EPIC FIC. Tentatively titled "Family" (PG-13)
Oh god. So, I've been writing (finally, Jesus) for the past few days. I have been writing an EPIC. By which I mean I wrote a ten thousand word, twenty-four page story...about...Lucci's kid. I know, I know. I get it, seriously, shut up. (That means you. You know who you are.)
So yeah, I mean, you people-- some of you people-- remember Nori and Yuu, right? From this fic by
maldoror_gw? Well, if you don't, you should probably not read my story, or your should read that first. Actually, read that anyway. Read everything by Mal, it's worth it.
Anyway, so, this is set six years after-- okay, I don't know how much Mal is going to hate me for this. (Sorry.) Six years after Nori defects from the government via the use of a Clever Plan and joins Yuu's pirate crew (of which he is the carpenter, not the captain, FYI) because, uh, they kind of had a fling when they were teenagers and Yuu is like the only non-government affiliated person Nori could even remotely trust. Look, I know it's contrived, but it was fun to write.
Also, they are going to find Nori's cousin. Who is Jyabura's daughter. One of them. Um.
...Look, you don't have to read it if you don't want.
Nori was standing on the gunwale again, that impeccable sense of balance working in his favor and wreaking havoc on Yuu’s nerves. He would swear the lunatic did it on purpose if he didn’t know how that sharp, clockwork brain of his ticked: he trusted himself not to get hurt, so why shouldn’t Yuu? It made him feel unfaithful, watching and worrying that he’d fall at any moment, but he reminded himself that Nori was a hypocritical loony who worried just as much when Yuu went for a walk on the railing. They were just a pair of daredevils, but Yuu suspected he was the only one who was ever taking a risk.
Nori had his hands in his pockets, jacket flapping and hair blowing back in the wind; every once in awhile, he’d toss his head to throw back the strands that got in his face. Yuu remembered how he’d got it all cut short after he’d joined the crew, some kind of act of defiance, or possibly he’d still been trying to convince himself that he belonged—he’d grown it back out later, maybe because it was a part of his past, maybe because he really was vain as a jaybird. Nori was scanning the horizon, and Yuu could swear he hadn’t blinked in minutes, but he didn’t blame him. Keeping your eyes peeled for land was one thing, but looking out for a home port that mightn’t exist…
It’d be another hour at the very least, and Yuu figured he’d better go and rescue the guy from having his eyeballs dried and salted. He shoved off from the bulkhead he’d been leaning on, grabbed hold of the mainsail’s edge, swung out over the open air of the lower deck—some newbie shouted in surprise to his left as he let go, freefell six feet—snatched up a handful of rigging and hurled himself over another stretch of open air before braking violently and dropping to the deck before the backswing could rip his arms off.
“Goddamnit, Yuu, what’ve I told you about monkeyin’ around on the ship?” roared a voice from the upper deck. “Quit that acrobatic nonsense before you get your neck broken!”
At this, Nori glanced back over his shoulder, momentarily distracted from the promise of landfall by the mention of his lover’s name in the context of acrobatic nonsense and potential spinal injury. His expression was at first blank and searching as it had been facing the sea, but when his eyes met Yuu’s from across the deck, they narrowed and turned on him a glare both withering and unimpressed.
“Sorry, captain,” Yuu shouted back in response, without turning away from Nori’s admonishing gaze. The latter rolled his eyes and turned back to the ocean; Yuu grinned wider, chuckling to himself as he strolled across the deck. “Wet blanket,” he muttered.
When he reached the gunwale, he looked up, reaching up to shove a mess of hair out of his eyes. “You comin’ down, secret agent? We’re not gonna spot land for another hour.”
Nori looked down over his shoulder, still off in his own world. “Hmm?” It was almost lost to the roar of wind. He glanced back. “I suppose I ought…”
“Yeah, probably. C’mon. I’ll catch ya.” His mouth curved, unbidden, into a trademark lopsided grin with the words; he’d hoped to say it with a straight face, just to get another of those withering death glares he still found so infuriatingly endearing.
He never expected Nori to take him up on it.
The moron just fell back like he’d been shot, without a word, and Yuu didn’t even have time to finish yelling “Hey, what are you doing!?” before he had an armful of 26-year-old lunatic and had to give up on vocalization in favor of trying his damnedest not to land on his ass in front of the whole crew.
“You—!” he snapped, heaving Nori away and hauling himself fully upright. He pushed more hair out of his face, stared incredulously, and shoved indignantly at Nori’s chest. The idiot hadn’t even taken his hands out of his pockets.
“You offered,” he pointed out logically, and Yuu took a moment to gape like a fish, furious, watching Nori’s lips twitch into a smile at his fury and growing angrier until a rare flash of common sense reminded him that he’d brought it upon himself and told him to savor the first glimpse of his Nori, the real one and not the impersonal automaton posing as him, that he’d seen in days. So he swallowed his irritation and smiled, shaking his head.
“You’re a freak, secret agent.”
Nori returned the smile with a real one, and god, that was so much better. But then the smile turned confused. “Why do you still call me that?”
It was, shockingly, the first time he’d ever asked—well, the first time he’d ever asked and meant it. “I’ve always called you that.”
“But I’m not.” The smile was fading. It hadn’t occurred to Yuu—they were finding a part of Nori’s past for the first time in six years, six years since “secret agent” had stopped being more than a nickname. This was one of those times it was hard for him to remember what he used to be, when he looked at that time as a rift between the person he had been and the person he was. Yuu opened his mouth, but Nori turned away, looking back out to sea.
“You’re not,” Yuu agreed. He wrapped his arms around Nori from behind, pressing his face to wind-blown hair. “‘M sorry, babe. You gotta tell me this stuff, ya know? If you didn’t want me to say it—”
“It’s not that.” Nori covered Yuu’s arms with his own, leaning back against him. For a second, Yuu had been worried he’d pull away. “Call me that if you want. Do whatever you want. I like it when you do what you want.”
That didn’t make any sense, mostly because Nori always seemed to hate it when Yuu did what he wanted, but that was probably a distinction Yuu should have noticed before. Contrary sod. “’Kay. Listen, you gonna be all right? I know you haven’t seen her in ages, but it’s not like she’s gonna turn you away—”
“I know she won’t,” Nori interrupted, too quickly. Yuu sighed against Nori’s ear.
“She’s family, babe. Don’t worry about it.”
There was a brief pause, and then Nori gently disentangled himself from Yuu’s embrace. Nori turned to face him, tucking a lock of hair behind one ear as he smiled, hard and unconvincing. “They’re all family, Yuu. My dad, my aunts and uncles, my cousins. I’m sure they’d be proud of me now.”
He looked Yuu in the eyes, a stare as blank and cold as any windless night, and then he took his icy smile and walked right by, leaving Yuu alone with the rest of the crew and the approaching horizon.
An hour later, land came into view. It was a tiny spring island, temperate and green in the faint heat of early summer, and right away there were red-roofed stucco houses barely visible in the distance. It looked, from faraway and with a trained eye, like a perfectly nice and hospitable little place. Naturally, Captain Corby Stark was immediately skeptical.
“I don’t know about this place, boys,” Stark growled around a wad of tobacco, overhanging forehead and bushy gray eyebrows turning his stoic expression into a sullen scowl. “Looks a little shifty to me. Mitsu Mai, keep an eye on this hunk a’ dirt and lemme know if anything comes up.
“If you like,” said the violet-haired and entirely too muscular woman leaning purposefully against the bulkhead nearby. Mitsu Mai—who was called her full name by everyone, up to and probably including her own mother—was the ship’s quatermaster, and the only one on the crew who could get away with responding to a direct order with ‘if you like’ rather than ‘yes sir’. She stood up from her claimed leaning wall and ambled to the lower deck, presumably off to keep an eye on the hunk a’ dirt in question.
Yuu watched her go, then squinted up at his captain through the afternoon sunlight. Yuu himself was a good six foot two, but Stark towered over him by at least six or eight inches. His impressive height was one of two features that kept the man from looking like someone’s grandfather, the other being that he had a chest like a tank and arms like mounted cannons, all covered in more tattoos than were accurately numerable. “I really don’t think it’ll be a problem, Captain. It’s probably just a farm island.”
Stark glowered down at his shipwright, then winked solemnly and tapped the side of his nose. “A good cover story, m’boy. Very good. But you never know. Got to keep an eye out for these things.”
“Oh yeah, Yuu,” said Anderson, a wiry teenager who’d been around six months at most and had taken it upon himself to dispense as much sarcasm in as little space of time as possible. “Don’t you know the stories about farm islands? They use the dairy cows as their warrior chargers.”
“I had a cousin who got trampled by a cow,” Coleman the navigator added helpfully.
“All right, you knuckleheads,” Stark snarled, unfolding arms the size of tree trunks in gesture that promptly shut everyone up. “That’s enough of that. Get to work, you lot.”
The gathering dispersed double time. “Captain,” Yuu ventured, and gained an unfriendly but vaguely permissive glance. “We’ll make land in half an hour or so, I’d say…I should go get Nori.”
Stark paused, then nodded brusquely “Find wherever the sulky bastard is hiding and drag his ass out in the open, will ya? Haven’t seen him since he was playin’ chicken on the gunwale this afternoon. Woulda thought he’d be hovering like a buzzard all day.”
Yuu rubbed the back of his neck as if it itched, looking at his elbow in apparent fascination. “Yeah. Well, he woulda been, only I think I sorta pissed him off.”
Much to his surprise, this admission garnered a bark of laughter. “What’d you do, boy, call him a pansy again?”
“Hey, now, that was one time, that was over a year ago, we were drunk, I didn’t mean it, leave it alone. No, I sort of…” Yuu sighed, burying both hands in his hair and pulling in aggravation. “I sort of brought up a touchy subject by accident, is all.”
When he looked up again, Stark was wearing an expression of deep consideration. “Hmm. Family?”
“Yeah…”
“Going to see his…sister? Cousin, was it?”
“Yeah, his cousin. He hasn’t seen her in six years, he’s worried she won’t…ya know, she won’t want him around. From all he’s told me about her, she doesn’t seem like that at all, but I don’t really know, so I can’t tell him everything’s gonna be okay.” Yuu paused, twisting the unbuttoned hem of his shirt into a knot. “What if it’s not, ya know? What am I s’posed to do?”
Stark was scratching his chin, nodding to himself as though deciding which course to plot. Yuu waited, tying and untying his hem twice before his captain spoke, startling him.
“Well, I don’t know much about how you queers operate, but whenever my old lady Lucille had something happen, I don’t know, her sister got in a fight with her and there was nobody I could punch out, I’d just tell her I’d do whatever I could to help and let her know I was there if she needed me. Sometimes that’s about all you can do, m’boy.”
Yuu, who had long since given up protesting the use of the phrase ‘you queers,’ took a moment to think this over. “Yeah, I guess all I can do is just…whatever he needs me to.”
“Right,” Stark said definitively, and gave Yuu a slap on the back that almost plowed him face first into the deck. “Now go drag his pansy ass outta hiding, and do it quick. We’ll make port in twenty minutes and I want all hands on deck.” With that statement in closing, Captain Stark thundered away, roaring orders at the top of his formidable lungs as he went.
Yuu shook hair from his face, reaching around to rub his injured back as he steadied himself. “Yes sir,” he said, quietly and unnecessarily, and stumbled off to look for Nori.
Nori was sitting cross-legged on Yuu’s bed when the latter found him; meditating, as far as Yuu could tell. He did it every day—something about Rokushiki and how he had to maintain his inner energy or bad things would happen to his nervous system (which Yuu had at first taken as code for “I’m taking a break so I don’t snap from dealing with your lunacy” but later found out that his actual inner energy was actually important). There were two things about this that were weird: first, he was on Yuu’s bed. Nori usually meditated on his own bed (easily identifiable by being the only bunk in the cabin that was ever made properly). The other weird thing was that he picked now of all times to meditate on Yuu’s bed. Wasn’t he supposed to be mad, or something?
Yuu waited, leaning against the doorframe. It had to have been at least seven or eight minutes before Nori finally came to, eyes immediately finding Yuu across the room. “Why are you standing there?” he asked quietly, voice somehow amplified in the narrow room. His eyes were almost glowing in the darkness—or maybe not almost, maybe they really were. They did when he was in dog form, and very occasionally they took on that phosphorescent night vision quality when he wasn’t paying attention.
“Because you’re acting like a sulking teenager and I’ve been ordered to drag you out into the light to play with the grownups. Why, am I bothering you?” Yuu wanted to say, but didn’t. “I was waiting,” he answered instead.
Nori tilted his head, that predatory analytic gesture of his. “Come in, then.” And Yuu realized the first question hadn’t been accusatory, just inquisitive, and then he felt bad. He shook the feeling off and crossed the room to sit on the edge of his bunk next to Nori. They sat in silence for a moment; Nori uncrossed his legs and leaned forward, elbows propped on his thighs. Yuu pulled up an unmade corner of his bed sheet and twisted it into a knot.
“Come down here to think?” Yuu finally asked, sheet twisted halfway into an angler’s loop.
“Came down here not to think,” Nori corrected. Yuu smiled, finishing the knot and pulling it free again.
“Was wondering if you were planning on comin’ back up. We’re gonna hit land in, oh, ten minutes. Captain wants all hands on deck.” He was finding out how impossible it was to do a cow hitch with an abused sheet corner when Nori turned away and muttered something so quiet Yuu missed it entirely. He dropped the sheet and turned to face Nori, concerned. “What’d you say?”
“I said,” Nori repeated, turning back just enough so that Yuu could see his profile as he stared at the floor, “I don’t think I can do this.”
Yuu opened his mouth to say something, but he made the unfortunate miscalculation of not having had anything to say before he did. He sighed, and closed it again. “Nori…”
“Tell me it’s going to be okay. I dare you.” His voice was hard, eyes still fixed on the floorboards. Yuu flinched.
“Look, I don’t know—god damn it. I don’t know if it’s gonna be okay.” He shoved his hair back out of his face, resisting the urge to yank on it until his eyes teared up. Nori was looking at him now, startled. Yuu grimaced. “I don’t know, I don’t know anything. Okay? She’s your cousin. You always told me she’s so great, she’s so understanding, she cares about you—I don’t know what she’ll do, okay? She might have you drawn and quartered, for all I know. But does she really seem like the kinda person who’d do that?”
Nori still looked startled, and his eyes were blank as they moved from Yuu’s face to the edge of the bed. “I…don’t know. I haven’t seen her in…I don’t know.”
“Well, fine. You don’t know. You think I always know how things are gonna go?” Yuu twisted one of his hands in his hair, looking away. “You think I knew how my parents were gonna react when I told ‘em, oh yeah, by the way, guess who I’m bringing home on leave this year? Yeah, they weren’t happy. They’re still not happy, even though they know you now. How could they be? You think I knew how my uncle was gonna feel when I introduced you to him? Yeah, sure, he was fine with it. His crew was fine with it, But they might not have been, and I told them anyway.” He looked at Nori, combing his hair back and putting a hand on the other man’s rigid shoulder. “Look…you don’t have to go see her if you don’t want to. But you do want to. So why not? Why the hell not? I’m not gonna tell ya nothin’ bad’ll happen, I’m not gonna make any promises—maybe she hates you now. How do I know? But if you don’t go find her you’ll never know, and that’ll be worse. And you know what? Listen to me.” He shook Nori’s shoulder for emphasis. “You know what? If she hates you, if she never wants to see you again, fine. Fuck her. I’m still here. I’m not going anywhere. You got that? Everyone else in the goddamn world can desert you but I’m still here.”
Nori was staring at the floor like it was responsible for all the world’s evils, teeth clenched and fists clenched and he looked like he was trying not to break apart. “Yuu…”
“You wanna hit me? ‘Cause I wouldn’t blame you. Go ahead.”
Nori straightened up, still tense, and turned to look at Yuu, slowly, like a machine. He was always like a machine when he was hurt—he’d never known how to deal with emotion, and even now he was still learning. Being made of steel wasn’t a coping mechanism, but it was a defense, and it was all he knew how to do. “I don’t know if I want to hit you or not, you know that? I’m pretty sure I do. I’m pretty sure that I’d like to punch you very hard in the face.”
“I wouldn’t blame you,” Yuu repeated quietly.
“But I know that’s wrong. Normal people don’t punch people they love in the face—”
“I don’t know, sometimes they do—”
“And even if they do, it’s not right, and I don’t want to hurt you. What good would it do if I punched you? Besides, I’m not sure you said a single thing that merits physical violence.”
“I proved you wrong,” Yuu said, smiling wearily. “Lots of folks get an urge to hit people when they’re proven wrong.”
“That doesn’t make it right,” Nori said sternly. He looked so empty, but there was a sort of confused fear lurking behind his eyes.
“Does everything have to be right? Can’t you do anything just ‘cause it feels like the thing to do?”
“Are you saying you want me to hit you in the face?”
“Not really. If I wanted you to jack my jaw I’da said something a far sight worse than that. I’m just saying, for pity’s sake, just…go on instinct once in your life, maybe you’d feel better. If you did that now, you wouldn’t be so damn concerned.” Yuu paused to consider that. “Concerned, yeah, but not like the world’s crashing down around your ears. I thought they taught you not to second-guess yourself on that tower of yours.”
At this, the corner of Nori’s mouth twitched in a very involuntary smile. “Well, that was never my sort of place anyway.”
Yuu put his head down in his hands and laughed, and Nori didn’t do a thing but Yuu could practically feel the smile sticking in place on that formerly forlorn mouth. “But ya know, you’re still my secret agent, aren’tcha.”
“I guess so,” Nori answered, and when Yuu looked up—yeah, he was smiling, just a little, but real. “I guess I still am.”
Without thinking, or even realizing what he was doing, Yuu leaned forward and kissed the reluctant smile on Nori’s lips. Nori kissed back, immediately and intensely, reminding Yuu that the wet blanket did do some things on instinct after all…
“Hey,” said Yuu a moment later, leaning away just enough to speak, “what are you doing here, anyway? Thought you always meditated on your own bunk. You haven’t even been sleeping here the last week or so…”
Nori tilted his head away, looking guilty. “I’ve been…distracted. I felt it would be best to…maintain some distance—”
“You haven’t thought like that for years, though,” Yuu pointed out, brushing some hair away from Nori’s ear. Nori looked down, but didn’t turn farther away.
“It’s been a stressful time as of late.”
“Yeah. Kinda noticed.”
Nori smirked, briefly. “Well. I just thought…here, you know…with all the rend marks in the sheets from the knot-tying, and your hair stuck to the pillow, and it smells like you—” He stopped, as if he’d said too much. “It just…I suppose it’s comforting, somehow. It’s easier to focus…or, I suppose, not to focus…when the ground under me doesn’t feel so cold.”
Yuu thought about that. It was flattering, in a way, and also a little bizarre, but most things about Nori were a little bizarre (and so were most things about Yuu). “But I thought you were mad at me.”
“No. No, I was angry at you for ten seconds, and then I realized that I had overreacted and that you had been trying to help. Then I was angry at myself, but I couldn’t go out and apologize.” He frowned, looking far away. “That’s not right…”
“Nah, it’s okay. I know how that is. You don’t wanna talk to somebody you were just pissed off at, even if you’re not anymore. You don’t know what to say, right?”
“Right,” Nori said, not uncertain, but certainly unfocused. “Yuu, do you ever think I’ll be able to function emotionally like human beings are meant to?”
“I don’t think anybody does,” Yuu answered truthfully. “Besides, I like you the way you are, in case it wasn’t obvious. And it’s not like I do either most of the time. But if you wanna be more, I don’t know, sociable or whatever you aim is, you just gotta work at it. Get out and meet new people.” He looked up. “Not that there’s a ton of new people around, but you know what I mean. Mingle.”
Nori chuckled. “Yes, mingle. Spectacular idea. I will strike up a conversation with the cabin boy.”
“He’d be terrified.”
“That’s the idea.”
“I think that’s a clear-cut of case of doing it wrong, right there, but suit yourself,” Yuu said, laughing. “You just like to scare people, babe.”
”I love to scare people,” Nori whispered, drawing it out for emphasis, with that predatory grin on his face. There was a time when Yuu would have found it chilling, but as it was, all he did was laugh and slap Nori on the shoulder.
“And ya do it so well, too. You ready to come up and amalgamate with the masses yet?”
“Mm, in a minute,” Nori said, and the next instant, he had a handful of Yuu’s hair and Yuu had a mouthful of Nori’s tongue and was experiencing a sudden shift in priorities as he gripped the back of his boyfriend’s shirt and held on.
Moments later, the sound of the cabin door slamming against the wall broke them apart hastily and without the added benefit of making the situation any less compromising in appearance. “You two horndogs better get up here and help us dock the fucking ship or I’m telling the fucking captain you’re down here in the fucking cabin—”
“Fucking?” Yuu finished placidly, climbing off the bunk and finger combing his hair back into something resembling order (in that he could see out from under it). Carmen, the stocky redhead who’d presently barged into the room, grimaced at him in manner that fell just short of menacing. He smiled winningly.
“We weren’t,” Nori said defensively, now in a standing position as well and putting his own hair into order considerably more orderly than Yuu’s. “We were going to come up in a minute. I have better time management skill than that.”
“Oh, I bet knots-for-brains could get a lot done in a minute,” Carmen said cheerfully, and the effect of Yuu’s rude gesture in response was undercut when Nori leaned past him and, smiling serenely, answered, “Occasionally, yes.” Yuu turned to look at him, startled, and by the time he’d looked back with his mouth open to protest this notion, Carmen was already halfway up the stairs, laughing up a storm.
For his efforts, Nori received a withering glance. “That was one time.”
“No, that was four times. But who’s counting? Come on, we need to help dock the ship.”
When Yuu finally had the presence of mind to feel anything beyond hurt incredulity, Nori was already out the door, hands in his pockets. “You’re a devious bastard.”
“That tower they brought me up in may not have been my kind of place, but I suppose some things are immutable. Coming?”
Yuu went, muttering. Underneath it all, he almost felt proud, and he didn’t know whether that spoke to Nori’s weirdness or his own.
The Queen Lucille was docked in the harbor of Linden Island by six o’ clock, and the crew had scattered—the port town would be a wreck by the time the weekend was over, but that was nothing out of the ordinary. Nori stayed on the docks, hands in his pockets. His train of thought, headed nowhere, was broken when he felt a hand on his shoulder.
“How’re you gonna find her?” Yuu asked, looking out over the island. Nori followed his gaze; it was a nice place, green and pleasant aside from the grubby commotion of the smallish nearby port town.
“I hadn’t thought that through.”
“Sure you had. You think everything through.”
Nori smiled. “Well. I suppose so, yes.”
Yuu’s hand slipped from his shoulder; Nori was facing the other way, but Yuu was probably running his hands through his hair for the umpteenth time. One day, Nori would convince him to do something about it, always falling in his eyes. In Nori’s old days, that never would have been allowed—but Yuu had never lived that way. “So how—and I’m not second-guessing you, secret agent, but how do you even…well, know she’s here?”
“I’ve heard things.”
“Things.”
“I heard there’s a ‘wolf person’ on this island.”
“Wolf person? There’s a couple more a’ those, aren’t there?”
“Yes, but I heard she was female, which eliminates Weylyn, and I heard she had married a local and had children, which eliminates Ulrica and Adolpha.”
Yuu shrugged. “Eh, they coulda defected like you, right?”
Nori snorted, shaking his head. “No. You don’t know them. They would never.”
“Well, I don’t know ‘em. But, is there a rule says they can’t have kids?”
“Not one of which I am aware, though that never applied to me. However, Adolpha abhors children and Ulrica, unless this has changed in my absence, is a lesbian, so in the end there’s only one person it could be, and that’s Lupita.”
He could feel Yuu’s eyes on him, feel him wanting to say something. But he didn’t. He nodded once, accepting, and then he straightened up a bit and rubbed his chin. “So how are you gonna find her?”
“Hmm,” said Nori. There was a breeze blowing in from the hills; he tipped his head back and closed his eyes, focusing…all he could smell was salt and oakum and the nearby reek of alcohol and countless human bodies from the town. He shook his head sharply, coming back to his other senses. “Nothing from here. I don’t know why I even tried. I’ll have to get farther into the hills. Hold this, please?” He stripped his jacket off and handed it to Yuu, who accepted it.
“Shoes,” he reminded, and Nori stooped to pull those off as well, and his socks. Yuu took them, bundling them in the black jacket, and, after a moment’s thought, Nori pulled his T-shirt off as well. “Gonna be cold, aren’tcha?”
“No,” Nori said simply. He thought for a moment—or felt, rather. He’d tried to explain it to Yuu once; it was like…finding a part of yourself, not that wasn’t supposed to be there, but that was living there hidden away from everything else. And then, asking it to come out. Nori found that part and brought it out of hiding, barely noticing the change itself, and when he opened his eyes he was considerably closer to the ground and covered in fur.
“Damn,” said Yuu, to whom Nori suspected his turning into a wild dog on command would never stop being a big deal. He turned to look up at Yuu—his eyesight in this form was poor, but it hardly mattered. His ears were sharp enough to hear every move Yuu made. “That never stops bein’ weird.”
“To you,” said Nori. He didn’t like to talk in dog form, mostly because it was difficult to articulate properly, and also because, no matter how much he insisted it was in fact closer to growling, Yuu continued to maintain the words sounded like chirps. And of course, he was trying to hide a grin. Nori sighed (and that definitely sounded more like a growl) and trotted off the docks onto the grass. Yuu followed, carrying Nori’s discarded clothes under his arm.
He would have to search close to the houses on the hills, but not too close—he was quite sure the island’s inhabitants wouldn’t take kindly to a stray dog wandering through their yards with a strange man following it. He loped through the grass, trusting that Yuu would keep up.
It still smelled mostly like salt, and grass, and dirt, and trees. It smelled like the things living in the trees as well; birds and deer and rabbits. There was a rabbit just nearby—he fought down a very un-human instinct involving that rabbit and moved on. He could smell the houses and the people who lived in the houses…men and women and children…a few dogs and cats. He was looking for something different.
Yuu was still at the bottom of the previous hill when Nori found…something. Maybe…maybe it was right, but he couldn’t be sure…he turned to look back down the hill and barked. Yuu ran up the rest of the hill like his feet were on fire. “What? Did you find her? What?”
“Don’t know,” Nori said. He turned back up the hill and raised his head, smelling the wind. “Found…something.”
“Well what’s it smell like?”
“Wolf.”
“Oh, but…there’s real wolves on this island too, I’m pretty sure.”
“Smells like wolf…human…”
Yuu pushed some hair away from his face and sighed. “Well, that sounds like her, huh?”
Nori gave Yuu as withering a glance as a wild dog was capable of and turned to lope farther up the hill. There was the house, and that certainly smelled like her, but…
“Not sure,” Nori said. He sat down at the top of the hill and stared at the house. It was quaint but well-appointed, red-roofed stucco like most of the others spaced out widely around it. There was a garden out front, and the house was situated just ten or twelve yards from a river that wound away through the hills and into the trees. As he looked around, Yuu knelt down on the hill beside him, placing a hand on his furred back.
“Is there something else you can think of? Something she smells like, or that she’d have near the house?”
“I don’t—” Nori began, and then stopped. He turned to look at the river…it was too far to see from there, but… “Stay,” he said to Yuu, and stood up, stalking toward the house.
“Nori—”
“Stay.” He crept through the grass, lowering himself down until his belly was touching the ground. At this distance, he could hear people moving inside the house, and he could smell the food that was cooking, some kind of pasta…there were children, two of them. And a woman. A man lived there as well, but he wasn’t home. Finally, Nori got to his feet, tipped his head back, and sniffed the air…that woman, she smelled like dog—like wolf, and like the food from the kitchen and like the children and the man and any number of other things, but there was something else, some kind of flower. Flowers from the river. It was lotus blossom.
Nori ran back to Yuu and pulled the bundle of clothes away from him with his teeth.
“Hey, what—”
“That’s her,” was the first thing he said when he regained human form, already pulling his socks on.
“Really?” Yuu said, still apparently startled. “Are you sure?”
“Positive. Hand me my shoe.”
Yuu was grinning as he tossed the shoe to Nori and then took the liberty of handing him his jacket as well. “You found her.”
“Yes, I did. That has to be her.” He struggled to lace his other shoe up while attempting to stand at the same time, and let Yuu grab his elbow to steady him. “Do I look like I’ve just been rooting around through several hundred yards of island trying to find my long-lost cousin?”
“Only in the face,” Yuu said helpfully, and gave him a quick kiss. “So you’re gonna go talk to her?”
Nori paused, blinked. “Yes. I have to.”
“Good,” said Yuu. He put his hands on Nori’s shoulders. “Don’t panic, okay?”
“I won’t. I’ll try not to.”
“That’s a good start. Just, y’know, be yourself. Or something.”
“I think I can handle that.”
“‘Course you can.” Yuu took his hands back, glanced down, and looked back up as if he had something to say. But he stopped and shook his head. “Be good.”
Nori paused for several seconds longer than he probably should have. He swallowed. What was he supposed to say? “Where…”
“I dunno. Around. You’ll find me.”
“…Yuu.”
“Hmm, what?”
“Yuu, could you…will you come with me?”
Yuu looked startled. “You want me—”
“I want you to come with. Not for moral support, I want you to meet her. I thought that was…I assumed it was implied…”
Yuu was giving him one of those looks Nori had no idea what to do with. It was an expression he was tempted to label as tender, though he didn’t like to think of Yuu that way. It made him seem vulnerable, somehow…but in this case, it was more easily acceptable. “Yeah,” Yuu said quietly. He was smiling. “Okay. Yeah, that’d be good.”
“Thank you.”
“No, thank you. Now come on, it’s getting late.”
He gave Nori’s shoulder a push. Nori tried to smile, but he was too—well, he wasn’t nervous. Maybe a little bit. Either way, he was going to do it, and no matter what happened in the end…Yuu would still be there.
When he was younger—a child, though he’d never thought of himself that way—Nori had assumed the hardest thing he would ever have to do was prove himself. He had always wanted his father to be proud of him, and if that wasn’t possible, he at least wanted to be accepted as useful. After he’d given that up—after he’d given up on his father entirely—the hardest thing in his life was finding something new to care about. And then there was Yuu…after that, he’d stopped thinking in terms of obstacles.
But it never would have occurred to him that the biggest challenge he would ever face was to knock on a door.
“There’s not an axe trap behind it,” Yuu said helpfully. “Door’s not sturdy enough.”
“Could you go stand over there, please?” said Nori, who knew he was just trying to help but was in no position to accept an attempt at humor. Yuu put his hands up, a gesture of acquiescence, and went to lean against the house, just next to the kitchen window. “I’m sorry.”
“S’okay.”
Nori stared at the door. It was just a door, that was all. But if there was one thing he had learned from his uncle Blueno, it was that doors were nothing to be afraid of. What was behind them, that was the threat.
He knocked.
Nothing happened for a second. It occurred to him that he hadn’t knocked loudly enough, so he did it again, probably too hard this time. He couldn’t do anything right today.
“Coming!” said a voice from inside, in the kitchen. “Just a second, the stove’s on!”
Nori closed his eyes. Oh god, that was her. He would know that voice anywhere. The thing to do now was not to run away like that rabbit out in the wood.
The door opened. “Sorry about…” said Lupita, and then she stopped talking.
She looked just like he remembered—she’d gained a few pounds, probably, and she was wearing a pink apron with a sauce stain on one corner. Dark hair down around her shoulders, and those brown eyes (shocked) looked just the same, and there was, of course, like always, a lotus blossom pinned to her hair just above her left ear. He’d never seen someone look speechless before, rather than simply embodying the concept, but she certainly had a speechless sort of expression on. He wished she’d smile, but he couldn’t expect that much, now or ever.
“Hi, Loopy,” he said.
Slowly, she raised her hand and put it on the doorframe, as if for support. Her expression didn’t change. Nori cleared his throat.
“I’m…sorry I haven’t…I’ve been busy…” That sounded terrible. He started over. “I apologize for showing up like this, and I would have come sooner, but I didn’t know you were living here for a long time, and then I had to explain everything to the captain, and of course we couldn’t just come straight here, we had to wait until we were in the area, and I didn’t want you to get in trouble for harboring a criminal, and I understand that this is a bad idea and it’s risky, and I know you probably don’t want anything to do with me, I k now I wouldn’t, so if you’d like me to leave right now I will, and I promise not to come back or contact you again if you want me not to—”
Nori could have gone on talking all day if he hadn’t suddenly found himself enfolded in Lupita’s fervent, inescapable embrace. He wanted to keep talking anyway, about something, but he forced himself to shut up before he said something stupid and hugged her back, hoping that was okay.
“Oh my god,” she said against his shoulder. “Nori.”
“Yes,” said Nori. It seemed like the appropriate response.
“Oh my god,” she repeated, leaning back from the embrace and putting her hands on either side of his face, holding onto him as if she didn’t believe it was really him. “Where have you…you’re still…why are you here? Are you hungry? I made pasta. Do you want some pasta? Oh my god. Have you come a long way? You must be hungry.”
“I’m not very hungry, thank you,” he said honestly. “Um. Did you ever…a long time ago, I sent a letter to you and your mother…did you get it?”
“What?” said Lupita. She moved her hands to his shoulder. “Oh, the letter! The one that…said you’re still alive. You are still alive. Yes, I have it, it’s in the drawer in the bedroom. I didn’t know you were ever coming back! I—if I’d known you were—I would have made a cake or…where have you been? Do you have a—a crew, or—”
“Yes. I’m sailing on the Queen Lucille under Captain Corby Stark.”
“Is that a…is that a pirate ship?”
“…Yes. I’m sorry.”
“It’s…no, it’s okay…Nori, what happened?”
Nori paused. “Well.” He glanced to his right, and Lupita followed his gaze and gasped, startled—she hadn’t noticed Yuu standing there. He stood up, away from the wall, and looked from Lupita to Nori. “I…brought someone with me.”
Yuu stepped forward and held his hand out. “Hi. I’m Yuu. I’m what happened.”
Gingerly, Lupita reached out and took Yuu’s hand. He shook it, smiling genially, and she tried for a smile of her own before looking back at Nori, questioning.
“It’s okay. He’s…”
“I’m Nori’s boyfriend.”
Lupita’s eyes went wide. “You’re—you’re that Yuu?”
Yuu grinned. “The one and only, ma’am.”
“Oh, wow,” Lupita said very quietly, as Yuu gave her her hand back. “You…” She looked back to Nori. “And he…?”
“He’s the carpenter on Captain Stark’s crew,” Nori said simply. “He…a long time ago, I was ordered to kill Captain Stark because he was becoming a menace to the government. Raiding Marine ports.” He stopped, glancing at Yuu, who only looked back at him without a hint of malice—of course. He looked back to Lupita. “I think…it’s a long story, but essentially, Yuu stabbed me in the gut and then convinced Captain Stark to let me recuperate on the ship.”
“You stabbed him?” Lupita asked weakly. Yuu nodded, expression suggesting he’d just been asked if he was enjoying the weather.
“Well, there are no hard feelings,” Nori said earnestly. “Besides, he didn’t mean to. I made him do it.”
“Fucker faked me out,” Yuu said brightly. Then he winced. “Pardon my language.”
“Pirate ruffian,” Nori said dismissively. “He won’t do it again if he knows what’s good for him.”
“I don’t,” Yuu interjected, “but I’ll keep my mouth shut.”
“Anyway,” Nori continued, “the rest is a long story, but I can tell you the rest if you’d like. Probably not out in the yard, though. Unless you don’t want us to come in—if you’d like us to leave, we—”
“No,” Lupita said suddenly. She was wearing that particular determined expression he’d seen a few times before; it was a ‘now you listen to me, young man’ sort of expression, and it worked every time (which wasn’t fair, Nori thought, considering he was supposed to be the one who was five months older). “You two have come all this way to see me, and now I’m going to be a good hostess and make sure you have something to eat. I made pasta. Come in and sit down.”
Yuu didn’t even look to Nori for permission. He was catching on fast.
The children were named Zev and Tala, ages two and five respectively. Tala took an immediate liking to Yuu and wanted to hold his hand, something that—Lupita explained with some embarrassment—she normally didn’t do. “I’m a ladies man, what can I say,” was Yuu’s comment on the matter. Lupita found this hilarious.
Tala looked a bit like her mother, mostly in the brown eyes, but she had—Lupita said—her father’s dark blond hair. Zev (who seemed content to sit on the kitchen floor and gabble semi-comprehensible baby talk Nori like he’d known him his whole, admittedly short, life) was small and pudgy and lacking in any features recognizable as his mother’s aside from the hair and eye color. The extent of Nori’s knowledge on children was that, eventually, with proper care, they grew up to be adults, but he wondered if Zev looked like his father or was simply too young to look like anyone other than a baby.
“What’s their father’s name?” Nori asked as Lupita handed him a plate of pasta and a dinner roll and gestured toward the kitchen table. (The room, like the rest of the house, was small but not too small, cheerily decorated, and modestly but comfortably furnished. Lupita seemed very proud of it.)
“Jonathan,” she said, smiling. “We’ve been married for almost seven years now. Tala, let Mr. Yuu sit down.”
“Just Yuu is good, if ya don’t mind,” said Yuu. He sat down, and ruffled Tala’s hair.
“Yuu,” she repeated. “No, Zev, you had dinner already. Leave Uncle Nori’s shoe alone.” She sat down at the table. “So, how long are you boys here?”
“‘Til the ship leaves,” said Yuu, with his mouth full of pasta. Nori glared at him. He swallowed, sheepish.
“In three days,” Nori clarified. Lupita put her fork down, looking forlorn.
“But you just got here!”
“I know, right?” said Yuu. “Pirates. Crazy.”
“You should just let the ship sail away and stay here. I’m sure they’ll come back for you eventually.”
“Oh, you don’t know Captain Stark, ma’am.”
“Just Lupita, please.”
“Right. Lupita. S’a nice name.”
“Thank you. He’s very charming, Nori, I can see why you like him.”
Nori hid half a smile behind his fork. “Charming? Oh, I don’t know about that.”
“Hey, now,” said Yuu, pretending not to be amused.
There was a brief and not unpleasant silence.
“I’m glad we came here,” Nori said at last. “I was…I didn’t…” He put his fork down and pressed his hand to his forehead, trying to hold onto a coherent sentence.
“He’s not so good with words, ya know?” said Yuu. Nori glared briefly, but lost the expression just as fast.
“It’s not that I didn’t want to see you. I did, really. But I was…concerned…that you wouldn’t want to see me.”
“Nori, why would you think that?” she said quietly. Zev stopped tugging his shoelaces to look up at his mother; that was as good an indication that she was hurt as any, he supposed. He pushed some pasta around on his plate.
“I’m not sure.”
“Because he’s one insecure motherf—guy,” said Yuu. “He figured you’d hate him.”
“I could never hate you, Nori. You’re family.”
Nori paused. He took another bite of his food and chewed it for awhile, and then he swallowed it without enthusiasm, feeling it stick in his throat. “Yes, well. I’m not sure the rest of my family thought that way.”
There was a longer silence this time. Finally, Tala knocked something off the counter reaching for the dinner rolls, and Lupita got up to take care of it.
Yuu looked at Nori over the table. His expression said, Stop trying to make this hard.
I’m not, said the expression Nori made back at him. Yuu shook his head, wearing an ironic sort of smile. “So Lupita,” he said over his shoulder, “do you guys have dogs? Your boy keeps saying something about puppies.”
“Oh, yes!” Lupita replied. She was scrubbing the pasta pan in the sink. “Well, actually she’s half wolf. Like me, I guess! She needed a place to stay, so we took her in. Her name’s Deer Chaser, or at least that’s what it translates to, but we just call her Chase. She had a litter two months ago. Jonathan took them all down to the market—with Chase, of course—to sell them, because she says, oh, lord knows she doesn’t expect us to keep them here and it’s time for them to get out on their own anyway, and they’ll make fine hunting dogs. She’s really a sweetheart, and I know she feels bad about it, but she insisted. We’re keeping one if they don’t go fast, though. Zev just loves them. Of course, the children aren’t wolf, but I think they have sort of a connection to dogs all the same.”
“So, you can talk to dogs?” Yuu asked.
“Mm, well, it depends. On how closely relate they are to wolves, anyway. But with most dogs, yes, there’s usually a way to work out a system of communication even if I don’t understand their speech. Chase, of course, we talk with almost no problems at all.”
“Sounds useful,” Yuu remarked, and then turned back to Nori. Is she pulling my leg? he mouthed. Nori shook his head. Yuu leaned back over his chair. “Wish I could do that. Not to say I don’t talk to dogs sometimes anyway, but they don’t usually talk back, most of ‘em. Need any help with those dishes?”
“Oh no, thank you, let me take care of it. You’re guests. Don’t let me stop you from having seconds, either—I just want to get these out of the way before Tala climbs up on the counter and starts tossing the dishes around.” She leaned over and swiped a soapy thumb across her daughter’s cheek. Tala giggled.
“Mommy’s mean to me,” she told Yuu, smiling.
“Yes, she’s clearly a horrible person,” Yuu agreed.
“She’s a daddy’s girl,” Lupita said cheerfully. “Jonathan will be home tomorrow morning, by the way. Whenever he goes all the way into town like that he usually stays the night at Greg and Martha’s place. He has Chase to look after him so this time he doesn’t end up sticking around and bothering them until after lunch. I love the man, but he has no sense of time.” She wiped her hands on a dish towel and leaned down to pick Zev up from the floor. “This one is going to need a bath tonight. Now, Tala may be a daddy’s girl, but this is my little mama’s boy, right here. Isn’t that right, baby boy?”
Zev gave a high-pitched shriek that ended in a giggle and flailed in Lupita’s arms. She laughed and hefted him up into the air, then let him drop down into her arms, causing further giggles. Nori didn’t think he’d seen anyone look so happy in a long time. It was a good feeling, just being somewhere happy.
He didn’t want to leave when the weekend was over, but he knew he couldn’t stay here. He wouldn’t want to stay in one place, now—when it came right down to it, he was a pirate. His home was on the ocean. How had that happened?
Yuu was now sitting on the floor, letting Tala teach him some sort of patty cake game that Yuu couldn’t follow to save his life, hands easily three times the size of Tala’s trying to keep up with movements impossible for anyone over eight years old. “So, wait, it goes like this twice, and then over and then under and after that you…what, snap your fingers?”
“No, first you hit your knee.”
“Like this?”
“Then you snap your fingers.”
“And what is this, the summoning ritual of the Demon Blood Cult?”
“No, it’s a game! Heeehee, you’re stupid.”
“Oh, I’m stupid? Who’s the one who calls up demons to wreak havoc in your mother’s kitchen?”
“Hahahaha!”
Oh, right. That was how.
Tala had refused to go to bed until Yuu had told her a story. The story had started out basic, but got more and more convoluted until Lupita was laughing, Tala was trying to correct him on details that she insisted were impossible, and even Nori was chuckling at the absurdity of it, which meant that Yuu had done his job. Yuu liked telling stories. He’d probably picked it up from Usopp.
“Thanks,” Lupita told him later, closing the door to the children’s bedroom. “She really like you, you know. You’ll have to come to visit more often.”
“Whenever we get the chance,” Nori said earnestly, and Yuu couldn’t help but smile.
“You two don’t have to…I don’t know, go back to your ship for a headcount or something, do you?” she asked, and Yuu laughed.
“Nah, they don’t even do a headcount before we set sail. If you were too stupid to get you’re a—self to the docks on time, they take off without you.”
“Much like my father,” Nori said thoughtfully, and Lupita laughed. Yuu was expecting Nori to retreat somewhere on his mind again, but instead, he smiled.
Nori never talked much about his family and hardly at all about his father—all Yuu knew about the guy was that he was a hardass and a badass, but that was all he really needed to know. He was, admittedly, a little jealous seeing that Lupita knew all the little details from his childhood, but it wasn’t as if Nori told her things he didn’t tell Yuu. She had just been there at the time. And it was probably good that he had someone like that, who knew what it was like—especially if it meant that he stopped being so damn melancholy about it.
“Well, as long as there’s no official pirate curfew or anything, it’d be nice if you two would stay here for the weekend. We have a guest room, and I’m making pancakes in the morning.”
Yuu turned to look at Nori imploringly. “Pancakes.”
“He likes pancakes,” Nori explained to Lupita.
“I love pancakes.”
“We’ll stay,” Nori said, smirking.
The guest bedroom was small and green and blue and, as Lupita explained, would be Tala’s bedroom when the children were older. “After that, I guess we’ll have to add onto the house,” she laughed. “Maybe you could help us with that, huh, Yuu? Jonathan’s actually a lumberjack, you see—the whole island’s industry is built on the wood. That’s why it’s called Linden Island; because of the trees. Mostly they make instruments out of it, but Jonathan can’t actually make anything to save his life. He just cuts them down. Well, he can sew as well, but don’t tell him I told you that. Do you two need anything, or will you be okay in here?”
“I think we’ll be fine,” said Nori. After a moment’s awkward hesitation, he gave his cousin a hug. “Thanks, Loopy.”
“You’re welcome. And thank you.” She hugged back, then let him go, patting his shoulders. “If it gets chilly, there are extra blankets in the closet.”
“Thanks,” Yuu put in, as she left the room. “For everything.”
“It’s no trouble,” she told him, and gave Nori a last grinning glance before departing for her own room.
“She’s really a sweet lady,” Yuu said, and went over to sit on the bed, testing it. Pretty nice mattress, he judged. “And a looker, too. Are the rest of your cousins married?”
“Shut up,” Nori said, with a hint of a smirk. He went to the window and opened it, leaning out and twisting to look up at the roof. “I think I’ll sit up on the roof. Will you join me?”
“Sure,” said Yuu. Nori climbed out the window, and as soon as his feet hit the ground, he did that jump thing—Geppou. He kept offering to teach Yuu, but it was the sort of skill set that took years and years to develop, and Yuu didn’t have the patience for meditation anyway. He climbed out the window and scaled the side of the house with the help of the window sill and the drainage pipe.
When he got up to the roof, Nori was already sitting there. He crawled over and sat beside him, looking out over the island. It was more gray than green under the moonlight, and neither the ocean nor the raucous port town were visible from this side, but the endless forest stretched out from the house, interwoven with a river that wound its way out to the sea on the other side. “S’really nice here, ya know.”
“I know,” said Nori. He looked…calm. It had been weeks since Yuu had seen him without the tension in his shoulders. It was sight for sore eyes.
“I like your family. We need to come back here as soon as we can, for sure.”
“Right,” said Nori, distracted. He was thinking. Yuu wondered if Nori had even made the connection before this instant—that he had a family again. Nori lay back against the roof and looked up at the stars, hands crossed over his stomach. Yuu mimicked him, stacking his arms behind his head. “I wonder how…they’re all doing.”
Yuu guessed he was referring to the rest of his ‘family’. “Ask Lupita.”
“I can’t ask her that.”
“Why not? She wants to tell you. Can’t you tell?”
That thought line showed up between Nori’s eyebrows again. “How do you know these things, and I don’t?”
“Dunno. I like people more than you do, I guess.”
Nori smirked. “Well. I suppose that’s true.”
“Right,” said Yuu. He watched Nori watching the stars until Nori turned to look at him, blue eyes blazing in the faint light. “Thank you for coming with me.”
“Thanks for inviting me. Are you gonna quit pretending you don’t have feelings now?”
“I don’t do that.” He was at first resolute, then concerned. “Do I?”
“Sorta.”
“I’ll stop, then.”
“Good idea,” Yuu laughed. He rolled over and wrapped his arm around Nori’s waist. Nori got up and rolled onto his side so that they were pressed front to front, head tucked under Yuu’s chin. They lay on the roof in comfortable silence for some time, and Yuu wouldn’t have minded falling asleep there—it was warmer now that the wind had died down. But Nori didn’t seem to feel like sleeping. Which gave Yuu an idea. “You know what we should do?”
“Hmm.”
”We should have sex on this roof.”
“Yuu,” Nori said sternly, but Yuu could tell he didn’t mean it. Probably because he could feel the grin against his collarbone.
“No, we totally should. I think it’s a spectacular idea.”
“No, Yuu.”
“Why not? Come on, that’s what shore leave is for. That and getting drunk, and you don’t drink. C’mon.”
Nori rolled away from him, burying his face in the crook of his arm. “You know what I think you’re doing? You’re trying to trivialize my very important reunion with my family.”
“No, I’m trying to make it more memorable. You ever fucked on a roof? Might be fun.”
“Yes, Yuu. I fucked you on a roof. Remember?”
Yuu thought. “Oh right…right, that was—”
“That was your roof, yes.”
“Huh.” Yuu grinned. “See, it was fun. We should do it again. Besides, new roof. We could start a catalogue, like those ones for restaurants.”
“Now I’m not having sex with you here, because I’m not going to condone anything that involves persuading other people to visit my cousin’s roof so that they can fuck on it.”
Yuu got up on his elbows and pulled Nori’s arm from his face. “You want to.”
“That is beside the point,” Nori said haughtily, and the effect was lost when Yuu leaned down and bit Nori’s chin. “Ow! What are you—hmph…”
Moments passed, and finally Nori shoved Yuu off of him and sat up. “All right, fine,” he said, as though highly put-upon, while pulling his shirt off. “But I’m not getting shingle marks imprinted on my back, is that clear?”
“I hereby offer up my own back for shingle marks, in the name of all things good,” Yuu said, a selfless gesture if he didn’t say so himself, as he yanked his shoes off and tossed them over the side of the roof before leaning over to drag Nori, exasperated but recovering, into as persuasive a kiss as Yuu knew how to give.
The roof, in Yuu’s opinion (and Nori’s reluctant yet equally well-disposed one), turned out to have been a splendid idea.
And the next morning, the pancakes were delicious.
So yeah, I mean, you people-- some of you people-- remember Nori and Yuu, right? From this fic by
maldoror_gw? Well, if you don't, you should probably not read my story, or your should read that first. Actually, read that anyway. Read everything by Mal, it's worth it.Anyway, so, this is set six years after-- okay, I don't know how much Mal is going to hate me for this. (Sorry.) Six years after Nori defects from the government via the use of a Clever Plan and joins Yuu's pirate crew (of which he is the carpenter, not the captain, FYI) because, uh, they kind of had a fling when they were teenagers and Yuu is like the only non-government affiliated person Nori could even remotely trust. Look, I know it's contrived, but it was fun to write.
Also, they are going to find Nori's cousin. Who is Jyabura's daughter. One of them. Um.
...Look, you don't have to read it if you don't want.
Nori was standing on the gunwale again, that impeccable sense of balance working in his favor and wreaking havoc on Yuu’s nerves. He would swear the lunatic did it on purpose if he didn’t know how that sharp, clockwork brain of his ticked: he trusted himself not to get hurt, so why shouldn’t Yuu? It made him feel unfaithful, watching and worrying that he’d fall at any moment, but he reminded himself that Nori was a hypocritical loony who worried just as much when Yuu went for a walk on the railing. They were just a pair of daredevils, but Yuu suspected he was the only one who was ever taking a risk.
Nori had his hands in his pockets, jacket flapping and hair blowing back in the wind; every once in awhile, he’d toss his head to throw back the strands that got in his face. Yuu remembered how he’d got it all cut short after he’d joined the crew, some kind of act of defiance, or possibly he’d still been trying to convince himself that he belonged—he’d grown it back out later, maybe because it was a part of his past, maybe because he really was vain as a jaybird. Nori was scanning the horizon, and Yuu could swear he hadn’t blinked in minutes, but he didn’t blame him. Keeping your eyes peeled for land was one thing, but looking out for a home port that mightn’t exist…
It’d be another hour at the very least, and Yuu figured he’d better go and rescue the guy from having his eyeballs dried and salted. He shoved off from the bulkhead he’d been leaning on, grabbed hold of the mainsail’s edge, swung out over the open air of the lower deck—some newbie shouted in surprise to his left as he let go, freefell six feet—snatched up a handful of rigging and hurled himself over another stretch of open air before braking violently and dropping to the deck before the backswing could rip his arms off.
“Goddamnit, Yuu, what’ve I told you about monkeyin’ around on the ship?” roared a voice from the upper deck. “Quit that acrobatic nonsense before you get your neck broken!”
At this, Nori glanced back over his shoulder, momentarily distracted from the promise of landfall by the mention of his lover’s name in the context of acrobatic nonsense and potential spinal injury. His expression was at first blank and searching as it had been facing the sea, but when his eyes met Yuu’s from across the deck, they narrowed and turned on him a glare both withering and unimpressed.
“Sorry, captain,” Yuu shouted back in response, without turning away from Nori’s admonishing gaze. The latter rolled his eyes and turned back to the ocean; Yuu grinned wider, chuckling to himself as he strolled across the deck. “Wet blanket,” he muttered.
When he reached the gunwale, he looked up, reaching up to shove a mess of hair out of his eyes. “You comin’ down, secret agent? We’re not gonna spot land for another hour.”
Nori looked down over his shoulder, still off in his own world. “Hmm?” It was almost lost to the roar of wind. He glanced back. “I suppose I ought…”
“Yeah, probably. C’mon. I’ll catch ya.” His mouth curved, unbidden, into a trademark lopsided grin with the words; he’d hoped to say it with a straight face, just to get another of those withering death glares he still found so infuriatingly endearing.
He never expected Nori to take him up on it.
The moron just fell back like he’d been shot, without a word, and Yuu didn’t even have time to finish yelling “Hey, what are you doing!?” before he had an armful of 26-year-old lunatic and had to give up on vocalization in favor of trying his damnedest not to land on his ass in front of the whole crew.
“You—!” he snapped, heaving Nori away and hauling himself fully upright. He pushed more hair out of his face, stared incredulously, and shoved indignantly at Nori’s chest. The idiot hadn’t even taken his hands out of his pockets.
“You offered,” he pointed out logically, and Yuu took a moment to gape like a fish, furious, watching Nori’s lips twitch into a smile at his fury and growing angrier until a rare flash of common sense reminded him that he’d brought it upon himself and told him to savor the first glimpse of his Nori, the real one and not the impersonal automaton posing as him, that he’d seen in days. So he swallowed his irritation and smiled, shaking his head.
“You’re a freak, secret agent.”
Nori returned the smile with a real one, and god, that was so much better. But then the smile turned confused. “Why do you still call me that?”
It was, shockingly, the first time he’d ever asked—well, the first time he’d ever asked and meant it. “I’ve always called you that.”
“But I’m not.” The smile was fading. It hadn’t occurred to Yuu—they were finding a part of Nori’s past for the first time in six years, six years since “secret agent” had stopped being more than a nickname. This was one of those times it was hard for him to remember what he used to be, when he looked at that time as a rift between the person he had been and the person he was. Yuu opened his mouth, but Nori turned away, looking back out to sea.
“You’re not,” Yuu agreed. He wrapped his arms around Nori from behind, pressing his face to wind-blown hair. “‘M sorry, babe. You gotta tell me this stuff, ya know? If you didn’t want me to say it—”
“It’s not that.” Nori covered Yuu’s arms with his own, leaning back against him. For a second, Yuu had been worried he’d pull away. “Call me that if you want. Do whatever you want. I like it when you do what you want.”
That didn’t make any sense, mostly because Nori always seemed to hate it when Yuu did what he wanted, but that was probably a distinction Yuu should have noticed before. Contrary sod. “’Kay. Listen, you gonna be all right? I know you haven’t seen her in ages, but it’s not like she’s gonna turn you away—”
“I know she won’t,” Nori interrupted, too quickly. Yuu sighed against Nori’s ear.
“She’s family, babe. Don’t worry about it.”
There was a brief pause, and then Nori gently disentangled himself from Yuu’s embrace. Nori turned to face him, tucking a lock of hair behind one ear as he smiled, hard and unconvincing. “They’re all family, Yuu. My dad, my aunts and uncles, my cousins. I’m sure they’d be proud of me now.”
He looked Yuu in the eyes, a stare as blank and cold as any windless night, and then he took his icy smile and walked right by, leaving Yuu alone with the rest of the crew and the approaching horizon.
An hour later, land came into view. It was a tiny spring island, temperate and green in the faint heat of early summer, and right away there were red-roofed stucco houses barely visible in the distance. It looked, from faraway and with a trained eye, like a perfectly nice and hospitable little place. Naturally, Captain Corby Stark was immediately skeptical.
“I don’t know about this place, boys,” Stark growled around a wad of tobacco, overhanging forehead and bushy gray eyebrows turning his stoic expression into a sullen scowl. “Looks a little shifty to me. Mitsu Mai, keep an eye on this hunk a’ dirt and lemme know if anything comes up.
“If you like,” said the violet-haired and entirely too muscular woman leaning purposefully against the bulkhead nearby. Mitsu Mai—who was called her full name by everyone, up to and probably including her own mother—was the ship’s quatermaster, and the only one on the crew who could get away with responding to a direct order with ‘if you like’ rather than ‘yes sir’. She stood up from her claimed leaning wall and ambled to the lower deck, presumably off to keep an eye on the hunk a’ dirt in question.
Yuu watched her go, then squinted up at his captain through the afternoon sunlight. Yuu himself was a good six foot two, but Stark towered over him by at least six or eight inches. His impressive height was one of two features that kept the man from looking like someone’s grandfather, the other being that he had a chest like a tank and arms like mounted cannons, all covered in more tattoos than were accurately numerable. “I really don’t think it’ll be a problem, Captain. It’s probably just a farm island.”
Stark glowered down at his shipwright, then winked solemnly and tapped the side of his nose. “A good cover story, m’boy. Very good. But you never know. Got to keep an eye out for these things.”
“Oh yeah, Yuu,” said Anderson, a wiry teenager who’d been around six months at most and had taken it upon himself to dispense as much sarcasm in as little space of time as possible. “Don’t you know the stories about farm islands? They use the dairy cows as their warrior chargers.”
“I had a cousin who got trampled by a cow,” Coleman the navigator added helpfully.
“All right, you knuckleheads,” Stark snarled, unfolding arms the size of tree trunks in gesture that promptly shut everyone up. “That’s enough of that. Get to work, you lot.”
The gathering dispersed double time. “Captain,” Yuu ventured, and gained an unfriendly but vaguely permissive glance. “We’ll make land in half an hour or so, I’d say…I should go get Nori.”
Stark paused, then nodded brusquely “Find wherever the sulky bastard is hiding and drag his ass out in the open, will ya? Haven’t seen him since he was playin’ chicken on the gunwale this afternoon. Woulda thought he’d be hovering like a buzzard all day.”
Yuu rubbed the back of his neck as if it itched, looking at his elbow in apparent fascination. “Yeah. Well, he woulda been, only I think I sorta pissed him off.”
Much to his surprise, this admission garnered a bark of laughter. “What’d you do, boy, call him a pansy again?”
“Hey, now, that was one time, that was over a year ago, we were drunk, I didn’t mean it, leave it alone. No, I sort of…” Yuu sighed, burying both hands in his hair and pulling in aggravation. “I sort of brought up a touchy subject by accident, is all.”
When he looked up again, Stark was wearing an expression of deep consideration. “Hmm. Family?”
“Yeah…”
“Going to see his…sister? Cousin, was it?”
“Yeah, his cousin. He hasn’t seen her in six years, he’s worried she won’t…ya know, she won’t want him around. From all he’s told me about her, she doesn’t seem like that at all, but I don’t really know, so I can’t tell him everything’s gonna be okay.” Yuu paused, twisting the unbuttoned hem of his shirt into a knot. “What if it’s not, ya know? What am I s’posed to do?”
Stark was scratching his chin, nodding to himself as though deciding which course to plot. Yuu waited, tying and untying his hem twice before his captain spoke, startling him.
“Well, I don’t know much about how you queers operate, but whenever my old lady Lucille had something happen, I don’t know, her sister got in a fight with her and there was nobody I could punch out, I’d just tell her I’d do whatever I could to help and let her know I was there if she needed me. Sometimes that’s about all you can do, m’boy.”
Yuu, who had long since given up protesting the use of the phrase ‘you queers,’ took a moment to think this over. “Yeah, I guess all I can do is just…whatever he needs me to.”
“Right,” Stark said definitively, and gave Yuu a slap on the back that almost plowed him face first into the deck. “Now go drag his pansy ass outta hiding, and do it quick. We’ll make port in twenty minutes and I want all hands on deck.” With that statement in closing, Captain Stark thundered away, roaring orders at the top of his formidable lungs as he went.
Yuu shook hair from his face, reaching around to rub his injured back as he steadied himself. “Yes sir,” he said, quietly and unnecessarily, and stumbled off to look for Nori.
Nori was sitting cross-legged on Yuu’s bed when the latter found him; meditating, as far as Yuu could tell. He did it every day—something about Rokushiki and how he had to maintain his inner energy or bad things would happen to his nervous system (which Yuu had at first taken as code for “I’m taking a break so I don’t snap from dealing with your lunacy” but later found out that his actual inner energy was actually important). There were two things about this that were weird: first, he was on Yuu’s bed. Nori usually meditated on his own bed (easily identifiable by being the only bunk in the cabin that was ever made properly). The other weird thing was that he picked now of all times to meditate on Yuu’s bed. Wasn’t he supposed to be mad, or something?
Yuu waited, leaning against the doorframe. It had to have been at least seven or eight minutes before Nori finally came to, eyes immediately finding Yuu across the room. “Why are you standing there?” he asked quietly, voice somehow amplified in the narrow room. His eyes were almost glowing in the darkness—or maybe not almost, maybe they really were. They did when he was in dog form, and very occasionally they took on that phosphorescent night vision quality when he wasn’t paying attention.
“Because you’re acting like a sulking teenager and I’ve been ordered to drag you out into the light to play with the grownups. Why, am I bothering you?” Yuu wanted to say, but didn’t. “I was waiting,” he answered instead.
Nori tilted his head, that predatory analytic gesture of his. “Come in, then.” And Yuu realized the first question hadn’t been accusatory, just inquisitive, and then he felt bad. He shook the feeling off and crossed the room to sit on the edge of his bunk next to Nori. They sat in silence for a moment; Nori uncrossed his legs and leaned forward, elbows propped on his thighs. Yuu pulled up an unmade corner of his bed sheet and twisted it into a knot.
“Come down here to think?” Yuu finally asked, sheet twisted halfway into an angler’s loop.
“Came down here not to think,” Nori corrected. Yuu smiled, finishing the knot and pulling it free again.
“Was wondering if you were planning on comin’ back up. We’re gonna hit land in, oh, ten minutes. Captain wants all hands on deck.” He was finding out how impossible it was to do a cow hitch with an abused sheet corner when Nori turned away and muttered something so quiet Yuu missed it entirely. He dropped the sheet and turned to face Nori, concerned. “What’d you say?”
“I said,” Nori repeated, turning back just enough so that Yuu could see his profile as he stared at the floor, “I don’t think I can do this.”
Yuu opened his mouth to say something, but he made the unfortunate miscalculation of not having had anything to say before he did. He sighed, and closed it again. “Nori…”
“Tell me it’s going to be okay. I dare you.” His voice was hard, eyes still fixed on the floorboards. Yuu flinched.
“Look, I don’t know—god damn it. I don’t know if it’s gonna be okay.” He shoved his hair back out of his face, resisting the urge to yank on it until his eyes teared up. Nori was looking at him now, startled. Yuu grimaced. “I don’t know, I don’t know anything. Okay? She’s your cousin. You always told me she’s so great, she’s so understanding, she cares about you—I don’t know what she’ll do, okay? She might have you drawn and quartered, for all I know. But does she really seem like the kinda person who’d do that?”
Nori still looked startled, and his eyes were blank as they moved from Yuu’s face to the edge of the bed. “I…don’t know. I haven’t seen her in…I don’t know.”
“Well, fine. You don’t know. You think I always know how things are gonna go?” Yuu twisted one of his hands in his hair, looking away. “You think I knew how my parents were gonna react when I told ‘em, oh yeah, by the way, guess who I’m bringing home on leave this year? Yeah, they weren’t happy. They’re still not happy, even though they know you now. How could they be? You think I knew how my uncle was gonna feel when I introduced you to him? Yeah, sure, he was fine with it. His crew was fine with it, But they might not have been, and I told them anyway.” He looked at Nori, combing his hair back and putting a hand on the other man’s rigid shoulder. “Look…you don’t have to go see her if you don’t want to. But you do want to. So why not? Why the hell not? I’m not gonna tell ya nothin’ bad’ll happen, I’m not gonna make any promises—maybe she hates you now. How do I know? But if you don’t go find her you’ll never know, and that’ll be worse. And you know what? Listen to me.” He shook Nori’s shoulder for emphasis. “You know what? If she hates you, if she never wants to see you again, fine. Fuck her. I’m still here. I’m not going anywhere. You got that? Everyone else in the goddamn world can desert you but I’m still here.”
Nori was staring at the floor like it was responsible for all the world’s evils, teeth clenched and fists clenched and he looked like he was trying not to break apart. “Yuu…”
“You wanna hit me? ‘Cause I wouldn’t blame you. Go ahead.”
Nori straightened up, still tense, and turned to look at Yuu, slowly, like a machine. He was always like a machine when he was hurt—he’d never known how to deal with emotion, and even now he was still learning. Being made of steel wasn’t a coping mechanism, but it was a defense, and it was all he knew how to do. “I don’t know if I want to hit you or not, you know that? I’m pretty sure I do. I’m pretty sure that I’d like to punch you very hard in the face.”
“I wouldn’t blame you,” Yuu repeated quietly.
“But I know that’s wrong. Normal people don’t punch people they love in the face—”
“I don’t know, sometimes they do—”
“And even if they do, it’s not right, and I don’t want to hurt you. What good would it do if I punched you? Besides, I’m not sure you said a single thing that merits physical violence.”
“I proved you wrong,” Yuu said, smiling wearily. “Lots of folks get an urge to hit people when they’re proven wrong.”
“That doesn’t make it right,” Nori said sternly. He looked so empty, but there was a sort of confused fear lurking behind his eyes.
“Does everything have to be right? Can’t you do anything just ‘cause it feels like the thing to do?”
“Are you saying you want me to hit you in the face?”
“Not really. If I wanted you to jack my jaw I’da said something a far sight worse than that. I’m just saying, for pity’s sake, just…go on instinct once in your life, maybe you’d feel better. If you did that now, you wouldn’t be so damn concerned.” Yuu paused to consider that. “Concerned, yeah, but not like the world’s crashing down around your ears. I thought they taught you not to second-guess yourself on that tower of yours.”
At this, the corner of Nori’s mouth twitched in a very involuntary smile. “Well, that was never my sort of place anyway.”
Yuu put his head down in his hands and laughed, and Nori didn’t do a thing but Yuu could practically feel the smile sticking in place on that formerly forlorn mouth. “But ya know, you’re still my secret agent, aren’tcha.”
“I guess so,” Nori answered, and when Yuu looked up—yeah, he was smiling, just a little, but real. “I guess I still am.”
Without thinking, or even realizing what he was doing, Yuu leaned forward and kissed the reluctant smile on Nori’s lips. Nori kissed back, immediately and intensely, reminding Yuu that the wet blanket did do some things on instinct after all…
“Hey,” said Yuu a moment later, leaning away just enough to speak, “what are you doing here, anyway? Thought you always meditated on your own bunk. You haven’t even been sleeping here the last week or so…”
Nori tilted his head away, looking guilty. “I’ve been…distracted. I felt it would be best to…maintain some distance—”
“You haven’t thought like that for years, though,” Yuu pointed out, brushing some hair away from Nori’s ear. Nori looked down, but didn’t turn farther away.
“It’s been a stressful time as of late.”
“Yeah. Kinda noticed.”
Nori smirked, briefly. “Well. I just thought…here, you know…with all the rend marks in the sheets from the knot-tying, and your hair stuck to the pillow, and it smells like you—” He stopped, as if he’d said too much. “It just…I suppose it’s comforting, somehow. It’s easier to focus…or, I suppose, not to focus…when the ground under me doesn’t feel so cold.”
Yuu thought about that. It was flattering, in a way, and also a little bizarre, but most things about Nori were a little bizarre (and so were most things about Yuu). “But I thought you were mad at me.”
“No. No, I was angry at you for ten seconds, and then I realized that I had overreacted and that you had been trying to help. Then I was angry at myself, but I couldn’t go out and apologize.” He frowned, looking far away. “That’s not right…”
“Nah, it’s okay. I know how that is. You don’t wanna talk to somebody you were just pissed off at, even if you’re not anymore. You don’t know what to say, right?”
“Right,” Nori said, not uncertain, but certainly unfocused. “Yuu, do you ever think I’ll be able to function emotionally like human beings are meant to?”
“I don’t think anybody does,” Yuu answered truthfully. “Besides, I like you the way you are, in case it wasn’t obvious. And it’s not like I do either most of the time. But if you wanna be more, I don’t know, sociable or whatever you aim is, you just gotta work at it. Get out and meet new people.” He looked up. “Not that there’s a ton of new people around, but you know what I mean. Mingle.”
Nori chuckled. “Yes, mingle. Spectacular idea. I will strike up a conversation with the cabin boy.”
“He’d be terrified.”
“That’s the idea.”
“I think that’s a clear-cut of case of doing it wrong, right there, but suit yourself,” Yuu said, laughing. “You just like to scare people, babe.”
”I love to scare people,” Nori whispered, drawing it out for emphasis, with that predatory grin on his face. There was a time when Yuu would have found it chilling, but as it was, all he did was laugh and slap Nori on the shoulder.
“And ya do it so well, too. You ready to come up and amalgamate with the masses yet?”
“Mm, in a minute,” Nori said, and the next instant, he had a handful of Yuu’s hair and Yuu had a mouthful of Nori’s tongue and was experiencing a sudden shift in priorities as he gripped the back of his boyfriend’s shirt and held on.
Moments later, the sound of the cabin door slamming against the wall broke them apart hastily and without the added benefit of making the situation any less compromising in appearance. “You two horndogs better get up here and help us dock the fucking ship or I’m telling the fucking captain you’re down here in the fucking cabin—”
“Fucking?” Yuu finished placidly, climbing off the bunk and finger combing his hair back into something resembling order (in that he could see out from under it). Carmen, the stocky redhead who’d presently barged into the room, grimaced at him in manner that fell just short of menacing. He smiled winningly.
“We weren’t,” Nori said defensively, now in a standing position as well and putting his own hair into order considerably more orderly than Yuu’s. “We were going to come up in a minute. I have better time management skill than that.”
“Oh, I bet knots-for-brains could get a lot done in a minute,” Carmen said cheerfully, and the effect of Yuu’s rude gesture in response was undercut when Nori leaned past him and, smiling serenely, answered, “Occasionally, yes.” Yuu turned to look at him, startled, and by the time he’d looked back with his mouth open to protest this notion, Carmen was already halfway up the stairs, laughing up a storm.
For his efforts, Nori received a withering glance. “That was one time.”
“No, that was four times. But who’s counting? Come on, we need to help dock the ship.”
When Yuu finally had the presence of mind to feel anything beyond hurt incredulity, Nori was already out the door, hands in his pockets. “You’re a devious bastard.”
“That tower they brought me up in may not have been my kind of place, but I suppose some things are immutable. Coming?”
Yuu went, muttering. Underneath it all, he almost felt proud, and he didn’t know whether that spoke to Nori’s weirdness or his own.
The Queen Lucille was docked in the harbor of Linden Island by six o’ clock, and the crew had scattered—the port town would be a wreck by the time the weekend was over, but that was nothing out of the ordinary. Nori stayed on the docks, hands in his pockets. His train of thought, headed nowhere, was broken when he felt a hand on his shoulder.
“How’re you gonna find her?” Yuu asked, looking out over the island. Nori followed his gaze; it was a nice place, green and pleasant aside from the grubby commotion of the smallish nearby port town.
“I hadn’t thought that through.”
“Sure you had. You think everything through.”
Nori smiled. “Well. I suppose so, yes.”
Yuu’s hand slipped from his shoulder; Nori was facing the other way, but Yuu was probably running his hands through his hair for the umpteenth time. One day, Nori would convince him to do something about it, always falling in his eyes. In Nori’s old days, that never would have been allowed—but Yuu had never lived that way. “So how—and I’m not second-guessing you, secret agent, but how do you even…well, know she’s here?”
“I’ve heard things.”
“Things.”
“I heard there’s a ‘wolf person’ on this island.”
“Wolf person? There’s a couple more a’ those, aren’t there?”
“Yes, but I heard she was female, which eliminates Weylyn, and I heard she had married a local and had children, which eliminates Ulrica and Adolpha.”
Yuu shrugged. “Eh, they coulda defected like you, right?”
Nori snorted, shaking his head. “No. You don’t know them. They would never.”
“Well, I don’t know ‘em. But, is there a rule says they can’t have kids?”
“Not one of which I am aware, though that never applied to me. However, Adolpha abhors children and Ulrica, unless this has changed in my absence, is a lesbian, so in the end there’s only one person it could be, and that’s Lupita.”
He could feel Yuu’s eyes on him, feel him wanting to say something. But he didn’t. He nodded once, accepting, and then he straightened up a bit and rubbed his chin. “So how are you gonna find her?”
“Hmm,” said Nori. There was a breeze blowing in from the hills; he tipped his head back and closed his eyes, focusing…all he could smell was salt and oakum and the nearby reek of alcohol and countless human bodies from the town. He shook his head sharply, coming back to his other senses. “Nothing from here. I don’t know why I even tried. I’ll have to get farther into the hills. Hold this, please?” He stripped his jacket off and handed it to Yuu, who accepted it.
“Shoes,” he reminded, and Nori stooped to pull those off as well, and his socks. Yuu took them, bundling them in the black jacket, and, after a moment’s thought, Nori pulled his T-shirt off as well. “Gonna be cold, aren’tcha?”
“No,” Nori said simply. He thought for a moment—or felt, rather. He’d tried to explain it to Yuu once; it was like…finding a part of yourself, not that wasn’t supposed to be there, but that was living there hidden away from everything else. And then, asking it to come out. Nori found that part and brought it out of hiding, barely noticing the change itself, and when he opened his eyes he was considerably closer to the ground and covered in fur.
“Damn,” said Yuu, to whom Nori suspected his turning into a wild dog on command would never stop being a big deal. He turned to look up at Yuu—his eyesight in this form was poor, but it hardly mattered. His ears were sharp enough to hear every move Yuu made. “That never stops bein’ weird.”
“To you,” said Nori. He didn’t like to talk in dog form, mostly because it was difficult to articulate properly, and also because, no matter how much he insisted it was in fact closer to growling, Yuu continued to maintain the words sounded like chirps. And of course, he was trying to hide a grin. Nori sighed (and that definitely sounded more like a growl) and trotted off the docks onto the grass. Yuu followed, carrying Nori’s discarded clothes under his arm.
He would have to search close to the houses on the hills, but not too close—he was quite sure the island’s inhabitants wouldn’t take kindly to a stray dog wandering through their yards with a strange man following it. He loped through the grass, trusting that Yuu would keep up.
It still smelled mostly like salt, and grass, and dirt, and trees. It smelled like the things living in the trees as well; birds and deer and rabbits. There was a rabbit just nearby—he fought down a very un-human instinct involving that rabbit and moved on. He could smell the houses and the people who lived in the houses…men and women and children…a few dogs and cats. He was looking for something different.
Yuu was still at the bottom of the previous hill when Nori found…something. Maybe…maybe it was right, but he couldn’t be sure…he turned to look back down the hill and barked. Yuu ran up the rest of the hill like his feet were on fire. “What? Did you find her? What?”
“Don’t know,” Nori said. He turned back up the hill and raised his head, smelling the wind. “Found…something.”
“Well what’s it smell like?”
“Wolf.”
“Oh, but…there’s real wolves on this island too, I’m pretty sure.”
“Smells like wolf…human…”
Yuu pushed some hair away from his face and sighed. “Well, that sounds like her, huh?”
Nori gave Yuu as withering a glance as a wild dog was capable of and turned to lope farther up the hill. There was the house, and that certainly smelled like her, but…
“Not sure,” Nori said. He sat down at the top of the hill and stared at the house. It was quaint but well-appointed, red-roofed stucco like most of the others spaced out widely around it. There was a garden out front, and the house was situated just ten or twelve yards from a river that wound away through the hills and into the trees. As he looked around, Yuu knelt down on the hill beside him, placing a hand on his furred back.
“Is there something else you can think of? Something she smells like, or that she’d have near the house?”
“I don’t—” Nori began, and then stopped. He turned to look at the river…it was too far to see from there, but… “Stay,” he said to Yuu, and stood up, stalking toward the house.
“Nori—”
“Stay.” He crept through the grass, lowering himself down until his belly was touching the ground. At this distance, he could hear people moving inside the house, and he could smell the food that was cooking, some kind of pasta…there were children, two of them. And a woman. A man lived there as well, but he wasn’t home. Finally, Nori got to his feet, tipped his head back, and sniffed the air…that woman, she smelled like dog—like wolf, and like the food from the kitchen and like the children and the man and any number of other things, but there was something else, some kind of flower. Flowers from the river. It was lotus blossom.
Nori ran back to Yuu and pulled the bundle of clothes away from him with his teeth.
“Hey, what—”
“That’s her,” was the first thing he said when he regained human form, already pulling his socks on.
“Really?” Yuu said, still apparently startled. “Are you sure?”
“Positive. Hand me my shoe.”
Yuu was grinning as he tossed the shoe to Nori and then took the liberty of handing him his jacket as well. “You found her.”
“Yes, I did. That has to be her.” He struggled to lace his other shoe up while attempting to stand at the same time, and let Yuu grab his elbow to steady him. “Do I look like I’ve just been rooting around through several hundred yards of island trying to find my long-lost cousin?”
“Only in the face,” Yuu said helpfully, and gave him a quick kiss. “So you’re gonna go talk to her?”
Nori paused, blinked. “Yes. I have to.”
“Good,” said Yuu. He put his hands on Nori’s shoulders. “Don’t panic, okay?”
“I won’t. I’ll try not to.”
“That’s a good start. Just, y’know, be yourself. Or something.”
“I think I can handle that.”
“‘Course you can.” Yuu took his hands back, glanced down, and looked back up as if he had something to say. But he stopped and shook his head. “Be good.”
Nori paused for several seconds longer than he probably should have. He swallowed. What was he supposed to say? “Where…”
“I dunno. Around. You’ll find me.”
“…Yuu.”
“Hmm, what?”
“Yuu, could you…will you come with me?”
Yuu looked startled. “You want me—”
“I want you to come with. Not for moral support, I want you to meet her. I thought that was…I assumed it was implied…”
Yuu was giving him one of those looks Nori had no idea what to do with. It was an expression he was tempted to label as tender, though he didn’t like to think of Yuu that way. It made him seem vulnerable, somehow…but in this case, it was more easily acceptable. “Yeah,” Yuu said quietly. He was smiling. “Okay. Yeah, that’d be good.”
“Thank you.”
“No, thank you. Now come on, it’s getting late.”
He gave Nori’s shoulder a push. Nori tried to smile, but he was too—well, he wasn’t nervous. Maybe a little bit. Either way, he was going to do it, and no matter what happened in the end…Yuu would still be there.
When he was younger—a child, though he’d never thought of himself that way—Nori had assumed the hardest thing he would ever have to do was prove himself. He had always wanted his father to be proud of him, and if that wasn’t possible, he at least wanted to be accepted as useful. After he’d given that up—after he’d given up on his father entirely—the hardest thing in his life was finding something new to care about. And then there was Yuu…after that, he’d stopped thinking in terms of obstacles.
But it never would have occurred to him that the biggest challenge he would ever face was to knock on a door.
“There’s not an axe trap behind it,” Yuu said helpfully. “Door’s not sturdy enough.”
“Could you go stand over there, please?” said Nori, who knew he was just trying to help but was in no position to accept an attempt at humor. Yuu put his hands up, a gesture of acquiescence, and went to lean against the house, just next to the kitchen window. “I’m sorry.”
“S’okay.”
Nori stared at the door. It was just a door, that was all. But if there was one thing he had learned from his uncle Blueno, it was that doors were nothing to be afraid of. What was behind them, that was the threat.
He knocked.
Nothing happened for a second. It occurred to him that he hadn’t knocked loudly enough, so he did it again, probably too hard this time. He couldn’t do anything right today.
“Coming!” said a voice from inside, in the kitchen. “Just a second, the stove’s on!”
Nori closed his eyes. Oh god, that was her. He would know that voice anywhere. The thing to do now was not to run away like that rabbit out in the wood.
The door opened. “Sorry about…” said Lupita, and then she stopped talking.
She looked just like he remembered—she’d gained a few pounds, probably, and she was wearing a pink apron with a sauce stain on one corner. Dark hair down around her shoulders, and those brown eyes (shocked) looked just the same, and there was, of course, like always, a lotus blossom pinned to her hair just above her left ear. He’d never seen someone look speechless before, rather than simply embodying the concept, but she certainly had a speechless sort of expression on. He wished she’d smile, but he couldn’t expect that much, now or ever.
“Hi, Loopy,” he said.
Slowly, she raised her hand and put it on the doorframe, as if for support. Her expression didn’t change. Nori cleared his throat.
“I’m…sorry I haven’t…I’ve been busy…” That sounded terrible. He started over. “I apologize for showing up like this, and I would have come sooner, but I didn’t know you were living here for a long time, and then I had to explain everything to the captain, and of course we couldn’t just come straight here, we had to wait until we were in the area, and I didn’t want you to get in trouble for harboring a criminal, and I understand that this is a bad idea and it’s risky, and I know you probably don’t want anything to do with me, I k now I wouldn’t, so if you’d like me to leave right now I will, and I promise not to come back or contact you again if you want me not to—”
Nori could have gone on talking all day if he hadn’t suddenly found himself enfolded in Lupita’s fervent, inescapable embrace. He wanted to keep talking anyway, about something, but he forced himself to shut up before he said something stupid and hugged her back, hoping that was okay.
“Oh my god,” she said against his shoulder. “Nori.”
“Yes,” said Nori. It seemed like the appropriate response.
“Oh my god,” she repeated, leaning back from the embrace and putting her hands on either side of his face, holding onto him as if she didn’t believe it was really him. “Where have you…you’re still…why are you here? Are you hungry? I made pasta. Do you want some pasta? Oh my god. Have you come a long way? You must be hungry.”
“I’m not very hungry, thank you,” he said honestly. “Um. Did you ever…a long time ago, I sent a letter to you and your mother…did you get it?”
“What?” said Lupita. She moved her hands to his shoulder. “Oh, the letter! The one that…said you’re still alive. You are still alive. Yes, I have it, it’s in the drawer in the bedroom. I didn’t know you were ever coming back! I—if I’d known you were—I would have made a cake or…where have you been? Do you have a—a crew, or—”
“Yes. I’m sailing on the Queen Lucille under Captain Corby Stark.”
“Is that a…is that a pirate ship?”
“…Yes. I’m sorry.”
“It’s…no, it’s okay…Nori, what happened?”
Nori paused. “Well.” He glanced to his right, and Lupita followed his gaze and gasped, startled—she hadn’t noticed Yuu standing there. He stood up, away from the wall, and looked from Lupita to Nori. “I…brought someone with me.”
Yuu stepped forward and held his hand out. “Hi. I’m Yuu. I’m what happened.”
Gingerly, Lupita reached out and took Yuu’s hand. He shook it, smiling genially, and she tried for a smile of her own before looking back at Nori, questioning.
“It’s okay. He’s…”
“I’m Nori’s boyfriend.”
Lupita’s eyes went wide. “You’re—you’re that Yuu?”
Yuu grinned. “The one and only, ma’am.”
“Oh, wow,” Lupita said very quietly, as Yuu gave her her hand back. “You…” She looked back to Nori. “And he…?”
“He’s the carpenter on Captain Stark’s crew,” Nori said simply. “He…a long time ago, I was ordered to kill Captain Stark because he was becoming a menace to the government. Raiding Marine ports.” He stopped, glancing at Yuu, who only looked back at him without a hint of malice—of course. He looked back to Lupita. “I think…it’s a long story, but essentially, Yuu stabbed me in the gut and then convinced Captain Stark to let me recuperate on the ship.”
“You stabbed him?” Lupita asked weakly. Yuu nodded, expression suggesting he’d just been asked if he was enjoying the weather.
“Well, there are no hard feelings,” Nori said earnestly. “Besides, he didn’t mean to. I made him do it.”
“Fucker faked me out,” Yuu said brightly. Then he winced. “Pardon my language.”
“Pirate ruffian,” Nori said dismissively. “He won’t do it again if he knows what’s good for him.”
“I don’t,” Yuu interjected, “but I’ll keep my mouth shut.”
“Anyway,” Nori continued, “the rest is a long story, but I can tell you the rest if you’d like. Probably not out in the yard, though. Unless you don’t want us to come in—if you’d like us to leave, we—”
“No,” Lupita said suddenly. She was wearing that particular determined expression he’d seen a few times before; it was a ‘now you listen to me, young man’ sort of expression, and it worked every time (which wasn’t fair, Nori thought, considering he was supposed to be the one who was five months older). “You two have come all this way to see me, and now I’m going to be a good hostess and make sure you have something to eat. I made pasta. Come in and sit down.”
Yuu didn’t even look to Nori for permission. He was catching on fast.
The children were named Zev and Tala, ages two and five respectively. Tala took an immediate liking to Yuu and wanted to hold his hand, something that—Lupita explained with some embarrassment—she normally didn’t do. “I’m a ladies man, what can I say,” was Yuu’s comment on the matter. Lupita found this hilarious.
Tala looked a bit like her mother, mostly in the brown eyes, but she had—Lupita said—her father’s dark blond hair. Zev (who seemed content to sit on the kitchen floor and gabble semi-comprehensible baby talk Nori like he’d known him his whole, admittedly short, life) was small and pudgy and lacking in any features recognizable as his mother’s aside from the hair and eye color. The extent of Nori’s knowledge on children was that, eventually, with proper care, they grew up to be adults, but he wondered if Zev looked like his father or was simply too young to look like anyone other than a baby.
“What’s their father’s name?” Nori asked as Lupita handed him a plate of pasta and a dinner roll and gestured toward the kitchen table. (The room, like the rest of the house, was small but not too small, cheerily decorated, and modestly but comfortably furnished. Lupita seemed very proud of it.)
“Jonathan,” she said, smiling. “We’ve been married for almost seven years now. Tala, let Mr. Yuu sit down.”
“Just Yuu is good, if ya don’t mind,” said Yuu. He sat down, and ruffled Tala’s hair.
“Yuu,” she repeated. “No, Zev, you had dinner already. Leave Uncle Nori’s shoe alone.” She sat down at the table. “So, how long are you boys here?”
“‘Til the ship leaves,” said Yuu, with his mouth full of pasta. Nori glared at him. He swallowed, sheepish.
“In three days,” Nori clarified. Lupita put her fork down, looking forlorn.
“But you just got here!”
“I know, right?” said Yuu. “Pirates. Crazy.”
“You should just let the ship sail away and stay here. I’m sure they’ll come back for you eventually.”
“Oh, you don’t know Captain Stark, ma’am.”
“Just Lupita, please.”
“Right. Lupita. S’a nice name.”
“Thank you. He’s very charming, Nori, I can see why you like him.”
Nori hid half a smile behind his fork. “Charming? Oh, I don’t know about that.”
“Hey, now,” said Yuu, pretending not to be amused.
There was a brief and not unpleasant silence.
“I’m glad we came here,” Nori said at last. “I was…I didn’t…” He put his fork down and pressed his hand to his forehead, trying to hold onto a coherent sentence.
“He’s not so good with words, ya know?” said Yuu. Nori glared briefly, but lost the expression just as fast.
“It’s not that I didn’t want to see you. I did, really. But I was…concerned…that you wouldn’t want to see me.”
“Nori, why would you think that?” she said quietly. Zev stopped tugging his shoelaces to look up at his mother; that was as good an indication that she was hurt as any, he supposed. He pushed some pasta around on his plate.
“I’m not sure.”
“Because he’s one insecure motherf—guy,” said Yuu. “He figured you’d hate him.”
“I could never hate you, Nori. You’re family.”
Nori paused. He took another bite of his food and chewed it for awhile, and then he swallowed it without enthusiasm, feeling it stick in his throat. “Yes, well. I’m not sure the rest of my family thought that way.”
There was a longer silence this time. Finally, Tala knocked something off the counter reaching for the dinner rolls, and Lupita got up to take care of it.
Yuu looked at Nori over the table. His expression said, Stop trying to make this hard.
I’m not, said the expression Nori made back at him. Yuu shook his head, wearing an ironic sort of smile. “So Lupita,” he said over his shoulder, “do you guys have dogs? Your boy keeps saying something about puppies.”
“Oh, yes!” Lupita replied. She was scrubbing the pasta pan in the sink. “Well, actually she’s half wolf. Like me, I guess! She needed a place to stay, so we took her in. Her name’s Deer Chaser, or at least that’s what it translates to, but we just call her Chase. She had a litter two months ago. Jonathan took them all down to the market—with Chase, of course—to sell them, because she says, oh, lord knows she doesn’t expect us to keep them here and it’s time for them to get out on their own anyway, and they’ll make fine hunting dogs. She’s really a sweetheart, and I know she feels bad about it, but she insisted. We’re keeping one if they don’t go fast, though. Zev just loves them. Of course, the children aren’t wolf, but I think they have sort of a connection to dogs all the same.”
“So, you can talk to dogs?” Yuu asked.
“Mm, well, it depends. On how closely relate they are to wolves, anyway. But with most dogs, yes, there’s usually a way to work out a system of communication even if I don’t understand their speech. Chase, of course, we talk with almost no problems at all.”
“Sounds useful,” Yuu remarked, and then turned back to Nori. Is she pulling my leg? he mouthed. Nori shook his head. Yuu leaned back over his chair. “Wish I could do that. Not to say I don’t talk to dogs sometimes anyway, but they don’t usually talk back, most of ‘em. Need any help with those dishes?”
“Oh no, thank you, let me take care of it. You’re guests. Don’t let me stop you from having seconds, either—I just want to get these out of the way before Tala climbs up on the counter and starts tossing the dishes around.” She leaned over and swiped a soapy thumb across her daughter’s cheek. Tala giggled.
“Mommy’s mean to me,” she told Yuu, smiling.
“Yes, she’s clearly a horrible person,” Yuu agreed.
“She’s a daddy’s girl,” Lupita said cheerfully. “Jonathan will be home tomorrow morning, by the way. Whenever he goes all the way into town like that he usually stays the night at Greg and Martha’s place. He has Chase to look after him so this time he doesn’t end up sticking around and bothering them until after lunch. I love the man, but he has no sense of time.” She wiped her hands on a dish towel and leaned down to pick Zev up from the floor. “This one is going to need a bath tonight. Now, Tala may be a daddy’s girl, but this is my little mama’s boy, right here. Isn’t that right, baby boy?”
Zev gave a high-pitched shriek that ended in a giggle and flailed in Lupita’s arms. She laughed and hefted him up into the air, then let him drop down into her arms, causing further giggles. Nori didn’t think he’d seen anyone look so happy in a long time. It was a good feeling, just being somewhere happy.
He didn’t want to leave when the weekend was over, but he knew he couldn’t stay here. He wouldn’t want to stay in one place, now—when it came right down to it, he was a pirate. His home was on the ocean. How had that happened?
Yuu was now sitting on the floor, letting Tala teach him some sort of patty cake game that Yuu couldn’t follow to save his life, hands easily three times the size of Tala’s trying to keep up with movements impossible for anyone over eight years old. “So, wait, it goes like this twice, and then over and then under and after that you…what, snap your fingers?”
“No, first you hit your knee.”
“Like this?”
“Then you snap your fingers.”
“And what is this, the summoning ritual of the Demon Blood Cult?”
“No, it’s a game! Heeehee, you’re stupid.”
“Oh, I’m stupid? Who’s the one who calls up demons to wreak havoc in your mother’s kitchen?”
“Hahahaha!”
Oh, right. That was how.
Tala had refused to go to bed until Yuu had told her a story. The story had started out basic, but got more and more convoluted until Lupita was laughing, Tala was trying to correct him on details that she insisted were impossible, and even Nori was chuckling at the absurdity of it, which meant that Yuu had done his job. Yuu liked telling stories. He’d probably picked it up from Usopp.
“Thanks,” Lupita told him later, closing the door to the children’s bedroom. “She really like you, you know. You’ll have to come to visit more often.”
“Whenever we get the chance,” Nori said earnestly, and Yuu couldn’t help but smile.
“You two don’t have to…I don’t know, go back to your ship for a headcount or something, do you?” she asked, and Yuu laughed.
“Nah, they don’t even do a headcount before we set sail. If you were too stupid to get you’re a—self to the docks on time, they take off without you.”
“Much like my father,” Nori said thoughtfully, and Lupita laughed. Yuu was expecting Nori to retreat somewhere on his mind again, but instead, he smiled.
Nori never talked much about his family and hardly at all about his father—all Yuu knew about the guy was that he was a hardass and a badass, but that was all he really needed to know. He was, admittedly, a little jealous seeing that Lupita knew all the little details from his childhood, but it wasn’t as if Nori told her things he didn’t tell Yuu. She had just been there at the time. And it was probably good that he had someone like that, who knew what it was like—especially if it meant that he stopped being so damn melancholy about it.
“Well, as long as there’s no official pirate curfew or anything, it’d be nice if you two would stay here for the weekend. We have a guest room, and I’m making pancakes in the morning.”
Yuu turned to look at Nori imploringly. “Pancakes.”
“He likes pancakes,” Nori explained to Lupita.
“I love pancakes.”
“We’ll stay,” Nori said, smirking.
The guest bedroom was small and green and blue and, as Lupita explained, would be Tala’s bedroom when the children were older. “After that, I guess we’ll have to add onto the house,” she laughed. “Maybe you could help us with that, huh, Yuu? Jonathan’s actually a lumberjack, you see—the whole island’s industry is built on the wood. That’s why it’s called Linden Island; because of the trees. Mostly they make instruments out of it, but Jonathan can’t actually make anything to save his life. He just cuts them down. Well, he can sew as well, but don’t tell him I told you that. Do you two need anything, or will you be okay in here?”
“I think we’ll be fine,” said Nori. After a moment’s awkward hesitation, he gave his cousin a hug. “Thanks, Loopy.”
“You’re welcome. And thank you.” She hugged back, then let him go, patting his shoulders. “If it gets chilly, there are extra blankets in the closet.”
“Thanks,” Yuu put in, as she left the room. “For everything.”
“It’s no trouble,” she told him, and gave Nori a last grinning glance before departing for her own room.
“She’s really a sweet lady,” Yuu said, and went over to sit on the bed, testing it. Pretty nice mattress, he judged. “And a looker, too. Are the rest of your cousins married?”
“Shut up,” Nori said, with a hint of a smirk. He went to the window and opened it, leaning out and twisting to look up at the roof. “I think I’ll sit up on the roof. Will you join me?”
“Sure,” said Yuu. Nori climbed out the window, and as soon as his feet hit the ground, he did that jump thing—Geppou. He kept offering to teach Yuu, but it was the sort of skill set that took years and years to develop, and Yuu didn’t have the patience for meditation anyway. He climbed out the window and scaled the side of the house with the help of the window sill and the drainage pipe.
When he got up to the roof, Nori was already sitting there. He crawled over and sat beside him, looking out over the island. It was more gray than green under the moonlight, and neither the ocean nor the raucous port town were visible from this side, but the endless forest stretched out from the house, interwoven with a river that wound its way out to the sea on the other side. “S’really nice here, ya know.”
“I know,” said Nori. He looked…calm. It had been weeks since Yuu had seen him without the tension in his shoulders. It was sight for sore eyes.
“I like your family. We need to come back here as soon as we can, for sure.”
“Right,” said Nori, distracted. He was thinking. Yuu wondered if Nori had even made the connection before this instant—that he had a family again. Nori lay back against the roof and looked up at the stars, hands crossed over his stomach. Yuu mimicked him, stacking his arms behind his head. “I wonder how…they’re all doing.”
Yuu guessed he was referring to the rest of his ‘family’. “Ask Lupita.”
“I can’t ask her that.”
“Why not? She wants to tell you. Can’t you tell?”
That thought line showed up between Nori’s eyebrows again. “How do you know these things, and I don’t?”
“Dunno. I like people more than you do, I guess.”
Nori smirked. “Well. I suppose that’s true.”
“Right,” said Yuu. He watched Nori watching the stars until Nori turned to look at him, blue eyes blazing in the faint light. “Thank you for coming with me.”
“Thanks for inviting me. Are you gonna quit pretending you don’t have feelings now?”
“I don’t do that.” He was at first resolute, then concerned. “Do I?”
“Sorta.”
“I’ll stop, then.”
“Good idea,” Yuu laughed. He rolled over and wrapped his arm around Nori’s waist. Nori got up and rolled onto his side so that they were pressed front to front, head tucked under Yuu’s chin. They lay on the roof in comfortable silence for some time, and Yuu wouldn’t have minded falling asleep there—it was warmer now that the wind had died down. But Nori didn’t seem to feel like sleeping. Which gave Yuu an idea. “You know what we should do?”
“Hmm.”
”We should have sex on this roof.”
“Yuu,” Nori said sternly, but Yuu could tell he didn’t mean it. Probably because he could feel the grin against his collarbone.
“No, we totally should. I think it’s a spectacular idea.”
“No, Yuu.”
“Why not? Come on, that’s what shore leave is for. That and getting drunk, and you don’t drink. C’mon.”
Nori rolled away from him, burying his face in the crook of his arm. “You know what I think you’re doing? You’re trying to trivialize my very important reunion with my family.”
“No, I’m trying to make it more memorable. You ever fucked on a roof? Might be fun.”
“Yes, Yuu. I fucked you on a roof. Remember?”
Yuu thought. “Oh right…right, that was—”
“That was your roof, yes.”
“Huh.” Yuu grinned. “See, it was fun. We should do it again. Besides, new roof. We could start a catalogue, like those ones for restaurants.”
“Now I’m not having sex with you here, because I’m not going to condone anything that involves persuading other people to visit my cousin’s roof so that they can fuck on it.”
Yuu got up on his elbows and pulled Nori’s arm from his face. “You want to.”
“That is beside the point,” Nori said haughtily, and the effect was lost when Yuu leaned down and bit Nori’s chin. “Ow! What are you—hmph…”
Moments passed, and finally Nori shoved Yuu off of him and sat up. “All right, fine,” he said, as though highly put-upon, while pulling his shirt off. “But I’m not getting shingle marks imprinted on my back, is that clear?”
“I hereby offer up my own back for shingle marks, in the name of all things good,” Yuu said, a selfless gesture if he didn’t say so himself, as he yanked his shoes off and tossed them over the side of the roof before leaning over to drag Nori, exasperated but recovering, into as persuasive a kiss as Yuu knew how to give.
The roof, in Yuu’s opinion (and Nori’s reluctant yet equally well-disposed one), turned out to have been a splendid idea.
And the next morning, the pancakes were delicious.