It was really—the whole thing—when you thought about—was definitely Haru's fault, for leaving them alone, together, with something of hers, which was such a persona item, and contained so much of the past four years of her life.
At least, if you asked Legoshi, it was (not that he was blaming Haru, but she really shouldn't have) that way.
In Haru's view, it was Louis' fault, for making such a big deal of it in the first place (as if the piece of contention had been the only one of its kind).
If you asked Louis, it was everyone's fault. Not just those who had been in the room, but everyone, everywhere, had conspired and contributed and he was thoroughly put out with all of them, the entire world (although, as usual, he was not wholly displeased with his fame).
Juno didn't care whose fault it was, she was just joyously glad and incurably horrified that she had been involved (it would have been better, though, for it to happen another way, preferably one that did not involve so many other parties).
What happened was this: They decided to order out.
Legoshi finally had a couch—now sitting in the middle of the room while they argued about where it would look best—and this seemed reason enough to celebrate. According to Haru, a couch was a Big Adult purchase (she told Louis and his dozen couches back at the house that not only could he shut up, they didn't count because he had inherited them).
But Legoshi had left his phone at work by mistake, so Haru lent him hers, while she and Louis went to check Legoshi's mail, because Haru was feeling helpful, and also wanted company.
So it was Juno and Legoshi left on the couch to order the take-out they had agreed upon.
"Oh…" Where someone else might have inserted a curse, Legoshi just made a quiet noise of distress as his massive fingers punched haphazardly around Haru's unfamiliar phone. "Oh…no…"
"Do you want me to do this?" Juno asked.
"No, no, I've—oh, how do I close this? Everything is so small…" While Legoshi fiddled with the phone, bringing up things he didn't mean to and changing settings he wasn't aware of, he unintentionally stumbled into the jungle. "Oh no." There was a shift in Legoshi's worry, an escalation that immediately drew Juno's attention to the phone, and as soon as she looked, she couldn't stop looking. Her hands flew up to her muzzle, eyes like saucers, and she kept telling herself she should look away, but she couldn't (in fact, she leaned closer).
"Is…is that…close it!" she cried, her eyes opened about as wide as they could be, like this would help her take it in in greater detail. "Wait—close it!"
"I'm trying! Stop looking at it!" Legoshi yelped, but panic made his fingers clumsier still, and when the front door swung open, he let out a strangled scream, nearly flinging the phone at the wall.
"Have you managed to order yet?" Haru asked, throwing down onto the counter Legoshi's meager mail, which consisted entirely of advertisements for services he did not want and probably didn't need. Louis passed by her and Legoshi might have pitched the phone straight out the window, if he had thought of it before Louis caught a glimpse of it over the back of the couch. Juno's ears were flat against her head, her tail tucked close to her legs, as if she was the one caught misbehaving.
"Haru!" Louis' screeching could probably be heard across the entire floor the moment he caught sight of Haru's phone screen, Legoshi marveled. He didn't know deer could be that loud. He seized the phone from the wolf's inert hands. "Haru!"
"What?" she whined, dragging her feet about addressing whatever drama Louis had fomented now.
"When did you take this?" He thrust the phone in her face, and it took her less than a second to familiarize herself with the photo: Louis, asleep on his belly in her garden shed bed, the sheets thrown carelessly over his legs, barely up to his knees, back angled to the camera, and not wearing a single stitch of clothing. The patch of off-white fur that started beneath his tail and ran between his legs up to his bellybutton was visible, and particularly prominent, reminding her it had been early fall when she took the shot. It was one of the rare times she'd ever seen him totally relaxed: naturally, he was unconscious.
"Ah…" Fuck. Rather than answering, Haru made a grab for the phone.
"Haru, when did you take this? What is this?"
"It's a cute photo!" she argued, leaping up as if she had a chance to reach the phone out of Louis grasp once he'd raised his hand. "It was ages ago, Louis, come on…"
"Why do you still have this! How many other—" He cut off, his pupils dilating. He fixed Haru with all the urgency of a man whose life might be at stake, clutching the phone in his hand. "Haru. How many do you have?"
"Hey, hey, I deleted everything you told me to delete!" she said. She wasn't some kind of creep! And Louis' nudes had always came with a reminder to delete them after she'd viewed them to her satisfaction, like they were making some kind of clandestine business deal, or that she might suddenly decide to trade them for cash (which, she had pointed out to him a few times, could make her bank at Cherryton).
"I don't believe you." And he started to browse her gallery.
"Hey! Louis! Stop looking through my stuff!"
"Oh, I'm sorry, do you feel like your privacy is being invaded right now? Do you feel exposed?"
"Louis!" She grabbed at his shirt, pulling and jumping, trying to latch onto his arm.
"I can't believe you still have this even when you're dating Legoshi!"
"I forgot it was even there!" she exclaimed. "That's how long ago it was! Go ahead and delete it; I don't care!"
"And you expect me to believe you remember every other photo you might have saved on here?" The wolves on the couch watched guiltily as the herbivores went at it, not especially wanting to intervene, but feeling the current situation was at least somewhat their doing.
Haru had given up on trying to reach Louis from where she stood. While he zipped through her photos—passing several of her own nudes, which he didn't feel was any great invasion, as he had already seen all of that before—she climbed onto the back of the couch, and grabbed onto his antlers, threatening to put her full weight on them.
"Ack-! Haru! Stop that!"
"Give me my phone, Louis!"
"Not until I know it's clean!"
"Louis!"
"Haru!"
Louis tried to move away from the couch, at which point Haru slipped, and then was putting far more weight on Louis' antlers than they were ever intended to hold, and Legoshi gaped in horror, wondering if they might just break right off. Louis' strangled yelping as Haru's weight snapped his head back made both wolves wonder if this wasn't the moment when they should try to get involved, but Haru managed to hook her legs around Louis' hips, and reached around with another effort to get her phone back.
"I can't believe this!" Louis said, holding the phone out of reach. "Not a single nude of Legoshi on here! He's holding out on you!"
"What?" His name and the word "nude" had just been used in the same sentence, which would have grabbed Legoshi's attention from a continent over.
"Aha!" As they struggled around Legoshi's shoebox apartment, Haru managed to get a foot against a wall, and use this to leverage herself to grab the phone from Louis. "Are you satisfied?" she demanded as she fell off him, hitting the ground and stumbling a few steps. Louis' eyes flicked up to Juno, who squeaked and looked away, with a truly remarkable (and completely ineffective) effort to feign that she had no idea the whole thing was happening at all.
"Of course not. I can't believe you would hang onto that," he said. "Or that you wouldn't tell me that you took it."
"I honestly forgot about it, Louis. I don't even know how—" The end of the sentence seemed to inspire her, and she turned to the wolves on the couch. "How did you guys find that?"
"Oh—er—we—I was—" Legoshi, to the best of his awareness, had not done anything wrong (he certainly hadn't gone looking for naked pictures of Louis-senpai), and yet, here they were.
"You're making yourself look very guilty," Louis informed him, which did not help Legoshi's ability to explain.
"It's not like we were trying to find pictures of Louis with nothing on!" Juno burst out, her face roughly equal in temperature to the average slab of pavement on a typical July afternoon in Death Valley. Luckily for her, Louis would never know how intently she was trying to imprint that photo in her brain. "It just happened and we barely looked at it, we hardly even saw anything, if you know what I mean, although Haru is right it was a nice picture, not that we were really looking and it's just a picture, there's nothing to make a big deal about, but half the animals at school would probably kill to see that and Legoshi brought it up!" At some point, Juno decided the only way to stop digging herself deeper into a grave was to throw her upperclassman under the bus. It seemed fair enough, since it was mostly his fault.
"The buttons are so tiny," Legoshi lamented to Haru, ears flat back, twisting his fingers together. Louis had turned his displeased countenance back on the rabbit, who gave Legoshi a reassuring look.
"If you wanted to see it, you could have just asked me," she said, which made Louis and Legoshi both gape at her in varying degrees of shock.
"Haru!"
"What, I'm kidding!" She threw her hands up. "You're both terrible at taking a joke, jeez."
"Anyway, you should really send a few of those to Legoshi," Louis said, pointing to Haru's phone as he went to retrieve his own, so they might finally get some food in there. "Particularly the one with the tulips."
"Louis!"
Juno was pulling at the hem of her blouse, and found now a pertinent time to interject with a question that had arisen in her mind while watching the two herbivores waging war over the phone in Legoshi's bedroom/living room:
"Were you guys…" There was a long, flustered pause, as Juno hoped someone might answer the question before she had to pick a turn of phrase to fill in the rest of the sentence, during which Haru glanced over at Louis, who was studying his phone, "…dating?" Haru snorted.
"Yeah, I wouldn't call it that." She looked over at Louis, and they exchanged a look: it was such common knowledge between them and Legoshi that it had escaped both of them that Juno was not aware of their prior relationship status.
"Uh…" Haru wasn't sure what was the right follow-up to what appeared now to be a surprisingly genuine question, and Louis clearly was not going to respond at all, which, as it turned out, was enough of an answer for the she-wolf. With a strangled wail, she threw herself backwards on the couch, sliding off halfway onto the floor.
"What's up with her?" Haru looked between the two males. Legoshi froze, casting a sidelong glance at the desolate Juno, and Louis shrugged carelessly as he punched in the restaurant's number.
"I have no idea."
You can't tell me Haru never had any nudes of Louis. You can't. She thought she'd deleted them all but sometimes those old files escape you.
Louis' fur color is a reference to a deer's rump patch, which becomes more prominent during the mating season. While Beastars animals don't appear to go into heat, the desaturation of the rump patch probably remains.
I am endlessly entertained by portrayals of Juno realizing Haru's been involved with BOTH of her crushes, so I couldn't resist adding one here.