"Oh." The delivery man taps his foot against the welcoming mat, peering at Futaba with blatant curiosity. "I expected Kitagawa-san, not… Not, uh, his girlfriend."
"Well, carry on and keep expecting, cos you are not talking to her, my dude," Futaba says and takes the pizzas — two Hawaiians with double pineapple — from him, then closes the door before he can make any more dumb comments. Jeez, such a nosy clod. "Oi, Inari!"
Yusuke pokes his head out of the kitchen, where he's doing who the hell knows what. "Yes?" He'd better not be trying to take his revenge on Futaba for adding salsa sauce to his ramen. He better.
"Our food's here." She plants the wonderfully warm boxes on the tiny dining table and, as Yusuke sets to opening them, grins up at him. "I didn't know that you frequent that pizza joint."
He frowns at her.
Acquired: quality teasing material. And Akira will have a laugh out of the girlfriend thing.
The ocean breeze toys with her hair, blowing a few strands into her eyes. Futaba tucks them back behind her ear and returns to tapping languidly at her laptop. As she's taking a sip of her iced coffee (don't tell Dad), the screen lights up with a new call on Skype. She answers it with a smile.
"Hi, Jess," Futaba says, English words flying smoothly off her tongue. "Been a while since we last talked."
"Yeah, yeah, I know." The beautiful, dark-skinned woman — who's also a hellacious graphic designer and a pleasure to work with — has the decency to look sheepishly ashamed. "My wife was in the hospital with pneumonia, so there's that. She's fine, now, but we all had a bit of a scare."
"Aw, that couldn't have been terrific."
"True, true. Kudos to the lovely American healthcare." They laugh, then Jess makes a face. "By the way, where the hell are you? 'cause that sure as fuck ain't Tokyo."
Futaba signals the waitress, a high-school girl who makes mean espressos, for another cup — she's become quite fond of this tiny cafe, located by the pier and locally famous for its awesome hazelnut frappuccinos. "Oh, guess I didn't tell you. I moved to this seaside town by Miyazaki — my friend lives here, and so we've become roommates. Been here for about three weeks—"
"Oh my god they were roommates," Jess whispers dramatically, prompting Futaba to groan.
"You meme-loving frick."
"Takes one to know one, honey. Is your friend, at least, hot?"
"Nah." Speaking of which — Futaba quickly texts him about the alarming shortage of milk and dishwasher liquid. "He's a nerd. And gay."
"Geez, I wasn't trying to set you up with him, Futaba, darling, chill!" Jess snickers, almost elbowing her laptop in her mirth. "Besides, I know you ain't down for a dick, but it's good to have around someone pleasant to look at. Anyway — how did you two even meet?"
Futaba's fingers go slack on the tiny keyboard, the wind suddenly cold where it brushes her skin. She's— she's still having, from time to time, nightmares, okay, about Shibuya damp in the bloody rain, and about Akira's bruised face stretched out in an exhausted smile, and about the sound Mom made when the car hit her, and about — about all the bad stuff. It's not too often, yeah, but a few weeks ago she woke up screaming.
At least she's not sleeping alone. After a week taking turns on the couch while trying to figure out how to fit a futon or a mattress in the small bedroom, Yusuke and her decided to just share the bed already in the apartment, thankfully big enough for a beanpole and a gremlin (thanks, Ryuji, for those nicknames, you're awesome, and nooo that's not sarcastic at all). It's nice to fall asleep when cuddling, it turns out, and it's also nice to stay awake until wee hours of the morning, soft talk hardening into old sorrows.
God, she's beginning to mellow out at her old age of twenty-six.
"It's a long story," Futaba ends up blurting out, than adds, "And I'm not saying that to seem mysterious. Totally."
Jess stares at her, incredulous.
No later than half a second after she enters the house, ready to turn on her main computer and do some actual work — thank god for the internet and the abundance of freelance jobs — Futaba chokes on some smoke. And it isn't the cigarette kind. Besides, she told Yusuke he either goes to the balcony or she'll toss his Marlboros into the toilet. And he wouldn't want to have his hard-earned money wasted due to being a moron.
But he is, apparently, okay with setting the place on fire.
"What the fuck, Inari," Futaba gasps out as she quickly makes her way to the kitchen, where Yusuke is jabbing the rice cooker, currently resembling a throat of a dragon that ate too much spicy chicken. What the fuck. Why has this image come to her mind. What the fresh hell is happening.
"I seem to have forgotten about it."
"No shit!"
After they let out the smoke, earning quite a few disapproving looks from their neighbors, Futaba orders a new cooker on eBay and has Yusuke promise to get her Starbucks the next time he has the chance. Seems fair enough, yeah? Yeah.
Popping the pink Paxil pill (wow, alliteration much) into her mouth, Futaba stretches her linked hands over her head, then reaches for the comb. When her hair is tidy enough, she pulls it into a lopsided ponytail and exits the bathroom. In the kitchen, Yusuke is frying tamagoyaki (they don't have a cooker yet, fucking eBay), bleary-eyed and even more disheveled than usual. Probably didn't get enough sleep, judging by his appearance and by how he woke Futaba around four thirty in the morning when leaving the bed.
"You look like something that crawled out of a sewer after rotting in there for a month, Inari," she says as she turns on the coffee maker. "Did you forget about the wonders of caffeine?"
"Not quite," Yusuke replies, turning the stove off and moving the omelets to the prepared purple plates (alliteration again, ha! Futaba for the win). "Today marks one month since you moved here, so I found it proper to cook you a breakfast as a way to celebrate. However, that meant my not having the time to strengthen myself with—"
"You're terrible," Futaba cuts in as she's handing him a cup of double espresso with cream. "Sweet—" she stands on her toes to kiss his cheek "—but terrible. Zero outta ten."
"Hm, how impudent of you," Yusuke says with a smile, gently tugging on her ponytail.
They pull a lot of all-nighters, which sorta can be expected of an artist and a computer programmer. They probably keep the pizza delivery place in business, but also piss off its staff by ordering from them at three in the morning. In the night? Whatever. It's fuck o'clock either way.
Futaba stuffs a triangle of Margarita into her maw and goes back to fiddling with a website her client wants to have touched up. Hopefully he'll be satisfied with it and pay her well — and anyway, if he doesn't, she can just hack it and have the contact page redirect to, let's say, some nice YouTube compilation of the best classic Vocaloid songs.
Not like she'd do that, though. Akira would be disappointed and tell Dad — or, worse, he'd tattle to Makoto.
"That'd suck a lot of ass," she says out loud.
"Excuse me?" Yusuke looks at her from where he's curled on the sofa, a sketchbook full of painting ideas open on his lap.
"Not talking to you, Inari," Futaba says curtly, already back to typing. Then she pauses and opens 8tracks in a new page. Barely half a minute it takes her to find a proper playlist before the starting chords of 'Just Be Friends' filling the room. "Nice."
"Nice," Yusuke echoes back, his pencil gaining speed as it glides on the paper. Futaba rolls her eyes. It fucking figures that this nerd would find a way outta his art block thanks to cliché tunes.
Living in a tiny town is surprisingly hella, Futaba realizes. There's not much there, only the cafe, the pizza place, a few shops, and a pharmacy. Every few days or so, she goes to the beach and sits on the sand, looking at waves and counting the boats. Sometimes she takes pictures, using the Polaroid camera Ann got her for birthday, and pins them to the corkboard above her tiny desk cluttered with hardware and food wrappers.
Yet, once a month, Yusuke and her take the bus to Miyazaki to meet up with their psychiatrist, a soft-spoken woman who takes no shit and makes sure they're doing well.
Today Futaba has her appointment first, spends half an hour describing the past four weeks and gets a prescription for her antidepressants, then sits in the waiting room while Yusuke takes her place. She connects to the wi-fi and downloads a Neko Atsume update; her cats are all fed and happy by the time they leave. Outside the clinic, she watches Yusuke have a smoke before they go to the group therapy meeting. It's, as usual, hard and exhausting, all discussing the worst parts of their lives (losing Mom for her, Madarame's abuse for him) and avoiding talking about the Metaverse, so, after they're done, they treat themselves to gelato.
"We oughta get an ice cream maker," Futaba says thoughtfully as she's wiping her mouth with the back of her hand. "I'm pretty sure we can afford it."
"We can," Yusuke confirms, playing with his braided hair. "With how much my last painting was sold for, such a contraception—"
"Getting that and having to eat instant ramen because we don't have the cash for anything else ain't gonna happen, pal."
"L-listen—"
"Inari, it's common knowledge that both gays and artists don't know math, ergo: can't budget to save their lives. And you're a gay artist. So your math skills are prolly well below zero."
Yusuke sighs, pushing his hands inside his pockets. "That was quite an apt description of me."
Linking her arm with his to pull him towards the bus stop, Futaba smirks proudly. "You're welcome."
When summer comes, so hot and sunny that even the two of them get tanned — which looks awesome on Futaba and awful on Yusuke, naturally — they invite their friends to spend a few days at their place before going for their annual road trip, this time in the middle of August. That's why Ann ends up teaching Futaba how to bake banana bread a few minutes after midnight, while Yusuke's out to obtain beer for Ann and tampons for Futaba.
"So," Ann says, stirring the dough and running her hand through her hair so her pixie cut ends up messy and sticking up. There's a sentence in Spanish tattooed on her bared collarbone. "You two seem to have fun living together."
"Hell no," Futaba replies with a fierce smile. "It's awful. I hate it. Wanna strangle Inari at least twice per second."
Ann shakes her head. "I'm happy for you."
Before Yusuke's back, there are only two slices left of the loaf. In their defense, Ann added chocolate chips. They're important.
"Well, fuck me sideways with an eggplant!" Futaba jumps out of the — painfully cold — water, slips on the wet sand and falls on her ass. "Fuck!"
"Language," Yusuke chides from where he's resting on a towel with the rest of the squad, his usual hoodie (yup, it's the one he's got since high school) blindingly white in the sun. Futaba plops down by him, thinks for a while, then takes her revenge by pressing her icy feet to his sun-warmed knees. "Dammit!"
"Language," she parrots back at him.
"Settle down, children," Akira chirps in. Futaba pinches him.
During the road trip, Yusuke paints a pretty cool impressionist landscape of Kyoto — and, barely a week after putting it in the exhibition, an art collector from South Korea buys it for over a hundred thousand yen, not forgetting to enquire about Yusuke's other works.
"Well, about time," he says when he gets back home. Futaba chuckles to herself.
"'s a shame we can't celebrate that with a drink," she says fondly, turning off her computer, before a memory hits her. "Hey, Inari."
"Yes?"
"Remember college?"
"Hm, it would not be easy to simply forget four years of—" Yusuke pauses, halfway through unknotting a tie, as he notices Futaba's cheeky grin.
"I mean," she drawls out, not taking her eyes off him, "that one day when Akira and I went to visit you in your dorms and found you stoned like a koala bear."
"In my defense, I hadn't had the faintest idea that the pastries I was offered were not ordinary," Yusuke says fervently.
"How many did you have, again?" Futaba taps her chin. "Seven? Eight?"
"N-nine."
"Nine pot brownies. I, for one, sure as hell ain't forgetting it."
On Christmas night, Futaba wakes up from a nightmare (as usual) and hears Yusuke making soft, whimpering sounds in his sleep (not as usual). She wriggles out of his tight grip before finding his hand underneath the covers and squeezing it with as much force as she can muster up. "Hey, Inari," she murmurs, barely feeling her voice leave her throat, "wake up, dude. Hey, pal, my man, wakey wakey eggs and bakey. 's just a dream."
Yusuke opens his eyes with a hoarse cry, then relaxes as he sees Futaba. "M-my apologies, I d-did not mean to—"
"S'okay," Futaba says and clings back to him, anxiety and shadowy remains of the dream fleeing her mind when she finds herself in the familiar position, her head tucked under his chin and his arm draped over her side.
A silence falls on them, heavy but not suffocating. Futaba closes her eyes and listens to Yusuke's breathing, all ragged edges and muffled down sobs. Her fingers tighten where she has them hooked in the fabric of his undershirt; she presses herself closer, slips her foot in-between his shins, hopes that's enough.
She inhales, one two three, holds, one two three, exhales, one two three four five. Again. And again, when she feels Yusuke follow her rhythm, then again, again — until the moment of shared horror passes.
"I'm sorry," Yusuke says. His voice is quiet and weary. Futaba shakes her head.
"Don't be."
She senses him shift, sigh, then kiss her forehead.
"Thank you."
"You owe me one." Futaba tugs at the waistline of her dress (a nice knee-length thing made of soft cotton in the color of green apples), then looks up at Yusuke (a purple dress shirt, charcoal grey slacks and a black tie), who runs his hand over his slicked back hair. "Or two. Three. Thousands."
"Perhaps," he says amicably and pauses in front of another portrait. "Hm. You need not worry, however, for the next art show will not be before next year, judging by my frequency of producing new paintings."
Scoffing, Futaba chews on her lip, tasting lipstick. Yucky. "I damn well hope so."
Before Yusuke can reply, an elderly man approaches them, his hands linked behind his hunched back. There's a friendly smile playing on his face. Spotting him, Yusuke blinks in bewilderment, then bows.
"Good evening, Kawanabe-san," he says. "It's both a pleasure and a surprise to meet you again."
"Good evening, Yusuke-kun," Kawanabe replies, nodding back. "Same goes for you — well, especially considering the works I have seen here. You did grow a lot as an artist during these years."
"Thank you," Yusuke bows again, grinning. It's such a sweet, candid expression that Futaba can't help but coo, drawing Kawanabe's attention to herself. He peers at her curiously.
"And who is this beautiful young lady you've got here, hm?" he asks, not unkindly. Yusuke looks at her too, and his unambiguous contentment almost makes his eyes sparkle.
"You could say," he states, "that Futaba here is my sister."
"Y-yes, you could say that," Futaba repeats, too happy to respond properly.
Futaba hates winter. It's all just bad, bad memories, Akira's incarceration and Mom's death, and every other night she dreams about it. Yusuke never complains, though, merely holds her, strokes her hair and doesn't say a word about the mess she makes on his shoulder where she hides her face.
Haru visits them, one day, bringing warm hugs and homemade cookies — so many cookies that they still have a bowl left a week after she's gone.
Inserting one — mm, chocolate chunks and peanut butter — into her mouth, Futaba cards her fingers through Yusuke's hair as she's scrolling through her Tumblr dash. Before Yusuke fell asleep with his head on Futaba's lap, they'd been playing the prequel of Life Is Strange and damn well enjoying it, just as they had the first game. Yusuke likes the aesthetics, Futaba likes the soundtrack (she even set 'Spanish Sahara' as her ringtone), and both of them adore Chloe.
Futaba pauses, then opens the memo with a shopping list and adds hair dye to it. She's gotta do her roots.
Maybe she'll buy a blue one, instead of the usual orange. People would think she's Yusuke's sister, not girlfriend, in that case — but hey, Futaba would rather stick a fork down her throat than give a dang about what others presume.
"You look dashing." Yusuke nods and does his finger frame quirk. "Your new hairstyle is called, hm, an undercut, yes?"
"No," Futaba says flatly. Yusuke deflates. "A sidecut, nerdlord. But points for trying."
It makes him so dour that Futaba ends up letting him braid whatever's left of her hair. She looks like a dope, but, hey, at least her friend's having fun.
After the therapy session, Futaba feels as if someone put her through a meat grinder, then set the result on fire. It's— God, it's not the first time she started crying, and probably not the last either, but the exhaustion etches itself into her muscles and bones, and she almost falls asleep as Yusuke and her are waiting for the bus.
"Fucking hell," she says faintly, the side of her face resting against Yusuke's shoulder. She feels him inhale deeply, slowly, and closes her stinging eyes.
"Are you alright?" he asks, just as quietly.
Futaba's mind flashes back to the sessions in Tokyo, where they talked about depressive thoughts and suicidal ideation; to how Yusuke said, with his head hung down, that he sometimes wondered if Madarame's deeds weren't his fault; to the day where she followed him to his dorm room and saw him cry. And then she thinks about where they are, who they are now, young and successful, an artist growing in fame and one of the best programmers in all of Japan.
"No," she hears herself say, "but I will be."
For Yusuke's birthday, Futaba gets him a set of watercolor paints and a few nice brushes. For her birthday, four weeks later, he gets her a bunch of games she's been eyeing for weeks. They don't really bother with a cake, but that's okay. That's really okay.
At least they get to see Akira, smiling and unhurt. He stays for the night on both occasions and doesn't bother making assumptions. He knows too well, Futaba decides; he was, after all, one of the first people each of them came out to.
The sakura starts blooming by the end of February — there's a tree just in front of their apartment building, and the fragile, pale flowers remind Futaba of, for some reason, popcorn. When she shares this observation with Yusuke, while they're playing FFXV in the middle of the night, he laughs, sets his pad down and quickly sketches, on the top of an empty pizza box, a tree with popcorn kernels instead of leaves. It's surreal asfuck.
"You're welcome," Futaba deadpans and gets a flick to the ear for that.
(The next day, Yusuke copies the doodle to canvas and uses his birthday gifts to paint it. Futaba takes a photo and snapchats it to Ann).
Futaba stares at the box of cereal. The box, like the abyss, stares back at her. Finally, she sighs and puts it in the shopping basket. It's got chia seeds, so that's gotta be nice — besides, every other kind available has either raisins or oats in it, and Futaba hates their textures, plus it's too late to go the other shop or order groceries online.
Cons of living in butt-fucking nowhere — so little choice, so many needs. She thinks back to the big-ass malls in Tokyo, then sighs again.
"What's wrong?" Yusuke asks, appearing by her side with a paper bag full of veggies in his grip. Futaba makes a face at him.
"I wish I could teleport to Tokyo, buy hella lot of stuff and then teleport back here," she explains. Yusuke nods, unsurprised.
"Hm, I could use some of Akira's coffee, to be frank."
Futaba pats him on the back. "Me too, pal."
Reminder: get Haru to send them some of her coffee beans.
When the news about a convention in Miyazaki drop, Futaba decides she has to go, and she doesn't even have to whine and/or mope around to get Yusuke to go with her.
Both of them cosplay as Chloe — he as the main game version, she as the prequel version. The con is teeny tiny, only around fifteen stands and one room for presentations, but everyone's having fun.
Futaba poses for a photo, resting a baseball bat on her shoulder and making an angry face while Yusuke fiddles with her Polaroid.
"Be careful," she hisses out without changing her expression. "This shit's expensive as hell. Use your phone instead."
Before it's Yusuke's turn to fool around, they take five to munch on protein bars and text photos to their friends. Akira spams the group chat with a bunch of smiling cat emojis, then says that it's from Mona.
When they send a picture of Yusuke, holding a gun in one hand and a lit cigarette in another, the reply is 'that's my pistol? i thought i lost it. FUTABA.'
"Inari," Futaba says gravely, "I think we pissed our boss off. Please be of help."
"I got nothing," Yusuke says and eats another bar. An Ignis cosplayer, passing by their hideaway, gives them a long, confused look.
On the first of June, the Diet passes a new legislation, called, not without reason, the rainbow law. From now on, gay people in Japan can get married, and trans ones can transition with ease.
On the fifth of June, there's a Pride parade in Tokyo — and all of the Thieves are there. They used to fight for freedom and justice, after all.
Futaba links her arm with Yusuke's as they step into an ocean of celebrating people. They're wearing matching asexual pride tees, Futaba has an aromantic flag painted on her cheek, while Yusuke proudly dons c.a. fifteen rainbow bracelets.
We're not roommates, Futaba thinks at one point, perched on Yusuke's shoulders and taking photos, we're family. She spots Ann, Haru and Makoto, all covered in lesbian symbols, and beams at them. Makoto, extremely pretty in her dress that's colored like the genderfluid flag, gives her a thumbs up.
The cup of coffee Dad fixes for her tastes almost too good to be real, and Futaba is torn between savoring it and drinking it all in one gulp. She makes a compromise and takes an entire three minutes to down it, then goes behind the counter to prepare more.
"So," Dad says from the tiny kitchen where he's cooking a nice, big pot of curry, "that boy." He points a spoon at Yusuke, who's sitting in a booth, cushioned between Haru and Akira, and drawing the sleeping Morgana. "He treat you right?"
"Yeah," Futaba says, pouring the delightfully black and thick liquid from a siphon into the biggest cup she could find. "We're doing okay, so chill, mi padre. It's really fun, living with him." She stills, realising how honest that was.
Thankfully, Dad picks up on that and goes to give her a one-armed hug.
"Hey," he tells her, "it's been almost a year since my little girl moved out, okay? So of course I worry. Let the old man feel nostalgic, now will you?"
Chuckling, Futaba elbows Dad gently in the ribs. "I don't see any old men here."
"A flatterer," Dad laughs. "Just for that, you're getting more curry."
Score.
All of them go to Akechi's grave, the day before Yusuke and Futaba are set to go back home. The cemetery, the same one where their mothers are laid to rest, is quiet, so quiet in the scorching sun.
There are no words said when they stand in front of the plain marker. Futaba recalls the moment when Crow's signal went out; she reaches out and grabs Akira's hand. Without looking at her, he squeezes back. Makoto has her arm around Haru's waist, and Ann leans against Yusuke, her fingers tight on Ryuji's elbow. Mona's eyes, blue like the cloudless sky above them, seem too sad and too old for him.
Just two days after they're back home, Yusuke leaves again — and when he announces he's going to visit Madarame, Futaba gives him a long, tight hug. She feels like it's appropriate, considering he plans to go on June twenty first. Father's Day.
When she wakes up on that day, it's to an empty, already cold bed. She goes through the motions, does her work, eats lunch at the café, texts Kana, calls Dad, spends the entire evening on the beach where she sits on the sand with her arms around her knees and watches the waves. It's all kinda lonely.
By the time she gets back home, Yusuke has returned. She finds him on the balcony, an ashtray full of cigarette butts on his lap. He looks tired and sad, but, when she sits by him, he lays his head on her shoulder.
"Every time…" He inhales deeply, takes a long drag. "Every time he and I talk, he speaks of yet another sin he committed to condition me." He laughs, and Futaba takes his free hand.
"Fuck him," she says gently. Yusuke smiles, and it's a bitter, sorrowful expression.
"When I was eight years old, he told me that I should not wear red, for it does not fit me. That— that was a lie, of course. Today he explained he said that because my— my Mom used to wear a lot of red."
He breathes in again, and again, and when it turns to quiet, stifled sobs, Futaba squeezes his palm even harder.
There's a cake sitting on the table. Futaba whips out a fork and pokes at it. "Inari," she begins, but before she can formulate a question about what the fuck is going on, Yusuke enters the kitchen, carrying a bottle of alcohol-free sparkling wine and two glasses.
"Happy anniversary," he announces proudly. Futaba sniffs, then gets a knife and starts cutting the cake. Dang. It has cherries inside. And a crunchy crust.
"Can't believe I've lived with you for a whole year and haven't even tried to murder you yet," she says with a fond smile.
"We should go shopping for clothes," Futaba announces, looking at the sorry state of her wardrobe. "Damn, I only have one dress, the one from the party…" She examines a pair of jeans shorts. "Dear God, I should set those on fire — they've got fake pockets. Fake pockets, Inari! Do you…" She pauses. "Actually, we should move to America, breed frogs and churn butter."
"Yes, that sounds— Wait, wait." Inari looks at her from his phone. "Butter?"
"Butter," Futaba confirms. "You'll have to eat at least ten kilograms of it per day, for not listening to me."
"I was listening!" he protests, getting up from the bed. "You said— Clothes, correct?" He rolls his shoulder, smiling. "Hm, and I have been thinking about getting a skirt, just to see how it would look on me."
"Dude, you'd look so hella that all the guys would be yours." She grins back.
Ah, does she love the smell of yeeting gender norms out of the window.
(Two hours later, this happens:
"Take off those goddamn fishnets or I'll use them to strangle you, then make a rope outta 'em to hang myself," Futaba says darkly. Yusuke gives her a petulant look.)
Both of them have a few tattoos. They get their next ones together, matching infinity symbols on their ankles. It's all around a sappy kind of affair.
Futaba regrets it barely five hours later, after Yusuke has destroyed another rice cooker.
Piece of shit.