and away

“That’s one word for it,” he says, as Takashi drops down onto the bed, their shoulders brushing as Tanuma tilts the phone so he can see. “It keeps opening some selection screen when I try to attack, and when I do manage it I guess I’m not fast enough?” He hums, tapping a menu option. “I think some spells are meant to be quicker to use than others, but…” A bemused smile. “Not sure I’m much use as, ah. What was it?”

“Guild member?” Takashi prompts, honestly surprising himself that he even remembers that much when he’d dropped his phone on his face nodding off.

“Right, that.” He taps another few buttons before his character screen pops up. “I know Nishimura said this looks fine as is for now until I’ve practiced more, but. Even if the character’s meant to mostly be casting spells, shouldn’t he be wearing more than just his regular clothing? I keep dying. Um, really fast. But I guess all the actual armor’s locked.” A little divot forms between his brows. “Not sure how you’re meant to level up in the first place if you can’t protect yourself, but…” he trails off, letting his phone rest between cradled fingers.

“I don’t think I remember how it works either, but we can practice together tomorrow if you want,” Takashi says, the words catching on the edge of a yawn. Tanuma glances down at him, then drops his phone on his knee, scooting closer so he can drop his cheek down onto the top of Takashi’s head. There’s a fluttering in his chest, restless but soft like gossamer moths’ wings behind his ribs, and it’s not so bad. Just, new. Still new. He feels himself smile, even as he says, “My hair’s not dry yet.”

He feels Tanuma’s shrug. “Mine isn’t either.”

“Ah, wait—“ Takashi reaches up, plucking slightly at the matted bits. They’re more on the left side, not near Tanuma’s face, or the parts where their hair overlaps slightly, but it’s enough to make him fidget. Tanuma shifts beside him.

“What’s the matter?” He frowns, taking in Takashi’s hand hovering near his head. “Headache? I know you had a long day—“

“No,” Takashi’s quick to reassure him, but not relishing the idea of offering the required explanation just yet, either. “The bath helped a lot. I’m not all that sore anywhere.”

“Good,” Tanuma says, and he seems to mean it. But he’s also watching Takashi’s face, waiting. Quietly, with no presumption, and Takashi knows Tanuma would drop it completely if he asked. That knowledge alone has Takashi willing to bite the bullet.

It doesn’t mean he can stop the heat that creeps its way into his cheeks when he mutters, “There’s sap in my hair.”

To Tanuma’s credit, he does sort of smush his lips together to try and mitigate the amusement on his face, but his eyes crinkle around the edges when he asks, “How?”

“The plum tree. At the park.” Takashi sighs. “I didn’t think to check. It didn’t wash out.”

“Can I see?” Tanuma turns to face him fully. “I didn’t notice before, so maybe it’s not so bad?”

Takashi gives the offending chunk of hair one last dubious tug before obliging and turning his head. “Hope so.”

Tanuma hums, plucking up the snarled mess and turning it in his fingers. “It’s a…bit bad,” he concedes, after a moment.

Takashi feels the involuntary slump of the shoulders but keeps his voice light as possible when he says, “It’s fine. I’ll just cut it out if I need to.”

Small mercy that Sensei’s not present for this conversation. The temple, he’d long since pointed out, is arguably a safer place for Takashi to be staying the night than his own bedroom, so he has very few qualms about taking off for evenings of inebriated revelry before coming back to hog Tanuma’s bed in the wee hours.

“You don’t need to—” Tanuma starts, then chews his lip a bit as he gives the strands another critical tug. “I mean, let’s see what we can do first. I have something that may help.” He untangles his fingers, gently, and as he starts to stand Takashi feels the loss of warmth alongside the barest of tugs behind his own sternum.

“Did you use conditioner?” Tanuma’s asking now, turned towards the bedroom door.

“A little.” Takashi hadn’t even known to use it, back when Touko-san had first started buying it for him. After she’d shown him how, he’d discovered that a small amount was more than sufficient to get his hair reasonably brushable, and the type currently sitting on the edge of Tanuma’s bathtub has an even richer consistency. But he likes the smell, something adjacent to tart candies, to Tanuma’s pillowcase.

“You can use more if this doesn’t work,” he calls over his shoulder, then ducks out of the room.

Takashi leans forward, elbows on his knees. Everything aches less out of the shower, but all his limbs feel leaden, the core of him soft and yielding as wagashi. It’d been an assessment day for his class in PE, and though he hadn’t embarrassed himself quite so thoroughly as he’d anticipated—Nishimura had loudly bemoaned his own dismal scores in the sprint and distance run categories, and had been just as loudly delighted to learn Takashi had ranked decently, slightly above the class average. They’d both dragged their feet and just barely navigated the rest of their classes in some kind of aching fugue state. But one school bell and two cans of terrible coffee later Nishimura had been the one practically dragging Takashi along by the arm to the park, singlemindedly dedicated to recruiting him, Tanuma and Taki into his and Kitamoto’s current favorite game’s guild. Takashi wishes he’d had it in him to pay better attention; though Nishimura’s been going on about it for the better part of a week at lunch, without looking at his phone Takashi can’t even remember the title of the game.

Tanuma re-emerges with a squat plastic bottle that fits neatly in his palm, a towel slung over his arm and a thin folding comb tucked between his fingers. He returns Takashi’s weary smile with a small one of his own.

“It’s hair oil,” he says, dropping back down beside Takashi, and angling the bottle for him to see. “We’ll see how it does against tree sap, but. My hair’s thicker than yours, and sort of…” He tugs at a strand above his own ear. “Difficult, if I don’t stay on top of it. But this stuff is pretty helpful.”

He passes it to Takashi, who turns it over in his hands. “Camellia,” he reads, trying and failing to determine the color of it through the deep red of the bottle.

“Among other things, probably,” Tanuma says, with a shrug. “It smells more like soap than flowers to me, but. I use it every couple days, and it keeps it from frizzing up or tangling too badly when it dries. So I hope it can at least loosen it up for you.”

Two minutes later finds Takashi sitting cross-legged on the bed, angled half towards the pillow, the towel spread out between them. He’d expected pulling, thought it inevitable when his hair was so thoroughly gunked up, but he can feel that Tanuma’s holding the offending strands away from his scalp with one hand, working the product in with the other. It warms him, the sheer care of it, as much as it makes him glad that Tanuma can’t see whatever his own face is doing right now.

He starts at Tanuma’s voice behind him.

“You can, uh.” He feels a fingers release his hair, a brief touch to the shoulder. “You can relax a little. I’ll warn you if I start having to pull or anything.”

“Ah,” Takashi mutters. “Right. Sorry.” He drops his shoulders, does his best to keep them dropped.

“Did you want to look at the game?” Tanuma offers, after a beat. “I’ll warn you when you need to keep your head upright but it’s fine for now. This can’t be that interesting for you.”

“Or for you,” Takashi counters, with a faint grin.

“You could tell me what you’re doing as you do it,” he says. “Not that I’m going to have any idea what you’re talking about, but. Nishimura did say something about giving you and me both an intensive crash course in the next couple days.”

“We’re that hopeless?”

Tanuma hums. “I guess that’s not a fair assessment, for you at least. You can’t be bad at a game if you weren’t awake to play it in the first place, but. Yeah, safe to say I’m hopeless.”

A good few minutes on and Takashi thinks ‘hopeless’ is a pretty apt descriptor. He’s managed, thus far, to somehow change the color of the character’s entire outfit to a fairly offensive shade of orange, lose about six battles on what’s purported to be the game’s training mode, and somehow spend ¥299 of Tanuma’s actual money on some fancy spell or other that he doesn’t even remember selecting in the first place (a charge which Tanuma vehemently refuses to allow Takashi to refund). Once, the game had glitched out, shutting the app down abruptly just as Takashi’s character was about to suffer another spectacular defeat, and Tanuma’s phone is starting to feel overly warm in his palms.

It might be easier to play, he thinks, if the sensation of endlessly careful fingers and soft snick of the comb’s pointed end teasing out the knot in his hair wasn’t taking up a significant portion of his attention.

Or maybe it wouldn’t. He lets the phone drop onto his knees. It’s at 23%.

“How did you,” Takashi starts, then flounders a little in the silence of the room. Tries again. “How did you know to use hair oil? On yourself, I mean. I don’t think I knew it existed.”

He’s reminded, suddenly, of Touko’s eyes, when Takashi had admitted he didn’t know what conditioner was for. Widening in fleeting surprise, before filling just as quickly with a quiet kindness that Takashi had not yet known not to mistake for pity.

And maybe he shouldn’t have asked.

But then Tanuma says, “My mom showed me.” His voice is quiet, but there’s a thread of warmth strung into the words.

Takashi glances behind him. Tanuma’s gaze has dropped to the bottle in his hand, a soft set to his mouth.

Takashi knows Tanuma won’t elaborate unless pressed. A consideration. A kindness of his own.

So Takashi presses.

“Your mom?”

“Yeah,” he starts, diffident, searching Takashi’s face as Takashi turns to look at him properly. Takashi just waits. The space of a breath, and then he lets out some quiet sound between a huff and a laugh. “I was…I couldn’t have been older than six or seven. Before starting elementary school, my hair was actually pretty short.”

“Really?” Takashi can’t help his own smile He tries to picture it, eyes lingering on the dark tumble of his hair, still damp and a little unruly from a vigorous towel-drying, spiking up a bit around one arm of his glasses and the tip of an ear now flushed pink.

“Yeah,” he says, catching Takashi’s eye, returns the grin with a small one of his own. “Dad’s got the photo evidence. And would sort of stick out all over the place even then.” He plucks absently at it, rich black strands twisted between pale fingertips. “And he used to just cut it for me himself, back then, but. I don’t know. I kept asking him to wait longer and longer between trims, and to take off less, and it’s basically looked like this since.”

“Any particular reason?”

The faint flush of his cheeks deepens, and his expression shifts. “I mean. Maybe not a great reason, but sort of.” He doesn’t look unhappy, just unsure, eyes fixed somewhere near Takashi’s shoulder now. “I remember that elementary school was…a lot, for me, when I started. Not so bad,” he adds, quickly, as though remembering himself, his audience. “But way more people in one place than I was used to. And it sounds odd to say it, but I remember not liking the fact that everyone could see all of my face all of the time.” He shrugs, yanks at that same strand of hair. “Hard to explain.”

“Well it suits you,” Takashi says, a little abruptly, before he loses his nerve or the moment or both. Because now would be the time to say so if ever there was one.

Tanuma’s eyes flick back up to meet his. His lips twitch. “Yeah?”

Takashi nods. They’re both red in the face now. It seems a bit unfair, that they’re both still so easy to fluster; he’d have thought they’d have run the gauntlet of mutual embarrassment by now. But even kissing him is easier than this, when there’s no breath to be spared between them for the exchanging of words, for what should be a casual compliment. No eye contact involved.

But the apple-flush of fair skin across his cheekbones makes Takashi’s mouth dry as sand.

“Well. Thank you,” Tanuma says, swallowing just a little like he’s having the same problem. “Anyways. I may have preferred it that way, but. My hair’s got a texture to it that can make it sort of difficult to manage, it you’re not careful.” He reaches out, catches a strand of Takashi’s own hair not far from the knotted bit, twisting it gently. “Mine’s thicker than yours, and it can dry out pretty easily. It feels like straw, at the worst of times. And it’d get tangled up really easily, back then, especially if I ever slept on it wet. Dad would try to help, but sometimes it got so bad that there wasn’t anything we could really do at that point but cut a chunk of it away and be done with it.”

And Takashi can relate, there. But he doubts it would be constructive, his own hazy recollection of a plastic comb with missing teeth going missing from his box of belongings between one relative’s house and the next. Not when he can picture, even more clearly, a dark-haired little ghost of a boy who wished to sink right through the walls of his own classroom.

“What did you do about it?” he asks, instead.

“Well that’s when Mom stepped in.” Tanuma’s fingers trail over the printed text on the bottle’s front, gentle, near-reverent. He shakes his head a little. “I think Dad must’ve called her. There was a really bad knot right at the back of my head at the time, maybe the worst I’d ever had, and if he’d cut it out it would’ve been really obvious. He suggested I just try wearing it short again, but I said no.” He rubs the back of his neck. “I think I might’ve cried when he said that, actually. He felt awful afterwards.” A pause, a glance towards the soft sleepy dark of the window. “I am…glad Ponta’s not here.”

“I’d have kicked him out,” Takashi mutters.

“I appreciate it.” He taps the bottle. “By the time I showed up for the visit we’d planned that month, she’d already prepared some things for me. Better shampoo and conditioner. Some oil, and a nicer comb. She’s always worn her own hair long, and she says it tangles up if you even look at it the wrong way, so. She sorted the big knot out, and then taught me how to take care of it myself.” He turns the comb over between his fingers, running his thumb along the spine of it like it’s something precious, gilded silver instead of brown plastic. Takashi can see a few shedded strands of his own hair threaded between the teeth, catching the light. “I’ve only had to cut knots out myself maybe twice since then, so I guess I’ve managed well enough.”

“Did she give you these?” Takashi asks, a taut humming sensation behind his ribs that’s somehow both overfull and not unwelcome.

“No.” He grins, flips the comb over. Taps the tiny Daiso label on the handle that Takashi hadn’t seen. “She still sends me things from time to time, especially if she’s found something new that she’s tried for herself, but when I’m buying I tend to just go for the discount versions.” A shrug. “They work fine, I think. She prefers products with camellia, and that’s not so hard to find.”

“I’m glad you’re not having to use up a gift, anyhow,” Takashi says. His hand hovers near the knot behind his own ear. He doesn’t want to touch, doesn’t want to undo Tanuma’s progress.

“I think she’d have been pretty delighted to hear about it if I did,” Tanuma says, fondly. “She might ask if I took before-and-after pictures, though.” He reaches for Takashi’s hair again, this time holding the entirety of the knot in his palm, cradled absurdly like a baby bird, turning it a little to inspect. He offers Takashi a soft moonrise of a smile. “It might be too late to get a before-and-after, but I could still get a progress shot. Not to send her, just. In case we need it. For future reference.”

“….future reference.”

“Yes.”

Takashi feels his nose wrinkle. He holds up Tanuma’s phone. “I’ll hide this.”

“There’s still my film camera,” he counters, peacefully.

 “I’ll hide myself.”

“But then I couldn’t help you.” He sets the comb down between them like a greasy little peace offering, and holds his hands up.

Takashi feels the wobble in the set of his own mouth, but he doesn’t break eye contact until he’s tucked the phone firmly away beneath Tanuma’s pillow.

“I don’t need help,” Takashi informs him. But he his own hands up to meet Tanuma’s still-raised ones, the traitorous grin finally leaking through when Tanuma immediately laces their fingers together, an unwieldy half-hover of hands clasped midair.

“No,” Tanuma agrees, and snorts lightly when Takashi’s forehead bumps against his shoulder. “But you want it, I think.”

“Mm,” is all Takashi can muster in reply, his arms looping themselves around Tanuma’s waist. There’ll be oily spots on Tanuma’s shirt from this, maybe. He should probably move.

But Tanuma just shuffles closer, the warm weight of his arms around his shoulders to draw him in, so Takashi resigns the shirt to its fate. Beneath him, the sharp end of the comb pokes into Takashi’s leg.

“‘Future reference’?” Takashi asks, muffled by the shirt, after a moment. “For what?”

“In case of, you know,” he starts, smile shaping the words pressed into the damp crown of Takashi’s head. “Trees. Spirits. Tree spirits.”

“Tree spirits,” Takashi echoes, drily.

“You never know.”