"Something to tell me...?" Yuuta ushered his brother to sit down on the bed – it seemed wrong to let him continue standing when he looked so forcedly normal – and momentarily considered putting a brotherly arm around his shoulders until he remembered that, at this point, he wasn't supposed to know that it was bad news. Aniki had seen his arm start to move and then be pulled back, but if there was one good thing about aniki being angry and sad, it was that he usually forgot to smile unsettlingly at all the little things Yuuta found himself doing by accident when he was around him. They were accidents, of course; they just... happened with alarming frequency, that was all.
"Mmn," Shuusuke said, settling himself against the wall, his legs crossed beneath him. "I was waiting until now to tell you, as there was a chance that it wouldn't happen after all, but we got a phone call last night that made it final." Hearing aniki speak coldly was an unhappy experience for Yuuta; his voice was normally full of warmth and mirth, or full of something, anyway, and the world felt skewed at a disconcerting angle when that wasn't present. "Father's not coming home for the summer like he said he would, not any of it, and mother's flying out to visit him, for the whole four weeks. I'm sorry, Yuuta."
Although Yuuta had promised to try not to look too disappointed, he couldn't fight the distress that flashed over his face like the beam of a lighthouse; only for a second, but absolutely unmissable. Since their father worked overseas, Yuuta rarely ever got to see him – aniki barely ever got to see him, even though, unlike Yuuta, he still lived at home – and he had really been excited about having a few weeks in the summer to spend with him. He'd been promised tennis matches (his father wasn't very good, but it was the bonding that counted), and fishing trips (Yuuta wasn't very good, but it was the bonding, again, that counted) and movie nights and hikes outside Tokyo - and what made it worse was that he'd been promised all this last holiday too. The feeling that none of this was ever going to happen was slowly starting to creep across his skin, so he tried to banish it in favour of looking as if he didn't care, even though the chance of aniki buying it was probably in the minus figures.
"Where are we going to stay?" Yuuta asked, trying to be as practical as possible under the circumstances. "They can't leave us on our own, can they?" Maybe if they couldn't stay home alone for four weeks, their parents would have to look after them after all...
Shuusuke shifted slightly on the bed. "Yumiko's going to be staying, to make sure we're not misbehaving."
Yuuta mentally added "Which is a pity, as I know how you so enjoy misbehaving" to the end of his brother's sentence, and then wondered why he'd thought it. He must have been compensating for aniki's disquiet. Yes.
"I... guess that works," Yuuta said, trying to turn it over in his mind as he spoke. It was still kind of irresponsible, wasn't it, leaving two junior high school-aged boys to their own devices for an entire month? Yumiko had a job and a boyfriend and couldn't possibly watch them for the whole time.
"It works because we're good children," Shuusuke said, and Yuuta wondered if he'd ever seen his brother look so placidly seething. "And Yumiko is responsible enough to look after us."
Yuuta found himself adding "Do you think we should be bad boys?" to this in his head again, and gave himself a little shake to try to get it to stop. When had he started to anticipate aniki's flirtations? Was that what they were? No, that was stupid. It was just aniki being aniki, and when he wasn't, then there was a hole there that Yuuta felt he had to fill. As long as he wasn't standing in for him out loud, everything was as it should be.
If aniki had noticed his little shake, he chose to say nothing about it. Yuuta searched for something to say that wouldn't make his brother feel any worse, but it was hard, because he wasn't very good at talking about things like this. He didn't even know quite why aniki was so angry, because aniki didn't do things with their father like Yuuta did; aniki never treated his infrequent arrivals with anything other than his own particular brand of cordial welcome, and Yuuta couldn't actually remember any time that aniki had been at all excited, even when they'd been little. Maybe when they'd been little, actually – his memory was blurrier than he'd've liked once he went back further than around eight – but certainly not in the last five years or so. So why was he so angry and upset? He was close to their mother (Yuuta too was sad about her being away, and not just for the food he'd've been greeted with), but it wasn't quite as big a deal as their father not being there either, because mother was always there for the rest of the time and Shuusuke spent a lot of his time talking to her, so it couldn't just be her absence that had flicked the switch marked 'do not touch' inside him. Yuuta felt completely out of his depth here. Why did aniki have to understand him better than he understood aniki?
"Well... you don't have to worry about feeling responsible for me," Yuuta said, trying to relieve the burden that he did know would be making it harder for him. "I won't be any trouble."
Shuusuke looked at him with the eyes he seemed to save only for him (not that he'd ever paid attention to how aniki looked at other people) and seemed to smile despite himself. "That's the only part of this I'm happy about, getting to take care of you, Yuuta. Is that okay with you...?"
"I... suppose so..." Yuuta said, not sure what he really should have said to that, or what he really should have felt at it. It wasn't so unusual, was it, for older brothers to want to take care of their siblings? It didn't feel quite like that, though...
"Then that's good. We can still have a nice holiday, right?"
"I... yes," Yuuta said, still a bit unsettled about the change in circumstances, but trying to sound positive to make aniki feel better. In reality, he wasn't so sure. Because St Rudolph was a boarding school, a large percentage of his friends lived a long way away from Tokyo, so he wouldn't be able to see any of them until school started again, and this suddenly seemed like a much bigger deal now that he wouldn't be seeing his parents either. He had his Game Boy and tennis to play, but... aniki was going to be hanging around the house all the time, if he was taking it upon himself to look after him, and he was going to be lonely without Yuuta to spend time with, so... an entire summer of aniki. Yuuta didn't know how he felt about that just yet. He loved aniki, of course, but he didn't know how long he could take non-stop flirting – when they were on their own all the time with no escape! – before he would find himself begging Yanagisawa-senpai if he could stay at his house for the rest of the holiday, just to stop his cheeks from staying bright red permanently. If you stayed one way all the time and the wind changed, you'd get stuck, and he didn't want to leave his fate in aniki's hands like that! (Yuuta knew it wasn't really true, but neither did he really want to experience a perma-blush as one would a perma-tan.)
Maybe it would be okay, though. Maybe. It depended on what sorts of things aniki felt like doing; Yuuta couldn't picture him going fishing, and the kinds of movies Yuuta liked to watch were, he knew, completely at odds to aniki's (weird) tastes, but maybe they could still go hiking and aniki could take his camera and they'd have a nice time. As long as they didn't get stuck in the wilderness together, anyway. Yuuta didn't know whether he'd actually survive (or want to survive) having to share a sleeping bag with aniki to 'preserve warmth'. It would be worse if aniki didn't wear anything to bed. Not that Yuuta wanted to be thinking about that. Time to change the subject now!
"Are you upset about it?" Yuuta asked the first thing that sprang to mind instead of aniki naked. He was lucky that his word association was being sensible today...
"Not upset, no. Maybe a little disappointed. But I get to spend the summer with my sexy little brother, so it's not too bad for me, hmm?"
"... Sexy...?" Yuuta wished aniki wouldn't look at him like that!
"Do you not think so? I'll have to make a more thorough appraisal later, then."
Oh no.
"Are you upset, though? It's okay to be sad, Yuuta. You can always cry on my shoulder if you need to..."
That would have sounded sarcastic coming from anyone other than aniki. Yuuta almost wished it had been sarcastic, because at least there would have been no ulterior motives that he didn't quite understand.
Remembering what Yumiko had asked of him, Yuuta decided to play down what he was really feeling. He still hadn't worked out quite why aniki was as angry as he was, though he seemed to have calmed down a little since they'd started talking about it, so it seemed better to play it safe.
"I don't need to cry! I'm fine, really I am. I'm disappointed, but there'll definitely be no crying. So you don't need to have your hand on my leg like that...!" That last sentence hadn't been one he'd composed in his head, as the hand had come as a surprise, but it was by far the most sincere line of his not-really-a-speech.
"I was just checking your sexy levels," Shuusuke said, with a carefully innocent smile. "What happens to them when you're sad, that sort of thing."
Yuuta just stared, so Shuusuke continued on. "If it ever starts to get to you, though, you know you can always come to me, right?" It took Yuuta a moment to realise that aniki was talking about their parents and not the putting of his hand on his leg. It had, thankfully, been removed, but his thigh still felt a bit warm and his pulse was still too quick after the shock.
"Er... yes. Yes. I know I always can. Thank you." Yuuta didn't really know what else to say to that. Was it wrong that he was a little bit curious about what happened to his sexy levels when he was genuinely upset? The answer was, of course, 'yes', but it was better than aniki being curious, surely? It had to be. And it had to be better than them checking them together, God forbid.
Aniki seemed to consider him carefully for a few moments, as if to check that he really wasn't fighting back tears, and then he said, "So, are you looking forward to our pyjama parties?"
It took all of Yuuta's self-control to not ask when Yumiko was taking him back home. And damn, the subject had been changed and he still hadn't found out why aniki was angry about what was happening. If he was planning – it was painful even to think it – pyjama parties and sexiness tests, then he couldn't be unhappy about their parents not being there, so what was it?
Once aniki was gone and wasn't threatening to stroke his leg again (he wasn't actually threatening, but Yuuta knew he was thinking about it), he'd devote some time to thinking about it. For now, he had to fight off aniki's plans to play Twister and feed each other fondue...