clasping his hand firmly.

“Akira?” he said, wincing as he heard his own voice crack.

“Yeah?”

“What’s up, buddy?”

Akira shrugged. Ryuji’s stomach somersaulted.

“Can you see the blankets?”

“Uhh…” Ryuji looked over his shoulder; the coming darkness flattened the colors into gray and blue and blurred the background, but he could see the bright smudges of Futaba and Ann’s hair, and a glint of light from a cell phone. “Not really. I can tell they’re over there, though. I don’t think we’ll get lost, if that’s what you’re—“

He cut off sharply as he turned back to Akira, who was suddenly much, much closer than he had been, six inches if that, and closing the distance quickly; Ryuji barely had time to close his eyes before Akira’s lips were on his. Ryuji entwined his fingers with Akira’s tightly, without any conscious effort on his part, gripping desperately at anything that could hold him steady against the shock of it.

It was a quick kiss, Akira pulling away just as Ryuji’s frantically short-circuiting brain began to comprehend what was happening. He gaped at Akira, mouth hanging open, blinking rapidly. Akira let out a breathy laugh.

“I had to put you out of your misery,” he said, clapping a hand on Ryuji’s shoulder in what would have normally been a friendly gesture, but it was different now, everything was different, and Akira’s hand didn’t rest there but idly crept over to tangle in the short hair at the base of Ryuji’s neck.

“Holy shit,” Ryuji said in response.

“Yeah,” Akira agreed.

“You like me. I mean, you like like me.”

“Have for a while.” Akira smiled slightly, and tilted his head. “I just wasn’t sure… about you, I mean. Didn’t want to scare you off. But then Ann got involved, and, well—“

Ryuji groaned. “I don’t even wanna know what she’d be like if she wasn’t trying to be subtle.” He still had Akira’s hand clasped in his, and he gave it a hesitant squeeze, testing out the new feeling. “I, uh. It’s probably pretty obvious by now, but I… got a thing for you too. And I don’t really know how stuff like this works. Y’know, dating and— and shit like that. But…”

Akira leaned in, pressing his forehead against Ryuji’s, making his eyes cross and his breath hitch. “Hey.”

“Hey what?”

“Feel this.”

He pulled back and held out his arm; Ryuji looked at him askance.

“Feel your shirt?”

“Just do it.”

“You’re not gonna do what I think you’re gonna do, are you?” Ryuji sighed, and grinned, and felt the sleeve of Akira’s shirt.

“Guess what it’s made out of.”
“You’re gonna do it. You’re gonna make the joke.”

“It’s made out of boyfriend material,” Akira said, completely seriously, before the corners of his eyes crinkled and he started laughing. Ryuji laughed, too, and caught Akira’s shoulders in a hug; before he knew it, he had the other boy pressed to his chest, Akira’s arms around him, fingers digging into his back, as the other boy laughed and laughed until Ryuji stopped him with another kiss, and another, and another.

————

Futaba frowned at her phone, then adjusted the telescope a few degrees to the left. “It should be about here…”

She looked up as she heard footfalls on the grass. It was Akira and Ryuji, emerging from the darkness, back from whatever they had been doing down by the shore; she heard Morgana make some high-strung comment about cats being able to see in the dark, something that made Akira chuckle and Ryuji babble a protest, but she wasn’t paying much attention. The reason for that was looming over her left shoulder, waiting for the telescope with what he probably thought was patience but what Futaba thought was an incredibly unnecessary and distracting encroachment into her personal space.

“I’ll tell you when I have it!” she said irritably, looking over her shoulder at Yusuke. “You’re distracting me!”

“My apologies,” he said hastily, holding up his hands and taking a few steps backwards. Haru, sitting on a blanket a few feet away, giggled. Knowing exactly what she was thinking, Futaba shot her a murderous look.

“Do you use a telescope a lot?” Haru asked, displaying her usual passive immunity to Futaba’s glares, resting her chin on her hands as she looked upwards innocently. “You seem to know what you’re doing!”

“Not really,” Futaba replied, turning back to the telescope. “It’s Sojiro’s, and he forgot he had it until I reminded him. I guess he bought it way back to look at Hale-Bopp, but he pulled it out sometimes when I was a kid, for lunar eclipses and stuff. That’s basically all you can see in Tokyo, with the light pollution. The newer ones have computers, but with this old one I have to use an app to find anything…” she looked through the viewfinder once more, then exclaimed in delight. “Got it! Go ahead, Inari, eat your heart out.”

She backed away from the telescope, allowing Yusuke to take her place at the eyepiece. He bent almost double to look through the lens, then gasped in a way that she would have taken as sarcasm from anyone else. “Incredible! To think I can see the rings so clearly, although it’s hundreds of thousands of miles away…” He continued in that vein for a bit, extolling the virtues of Saturn to the group. Futaba felt herself smile despite herself at his excitement, relieved it was too dark for anyone else to notice. “Are those bright spots its moons?

“Scoot over,” Futaba said, waiting for him to move back a healthy distance before edging her way into the space where she could peer through the lens. “Mmm… yep. I think… yeah, Titan’s to the left,” she said, checking her app, then backing away to let him have another look. “I think you can see Rhea, too?” She shoved her hands into the pocket of her sweatshirt as she looked up into the sky; even though it was summer, they were higher in elevation than Tokyo, and as the sun had set, a noticeable chill had crept into the air.

“Do you think that one day, humans will expand out into the rest of the solar system?”

Futaba shrugged, as her eyes traced the path of the Milky Way, arcing faintly over the sky like spilled sugar. “Space stations, maybe. Mostly the other planets are uninhabitable. We have a probe orbiting Saturn right now, but it’s scheduled to be burnt up soon. It’ll go through the rings a few times, and then pew! Right into the atmosphere. All neatly scheduled because of a bunch of equations written before any of us were even born.” She put her hands on her hips, and turned back towards him. “And that is why physics is a valuable field and you need to stop sleeping through class.”

“As I’m passing the class and have no intention of becoming a space engineer, I fail to see your point,” Yusuke said archly, without looking up from the telescope.

“My point is, the next time you come to me looking for homework help, I’m going to make you beg for it.”
“I’m not above that.”

“And I’m withholding curry until you get all the problems right.”

“You wouldn’t dare— ah, I bumped it. Saturn is lost in the vast abyss.“

“I can’t believe you lost a planet! NASA is gonna be so mad. That’s the second one this decade!”

“In my defense, if the telescope weren’t set so low to the ground, I wouldn’t have—“

“Oh, would you two stop flirting and settle down over here already?” Morgana yowled, tail lashing back and forth. “We’re trying to relax!”

Futaba felt herself go pale, then flush to the roots of her hair. “Morgana, you—“

Before she could think of a sufficiently convincing protest, denial, and/or insult, Akira, who had sprawled out on the largest blanket between Ann and Ryuji, reached over and scooped Morgana up. As the cat squawked a protest, Akira gently held him up over his face and pressed a delicate kiss to his nose.

“Knock it off,” he said kindly, then craned his neck back to look at Futaba. “You guys should come lay down, though. You’re missing the meteors. And scaring the local wildlife.”

Face still crimson (thank heaven it was too dark for anyone to notice), Futaba tugged the hood of her sweatshirt up over her head before scampering over to join Haru. She sat down with a thump, then curled up next to her, too mortified to even look up to see Yusuke’s response to Morgana’s assessment of the situation.

Haru’s arms were pillowed behind her head, but she removed one to curl around Futaba reassuringly. “You know,” she said thoughtfully, over Morgana’s continued grumbles about are we a band of thieves or a band of hormonal teenagers, I’ve made my peace with Lady Ann getting a girlfriend, but I can’t believe I have to deal with the rest of you fools too— “This is much nicer than the last time I went to the countryside.”

“Oh? When was that?” Makoto asked, relief at the change in subject evident in her voice.

“Hmm, I was a first year, I think,” Haru replied, tapping a finger on her chin. “We stayed in a lovely old inn up in the mountains. One night, I couldn’t sleep, so I decided to take a walk in the woods, but…”

“But what?” Ann asked, rolling over on her stomach to look at Haru with interest.

“Well…” Haru hesitated just long enough to pique everyone’s curiosity. “It was a very peaceful path during the daytime, so I thought I would be safe, but as I walked, I kept hearing a strange noise.” All of a sudden, Futaba realized what Haru was doing, and had to press her hands against her mouth to muffle her giggle. “It sounded like something was being dragged along the underbrush.”

There was a contemplative silence. Then there was a crunching sound, and half of the group jumped nervously. The source wasn’t anything mysterious, though, and Ryuji snatched the container of potato snacks away from Yusuke with a grumble.

“Really, dude? You’re gonna give us all a heart attack. Go on, Haru.”

“Well, it was dark, and the first couple of times I turned around, I couldn’t see a thing. It stopped when I looked, you see. But eventually, I reached a bit of a clearing, and as I turned quickly I was able to get a glimpse in the moonlight. It was a girl, lying behind a log, her arms crossed on top of it—“

“No!” Makoto shrieked, sitting up suddenly. “No, we are not doing this! We are not telling ghost stories at night in the middle of the wilderness!”

“I live in the suburbs,” Akira protested, although it went unnoticed as Haru turned her best puppy dog eyes on Makoto and Futaba dissolved into peals of laughter.

“Don’t give me that look. Everyone just— just lie down, and look at the stars, and stop talking nonsense!”

They did.

It lasted about five minutes.

“Once, last winter, I was in the third floor bathroom at Shujin, when I heard a voice—“

“Akira, I will drive back to Tokyo right now!”

————

“Not taking a bath?”

Futaba looked up to see Akira standing over her, dressed in the small inn’s simple blue and white cotton yukata, a towel draped over his head. The inn’s lobby opened onto an interior garden, and she was curled up on an antique wooden bench with her 3DS, checking up on some sorely neglected villagers. Akira had suggested the place to them in the first place because of its small but well-maintained hot spring, and with his flushed cheeks and wet hair, he had clearly just come from it.

“I will later,” she said, scooting over on the bench to make room for him to sit down. “Everyone else is in there now, and it’s kinda…”

“Guts not high enough?”

“Yeah, exactly,” she nodded. “I mean, I’ve only ever been to a public bath with my mom, and I’m really not interested in fact-checking anime hot springs episodes. Is it not weird for guys? Boyfriends aside, I mean,” she said with a scolding tone, meant to convey ‘how dare you keep something this important from me?’ There had been a general air of surprise when Akira and Ryuji had come clean the morning after their stargazing trip, casually, while they were shopping at the local grocery store for ingredients for a barbecue dinner. Haru had gone so far as to say “I didn’t notice, I was so focused on—“ before Futaba had grabbed her arm with a wide-eyed stare and she’d finished with “—school! So focused on school I didn’t notice.”

Akira shrugged, and rubbed the towel on his hair with a sheepish grin. “Hey, fair’s fair.”

“I don’t know what you mean,” she said stubbornly, staring down at her console, as if Ruby the rabbit asking her for a dinosaur fossil was suddenly the most interesting thing in the world.

“Of course,” he said agreeably, in a way that didn’t fool her at all. “Anyway, to answer your question, I’ve never felt strange about it. Most guys don’t, I think. Honestly, though, can you imagine anything fazing Yusuke?”

“Not really,” Futaba answered stoically, eyes and mind laser-focused on the screen.

“This isn’t our first time to a public bath together, anyway,” Akira said conversationally, leaning back on his hands casually. “I’ve seen Yusuke naked a lot. He’s pretty toned, underneath those clothes. Kind of sinewy, with how skinny he is, but his thighs are—“ he cut off, dissolving into laughter, as Futaba leaned forward, muffling a shriek in her own lap.

“You ass!” she cried, sitting back up and thumping her fists ineffectively against his shoulder and arm. “How long have you known?”

“I had a hunch,” he said, not bothering to protect himself against her onslaught. Once she stopped, he reached over to ruffle her hair, eliciting a grumble as she smoothed it back down.

“It’s just so embarrassing,” she groaned, hiding her face in her hands. “Having feelings, like some, some kind of—“

“Normal human being?” Akira said dryly.

“Yeah, exactly. I should be better than that!” She wrinkled her nose and saved her game before closing her 3DS. “…You aren’t really mad I didn’t tell you, are you?”

Akira shrugged, looking up at the sky; clouds were moving in, portending overnight rain. “Depends. Does Ann know?” Futaba nodded, guiltily. “Haru?” Another nod. “Makoto?”

“No, but I did make her break into his dorm room,” Futaba admitted. Akira opened his mouth to ask, then thought better of it.

“I’m glad,” he said, instead, and Futaba looked up in surprise. “If you hadn’t told anyone, I would have been worried that you were getting into your own head too much.”

“I tried to text you about it a couple of times,” she admitted, tucking her legs up underneath her on the bench. “But everything I came up with just sounded so dumb. And I kinda… I mean, you were heading off so many freakouts about school, I didn’t wanna dump on you too much. Especially once Ann got so excited about it. You can’t use the same party members all the time! What if you put all your best equipment on one member, and then they die?”

“You lose all your best equipment, and have to train up a new one,” Akira said, nodding. “Makes sense. I mean, it’s dumb, because there’s basically no amount of stuff you can dump on me that would make me tired of you, and also I’m going to live forever, but I get where you were coming from.”

Futaba shot him a quick grin, then looked back down at her lap. It was amazing how a few words from him could always make her feel reassured… was what she was thinking, as he began nudging her in the side.

“So, when did it start? What was it about him, his tap water ranking list or the poses he does when he’s feeling all overwrought? Have you bugged his dorm room? Want me to drop him some hints?” Each question was punctuated by a nudge, Futaba squeaking and jumping away each time until she was perched on the edge of the bench, laughing and trying her best to evade his longer reach to poke him in the stomach in retaliation.

“You’re one to talk!” she scolded. “Your boyfriend tried to have a fistfight with a cat! More than once!”

“It’s his charm point. Wouldn’t have him any other way.”

“Gross.”

“Yeah,” he agreed with a grin. “Pretty gross. Speaking of… you gonna tell him?”

Futaba let out a world-weary sigh. “Y…yeah,” she replied, clasping her hands together and intertwining her fingers. “I gotta. I think I’m gonna explode if I don’t. I’m still working out the details, but… I asked him to take me to Comiket,” she said, silently apologizing for leaving out the part that they were going to Comiket explicitly to sell art of Akira and his now-boyfriend sucking face. —Wow, that had worked out pretty well. Maybe she was psychic? “And I don’t wanna make it weird, so… I’ll do it then, right at the end of the day. Gotta leave myself an escape route,” she explained.

“I don’t think you’ll need one,” Akira said with a smile. Futaba fixed him with a flatly skeptical look. “I mean it. I think you’ll be able to steal his heart.”

“That’s so cheesy,” she groaned, but before Akira could protest or she could chastise him more, the other two boys emerged from the entrance to the baths, just down the hallway. Ryuji slung his arm over Akira’s shoulders in greeting, apparently making up for lost time, those months when he’d wished he could reach right through his phone to the other boy. Futaba went pink and covered her face, pretending it was because of the PDA and not because of Yusuke’s flushed skin and somehow artfully disheveled hair, and the four of them made their way upstairs to the two rooms the group had rented, for one more night of card games and local snacks and whispered midnight confidences before their return to Tokyo.

Days until Summer Comiket: 25

Chapter Text

It hadn’t been Futaba’s intention, but having a plan when it came to what she’d started referring to obliquely as The Inari Situation had taken a lot of pressure off. It was like that part in any Final Fantasy game when you finally get the airship and can take a breather, running around the world doing pointless side quests and leveling up while the final boss waits patiently for you in its cave/giant fish monster/interdimensional time vortex. There was still a good week and a half before she had to equip her ultimate weapon and jump into the fray, and so she found herself able to act almost normally around Yusuke, safe in the knowledge that nothing unexpected would happen.

She had invited him over that afternoon, but when the doorbell rang, she was still kneeling in front of the bathtub, using the detachable shower head to rinse out the orange dye sitting on her freshly bleached roots. She hastily turned the water off and wrapped her half-washed hair in a towel, one of the cheap dark-colored ones reserved for her touch-ups, and scampered out to answer the door.

“You’re early!” she accused him as she swung open the door. Yusuke crossed his eyes, attempting to look at the pointed finger she had thrust in his face. “It takes you almost an hour to get here from your dorm!”

“I was in Shibuya,” he said, wrinkling his brow. “And no it doesn’t. The dorm is a thirty-minute train ride away.”

“Please,” Futaba said with a wave of her hand, stepping out of the way to let him into the house. He slipped his shoes off and placed them neatly on the rack by the door as she explained. “Thirty minutes covers the train, and the walk to and from the station. But sometimes you can’t find your subway pass and leave late, and sometimes the bakery up the street is having a sale on day-old bread that you have to take advantage of, and you know how likely it is for you to see a weird bird or something and accidentally go on a vision quest. Statistically speaking, there’s about an eighty percent likelihood of you actually taking between forty five and fifty five minutes to get to Yongen-jaya!”

“That’s a distressing amount of mathematical analysis.”

“Don’t try it at home, you might sprain something.”

“I happily leave any and all calculations in your capable hands.” Yusuke had been following her down the hallway, but paused in the doorway as she reentered the bathroom. “I thought the books had come in. Are we not looking at them?”

“You interrupted me in the middle of rinsing out my dye,” Futaba explained, pulling the towel off of her head and releasing her hair. Half of it fell across her face, and she pushed it out of the way as she knelt by the tub and removed her glasses. “I gotta rinse it or all my hair will fall out. You can wait in my room, if you want.”

“You trust me that much?”

“Mmm…” Futaba wrinkled her nose. “Good point. You’d better stay where I can keep an eye on you.” Yusuke snorted, and moved a pile of towels out of the way to sit on the bench along one wall of the bathroom. He crossed his legs and folded his hands over his knee, watching as Futaba picked the shower head up from where she’d dropped it at the bottom of the tub and turned the water on.

“Do you need help?” he offered, watching her with interest. Futaba weighed the pros and cons of that for a moment. She didn’t need any help, not with rinsing. But it could absolutely work as an excuse. She let herself ruminate on that, on Yusuke coming over and running his hands through her hair—

“Nope!” she squeaked, glad that the curtain of her hair almost certainly hid her suddenly flushed face. “I-I’m good. I mean, the bleach is the only real hard part. You can’t really go over uneven parts right away, or you could kill your hair. I totally messed it up the first couple of times I tried, but you get the hang of it.”

“Do you always do it yourself? I’d think it would be hard to ensure even coverage.”

Futaba rinsed out her scalp once more for good measure, making sure the water was running mostly clear, then turned off the water and wrung out her hair. Yusuke seemed genuinely curious about her process; she hadn’t expected that, but didn’t mind. “I usually have Sojiro check if I’m good, but I wanted to get this done today. ‘Sides, I’ve done it so often that I’m pretty sure I could do it in my sleep by now.” She was too practiced to even really need Sojiro’s help, especially after the months she’d spent struggling through life alone, touching up her roots in the bathroom at school before trudging back to this or that relative’s house because at least, if nothing else, she could control her hair. But these days she liked the evenings, once a month or so, when she’d sit on the living room floor with an old towel around her shoulders and her hair clumsily sectioned up with plastic clips, watching an old dubbed episode of The X Folders as Sojiro painted bleach with a surprising amount of dexterity on the parts of her head that were hardest to reach.

After all, he had been the person she’d called frantically when, at thirteen, she’d gotten herself into a fit of pique and attempted to dye her hair blonde. Her mother had been at work until past ten at night for two weeks, pushing off both a parent-teacher conference and a planned trip to buy a new computer monitor for the beginnings of what Futaba would later call her battle station, which was clearly the more important broken promise. So Futaba had bought a package of drugstore dye, given the instructions a cursory glance, figured she was smart enough not to mess it up, and gone to town. This ought to get her mom’s attention. See what happens when you leave your daughter unsupervised for too long?

When Sojiro rushed in the door, after a frantic trip to a beauty supply store during which he’d bought every product the salesgirl thought might help (“Please don’t tell mom, and I can’t go to a salon, they’ll laugh at me, I can’t take it—“), it was to see Futaba in tears, hair looking rather like a patchy tiger who had gotten accidentally sun-bleached. After taking a moment to collect himself (“Sojiro, don’t laugh! Yes you are, I saw you!”) they spent the next two hours researching bleach volumes and watching video tutorials. After calming down, Futaba decided she liked the accidental orange parts better than the blonde parts that had actually come out correctly, anyway, so back to the store Sojiro went. And an hour and a half later, after ruining a set of Wakaba’s towels and permanently staining part of the bathtub, they both sighed in relief as they looked at Futaba’s new hair, mostly an even color and only a little bleach-crispy at the ends.

(In the end, her mother thought the new hair color was as cute as anything, but by then Futaba was already feeling guilty for throwing a tantrum, so that was all right. And whatever Wakaba ended up discussing at the delayed parent-teacher conference, she bought Futaba ice cream afterward, and Futaba somehow never got a single uniform infraction for her dye job.)

Once Futaba finished wringing out her hair, she put her glasses back on and looked over at Yusuke. He was staring at her intently. Rather than being embarrassed at his gaze, she stood up and put her hands on her hips. She knew that look.

“No,” she said in her best stern voice, turning to look at herself in the mirror, wiping streaks of dye off her neck with a towel.

“I was only wondering if by using a stencil—“

“Whatever you’re thinking, you don’t get to try it on my hair!” she shot back, using her fingers to untangle her wet hair and push her bangs down over her forehead. “Use your own!”

“There isn’t enough of it.”

“So ask Ann.”

“Although it would be striking, it would probably jeopardize her modeling career.”

“That weird, huh?”

“I’m glad you asked. By juxtaposing an overall gradient with blockier sections— assuming the dye can be aerosolized, naturally, and that creating a sharp divide vertically would only be a matter of finding the right material to block off sections—“

Futaba glared at her reflection. I can’t believe you want to put your mouth on his mouth, she accused it silently.

In the end, she got him off the topic simply by walking down the hall to her room. He followed, still ruminating on how inspiring the chance to work in a new medium would be, but as she expected, he cut off as she knelt down and pulled a cardboard box out from under her bed.

“Is that them?” he asked, squatting down beside it. “You haven’t opened it yet?”

“I figured we could, y’know. Look at them together. I mean, you were the one who did most of the work, so…” Futaba mumbled as she searched in the detritus on her desk. She found the box cutter she was looking for under a pile of things she’d dumped out of her bag after roaming around the city with Akira yesterday (a stack of cosplay magazines, a half-empty bag of potato chips, and three strips of purikura), then came back over to the box to open it. “Besides, Akira and Morgana were here yesterday, and I couldn’t think of a way to prevent them from snooping unless I left it taped up!”

After she sliced the tape open, Yusuke reached into the box almost reverently, pulling out the top copy of the doujinshi. Futaba watched him, chin resting in her hands, as he paged through it, nodding at some pages, frowning at others.

“Ah… I forgot to erase part of the screen tone there. And the angle of that foot… hmm.”

“Yeah, I know, right? Can’t believe you didn’t draw twenty pages totally perfect your first time out of the gate,” Futaba admonished him sarcastically, leaning forward to peer at the book upside down.

“Don’t we all strive for perfection?” Yusuke said absently, flipping the page. “Oh, I forgot about this scene. The flow of these panels is quite nice.”

Futaba tilted her head, trying to remember the exact phrasing, then spread her arms dramatically. “‘What’s the point of achieving perfection? There is none! Not a single thing! If something is perfect, there’s nothing left. No room for imagination, no place left for a person to gain additional abilities! Our job is to create things more wonderful than anything to come before them, but never to obtain perfection…!’” She broke off there, bringing her hands back to her knees. Yusuke was looking at her as if she were a cat who had suddenly stood up on two legs and begun riding a unicycle.

“That was… unexpectedly deep,” he managed at last.

“Thanks,” she said. “It’s from an anime.”

He looked back down at the page, apparently attempting to move on, but looked back up a few seconds later, brow furrowed. Futaba could almost see the dialogue options flitting in front of his eyes. Oh, well. Yusuke didn’t have a leg to stand on when it came to blurting out odd non sequiturs, and she prepared several comebacks to that effect, just in case.

“So you’re saying… you want to put out another comic?”

“You’re one to— oh.” She blinked. “Wait, what?”

“This is good, but it isn’t perfect,” he continued, closing the comic and gesturing with it. “So there must be something left for us to achieve. If we leave our efforts at this, any knowledge we’ve gained will sit uselessly, merely taking up space. Is that what you were saying?”

“I… yes?” Futaba hazarded, squinting into the box as if she could find the answer in there. “—I mean, yes. Absolutely! Nothing for it but to spend a whole bunch of time together for the next four months until winter Comiket. If that’s okay?” she added, peering back up at him. He somehow managed to tower over her even when they were both sitting, and she tilted forward, raising herself up on her toes. “I mean, you did most of the work, if we’re being real.”

“Nonsense. You have a better head for the practical logistics of it. It wasn’t an enterprise I ever would have considered on my own. Although if we continue in the same vein, I believe we should probably treat Akira and Ryuji to dinner, as long as they aren’t too curious about why. How much do I owe you for printing, by the way?”

Futaba shook her head. “Don’t worry about it. I can float the cost until we sell them.”

“Are you sure? Come to think of it…” Yusuke cocked his head, looking somewhat chagrined. “I hope I haven’t been a burden, over the past few months. The art supplies, the food, the arcades… how is it that you always seem to have the spare money to treat me? You haven’t gotten a part-time job, have you? Or is Boss that generous with your allowance?”

Futaba stood up and stretched. “Inari, explaining my financial situation would require me having the time, patience, and energy to explain cryptocurrency to you, and you barely understand physical money. You haven’t eaten yet, right? We’ve got leftovers.”

“It’s past two in the afternoon, of course I’ve—“ whatever protest Yusuke had been about to make was cut off by the sound of his stomach rumbling. Futaba rolled her eyes and beckoned to him.

As she dug through the fridge in the kitchen for the leftover Chinese takeout she, Sojiro, and Akira had ordered for a late dinner last night, she continued their conversation. “Did you run out of grocery money again? I thought Makoto taught you how to budget. I saw her spreadsheets.”

“Sometimes things come up. Who am I to resist the whims of fate?”

“You didn’t buy more of those cursed items, did you? Can you grab some bowls? They’re next to the microwave.”

Yusuke sighed as he opened the cupboard, taking out two bowls and setting them on the counter. Futaba emerged from the fridge with several plastic containers, and set about dishing a little bit of everything into both bowls. “They’re not cursed. Why do you keep calling them cursed?”

“How do you find ancient foreign masks at a flea market and not bring home a curse?”

“I manage somehow. In any case, I had to replenish some paints, buy new canvases, pay for extra loads at the laundromat after I spilled turpentine on a pair of trousers… and by that point, I’d hit my spending limit for the week. So you see, I am budgeting.”

He looked so smugly proud at that that Futaba had no response except to make a face at him as she put the bowls in the microwave.

“I’m quite used to going without,” he protested. “Self-deprivation is no impediment to a sufficiently focused mind. In any case, between you, Boss’s curry, and Ryuji’s mother having me for dinner, I’ve been eating very well as of late. And even if I weren’t, it’s the highest form of devotion to sacrifice for your craft.”

“Who fed you that one?” He shot her a warning look; she crossed her arms. “Yusukeee. Who told you that?”

“Yusuke? You must be serious.”

“Don’t be an ass. And I am serious.” Futaba turned around and boosted herself up to sit on the counter next to the sink; all things considered, she felt on more of an even footing with Yusuke when they were at eye level. “And this isn’t just a callout post for you! I mean, we’ve both got all kinda weird stuff going on, right? I mean, I forget to eat all the time. But I don’t pretend it’s noble, I just get really into my stuff.”

“And you’re the only person to text me at 3 AM on a school night.” Yusuke leaned with one hip against the counter, arms crossed, looking mulish. “No wonder you fall into a coma every few months. It’s simply your brain begging for mercy.”

“Right, but the only reason you know that is because you’re up at 3 AM too. So if you’re gonna listen to anyone, listen to me. ‘Cause there’s the baseline weirdness, which is whatever, and then there’s the stuff… well.” She nibbled on a fingernail, wondering how much to say. She didn’t know, not for sure. But she remembered spending the first few weeks at Sojiro’s afraid to ask for food when she was hungry, and scurrying in secret to take a shower before someone could tell her no, and that was after five months of living with her uncle. What would sixteen years do to someone? If you were told that self-sacrifice was somehow divine, even by a dirty liar with stacks of hidden wealth, wouldn’t you be left with some subconscious undercurrent of guilt at the prospect of spending more than the bare minimum on your basic needs, the better to devote all your energy to the temple of Art?

The hardest thing for her to get used to about having real, genuine feelings for someone wasn’t always wanting to be with him, or the way he was the first thought on her mind every morning, or the fluttering jerk her heart made whenever they accidentally touched. It was the urge to be there, to help him through the difficult times in any way she could, the aching pull in her heart that told her to offer herself as a support even though what she had to offer was meager at best. She was well aware that for much of her life she’d had roughly the emotional stability of a toothpick bridge. She’d become better lately, through practice and the support of those closest to her, and could now proudly say she was the kind of really sturdy toothpick bridge made by a kid who really wanted extra credit in physics class. But when it came to supporting others, she still felt far more comfortable using her skills and intelligence than anything requiring her to bear the weight of someone else’s troubles. Were it anyone else, she might not have tried so hard, might have fallen comfortably into the role of being taken care of without a second thought. But Yusuke, who hid his vulnerabilities with pride and used his talents like both sword and shield against a world which had never tried to understand him— if she couldn’t understand those feelings, who could?

“We can… talk about that later,” she relented, unwilling to spoil a nice afternoon with discussions about the adults who had tried their best to ruin them. The microwave beeped; Yusuke hit the cancel button, then looked back at her, a curious expression on his face. “Thanks. But for now… how about this?” She clasped her hands together, steepling her fingers and tapping them against her chin. “You eat at least one real meal every day! Even instant noodles are fine, if you put some tofu or veggies in them. Sojiro already feeds you a couple times a week, so that should be easy. And in exchange, I’ll go to bed before 2 AM at least three… no, four nights a week,” she said with a sigh. “I guess I’ll just have to catch up on overseas twitter in first period, instead.”

She thrust out her hand, extending her pinky, before she could get too embarrassed. “Well? Deal?”

“Why?”

She blinked. It wasn’t an argument, it was a genuine question, asked directly. “Because…” she pulled back, clasping her hands together again. “I just… I dunno. Because it’s… important… I guess…?” She ducked her head, letting her damp hair swing down to hide her face. What was his deal? And why did the air in here suddenly feel so weird? Was there a thunderstorm coming? If there was a thunderstorm coming that was going to ruin their festival trip with the group tonight, Yusuke was going to have hell to pay, because it was going to be somehow, definitely his fault.

Yusuke clasped his hands behind his back, leaning down to peer at Futaba’s face through her hair, a slight smile flitting over his lips. She averted her eyes, scooting a little further away along the counter. “W-what?”

“Have you been thinking about this a lot?”

“Of course not! Don’t be stupid.” Why was he smiling like that? He was teasing her for sure, but knowing that didn’t make her any less flustered.

“Despite everything you say, you do care.”

“W-well. I do— I mean, i-it’s not like I care especially, but I c-care, like, in general, you know— who said I don’t care about my friends? What kind of jerk doesn’t care about their—“

As Yusuke took a step closer, trying to get a look at her face for some ungodly reason, Futaba kept inching along the counter, as if a few extra centimeters of space would keep him from seeing the flush to her cheeks. As she babbled, looking anywhere but at him, she forgot about one very important thing.

She scooted just a little further to her right, and shrieked as she fell into the sink.

Before they had time to do anything other than stare at each other in surprise, they heard the front door creak open, and the familiar sound of Sojiro’s footsteps floated down the hall.

“Futaba? Have you left yet?”

Half a second of wordless communication shot between Futaba and Yusuke, their reflexes and teamwork honed by months of fighting in the metaverse. He leaned forward and hoisted Futaba up under her armpits, swinging her down to the floor in one fluid movement as if she weighed nothing at all; she darted around him to grab the bowls of food from the microwave, yanking open a drawer in passing so he could get chopsticks.

She just barely had the time to wonder why they both felt as though Sojiro was about to catch them doing something they shouldn’t be.

By the time Sojiro poked his head through the doorway to the kitchen, they were both sitting calmly at the dining table, Futaba with her legs tucked up underneath her, Yusuke with a steamed bun halfway to his mouth.

“Oh! Hi, Sojiro. I didn’t hear you come in!” Futaba said, looking towards the doorway with an artfully surprised look on her face.

“Hm,” Sojiro said, raising an eyebrow and stroking his beard. “Hi, Yusuke. …Futaba, is that the last bun? I was saving that…”

Yusuke, having just taken a bite of the bun in question, paused mid-chew. He looked at Futaba, then Sojiro, then down at the bun, eyebrows furrowed.

“Well, you can’t give it back to him,” Futaba said with a roll of her eyes as Yusuke swallowed. Turning back to Sojiro, she reassured him, “It’s not, there’s still one more in the fridge. What are you doing here in the middle of the day?”

“Can’t I come into my own house?” he protested, shaking his head. “I just wanted to see you off before the festival tonight. You’re not dressed yet?”

Futaba shook her head. She was still wearing her dyeing outfit, clothes she didn’t mind getting stained, terrycloth shorts and an oversized yellow t-shirt with neon arrows on it, from a brief period in middle school when she thought she might try being into rhythm games. “I was gonna wait until I get to Ann’s. She wanted all the girls to get ready together, so I’ll just change there. Besides, it would make me stand out on the train.”

“I suppose that makes sense,” Sojiro admitted with a sigh. “It’s just… no, never mind.”

Futaba set down her chopsticks and groaned. “Daaaaaad. We’re not doing a repeat of my first day at Shujin! I was almost late because you wanted so many pictures!” Yusuke looked surprised, and Futaba realized he probably hadn’t heard her call Sojiro that before. She tended to reserve it for special occasions, like when she wanted to throw him off balance before asking for a big favor, or when she was feeling unusually vulnerable and affectionate, or when he was being a real dad about things. (Anyway, it was true; it had probably been true long before they’d formalized it with paperwork in front of a judge.)

“All right, all right!” Sojiro said, laughing and holding out his hands in supplication. “I won’t make you put the yukata on here. I don’t think you realize how much you’ve grown, that’s all. Make sure you take plenty of pictures, all right?” This last part was directed at Yusuke, along with a friendly clap on the shoulder.

“Yes, sir,” he said, picking up a dumpling.

“And have fun tonight. Boy, I remember being your age…” He trailed off, then added darkly, as if he’d thought better of it, “…Don’t have too much fun.”

His hand was still on Yusuke’s shoulder, applying firm pressure. Yusuke had paused with the dumpling in a holding pattern, brow wrinkled, looking at Futaba with an expression that said ‘I think I’m supposed to be doing something about this situation, but I’m not sure what it is, and I’m becoming increasingly nervous about it.’ That was how she interpreted it, anyway, and she flapped her hands at Sojiro bossily.

“Shoo! Don’t you have a cafe to run? All your looming is gonna give him indigestion! He already has the stomach of a delicate baby giraffe.” Sojiro chuckled and backed off, turning towards the fridge in search of the promised last bun. Futaba had a fleeting moment of concern that Sojiro knew something, but quickly brushed it off; in any case, it wasn’t like there was anything to know about.

An hour later, after they’d finished their late lunch and Futaba had dried her hair and changed into a t-shirt less bleach-stained, as they walked side by side down the sunny street towards the train station, Yusuke said seemingly out of nowhere, “All right.”

Futaba cocked her head. “Hmm?”

“I’ll eat, and you’ll sleep,” he said. Then he added with a chuckle, “When I put it like that, it’s a wonder we’ve both survived until now.”

“We’re a regular pair of disasters,” Futaba agreed, clutching the handles of the paper shopping bag that held her yukata set a little tighter as she tried not to grin too widely. “Good thing that together we make, like, three quarters of a well-adjusted person.”

“Thank you for handling the math again.”

“I know, right? What would you do without me?”

The subway car was almost full, only scattered empty seats left here and there. Futaba sat down in one, and Yusuke stood in front of her like a shield, holding on to a ceiling strap and planting his feet. Futaba was pretty sure that times like this were meant for standing together in a packed train car, the shorter one delicately clutching onto the taller one’s shirt for balance, the swaying of the subway shoving you into each other as you pretended that you weren’t using the lack of seats as an excuse to stand close— but the train wasn’t that busy, and besides, this let her rest the shopping bag with her yukata safely on her lap. (Maybe the next time they went somewhere together, she’d stop trying to avoid the train at rush hour, and see if she could unlock a special event.)

“Do you want me to accompany you to Ann’s apartment?” Yusuke asked, as they waited on the Shibuya platform for their transfer.

“I’ll be okay,” Futaba said, shaking her head and tapping at her phone. She tilted the screen so he could see the map Ann had sent her. “Once I get off at Otsuka, it’s only two blocks. See? I’ll never level up if I can’t even unlock a new area by myself.” She’d gotten so much better about being in public over the past year that it definitely would have been suspicious to ask for an escort on such a simple mission, no matter how much she liked his company. “Thanks for coming with me on the train, though. You never know what kind of random encounters you’ll get down here.”

“It’s not out of the way. And I feel like I still owe you for whatever questionably legal manipulation you did to my train pass,” he added, as the intercom blared and the subway car pulled into the station. “By the way, how likely am I to be arrested for that?”

“Please. What do you think I am, some kind of amateur?”

(If Futaba had been more familiar with the Tokyo metro past the lines she took to school, Akihabara, and her favorite arcades, she would have realized that Yusuke actually had no reason to transfer to the Yamanote line with her in the first place. Once she disembarked at Otsuka, he maneuvered his way to a different door at the other end of the car, and slipped out just in time to run and catch the inbound train pulling in at the opposite platform. By the time he got back to Shibuya station he had spent forty minutes on this unnecessary round trip, but at one point as they had sat next to each other on the train, Futaba had tilted her head close to his to show him a video on her phone; so, all in all, it had been a worthy use of his time.)

————

”Argh! Ouch! Abort mission!”

“Keep holding her down! I’ve almost got it!” Ann yelled. A few more seconds, and she managed to pop the contact smoothly in Futaba’s eye. “All right. Victory!”

She crawled off of the sofa; she’d been straddling Futaba’s lap, holding her still between her knees, as Haru held her hands, both to comfort her and to prevent her from flailing wildly in the vicinity of Ann’s face. Makoto, sitting on the arm of a sleek cream-colored armchair, looked worried; Shiho, who was staying the week with Ann, was sitting in the same chair, looking like she didn’t know whether she was allowed to laugh or not. Ann dusted her hands and looked with victory at Futaba, who had her hands over her eyes and was looking like a cat who’d just licked a lemon. “It’s fine! Just let it settle. No need to be such a drama queen!”

“There’s plastic in my eye,” Futaba wailed, but as she withdrew her hands and blinked furiously, the contacts drifted into place, and the stinging in her eyes stopped.

“Are they feeling all right?” Makoto asked anxiously. “You can always take them out, you know.”

Futaba cautiously shook her head. “I’m okay… I think,” she said, blinking around at the room. There was a sleek bookcase inset on the opposite wall, and she could read several titles down the spines without even squinting. “Wow. Is this how eyes are supposed to work? Just, like, seeing things all the time? Jeez. Glad I let you talk me into this.”

Ann rolled her eyes affectionately; she’d spent a patient fifteen minutes earlier in the evening talking Futaba down like a treed cat. “So you’re ready for makeup, then?”

Futaba groaned. “Do I have to?”

“Of course not,” Ann replied, surprised. “I mean, no one has to wear makeup. I just think it’s fun for special occasions! Besides, Mika told me my page in that PopTeen feature about the models’ daily makeup was embarrassing, so I wanted to practice on everyone.”

“She’s just jealous you have perfect skin and she needs to cover her dark circles,” Shiho chimed in, sounding equal parts exasperated and affectionate. “I can’t believe you actually hang out with her.”

“I mean, I know she was trying to one-up me, but I actually learned a lot about undertones! For example, Futaba, you’re… um, wait. Do veins look blue or green if you’re warm toned…? Orange hair really suits you, so… maybe warm? Shiho, you’re definitely warm, can you come stand next to her?”

“I think I just have vitamin D deficient undertones,” Futaba interrupted, looking at the underside of her arm in bemusement; Ann had snatched her hand, and was looking at the skin there as if trying to decode a secret message.

“Ann, make some flash cards before you start harassing her,” Shiho said without rancor, coming up behind Ann and tucking the other girl’s arm in hers. “Come on, you promised to do my hair.”

“Oh, fine. I just thought she might want to look extra cute tonight! You know, because…”

Ann raised her eyebrows hopefully; Futaba shook her head infinitesimally, and Ann shrugged and smiled and turned back to Shiho. “Because it’s a special occasion! You’re here, Akira’s here, we’re getting all dolled up…” Futaba breathed a sigh of relief. She actually quite liked Shiho— at least, as much as she liked anyone who was outside her trusted party. She’d met her for the first time back in Golden Week, when Ann had invited Futaba to the arcade with them. Futaba had grumbled and dragged her feet, not enthused about an interloper horning in on her time with her friends, even if the interloper was Ann’s girlfriend. But after ten minutes of playing shooting games Futaba had accused Ann of aiming like a bowl of pudding in an earthquake, and without skipping a beat the previously quiet Shiho had wondered if shaking her back and forth wouldn’t actually improve her aim; they’d spent the next ten minutes riffing on the topic while Ann protested, and Futaba, naturally drawn to dunking on her friends, started warming up to her. Still, it didn’t mean she was entirely comfortable with Ann spilling the details of The Inari Situation to an NPC, even a benign one.

Did she want to look extra cute tonight? she wondered, swinging her legs as Haru plaited her hair into a fishtail braid over one shoulder. It felt like trying to equip armor she didn’t have the strength stat for. Sometimes she liked wearing accessories that were a little punk-ish, but she didn’t really have an interest in pushing her fashion style anywhere past ‘these boots with a lot of buckles make me feel like a cool RPG rebel’. Dyeing her hair was far more about expressing herself than trying to appeal to anyone else; if anything, it was the opposite of trying to appeal, a way to stand apart, showing on the outside how little she felt she had in common with most people on the inside. Probably best not to get too caught up in it, she thought as she let Ann dab some blush on her cheeks and a little neutral eyeshadow on her eyelids (she’d firmly refused mascara, not liking the idea of anyone jabbing anything pointy near her eyes). All that had happened at the pool, once someone (Ann) had drawn attention to the fact she might be trying to be appealing, was that she’d gotten all tangled up in her own self-consciousness. And no matter how well-intentioned certain people (Ann) might be, and how much she appreciated their help sometimes, she was enough of a bull in an emotional china shop on her own, without adding another flailing bull (Ann) trying to guide her.

Still, as she stared at herself in the mirror after she was all dressed, she couldn’t help but think… not bad. She hadn’t worn a yukata since the last festival she’d been to with her mother in her first year of middle school, so the novelty must be part of it. This one was grass-green, with a design of peach-colored carp; her obi was bright yellow, a choice which the salesgirl had called very bold and on-trend, surprising Futaba, who had just thought it looked cheerful. She turned around and peered over her shoulder at the impeccable bow knot tied in the obi by Haru. She’d done the finishing touches on all of their outfits, saying she was glad those lessons on traditional feminine arts were finally useful for something fun.

“A-rank,” she said dubiously, fiddling with the end of her braid, tied off with a small bow.

Haru beamed; Ann, who had played substantially more video games in her life, sighed.

“SS-rank,” she assured the younger girl, pulling out her phone. “We all are! C’mon, selfie before we head out!”

———

“I don’t see it— ohhhhh, the red banners. I thought you meant the gold banners—“ Ann stood on her tiptoes, holding her cell phone to her ear, waving over the heads of the crowd. In response, Morgana appeared as a beacon, being held over the crowd by Akira, protesting halfheartedly until he realized what a good view being over six feet tall gave him.

“What’s so funny?” Futaba demanded, standing on her tiptoes. By general agreement, she’d been enclosed in a phalanx formed by the other four girls as soon as the first drunken college student had tried to pick them up on the subway platform. Unfortunately for the boy, Futaba had been the only one to cringe away and avert her eyes; the rest had gone off loudly and simultaneously, Haru going so far as to follow him a few feet down the platform as he attempted a hasty retreat, exclaiming shrilly about how ashamed his parents would be, to see him harassing poor defenseless young girls like this.

The festival was taking place in a large open plaza a few stops further out from Ann’s apartment; red lanterns and multicolored banners hung high above the crowd, illuminating the twilight with their soft golden glow. There were just enough people to make navigating the plaza difficult, but the congestion was nowhere near the jam-packed density of the fireworks festival closer to downtown. The focal point was a large traditional temple, and Akira and the other boys had staked out a home base to one side of the main steps, leaning on the waist-high elevated stone walkway that wrapped around the building.

Shiho inched closer to Ann, fixing Yusuke with a sideways look as the tall boy arranged his typical finger frame and squinted through it. “Uh… can I help you?”

“Oh, right, you haven’t met each other yet! Yusuke, this is Shiho, she’s back in town from Nagano for the week!” Ann said breezily. “Shiho, this is Yusuke Kitagawa. He’s just like that, so don’t take it personally.”

“The vertical stripes add an unexpected backbone to the traditional hydrangea print,” Yusuke said solemnly, “while the playful colors of your flowered comb balance the tranquility of the dark color scheme of your yukata. I’ve heard a lot about you. Pleased to make your acquaintance.”

“You too,” Shiho said faintly.

“Do me next, do me!” Ann chimed in, extending her arms and setting her sleeves fluttering. Yusuke obligingly looked her up and down, tucking his thumbs into his obi sash. Like last year, he was the only boy in a yukata, although Morgana was wearing a new red and white checkered collar for the occasion.

“The mature gradient-dyed navy obi, accented with a metallic obijime and set against a pattern of mandarin oranges… you remind me of nothing less than a sunset. That’s a different one than last year, isn’t it?”

“New year, new me! I got to take this home from a magazine shoot I did last month,” Ann explained, tucking her hair behind her ear. She’d let her hair out of its signature pigtails, and it cascaded in waves to the small of her back, a French braid across the crown of her head holding her bangs off of her face.

“Don’t,” Makoto said flatly, as Yusuke turned towards her. Ryuji let out a guffaw, and slapped Yusuke on the back, sending him stumbling. Akira shook his head as Ryuji leaned back against the wall, bumping shoulders with him affectionately.

“You had a good run, dude,” Ryuji laughed, as Haru knelt down and pulled a foldable bamboo mat out of the tote bag she was carrying. Yusuke was unfazed, and merely wrinkled his brow and craned his neck, looking past the girls as Morgana jumped down from Akira’s shoulders.

(“You have to act like a normal cat in front of Suzui,” Akira admonished him, the effect somewhat ruined by the fact he was addressing him like a human being, and also by Morgana immediately sticking out his tongue. Shiho wondered if she should let Akira know exactly how much Ann had told her, but decided it would probably be kinder if she didn’t.)

“Did Futaba decide not to come…?” Yusuke asked, with a distinct air of disappointment.

“Oh, no, she’s here,” Ann replied hastily. “She’s just, well…”

“Stealth mode!” a shrill voice called, from behind Ann. “I-I’m wearing clothes that make me blend in with the locals, s-so I shouldn’t stand out at all! And as long as I avoid the boss’s vision cone, I can slip by undetected!”

Akira raised an eyebrow, looking at the sky in thought as he translated. “She’ll come out as long as you don’t compliment her,” he explained, tilting his head towards Yusuke laconically.

“I wasn’t paying empty compliments,” Yusuke protested, “merely discussing my impressions of their ensembles. It isn’t my fault that traditional womenswear involves a delicate interplay between pattern and color, running the gamut between youthful boldness and sensual maturity. Nevertheless, I shall refrain, lest my genuine appreciation causes offense.”

“He says he won’t compliment you,” Akira said, leaning sideways to peer around Ann.

(“They’re five feet away from each other,” Makoto said, looking up at Akira from where she’d knelt on the mat. “I think they can hear each other.”

“Shush. I don’t tell you how to have fun.”)

After a moment, Futaba took a shy sideways step out from behind Ann, whose height and voluminous hair had concealed her. She raised her eyes slowly and by degrees, looking at the mat, then somewhere around Ryuji’s knees, then at Morgana perched on the low walkway, then Yusuke at roughly chest level, where he was holding his phone and taking a picture—

“What are you doing?” she shrieked, clapping her hands over her face.

“Boss asked me to,” Yusuke protested, looking back at Akira for support. “You can ask him yourself. Futaba, you were there. We’re about to lose the last of the twilight— oh, she’s gone again.”

Eventually, after Akira coaxed Futaba out from behind a temple column, and Makoto took a group photograph to send to Sojiro that met with Futaba’s approval, the group sprawled across the mat and the low stone walkway around the exterior of the temple, discussing strategy.

“The booths start running out of food a few hours in, so we should hit them up first,” Ann said, swinging her legs. “Games and stuff last the whole night, so we can do those whenever.”

“And we’re bound to get separated in the crowd,” Haru nodded. “We simply have too many people to stay together. Which is all right eventually, but perhaps we should send one or two volunteers to fetch food from the booths, and bring it back here? It would allow us to spend more time as a group.”

They drew straws; Ryuji lost, or won, depending on perspective. He held out his hands with a sigh as everyone dropped bills and coins into them, rattling off their requests.

“Grilled squid, please.”

“Taiyaki for me! Shiho, you want one too?”

“Do they have choco bananas? If you can’t find them, cotton candy is fine.”

“I will have an order of Takoyaki, five yakitori skewers, yakisoba with ginger, lemonade—“

“Stop, stop!” Ryuji yelped, waving his hands, then ruffling his hair with a sigh. “How many hands you think I got, dude? You want that much, you go get the food.”

“I don’t mind,” Yusuke agreed, as Ryuji handed over the collected cash. “However, as I have no more hands than you do, shall I just go with you?”

“Let’s be fair, and re-draw for an assistant,” Haru suggested, picking up the disposable chopsticks they had used the first round. This time it was Futaba who drew the one that had been broken in half. She held it in front of her face, frowning at it, before shooting Haru a narrow-eyed glance. Did she think Futaba wouldn’t notice the way she carefully angled the bundle of sticks in her hand, arranging for the outcome she wanted? She would have called Haru out on it, if she hadn’t been half-trying to think of a way to rig the draw herself.

“Guess that settles it,” Futaba said matter-of-factly, standing up and dusting off her hands before anyone could feel bad and offer to take her place. Sure, she didn’t like walking through crowds, but all level-up metaphors aside, there were going to be half a million people at Comiket next weekend. If she couldn’t handle walking through festival crowds with Yusuke tonight, she was seriously going to have to re-think her future strategy. “Let’s make like a banana and split. Inari, you done writing down orders yet?”

One of the nice things about Yusuke— one of the many nice things, most of which she’d rather die than tell him— was that in being built like a giraffe and moving with the singlemindedness of a missile, he made an excellent windbreak against the crowd. Futaba was able to trot along behind him, looking left and right with interest at the stands, without really paying attention to where she was going— and she could definitely trust him to find the aisle with the food stands. She stopped as something caught her eye, then dashed a few steps to catch up to him, poking him in the back to get his attention.

“Look!”

“Masks…?” Yusuke asked, following her eagerly pointing finger to a festival stall selling plastic masks in dozens of different designs, from traditional oni to smiling mascot characters from popular children’s shows. “It’s peculiar, but I feel as though ever since last year, I’ve been seeing masks everywhere. There’s a synchronicity called the Baader-Meinhof phenomenon, where once presented with a piece of information, one seems to stumble over it wherever they go. Perhaps it’s just a symptom of the human brain’s capability for pattern-matching, but—“

“I want an alien,” Futaba interrupted, knowing full well that if nobody stopped Yusuke when he went on one of his tangents, he could go on for days. She traipsed off towards the stand, fully confident that Yusuke would follow, and crouched down, picking up a green alien mask with orblike black eyes.

“Not Featherman?” Yusuke asked, as he ambled up behind her. Futaba looked up to see him pointing towards the left side of the stand, featuring Featherman masks in all five colors. She furrowed her brow, and darted over, exclaiming that she hadn’t seen those, and how was she supposed to choose?

“Hmm… or how about this one? Charming, isn’t it? Anyone should be happy to wear it.” Futaba looked over to see Yusuke holding a white and red kitsune mask over his face, a cheap facsimile of his Phantom Thief mask, tilting his head. She scoffed, then reached up and snatched it away from him; it revealed a teasing smile on his face that made her stomach clench, and she quickly held it up in front of her own face before he could see her blush.

“I’m Inari! I eat cubism for breakfast! I’m building a shrine to Picasso in my closet!”

“I do not sound like that.”

“Do too.” She removed the mask and tossed it back to him with a grin; he caught it with the expression of someone amused despite themselves, and hung it back up on its hook.

Two minutes later, still paralyzed with indecision between Featherman Yellow, the alien that had originally caught her eye, and the new challenger, a cute black and white maneki neko, Futaba felt a soft pressure on her head as the band of a mask was stretched around it. She looked up in surprise, putting her hand up; the front of the mask was up off to the side of her head, so she had an unobstructed view of Yusuke, taking a couple of steps back and framing her with his fingers.

“I hope you don’t mind,” he said, fixing her with a cautious stare as she pulled the mask off of her head to look at it curiously. It was golden, with an Egyptian headdress; probably meant to be a sphinx, she realized, looking up at the row Yusuke had taken it from, along the top of the booth, full of dragons and fairies and ghosts. “I always meant to ask you whether you had a genuine interest in Egyptology, but somehow I never got around to it.”

“Mm, sorta,” she answered, looking back down at the mask, turning it over in her hands. “I went through a phase when I was a kid. I was on all these forums about stuff like crop circles, or aliens building the pyramids…”

“Aliens built the pyramids?”

“No, you dummy,” she said, shooting him a quick grin. He’d dropped his finger frame, and was looking nonplussed, as if she’d just revealed a deep truth about the world. “I mean, don’t get me wrong, they were definitely here, but they were way more interested in trolling the locals than handing them advanced tech for free. Don’t try telling that to eleven-year-old me, though. Mom told me to do my research before taking stuff like that at face value, so for like three months I learned everything I could about ancient Egypt. I moved on pretty quickly, but I guess it still sat in my mind, just waiting to be yanked out by my subconscious when it needed a metaphor.” She grimaced at that. She wondered, too, why Yusuke had picked that mask in particular. Maybe her palace had just been that aesthetic? It was strange to think that her friends had seen more of its interior than she ever had, arriving as she had just as they’d finished their dungeon crawling.

“I’m sorry if I reminded you of something you would rather forget, but the entire time we were traversing your palace, I found myself captivated by the beauty of it.” There it was. She looked up, ready to make a sarcastic comment about his singlemindedness, but it seemed he wasn’t done. “I was enraptured by the labyrinthine depths, simultaneously fighting to keep us out and pulling us in with hints and clues, daring us to continue and prove ourselves worthy. I found myself regretting every time we advanced to a new area, wondering if we’d truly explored every corner of the last one. If your mind was capable of such complexity when it was battling itself, what heights would it be capable of reaching when presenting a united front? We’ve all been honed by adversity, but the strength you showed was truly…”

If Futaba had still been looking up, she would have seen a slight flush to his cheeks as he trailed off, having said perhaps more than he’d meant to. She’d ducked her head back down, however, eyes hidden by her bangs, staring at the mask without really seeing it. That’s what he’d been thinking about her, when she’d been at her worst? That she was strong, and beautiful, and worth exploring?

“…But, after all, that’s in the past. I’ll buy this for you, if you like.” His hand reached into her field of vision to take the alien mask she still held in her left hand. She didn’t let him take it, though, held on firmly as she wordlessly shook her head, and thrust the sphinx mask forward instead.

“…You want this one?”

She nodded, relinquishing her grasp, eyes still fixed firmly on the ground. Yusuke respectfully paid for it out of his own coin purse, not the wad of bills that the group had pooled together for food, not that Futaba saw. She hadn’t been able to raise her head yet, was overwhelmed with a curling warmth in her stomach that she couldn’t quite name, goosebumps running down her spine and sticking her feet to the floor as she replayed his words over and over in her head.

He thought she was strong. He thought she was beautiful. Something about her had spoken to him, and not the best parts, the bravery she worked so hard on or the intelligence she was so proud of, but the worst; the parts she tried to hide, that she was so sure were unlovable.

But because she couldn’t figure out what words to force through her throat, which seemed to have gone into lockdown mode, he got the wrong idea. Mask purchased, he strapped it gently to the side of her head again, then leaned down to peer at her face. She averted her eyes, still unable to look at him directly; he sighed, and straightened up.

“I’m sorry for… well. I’m sorry. Shall we go back to our mission? The others will get worried if we take too long.”

Futaba bit her lip and nodded. Yusuke reached a hand jerkily forward, then pulled it back; then he reached towards her again, enfolding her small hand in his larger one and giving her a gentle tug. “Come on. I noticed a yakitori stand down this way.”

She trotted behind him as he navigated the crowd, squeezing his hand like a lifeline. It was cool, even in the warm, humid evening, and a small part of her brain inanely wondered if that was a holdover from his persona or a testament to how poor his circulation was. She’d daydreamed about this more than she cared to admit, a frankly embarrassing amount, holding hands and walking down the street. But this wasn’t right. He thought he’d upset her somehow, when really, she was just overwhelmed by such a sincere… compliment? Something, anyhow. Overwhelmed by the notion that he regarded her so highly. She turned words over and over in her head, trying to figure out how to convey how much she appreciated it, really and sincerely, how much she wanted to tell him how she admired him, too, how much he’d come to mean to her. But whatever script she played out in her head either turned into a lie of omission, skirting around the main issue, or said too much, spilling out the truth of what she felt.

“Futaba? Sorry, I have to pay, so…” She jumped, and disentangled her fingers from his; at some point on their walk, they’d become entwined. They’d ended up in front of the yakitori stall without her noticing, and the middle-aged woman running it winked at her kindly as Yusuke dug out the money.

Now that Yusuke wasn’t staring directly at her, she was able to look up at him again, the sharp angles of his face glowing in the soft light of the lanterns strung up along the row of stands. He smiled at the woman as she handed him his change and his food, and she knew as her heart skipped a beat and her stomach lurched that there was only one way to really let him know why she had reacted the way she did to what he said.

Change of plans.

Prepared or not, it was all or nothing.

“Yusuke…”

He started as Futaba tugged on his sleeve, then turned around. “What is it? Do you want one now?” he asked, holding out one of the skewers of chicken he had bought. She shook her head mutely, and took a deep breath as he looked at her with concern.

“I…” What was the safe max limit for a human heartbeat? 130? 150? Hers had to be way above that by now. “Yusuke, I…” She couldn’t meet his eyes, had them fixed somewhere below his left hand, holding chicken skewers still sizzling from the grill. Her hand reached automatically to the festival mask jauntily perched on the side of her head, then clenched in midair; she linked her hands together firmly before she could give in to the urge to hide behind it. “I just… j-just wan…” She was breathing in quick gasps, edging dangerously close to panic, and the more she felt herself unravel the harder it was to get the words out. She’d practiced in her mirror, in front of the computer, mumbled the words into her pillow at night, rehashing again and again all the ways this conversation could play out, and it had all been about as useful as a team of six Magikarps.

Yusuke moved out of her field of vision and she felt a sudden hand on her back. She found herself being pushed forward, let him guide her without protesting as she tried to get herself under control. You can do this, she thought as she clenched her eyes shut and counted out measured, even breaths. Didn’t he tell you that you were strong?

“Are you all right?” he asked uncertainly, after they stopped. Futaba opened her eyes to find that Yusuke had led her a few yards away through a narrow aisle into the dark, open pathway behind the vendors’ booths. “You went pale and looked like you were about to faint. Were the crowds too overwhelming for—“

“I have a photo of you as my phone background!” Futaba blurted out, riding the dizzyingly deoxygenated high of hyperventilation straight into can’t-turn-back-now city. Yusuke’s brow furrowed and he opened his mouth to speak; she thrust her hands out in front of her. “No, don’t say anything, or I won’t be able to get it out! I get so nervous every time I text you that I throw my phone across the room so I don’t sit there staring at the screen. I pushed Ryuji out of his chair once just so I could sit next to you. He thought I was mad at him because he beat me at Puyo Puyo, but really I just wanted to make you pay attention to me by stealing your snacks.” A quivering inhale; a measured exhale. She clasped her hands in front of her, clamping her fingers together to stop them from shaking. “I… I like you. I like you a lot. I like you so much I don’t know what to do with myself. I like you even though you sometimes drink your own paint water. A-and… yeah.” Yusuke hadn’t moved since she started speaking, was standing there wide-eyed and frozen, and she took a stumbling step backwards, feeling the tears forming in the corners of her eyes. “I’m sorry, I did it all wrong, you don’t have to say anything, just—“

As she turned to flee, mortified beyond belief at how absolutely she’d botched this whole thing, she felt his hand close around her wrist. Before she knew it, she’d been tugged back towards him and pulled into an embrace; her face collided with Yusuke’s chest as his arms encircled her firmly.

“You know,” he said, in a tone she couldn’t quite identify, “you have the most curious mix of infuriating ego and absolute lack of self-confidence I’ve ever seen. Your bearing, your whole manner… it was that of a sea captain facing down a storm, solemnly swearing to make a good end despite his impending death.”

Futaba’s eyes were wide open, darting back and forth as she tried to follow what he was saying, although all she could see was the dark blue cotton of his yukata.

His arms tightened around her, and for the first time, she felt a tiny flicker of hope.

“Give yourself more credit,” he admonished her now. “You have a surfeit of good qualities. I should know. Shall I tell you how many of my waking hours are occupied by thoughts of you? How many sketchbooks I’ve filled due to not being able to take my eyes off of you? But first—“ he cleared his throat— “Did you really just insult me in the middle of confessing to me?”

“But you do drink your own paint water,” Futaba protested, tilting her head up and propping her chin on his chest to look up at his face. “I’ve seen you. Sometimes you do it two or three times before you realize.”

“And you never think to stop me?”

“Well, if it was gonna kill you, it would have done it by now.”

He was smiling at her, he was actually smiling at her, as if she hadn’t just reacted to his measured, thoughtful words about inner strength by spewing a torrent of absolute nonsense all over him. She clenched her fingers in the folds of his yukata and dropped her gaze, eyes fixed on his chest as she tried to steady the dizzying, whirling thoughts in her mind.

She supposed that somehow, despite all the planning and the positive thinking, deep down inside of her she hadn’t expected him to respond to her. Not really. Some of the things he’d said, some of the ways he’d acted over the past few weeks especially had given her pause, but they were all easy to brush off as just more of her misinterpretations. She’d confess, and she’d get it out of her system, and she could start getting over him. But instead, he had hugged her, and praised her, almost as if he felt the same way.

“S-so. Um. Just to be totally clear, you’re not… you’re not rejecting me?”

“On the contrary.” One of his hands moved from resting on her back to stroking her hair, and she thought: this is it. This is how I die. My heart explodes and I just get TKO’ed, right here. “I had my own confession planned, but it wasn’t quite ready. As usual, you’ve caught me completely off guard.”

“Oh.” She pressed her face into his chest, inhaling deeply as she attempted to steady her leaping heart, the smoky smell of the festival grills intermingling with the scent of soap and a faint air of turpentine. “I’m not gonna apologize.”

“Nor should you. I’ll show you later, in any case.”

Later. There was a later, and they were going to be together for it, and that knowledge was enough to make her heart feel like it was going to burst. That was another thing she hadn’t considered— just what, actually, was going to happen if the unthinkable happened and he actually liked her back. Were they dating now? Was that an automatic thing? Good thing she had someone right here to ask. “So… what happens now?”

“Now?” His hand stopped moving, paused on the back of her head as he thought about it. “Now… I’d quite like to kiss you. If that’s all right.”

A shiver ran down her spine, and Yusuke, as if he’d felt it, loosened his grip on her slightly. Just enough so that if she was overwhelmed, if she wanted to run away or change her mind, she had the space she needed. But she wouldn’t change her mind, and she didn’t want to run— at least, no more than she usually did, when faced with something new. There was a dizzying feeling bubbling up in her chest, and rather than wanting to run, she wanted more— wanted to hear him say it again and again, to make sure she wasn’t dreaming.

She pulled away just enough to look up at him, meeting his gaze with her own. It was as direct as always, but despite that she felt like she saw her own expression mirrored on his face— joy, of course, but uncertainty, too, bordering on surprise, a look that said he couldn’t believe it had been that simple, that all this time they’d been dancing around each other too caught up in their own worries to notice that really, they had been on the same page all along.

“W-well,” she stuttered, heart thrilling in her chest, “w-what are you waiting for?”

He laughed softly, and the wonder in his voice made her laugh, too. And then his hand was cupping her face, his thumb stroking along her cheek, and he was leaning down, his breath warm. He kissed her forehead first, and then her cheek, where a wayward tear had snuck out of her eye during her brief panic, and then, slowly and gently, pressed his lips to hers.

He was sweetly, awkwardly hesitant at first, kissing her as though she were made of glass, as though she were something precious. After the initial wild bluescreen of her mind trying to take in everything at once, after she got accustomed to the electric warmth of his mouth on hers, she stood on her tiptoes and wrapped her arms around his neck, pulling him closer firmly, tilting her head to match him, trying to show him that she wasn’t as fragile as all that. He responded in kind, flatteringly eager now, one hand threading through her hair, dislodging tendrils from Haru’s careful braid, the other encircling her back just above her obi sash, holding her close. Futaba had worried that she’d be too awkward, that she wouldn’t know how to breathe or where to put her nose, but all that was swept away as her world narrowed to the urgent pressure of his lips and the feeling of his hands clutching her as if he never intended to let go.

There was no telling how long they might have stayed there— hours, or days, maybe, enjoying the fact that they were both turning out to be pretty good at this whole kissing thing— had the kindly lady from the yakitori stand not sidled over and cleared her throat, and when that failed to catch their attention, poked Yusuke politely in the side. They jumped apart; Futaba squeaked and darted around behind him, mortified, realizing all of a sudden just how close they still were to the stands and the crowds, even though they were (probably, hopefully) hidden in the darkness.

“They’ll be bringing the torches for the bonfire through here soon,” she warned them; then, after sizing Yusuke up, told him he’d been volunteered to add more charcoal briquettes to the grill, because her days of lifting forty pound bags were behind her. He complied, sheepishly, after which she gave him replacement chicken skewers for the ones he’d dropped on the ground at some point during recent events.

“Y-you must really like me, if you forgot you were holding food,” Futaba teased, nervously, falling back on old habits in this new, upended world.

“I do,” he said, simply and directly; as she gripped his hand and buried her burning face in the sleeve of his yukata, following him through the crowds in search of the food they’d been sent out for in the first place, she was forced to concede that he had won this round.

Twenty minutes later, they arrived back at the stone steps with armfuls of food, stacked precariously on cardboard trays. They studiously didn’t look at each other as they handed out the orders, and Futaba nestled herself snugly between Haru and Makoto before biting into the middle of her taiyaki pastry. She’d asked Yusuke for a few days of discretion, as they shuffled paper containers of fried chicken and paper-wrapped crepes around their trays, trying to find room for Morgana’s grilled squid. She vividly remembered the immediate excitement when Akira and Ryuji had come clean, everyone asking since when, and what started it, and what now, and for them to spill all the details, and she really didn’t feel like she could handle that, not tonight, not when it was still so new. She wanted to process it first, hold it curled safely in her chest until it became a solid part of her before putting it publicly into the world.

Nevertheless, Ann looked at Futaba’s disheveled hair half out of its braid, and the way Yusuke kept gazing off into space and smiling. Then she checked a text document on her phone, and reached into her wallet to pass a thousand yen to Akira with a rueful grin, because his prediction had been closer than hers by a week and a half.

Days until Summer Comiket: 9

Chapter Text

”Hey, Sojiro. Um. I…” Futaba pushed the curry around her plate, avoiding eye contact, and took a deep breath. “Ihaveaboyfriend.”

“Pardon?”

“I. I have.” She gulped. “I’mgoingoutwithsomeone.”

“Didn’t quite catch that.”

Futaba twisted her hands in her lap, and was about to give it a third pass to see if she could manage to get the words out at anything less than sonic speed, when she heard a muffled chuckle from across the counter. She narrowed her eyes and whipped her head up in time to see Sojiro quickly cover his mouth, a twinkle in his eye.

“Hey! Come on, that’s no fair!” She put on her best pout, even as she felt relief course through her. She’d been pretty sure Sojiro wouldn’t pull the overprotective parent thing, but not completely.

“Sorry, sorry.” He removed his hand, revealing an unexpectedly gentle smile. “I’m just glad you feel comfortable telling me, rather than trying to sneak around. Yusuke… he’s a good kid. Polite. Takes life seriously. Odd, but then again who isn’t, in your little band of misfits?”

It was said with amused fondness, and Futaba nodded agreement, picking up her spoon again, appetite restored. Then she paused, a spoonful of curry halfway to her mouth, tilting her head as she considered it. “Wait, how did you know it was him?”

“I’ve had my suspicions,” Sojiro said, shaking his head in response to the accusatory look on her face. “I was young once too, you know. It’s not like he hasn’t been spending enough time here to make it obvious. Of course, teenage boys look a lot less harmless from this side of things.”

Futaba rolled her eyes. “You’re not gonna give him the dad talk, are you?”

“Do you want me to?” Sojiro stroked his beard in contemplation. “I think Akira left a couple of his model guns upstairs. I could sit on the doorstep with one, next time he comes by.”

“Ugh! Great time to develop a sense of humor,” Futaba complained. She looked down at her dinner, then looked up, fidgeting in her chair. “So… you’re really okay with it?”

“Futaba…” Sojiro sighed, then leaned his forearms on the counter. “A year ago, I didn’t know if I’d ever see you out of your room again, much less making friends. I’m not the best parent out there— no, let me finish,” he said, holding up a finger when Futaba opened her mouth to protest. “I’m muddling through this, the same as you are. But I meant it when I said I would always be here for you. The fact that you can handle going to school, or going on trips with your friends, or even dating, well… if it’s something you’re ready for, far be it from me to tell you you can’t.” He cleared his throat, suddenly embarrassed, and straightened up, picking up a dish towel and wiping some invisible smudge off the counter. “That being said, you’re only sixteen. I don’t want to see you getting too serious too quickly. Schoolwork comes first, no gallivanting around when you have exams to study for. And I still expect you home every night at a reasonable hour…”

She hopped off her chair and came around the counter, as he was doing his best to lecture sternly. He only broke off when she wrapped her arms around his waist and squeezed him into a hug, pressing her face into his coffee-stained apron.

“Thanks… dad.”

He didn’t bother to hide his smile as he returned the hug. “Sure, kiddo. Any time.”

————

Futaba gulped as she looked around the plaza. The last time she had been to Odaiba, the rain had kept the area looking like a ghost town, but the difference between then and now was night and day. She clutched her tote bag close to her body; it was filled with thermoses of coffee, lunches packed by Sojiro, and her secret weapon. She hadn’t been sure she was going to use it, but as her eyes darted around, she was relieved she’d thought to prepare it. Everywhere she looked, hundreds of people were headed towards Comiket: men with professional cameras trudged yawning to the muster area; girls in groups of two and three pulled bright-colored hard suitcases behind them, their faces in full makeup and their hair braided close to their heads, prepared for wigs; people of all ages carried boxes and rolling carts, filled with booklets and music CDs, prints and buttons, prepared for a long day of sales.

“I can’t run up the escalator like you with this, you know,” she heard Yusuke sigh. She turned her head to see him emerging from the subway station with the dolly that held their cardboard boxes of products and signs. He tilted it as he drew level with the pavement, dragging it behind him for a few steps as he came to join her. Then he tilted his head, looking at her expression. “Are you all right?”

“Hit points at sixty percent,” she said faintly, then shook her head firmly. “I-it’s okay. I can do this. It’s not like this is any more people than rush hour at Shibuya. R-right?” She fumbled with her bag and pulled out one of the thermoses. The coffee was still hot enough to burn her tongue, but at least the taste and sensation grounded her in her body. Crowds were nothing, she told herself firmly. She had techniques to deal with crowds by now. When riding the busy, rush hour train to and from school, she was able to pull her headphones over her ears and listen to her favorite playlist, shutting out the crowds as she wedged herself against the wall of the train, holding her school bag in front of her as a barrier. Once at Shibuya station, she’d make a beeline for the bakery by the Ginza line, where most days Ann or Ryuji would meet her to run a short escort mission the rest of the way to school. But— a treacherous voice whispered from inside her head, undermining her— but riding the train was different. You didn’t have to talk to anyone, on the train. You didn’t have to try to sell them things! She could barely manage helping out at Leblanc, what was she thinking? Last week she’d dropped a customer’s change all over the floor and had had to scurry all over like a moron gathering it from under the stove—

A gentle pressure on her upper arms brought her back to herself, and she found that Yusuke was standing in front of her, grasping her arms lightly, standing between her and the crowds so that all she could see was the striped pattern on his short-sleeved button-down shirt.

“Breathe,” he reminded her quietly.

She took a deep breath, and let it out slowly.

“I’m okay,” she reassured both him and herself, a little surprised to find that she was telling the truth. She could already feel her brief panic fading, receding until she was at her normal ambient level of about 20% formless anxiety. Was it Yusuke, shielding her from the crowds in a nonchalant way so as not to attract unwanted attention towards her? Or was it the months she’d spent gritting her teeth through busy stores and train rides, yanking herself through her discomfort until her brain learned that every sudden noise wasn’t a reason to lose itself to panic? Not that she could have done that without her friends at her side in any case, giving her something to hold firm to when those treacherous self-destructive thoughts threatened to overcome her.

In any case, it didn’t really matter right now. She wouldn’t be here right now if it wasn’t for Yusuke, and more than that, she wouldn’t have wanted to be.

She tucked the coffee thermos back into her tote bag and craned her neck to look up at him, pushing her glasses up her nose. “All right! Enough standing around. This is a time-limited quest. If we don’t get in the exhibitor line soon, it’s gonna back up like crazy, and we’ll melt once the sun gets up high enough.”

“I thought about that, and came prepared,” Yusuke said, digging into his own personal bag and pulling out a box of cooling gel pads. He ripped open the cardboard and handed her one; she took it greedily, peeling the backing off before slapping it on the back of her neck.

“I should have thought of that! I forgot to make a list of other things to bring, I was so focused on the merch…”

“At least one of us had the foresight to check the weather forecast.”

“Hey!” Futaba poked him in the side, right in the ticklish spot underneath his ribs. “I did my research. I still know more about this whole thing than you, remember! In fact… you should be calling me ‘Futaba-sempai’.”

“I will not.”

“Say it! Call me sempai!”

“This is ludicrous.”

She laughed and set off, mood buoyant once again. Yusuke followed slowly, a couple of paces behind her. She was about to turn around and tell him to hurry up when she felt a hand on her lower back. She grinned to herself a little, thinking wow, Inari, you can’t keep your hands off me, huh? and was about to retort to that effect when—

The hand on her back pushed her t-shirt up a few inches, and with his other hand, Yusuke slapped the cooling pack right onto the bare skin at the small of her back. Futaba screeched, nearly jumping out of her skin and probably deafening everyone in a ten-meter radius.

“Don’t get all cocky just because you have the legs of a giraffe!” she shouted after him as he easily passed her at a brisk trot, evading her attempts to grab him and enact her revenge. “You’ll have to stop running someday, noodle boy!”

(Even with Yusuke pulling the dolly, she still tired first, legs unused to more exercise than lamely trying to avoid being anywhere near the action in gym class. Yusuke walked back to meet her with a chuckle, and a wordless truce was called as she slipped her hand into his to continue the rest of the walk at a more sedate pace.)

————

“We could put the acrylic stands on the left. Or do you think the postcard prints would get more attention there? Everyone else has more decorations than we do, why didn’t I think of decorations? If we’re not eye-catching enough…” Futaba stood back from the table, left hand gripping her right elbow, right hand up by her mouth as she chewed on her fingernails.

“You’re not going to have any nails left,” Yusuke admonished her, pulling her hand away from her mouth. “You need a different calming technique. Although I have to say, even I find being here somewhat overwhelming. The sea of people outside is somehow different from a typical crowd. Is it their shared purpose, perhaps? Are we feeling the weight of their expectations and excitement?”

“Uh-huh,” Futaba said grimly. “It’s gonna come down on us like a wave. And worse, they’re gonna wanna talk to us.” She shook her head. “All right. I wasn’t sure I’d have to do this, but I prepared a secret technique, just in case. Futaba… transform!”

Of course, there was no transformation sequence. She knelt down and dug under the table for her tote bag, and then searched blindly around inside of it. She handed Yusuke the thermoses to get them out of the way, found what she was looking for folded somewhat less than neatly at the very bottom, tugged it out, and shoved her bag back under the table, crawling out backwards. She stood up, brushed her knees off, and threw it over her head, repeating once more, “Futaba… transform!”

There was a few seconds of silence, and then she heard Yusuke make the exact sudden chuckle of realization that she’d been hoping to hear, when she’d asked Sojiro to sacrifice an old sheet and pick her up a bottle of black fabric paint.

As far as a first cosplay went, Medjed was probably the simplest there was.

“The eyeholes kinda slide around, but meh, no big. Not like I’ll be moving around much,” she said, lifting her arms and twisting from side to side to flutter the hem of the white sheet back and forth. Her view of the world narrowed to uneven holes no bigger than a coin, she felt ready to take on whatever this crowd could throw at her. “Heheheh. And you thought we were on a lot of layers of meta before this.”

“Does that mean that ‘cosplay’ is allowed for artists, as well?” Yusuke asked as Futaba crawled back under the table to the artists side. He threw the term in with as much separation as one would a foreign term they weren’t quite sure they were using correctly. Futaba could practically hear the air quotes clank into place.

“Umm, no rules against it,” Futaba said with a shrug, pulling the hem of the sheet up to reveal her face again but draping it around her shoulders so it would be ready to fling back over herself the moment the doors opened to the public. “Usually nobody does anything elaborate, since it’s a hassle to get a spot in the dressing room when you’re trying to sell. But people online were saying that artists still wear accessories and stuff sometimes.”

“Good. I wasn’t sure of the etiquette, but just in case…” Futaba took her seat and looked on curiously as Yusuke dug in the cardboard box and pulled out a festival mask oddly similar to his Fox mask. He strapped it to his head, continuing, “I went back and bought it later on, at the festival. I’ve never been to an event like this, obviously, but I thought having something like a costume would make me feel more a part of things.” He cocked his head to the side. “Was that silly?”

Futaba shook her head, grinning at his earnestness. She reached up and patted his cheeks with both hands. “You’re really taking this seriously, huh. We’ll make a nerd of you yet!”

“Perish the thought. I’d have to give up my sense of style.”

Futaba was about to shoot a comeback about her shirt being a limited edition that she’d paid a proxy a lot of money to buy at a pop-up Featherman cafe— but at that moment two girls arrived to set up their wares on the table next to them. They were chatting boisterously, and Futaba clammed up the moment they dumped their boxes of doujin on the table with a loud thump and excited laughter, pulling the sheet of her costume back down over her face.

“I can’t believe we got here so late!” one was complaining, starting to open boxes; the other leaned around her and gave a cheery wave.

“Hey! I’m Akki. This is Momo. We brought a ton of snacks, so let me know if you want any, okay?”

Yusuke introduced himself with genuine warmth, with the prospect of snacks on the table; Futaba half-turned and gave a little, nervous wave.

Akki laughed out loud. “Ohh, I was wondering what the sheet was! I get it now! Medjed, that’s super fun. I really wanna cosplay the design from Destiny/Grand Order, d’you play it?”

“…Sometimes,” Futaba replied cautiously, as if surprised that this boisterous girl was actually interested in holding a conversation with her. “I didn’t have time to rank in the last event, though. Um. Do you… wanna trade friend codes?”

“Oh yeah, totally! Lemme just…” Akki plopped down on her chair and pulled her phone out. Futaba lifted the sheet once more, so she could actually see her phone without tilting her head this way and that to align the eye-holes. “Man though, I was super bummed, I saved up for months to pull for the summer outfits and still didn’t get Nero. How’d you do?”

“Crappy,” Futaba said, shaking her head. “I think I’m gonna stop saving for specific boxes and focus on events, my luck hasn’t been great lately. OK, here…” She turned her phone around to show her friend code. They continued in that vein for a bit, Akki helping her friend lay out display copies while she talked, Yusuke listening with bemusement until he could no longer hold back his interjection.

“Are you speaking of Marie Antoinette, the historical figure who was executed by guillotine?”

“Ehh, kinda yes, kinda no. Oh! Actually, it’s a little like…” Futaba hunched over her phone, her thumbs whirling as she typed for a solid thirty seconds before Yusuke heard his text tone go off.

His brow furrowed as he read, then cleared. “Oh! I see,” he said.

“Anyway, we’ll leave you be to finish setting up! Let’s trade later, okay?” Akki said with a wink, the meaning of which was entirely lost on Futaba. (The other girl’s thought process was along the lines of: ‘This girl seems a little shy, so she probably wanted to say something private to him! Are they dating? High schoolers are so cute!’. What Futaba had actually been doing was writing out a three hundred word essay on the way the collective unconscious thought about the aspects of different historical figures and how that applied to both personas and her anime phone game about collecting fancy jpgs, which couldn’t be said aloud for an entirely different reason.)

Seeing as she already had the app open, and this was something else she didn’t want the other girls to hear, she kept typing.

FUTABA. I forgot

FUTABA. everybody here likes the same stuff I do

FUTABA. I can talk about anime and games no problem

FUTABA. and plenty of people on forums online aren’t great with IRL stuff, but still come to Comiket… so even if I’m nervous, other people probably are too.

YUSUKE. You’re doing well so far.

YUSUKE. I’d like it if you could continue to enjoy yourself, and not merely endure.

FUTABA. ehehe… I feel like I leveled up!

She grinned up at him just as the loudspeaker crackled to life and the doors of the large hall were opened to the public.

The waves of people herded in like cattle were overwhelming, the noise was deafening, and it wasn’t long before customers were arriving at their table to peruse their books and other wares. Futaba was surprised and pleased when a few girls bought from them without so much as a glance inside the book, saying they’d seen the previews on their twitter account, and had come to their booth first of all.

(“We have a twitter account?” Yusuke asked.

“I’ve been impersonating you for weeks. Don’t worry about it.”)

But what surprised Futaba most of all was the fact that she was, largely… fine. Was it her shield in the form of her mask-like costume? Was it that the anticipation had been worse than the reality? Was it Yusuke’s calming presence beside her, having an impassioned debate with their other set of neighbors about the merits of traditional versus digital mediums?

Was she finally, in some measure at least, better?

“I’m not sure why you’re surprised,” Yusuke replied, when she asked him what he thought during a lull in traffic. “You’ve always been perfectly fine speaking about what interests you. Is it any wonder that you’re better at peddling fanart at a comic convention than working the counter at Leblanc?”

“It feels like… I’m cheating somehow,” she replied, wrinkling her forehead. “Like I’m getting a boost I don’t deserve.”

Yusuke shook his head. “You’re always trying,” he said reasonably. “You’re trying your hardest every day. Even when you whine about it, you try. You’ve more than proved yourself. What’s wrong with playing a level that’s a lower difficulty?”

“Yusuke Kitagawa, was that a video game reference?” Futaba shot back, lifting her sheet so he could see her astonished face as she nudged him in the shoulder.

“It was. I fear I’m irreversibly contaminated.”

She grinned. Then, after weighing the dangers for a moment, she offered, “It’s pretty quiet right now. You should go look around.”

“You’re sure?” he asked, surprised.

“Uh-huh.” He’d been itching to do it, she could tell, looking this way and that, craning his neck to get glimpses of the other artwork, asking visitors to the booth what table numbers they’d bought particularly appealing comics from. “I got this.”

He was gone for a solid half hour, during which time Futaba had a productive discussion with Akki about the likelihood of Feather Black returning for the next season, given the ambiguous way the season finale had left his death. She even got up the courage to ask the other girl to take a photo of her to send to Akira, although she first scampered out from behind her table so she could just pretend to be another customer.

She was just texting him the photo when a loud thump made her jump. She looked up to see the impressive pile of comics Yusuke had dropped on their table, and up further to see his eyes sparkling.

“I can’t believe you spent your half of the profits before you even left the building,” she scolded, although the impact was somewhat lessened by the eager way in which she picked up the first comic on the pile to flip through. “What happened to you seeing manga as a lower form of art, huh?”

“Everyone is devoted to their craft, and that deserves respect, no matter the medium,” he replied, turning sideways to scoot through the narrow gap between tables. “Anyway, some of them are for you.” He sat back down in his chair, flipping through the stack and pulling out a selection of volumes. Futaba grabbed them eagerly; most of them featured the character supposed to be her on the front, although there was one with a passable interpretation of Morgana.

“Hey, hey!” Akki leaned over, waving to get their attention. “I didn’t want to ask before you were back, Kitagawa-kun, since you’re the artist, but did you guys want to trade?”

“With pleasure,” Yusuke said, leaning around Futaba to hand her a copy of their comic. “I wasn’t sure of the etiquette, but I did notice your comic features one of my favorite characters…”

“Narcissist,” Futaba whispered, elbowing him in the stomach as he took Akki’s comic with a smile. The cover did indeed feature “Go”, the fandom-assigned name for Fox, according to his place as number five in the lineup shown in Shido’s calling card. Yusuke ignored her and removed the plastic wrapping from the comic to page through it, but she got her revenge when his eyes went wide halfway through. She snatched it from him, only to let out a peal of laughter when she saw the full-page spread of “Go” half-naked, very disheveled, and wrapped head to toe in “Niko”’s whip.

“Thanks, I love it!” Futaba said to Akki, who was looking a little confused at her reaction. Then the other girl’s expression cleared, and she clasped her hands together.

“Oh, I get it!” she said, pointing to the mask perched sideways on Yusuke’s head. “You cosplay him! You must be a really good one, since you’re so tall.”

Yusuke inclined his head gravely. “Thank you for the compliment. If there’s one thing that I and this character have in common, it’s certainly my height. Don’t you agree, Futaba?”

Futaba, eyes glowing, had come to a different conclusion, based on a certain red outfit she had always admired and envied. “Oh, man. That’s right! People totally cosplay the Thieves! As soon as I get home, I’m going on Taobao and ordering a catsuit.”

———

“Safe room!” Futaba groaned as she crossed the threshold of Yusuke’s dorm room. She kicked her shoes off, staggered down the short hallway, then collapsed face-down on his bed. Just because Comiket hadn’t been an insurmountable obstacle to her didn’t mean it hadn’t been absolutely exhausting.

She heard a quiet thump, and rolled over onto her back. Yusuke had put down the cardboard box that held their leftover merchandise, and straightened up, stretching his arms over his head.

“Less than ten copies left of the book,” he said, sounding pleased.

Futaba flashed him a thumbs up, before folding her arms over her face, blocking out the light of the orange sunset streaming through the windows. “Sweet. A copy for each of us, and I’ll list the rest on Toranoana.”

“What?”

“Internet sales, old man.”

She kept her eyes closed as she listened to the sounds of Yusuke puttering around the room. A shuffling noise as he straightened their shoes, left carelessly askew by the door. A soft clatter as he took his wallet and keys from his bag and placed them on his desk. The gurgle of his hot water heater as he filled two cups to make tea.

He put one down on the windowsill by her head. A few footsteps padded across the floor, and then the mattress squeaked and sunk as he took a seat down by her feet. “What is it?”

“Ugh.” She shifted her arms slightly and opened her eyes, looking up at the ceiling. “It’s dumb.”

“That’s fine.”

She snorted, a short burst of laughter escaping her. Usually people would say ‘No it’s not’ to a statement like that. Not brutally honest Yusuke, though; he was reserving judgment until he heard it. She folded her arms on her stomach, tilting her head to look at him. “It’s kinda like… okay! We did it! It went good! Now everything goes back to normal, like it didn’t even happen. It feels kinda gloomy.”

Feeling fidgety, she sat up and took the mug from the windowsill, curling her arms around the warm ceramic. It was an elegant black and red design, with a curling handle and a chip on the rim that betrayed its flea market origins. Yusuke sipped his own mug, then frowned.

“I should have let it steep longer. The flavor isn’t rich enough.”

“Tastes fine to me,” Futaba said with a shrug, after taking an experimental sip of her own. “Tea’s tea.”

“Tea brewing is a discipline that spans centuries of carefully perfecting techniques. You’re just biased towards coffee.”

“You got me there.” She smiled half-heartedly, and Yusuke put his mug down on the floor, leaning back on his hands as he looked at her, head tilted to the side. “What?”

“It’s always difficult to return to daily cares from something grand and meaningful,” he said, and she knew he wasn’t referring to doujinshi. None of them had ever really spoken of the sense of loss that came with the dissolving of Mementos back into the void, and with the knowledge that no matter how urgently you could feel your persona burning under your skin, you’d never summon them again. “This time, it’s not over, though, is it? It’s a respite, not a finale. We have, what, four months until the next one? And weren’t you talking about smaller local events as well?”

Futaba felt a smile creep onto her face. “You really still wanna keep going? All the nerds didn’t scare you off?”

“Of course. I don’t say things I don’t mean. It was a fascinating experience. Besides…” He reached a hand over and tucked a wayward strand of hair behind her ear, the tips of his fingers lingering on her cheek. Futaba’s heart immediately shot up to three hundred beats a minute, the exact same way it had done every time this past week Yusuke had done anything remotely romantic, because he was incredibly effortlessly unfairly cool about all of this and she had all the inner grace of a potato.

Chill, Futaba, she scolded herself. Okay, so he manages to be unbearably smooth sometimes. He also once called pineapple “especially invigorating, what with the mildly painful mouth tingling it causes” and Makoto had to break it to him that he was allergic. He wrote a strongly worded letter to a purikura company because the drawing time wasn’t sufficient. He spent a whole week obsessed with the word ‘effervescent’ and used it to describe a cookie and gummy worm sandwich I made him eat. The weirdness should take the hotness down by, like, six points, at least! The problem with that line of thinking, of course, was that those were all things that were somehow endearing to her, and she resigned herself to death by sudden heart explosion as he leaned in to kiss her.

It lasted barely a moment before he leaned back suddenly, exclaiming “Ah! That’s right! The whole reason I wanted you to stop by…” before jumping off the bed and crossing the room to rummage in a pile of canvases. Futaba let out a deep breath, covering her face with her hands, screaming silently into her own head.

“Here— no, leave your eyes covered.” The bed sank slightly as he sat down next to her. “All right. You can open them.”

Futaba peeked out from between her fingers, then let her hands slowly drop off her face as she stared at what he was showing her. The canvas was small, only a little more than a foot square. The subject was undeniably her, although seen from behind in near-profile view, eyes gazing towards the distance, where in the night sky a riot of color blazed. It reflected off the edges of the window, and off her hair, which streamed out behind her, fading to insubstantial impressions along the edge of the canvas.

She took it from him when he offered, although something seemed to be wrong with her throat, making both breathing and speaking suddenly impossible. “That was my tenth attempt,” Yusuke offered, filling the silence, although he seemed to grasp its meaning anyway. “My first was five feet tall. I kept repainting and attempting to render in more and more detail, seeking perfection… it had me in quite a state.”

“This one is perfect,” Futaba squeaked out, finding her voice.

Yusuke shook his head. “It’s rough. Only the center is rendered in any detail, and the colors were chosen based entirely on feel, without worrying about a coherent palette. But, you see, it clicked once I realized what I was trying to capture. It was that day in Odaiba, in the rain, that I first realized my feelings for you. A moment like that isn’t a moment of final perfection. It’s a beginning.”

Futaba forced herself to look up into his eyes; his gaze was direct, but to her surprise, he was blushing slightly, cheeks and ears red. She only lasted a moment before her embarrassment had her looking back down, but she made up for it by putting the canvas down and wrapping both arms around him, burying her face in his shirt.

“That’s so cheesy,” she mumbled.

“I don’t deny it.”

“Like, the cheesiest thing I’ve ever heard.”

“That’s going a little far.”

“Sojiro would have had a stroke if I tried to bring a five foot tall portrait of me into the house.”
“Nonsense. He’s a cultured man, even though not a true art enthusiast.”

Silence. Yusuke was stroking her hair with one hand. She pressed her face closer into his shirt.

“Thank you. I love it.”

They stayed that way for quite a while, long enough for Yusuke to scoot back on the bed so he could lean against the wall for support, long enough for Futaba to curl up tightly and begin to drift in and out of sleep. Long enough, in fact, for Futaba’s phone to alarm; when Yusuke looked over her shoulder to see what it said, he saw the alarm was labeled “IT’S TWENTY PAST NINE! FORTY MINUTES UNTIL SOJIRO MURDERS YUSUKE”, causing him no small amount of uncertain existential dread.

Oh, well, he thought, as Futaba began to stir, making small complaining noises and managing to turn off the alarm blind by slapping the bed wildly behind her until she hit the phone, an experienced oversleeper. A certain amount of existential dread was probably good for you, and, under the circumstances, entirely worth it.

————

And then it was the last week of summer vacation, with school looming on the horizon. They had a surprise party planned tonight, to celebrate Akira’s birthday before he had to return home. The fact that his birthday wasn’t actually until November was part of the surprise. Akira was somewhere out in the city with Ryuji, who had the task of distracting him until the evening. The rest of the squad would be by in a couple of hours with food and decorations. Yusuke had shown up at ten in the morning, telling a not-at-all-buying-it Sojiro that he had come early to help Futaba clean. The look Sojiro gave him said volumes, most notably You and I both know Futaba has never cleaned in her life, but I’ll let it slide without comment and I don’t disapprove of you but no funny business, I can hear everything that goes on upstairs so I will know.

It was the afternoon, getting on towards three o’clock now, and at this point Yusuke and Futaba had been bickering aimlessly and without malice for a solid half-hour, because some things never change. It had started halfway through Futaba’s latest attempt to teach him the basics of her most treasured hobby, like how to hold a video game controller the right way up and why turning on smart steering was for babies, and in the way of these things, had meandered along the path of petty sniping until they ended up right where they started.

“Whatever. You’re just mad I beat you at Mario Kart.”

“You did not beat me at Mario Kart. You distracted me, and I dropped the controller. It doesn’t count.”

“Sore loser.”

“Cheater.”

Futaba ducked her head and rubbed her cheeks furiously. The hardest part of squabbling with your boyfriend, she was learning, was trying to keep your face looking petulant and wronged when it kept wanting to smile all the time.

“Besides,” Yusuke continued, looking up from his magazine and brushing his hair out of his eyes to fix her with a raised eyebrow, “You’ve been playing video games since you were a child. I played Mario Kart for the first time last week. You should be embarrassed to even count me as competition.”

Futaba picked up a pillow and halfheartedly tossed it at his smug face; he batted it out of the air with a chuckle before returning his attention to whatever he was reading. Akira’s bed (or rather, Akira’s mattress-on-wooden-crates) had morphed into a daybed-slash-couch over the months, as Futaba added pillows and plush animals won from arcade games, and Sojiro added a new mattress topper he needed to get off his hands (aka, that he bought specifically for Akira, but didn’t want to admit to). All Akira had done now that he was back for the month was push the pillows to one side to make room for him to sleep, so they were still handy to use as ammunition.

At this point, the only thing the attic was missing was insulation and air conditioning. The windows were wide open, curtains hanging limply in the hot air. Futaba was sprawling out intermittently in various positions on the bed, trying to get airflow, while Yusuke was sitting up, leaning against the wall. He had even made a concession to the heatwave by wearing a t-shirt, which was surprising, considering Futaba hadn’t previously been sure he even owned one.

Too hot to keep arguing, she rolled onto her back, propping her legs up on the wall in an attempt both to get airflow and to distract Yusuke, something that was quickly becoming her favorite hobby. If he was going to give her heart palpitations by being all sweet, she was going to revenge-flirt like her life depended on it.

Yusuke, irritatingly, remained focused on his magazine.

She frowned. Rolling over onto her stomach, she rested her chin on her hands, trying to catch his eye. She was still adjusting to the fact that she could get affection whenever she wanted it, and from Yusuke, of all people; he was usually so poised and reserved that she’d expected him to shy away more. But he was perfectly happy to hold her hand when they walked down the street, or let her drape herself all over him while they sat on the couch watching some paranormal documentary. If he was sketching, she’d quietly occupy herself with her own business, content to be in the same room, the same way he’d doze on her bed listening to music when she was teasing out the tendrils of a nasty computer virus quarantined on her desktop, but anything else was fair game. Usually. She wondered if his focus had anything to do with the stack of thin volumes he’d shoved under a pillow for safekeeping as he settled on the bed.

She gave up all attempts at coy subtlety, scooting over and resting her head in his lap, propping her heels on the down pillow at the head of the bed (sorry, Akira). When even that didn’t con him into paying attention to her, she reached a hand up to tilt his magazine downwards into her view.

“A-ha! I thought so!” Nestled behind the pages of the innocuous cooking magazine was one of the doujins he had picked up at Comiket. She grinned up at him. “Is it one of the horny ones?”

“It’s not.”

“Bet it is.” She plucked it from his hands before he could protest, flipping through the pages with a smirk.

“For your information, it’s completely innocent. The cover would simply be hard to explain if Sojiro should suddenly— there,” he said with satisfaction, as he snatched it back, holding it high over his head.

Futaba affected a pout; Yusuke flicked her on the nose, and then brushed a stray strand of hair off her cheek. He looked at her for a long moment, head tilted, a slight smile tugging at the corner of his mouth, and if it was possible for her face to feel any warmer in this heat, it did. She didn’t mind when he looked at her like that; quite the opposite, as a matter of fact. But it was a lot to handle, especially from someone with such a naturally straightforward, intense gaze. Day by day, though, she was getting used to it, and every time he gazed at her with that warmth in his eyes, she felt a little more like she deserved it.

And then he was leaning down, and she closed her eyes, wondering if her heart would skip a beat every time—

“Hello~o! We’re early, but we’re here to set up—“

Futaba’s eyes flew open and she sat up abruptly. A sudden surprise impact had her seeing stars, and Yusuke let out a strangled yelp.

“Oh my God! Yusuke—“

She shook her head quickly to reorient herself, then opened her eyes, holding a palm to her forehead and grimacing; Ann raced across the room to kneel in front of Yusuke, who was doubled over, hands clutching his face.

Futaba stared for a moment in horror. “I broke him!”

“You didn’t break him. Well…” Makoto, emerging from the stairwell and hurrying over, pulled Yusuke’s hands from his face for a moment. Blood ran freely from his nose, and she hastily pushed his hands back into place before running to the shopping bag that Ann had dropped on the floor in her worried haste.

“I’m fine,” he said thickly, as Futaba wailed, Ann dithered, and Makoto pulled out a package of napkins and swiftly opened them before pushing them into Yusuke’s hands.

“Pinch your nose and tilt forward,” she ordered.

“What in God’s name are you all yelling— oh, good grief—“

“SOJIRO I BROKE HIM—”

“No, you’re supposed to tilt backwards!”

“He’ll swallow it if he tilts backwards!”

“I’ll call the clinic doctor—“

In the end, after he had been marched down the street to Takemi’s office, it was determined that Yusuke did not, in fact, have a broken nose. “Things like this bleed pretty impressively, but no real harm done,” the doctor informed them, cracking an ice pack and handing it over after cleaning the worst of the blood off of Yusuke’s face and giving him strict instructions to avoid blowing his nose for a few hours. She also handed over a lollipop. And then one for Futaba, too, who seemed like she needed it. And one for Ann, who seemed jealous.

“She never gave me a lollipop,” Akira said, a wounded note in his voice, as the story was relayed later that evening.

“She said she has a lot of new pediatric patients recently, so she stocked up!” Ann chirped, opening her second bag of potato chips. The attic was strewn with snacks and drinks, and with teenagers sprawled over every surface. Some variety show was playing on the television, and there were decks of cards and handheld consoles scattered on the low table, but for the moment everyone was focused on Yusuke’s harrowing experience.

“What happened in the first place?” Haru asked. “Did you trip, or…?”

“Well,” Ann said, a mischievous grin spreading across her face. “I mean, I don’t know anything for sure, but as I was coming up the stairs, I thought I saw—“

“You didn’t see anything!”

“—thought I saw something veeeery interesting…”

Futaba let out a wordless groan, covering her red face with her hands. Yusuke, sitting a respectable three feet away from her on the couch, held Ann’s gaze with a remarkable poker face.

“Oh, knock it off, Ann,” Ryuji said cheerfully, tossing a pillow in her general direction. He was stretched out on the bed, and half on Akira, too; he had been lying on his back, but rolled onto his stomach and sat up, eliciting an “oof” from the other boy as he accidentally drove his elbow into his side. “Put ‘em out of their misery. Guys, we all know. I mean, not that it hasn’t been funny to watch you try to sneak around, but you’re really bad at it. And this is coming from me.”

Futaba spread her fingers to peer out from between them nervously. Makoto leaned over to ask Haru exactly what they all knew; Haru whispered in her ear, and Makoto turned pink, looking between Yusuke and Futaba with the accusing air of someone who wanted to know why they hadn’t been briefed on the subject.

“Ooh, does Boss know?” Ann interjected, clapping her hands together and looking at the stairway with trepidation. “Should we keep our voices down? I could see him getting really protective…!”

“He’s known for weeks,” Akira said laconically, rolling over and stretching out his arms now that he was no longer pinned down by Ryuji. “He’s been asking me about it.”

“We haven’t been dating for weeks,” Yusuke responded, furrowing his brow. Akira stopped mid-stretch, his right arm shoved under a large mauve pillow, as he hit something unexpected. “That aside, though, I seem to be in his good graces for now. The watermelon may have softened his opinion of me.”

“The watermelon had n-nothing to do with it!” Futaba squeaked out, finding her voice at last to chastise him. “I still can’t believe you bought him a watermelon. He likes you anyway, you dummy.”

“It’s a seasonal gift!”

“He wrapped it,” Futaba continued, looking at Makoto for backup, hands no longer covering her face. “He spent five minutes explaining his research into traditional wrapping techniques!"

“Boss asked me to!”

“Only because you somehow bent physics to perfectly wrap a sphere!”

“The precision of traditional wrapping techniques is too valuable to be lost over time. If more people studied Japanese arts—“

“Some things never change, eh?” Ryuji said, elbowing Akira with a grin. The other boy failed to react, and Ryuji leaned over to look over his shoulder. “Whatcha got there? A comic?”

“Found it under the pillow,” Akira replied absently, eyes glued to the page and getting wider by the second.

Yusuke cut himself off mid-word, head whipping over to stare, dismayed, at the other boys. That had the unfortunate side effect of attracting the attention of the rest of the group; Haru scooted over towards Akira, catching a glimpse of the cover of the comic.

“Oh my,” she said, half-shocked, half-laughing, as Futaba let out a small screech too high-pitched for anyone but dogs and Morgana to hear. The latter winced, sitting up from his warm spot on top of the television and flicking one ear irritably, before jumping down to see what all the fuss was about.

“‘Leader, your broad shoulders aren’t broad enough to bear the weight of the world alone,’” Akira read out in a hushed tone, staring at the page, his grin growing wider by the moment.

“Yes, I wasn’t impressed by the writing in that one,” Yusuke sniffed, distracted from imminent peril by his natural impulse to provide unsolicited art criticism whenever the opportunity presented itself.

“Funny, seeing as you’re apparently the one saying it.” The shock on Ryuji’s face as he pawed through the pile of comics was mirrored in reverse by the glow in Akira’s eyes as an entirely new world of hilarity opened itself to him. “Futaba. Explain.”

Futaba squirmed. Dead-on as always, she grumbled to herself, shifting her eyes from side to side as she stalled. “I-it’s not my fault you aren’t up on current fandoms! I-I mean, I told you Yusuke was taking me to Comiket.”

(“Hey, this one’s you, Ann!”

“My chest has never moved that way in my life—“)

“—A-and it’s crazy, right? It’s like we’re some kinda anime characters! Anyone would wanna see themselves drawn by a bunch of really good artists—“

(“Ridiculous! They drew me as some kind of— of dim-witted, bobble-headed mascot!”

“Well, if the shoe fits—“

“Shut it, Ryuji!”)

“—And you know how Yusuke spends his money, there’s no way we weren’t coming away with forty comics—“

“Actually, my share of the spending money ran out after thirty-two.”

“Not the point!!”

“Mako-chan, look!” Haru said, nudging Makoto with her elbow to show her a particular page in the comic she’d taken. Makoto, slightly confused and incredibly unamused by this whole business, peeked over to see what Haru was staring at with such fascination, but as soon as her vision was assaulted by the sight of a rogue nipple protruding from a shredded and incredibly Skull-esque costume, she immediately mumbled something about forgetting how to see, and shoved her face into a pillow.

“It really does look quite accurate,” Haru mumbled to herself, one hand absently patting Makoto on the shoulder as her eyes roved along the pages.

Yusuke, unable to stop himself, leaned forward eagerly, hands clasped around his knees. Futaba had dashed over to the bed in an attempt to distract Akira by showing him a particularly charming volume of a character who almost resembled Morgana, running about the town and having a cute adventure with absolutely no hanky-panky to speak of, and so wasn’t on hand to dissuade him. “I see. You have discerning taste as always. I would welcome your opinion on that volume.”

“Well, it’s very well-drawn, of course, but there’s a certain… charm about it?” Haru said, cocking her head to the side. “It’s as if the artist sees the characters as people, in some way. Skull even has the same posture…” That came close, somehow, to the small thought that was buzzing in the back of her mind, and she closed the slim volume, checking the front for the circle name. “Did they have any other comics for sale? Let’s see, their name is Shke… Shiher…” Her tongue stumbled over the foreign syllables, written obtusely in roman letters, and she frowned. “Ann-chan! Can you look at this?”

Ann broke off from the comic she was sharing with Ryuji, a volume with a scandalously clad Joker on the cover, to scoot over. “What’s up?”

“Am I reading this right? It’s a bit of a tongue twister…”

She handed over the comic. Ann took a moment to appreciate the anatomy on display on the cover before turning her attention to the circle name. “Oh! It’s pronounced ‘Scheherazade’. Yeah, that’d be tough if you don’t recognize it. Here, I’ll write it out in katakana for you.”

“Is that English?” Haru inquired, as Ann typed it out on her phone to show her; the other girl shook her head.

“Nope. It’s, uh, Arabic maybe? I had a picture book about her as a kid. She was this princess who had to tell stories to this sultan or he’d kill her, or something. You’ve probably heard some of them before. You know, like Aladdin, or Alibaba and the…”

Ann paused. Then she snatched the book out of Haru’s hands, flipping it open and racing through the pages, staring at the two boys depicted within with fierce concentration.

In tandem, she and Haru looked up at Yusuke. He held their eyes for a moment, then spread his hands out, shrugging with a sigh.

“You know how much Futaba enjoys her clever nicknames,” he said in a tone that implied that really, there was no reason to make the amount of fuss he was resigned to them making.

A beat, and the attic erupted into cacophony. Amid the backdrop of Ann’s peals of laughter, Akira locked his arm around Futaba’s shoulders before she could scurry away from him. “All this time—“

“Lemme go!”

“All this time we’ve been watching you two spending so much time together, waiting, making bets—“

“Bets!?”

“—on when one of you would say something, and all along—“

(“I want royalties!” Ryuji sputtered.

“You can’t have them. I spent them already. I’ll sign a copy, if you want.”)

“—it was just a smokescreen for your lewd side hustle—“

“You’re one to talk! You’re king of side hustles! Your side hustles have side hustles!”

Amid the drama happening over on the daybed, Morgana’s complaints about Yusuke not drawing him instead, and Ryuji being corralled by Ann, telling him not to be such a spoilsport, Haru meandered over and sat next to Yusuke on the couch.

“Can I ask you a question?”

“Of course.”

She tapped her fingers together in front of her mouth, gazing at her friends, with a predatory light in her eyes that spoke of a newly-acquired interest.

“What’s your commission rate?”

Days until Winter Comiket: 120

Accept mission?

>YES
NO

MISSION START