Takumi lets the conversation drop, too embarrassed by Kamui's sudden text to follow up on Leo's pictures. He stares at the message all the way to the car, then all the way home, and then all the way upstairs to his room, where he flops on his bed face first and screams into the pillows. He clenches his hands in the sheets, gripping tight as though to will the embarrassment away.
It's unavoidable though, as he looks at his phone, the darkened screen stark among his light sheets. And oh god. Leo knows, he must know, he's not stupid , Takumi thinks with an angry growl as he shoves his head into a pillow once more. Kamui ruined everything by betraying his trust and now Leo must hate him, right? He hasn't responded to that stupid text, so he must!
A quiet knock at his door makes him pause, thoughts of Leo and betrayal momentarily set aside as his little sister pokes her head through the door curiously. He tries to look normal, or as normal as one can be while wallowing in their own self pity, but Sakura takes one look at his red face and sad eyes, before she steps in, closing the door behind her.
"I-I think.." She starts, nervous stutter evident as she leans back against his door. "I think some boba tea would be nice, don't you?" Oh. Oh. Takumi smiles, but not before Sakura can start second-guessing herself. "I-If you don't, that's okay, you've just been kind of distant lately, and I miss spending time with you since you're at school so much and omigoshsorryImustbesoannoyingand-"
"Sakura, wait!" He shouts, jumping up to grab her hands before she can spiral, letting her claw into his wrists instead of the wooden door. He sighs when she finally looks at him properly, round red eyes boring into his own. "How many times do I have to tell you not to hurt yourself! But.. tea does sound great right now." Her nails bite into the skin of his arm, but her smile is eternal.
"And then!" Sakura pauses to wipe the tears from her eyes, only to start another bout of laughter before she can even finish her story. Takumi smiles, taking another sip of his boba tea while he waits. It wasn't even a particularly interesting story to begin with, but Sakura is getting a kick out of her own retelling, and who is Takumi to deny her any shred of happiness?
The cafe they're at has some smooth jazz playing in the background that Takumi can't really hear over his sister's raucous laughter. It's so infectious that even the store employees have caught on from behind the counter, smiles lighting up their faces as they listen in.
And Takumi enjoys every second of it. His phone is hidden away in his pocket, silent, but he hardly even notices. He'll ask her about Halloween eventually, but not now.
His phone is still silent when he returns home with Sakura in tow, happily babbling on about a new dessert recipe she wants to try. She quiets though, as soon as she sees him looking at his phone. He's quick to pocket it, but Sakura's silence means that she's already seen.
He's hanging up his coat in the genkan when Sakura pipes up from behind him. "Why'd you look at your phone? W-Was there something more important that you wanted to do?"
"No, no! Nothing like that." Takumi tries his best to reassure her, but he's never been as good at it as Kamui. "I'm just waiting on a message is all."
"A message?" Sakura's eyes widen, eyebrows disappearing beneath her bangs. "It must be quite an important one. I don't think I've ever seen you quite that attached to your phone before."
"Yeah, it's important." Takumi doesn't say much more, but Sakura seems more intrigued by the second.
"C-Can I guess? Oh, I bet it's from a spurned lover, wouldn't that be exciting!" Sakura exclaims, before she frowns, placing her hand on her chin. "But why would a spurned lover be texting you. No, wait!" She snaps her fingers, and Takumi pouts. " You must be the spurned lover, confessing your everlasting love over text and still waiting for a response!" She swoons, falling into his arms playfully.
Takumi sits her upright as he fights the urge to facepalm, bringing a hand to the bridge of his nose while Sakura looks on, excitedly bouncing in the genkan. "I'd never confess over text." He says at last, and Sakura deflates a little, rocking on her heels a little slower. She pouts, resting a palm on her cheek in a visage of dejection, and Takumi's resistance breaks. "But it might be.. something like that." The heat returns to his cheeks, but the smile on Sakura's face is worth it.
"Is he cute? What does he look like? You have to tell me!" Sakura seems to catch herself just before she grabs him by the arm and demands the gossip. Takumi frowns softly, and Sakura backs up, a slight blush covering her face. "Well, you don't have to tell me if you don't want to. It's fine. I don't need to know."
"No, it's fine, I don't mind telling you. It's just that.." He pauses for a moment, squirming out of his shoes ungracefully while Sakura follows his lead. "Kamui.. did something."
"He did something?" Sakura parrots back at him, eyebrows raised curiously. "What did he do that made you so upset?"
"Here." Takumi unlocks his phone quickly, pulling up the conversation and handing it to Sakura. "Just.. Tell me what you think I should say."
She reads it silently for a moment, brow furrowed. "Is this a picture of the boy you like?" When Takumi nods, her face scrunches up. "He's not very.. Well, he's kind of average don't you think?"
"Average?" Takumi frowns as Sakura flips between the two selfies that Leo had sent him. "Average what?"
"Well.. He doesn't look very.. He's not.." Sakura's brow furrowed even more. "He's kind of plain and boring-looking, don't you think?" She says at last, and Takumi seethes. He steps forward to snatch his phone from Sakura, and she lets him.
"He's not like that at all!" He hisses, on the verge of raising his voice to a yell, but he stops when Sakura flinches. The guilt hits him in the gut when he sees tears form in her eyes. "No, no, I'm sorry, don't cry, I'm sorry. It's just.. Those are bad photos of him. He's kind of bad at photos."
"Oboro said he's mean to you, so I thought maybe he was really cute and that's why you liked him." She sniffles a little, wiping at her eyes pathetically in a way that makes Takumi's heart hurt. "Why do you like him anyways?" Her question gives Takumi pause.
It's because he's cute right? And smart. And funny sometimes. And he likes tomatoes too much, and he has a round, very squishable face, and writes papers well. He loves to tell stories, and sometimes he puts his clothes on backwards, and he loves his older sister, and his dexterous fingers feel so good in his hair. He can spend days studying for a test, with his glasses on and classical music playing in his headphones and... And underneath that cold exterior that he sometimes wears... Takumi thinks there's something more. That Leo, despite their differences, might be like him. Underneath it all, Leo might understand his feelings, and so he might understand Leo's as well.
That insecurity he saw, at the top of the stairwell, was real. What he's feeling, right now, in his heart, is real. He wants to help, to make Leo smile and laugh and feel just as good as he makes Takumi feel.
He seizes up, staring at a bad selfie of the object of his affections while his mind runs in loops. He's cute, Takumi thinks, and smart, and funny, and..
"He makes me laugh. His hands feel good in my hair. Pretty. Smart." Takumi's brain short circuits as he tries to explain, and his tongue suddenly feels too heavy in his mouth. His teeth clench. His face is aflame. "His glasses. Clothes. Sister. Mace. Nightmare. Alike." He stops talking to cover his face with his hands.
Sakura stares at him for just a moment, blinking wildly as a plethora of random nouns spill from his lips. He slips onto the floor, face still covered, as she runs past him shouting for Kamui.
Two sets of footsteps approach him as he lay still in the genkan, hands covering his face.
"I think I broke Takumi." Sakura's voice echoes in his ears. There's a small 'hm' from Kamui, before his hands are peeled away from his face. Even his ears must be red, Takumi thinks, as Sakura and Kamui look down at him curiously. Kamui is silent, but Sakura is not.
"What kind of glasses does he wear?" Kamui doubletakes, looking at Sakura with a furrowed brow, but she shushes him before he can say anything.
Takumi misses the whole exchange, of course. But he speaks anyways. "Leo has these big round glasses he wears when he studies and they're really cute."
"And clothes?"
"He wears his clothes backwards sometimes and it's cute when he gets embarrassed about it."
"Sister?"
"He just…" Takumi pauses, sighing out a long sigh. "Loves his sister. Like I do." Sakura pauses in her interrogation. Takumi looks at her, and her face is twisted into something both sad and tired.
"Mace?"
"I gave him my mace once and he thanked me. His smile.."
"Nightmare?"
"He woke me up from a nightmare once and he looked so handsome in the lighting that I thought he was going to kiss me."
Sakura pauses, giving Kamui a strange look. "Alike?" She finally says, still looking at Kamui instead of him.
"He's like me." Takumi says. "We like the same stuff." And I think we might feel the same way, Takumi thinks, but his mouth is so dry that the second half doesn't make it out.
Kamui gives a little pointed nod at Sakura and releases his hands. They fly right back up to cover his fiery face, and when his siblings leave, Fujin takes the chance to lay down next to him. His siblings leave him lying there in the genkan until he can work up the energy to trudge back upstairs to his bed and pass out. In the end, he realizes, he never sent a message to Leo at all.
Sakura's room is always a mess, but she's given him the go ahead to use her balcony for the afternoon. It's his last day there after all, and just a couple of hours on the balcony basking in the sun is enough to set his mind at ease about the trip back.
Sakura's balcony is the nicest balcony out of every bedroom in the house solely because it's facing south, such that the sun is constantly shining on it. Takumi decides that it's worth it to make the trek through the clothes and books and cat hair for the chance at the warm and relaxing reading experience.
He steps precariously around trash and everything else littering the floor, and he almost makes it to the door before something crinkles beneath his foot. He looks down to see a magazine, crumpled and shiny, and he picks it up without a second thought.
The title across the black cover, in big curly purple font, reads 'Roses Thorns', and for a moment Takumi assumes it's just another gardening magazine (because Sakura has more than enough of those). But something about the font must intrigue him because, before he consciously registers it in his mind, he's flipping open the magazine to a random page and-
Oh.
Oh, he thinks as he closes it just as quickly as he opened it. That was a breast. A boob. A full-on titty.
It's a titty mag. His little sister has a titty mag.
With all the grace and misplaced pride he can muster, he drops the magazine on the ground and high tails it out of Sakura's room as quickly as he can.
He doesn't speak of the magazine incident with anyone, but it weighs heavily on his mind while Mikoto drives them back. Kamui's taken shotgun this time, with Takumi sprawled over the back seat, playing shogi on his phone while the seat belt cuts into his neck.
There still hasn't been a response from Leo, and Takumi's too chicken to double text him. He'll just talk to him in person, explain that it wasn't him, laugh about Kamui a bit and get on with his life. Easy right?
When they arrive, Mikoto helps the two of them unload their bags from the back of the car, then kisses them both on forehead.
"Good luck with the rest of the month. Sakura and I will see you on Halloween if I end up dropping her off." She says, but then she thinks better of it, clearing her throat to get their attention once more. "Kamui, would you help me clean some of the trash out of the front seat before I go? It seems only fitting since it's all your McDonalds wrappers." Kamui makes a face but nods.
He looks towards Takumi as he gives a tired, lopsided grin. "Go on ahead without me Takumi. Live on in my memory, brother. Don't forget my sacrifice." Takumi laughs wholeheartedly.
"I believe in you, Kamui. You can do this." Kamui sticks his tongue out as Mikoto hands him some of the trash he'd left, and Takumi escapes towards the dorm building with his bags before Mikoto can rope him into cleaning the car with Takumi.
The hallway is dead, but music from 'Breath of the Wild' bleeds into the hallway from Oboro and Hinata's room. Takumi, mesmerized by the soft piano notes, drops his bags in the hallway. The door is just barely propped open by a black shoe that Takumi doesn't recognize, so he pushes through without a second thought. The smell of familiar cologne stops him in his tracks as he surveys the room.
Oboro herself sits at her desk, a button down shirt in one hand and sewing needle in the other, like everything is normal. And yet, Leo sits across from her, arms crossed and sullen as he looks at Takumi from the side, obscuring the right side of his face from view.
For a moment, he's overjoyed, anxious, and excited. "Leo!" He says, stepping into the room. But his jubilation is short lived, and he recoils as Leo flinches away from his greeting, shoulders tensing up as though he might bolt at any moment. He looks to Oboro for some sign, some reassurance, but all he finds there is cold pain.
"You should leave." She refuses to look at him as she speaks. Her hands don't stop their work as she sews a button onto the shirt. Those three words are said with such finality.
But he furrows his brow, pridefully intent on staying. "What's going on?" He asks, and he's standing so far away that it feels like they're on two different planets. Oboro sighs, rubbing her forehead with the back of her hand.
"It's none of your business, Takumi." She pleads, motioning for him to leave through the door he just came through. "Please just-"
"She said go." Leo says, and his voice is like ice. Takumi looks to him, but he stares ahead, eyes glued to Oboro's hands as they fly through the motions of sewing buttons onto a frayed pink shirt.
And Takumi starts. He'd recognized that shirt from somewhere, but he hadn't remembered where he'd see it. But now his memories remind him that Leo would wear a peach-colored shirt for tests. It'd been his lucky shirt, but Takumi had thought nothing of it until now. But it's sitting in Oboro's grasp, torn and frayed and missing buttons, and something tells him it wasn't an accident.
"Leo-" He starts, but the side eye stops him in his tracks.
Leo exhales, arms tightening around his midriff, now covered in a royal purple button down shirt. He stands slowly as if fatigued, and his eyebrows come together in a fierce glare that pierces through Takumi with red eyes. When Leo turns towards him proper, Takumi swears he can feel his heart stop.
There, covering the entire right side of his face, is a single purpling bruise.
"Leave."
A/N: long time no see guys, hope you enjoyed this update! Comments, favs and follows are always appreciated!
Also Sakura is best girl, never forget that. And the Halloween chapters are going to be a blast!