mission report for hatenaimirai_e (part 1 of 2)
Mission report for hatenaimirai_e
Delivered by: greatfountain
Title: Skyship
Groups/Pairings: Arashi, Kanjani8, Tokio, Becky, Haruna Ai / Aiba Masaki/Yokoyama Yuu, mentions of Matsuoka Masahiro/Haruna Ai
Rating: PG-13 for implications
Warnings: Historical-steampunk AU, butchering of science
Summary: Aiba Masaki is an inventor living in the mountains of Chiba. When Yokoyama Yuu, airship pilot, crashes back into his life--literally--he's not sure what to think.
Notes: This is set in Chiba, Japan, in roughly the year 1894. Cultural and historical notes: there are vague references to real historical events, most prominently the conflict over influence in Korea. Knowledge of the First Sino-Japanese War isn't necessary to enjoy this, though. :D? For the sake of world-building several individuals have been aged up or down from their real-life personas. Thank you to my beta, H, for her help, and our lovely mods for their hard work. Kara, I really really really hope you enjoy this!
Aiba wakes when the sun saunters through the curtains of the tall window across the lab and lights up his face. There's a blanket tucked about his shoulders he doesn't remember bringing to the couch when he'd collapsed on it, and a warm fondness for Jun fills him up to match the warmth in the room. He swings his feet from the end of the couch to the floor, and the deceptive cool of the wood is a pleasant surprise. He stands, stretching lazily, and then turns his attention to the blanket, folding it lengthwise once, but then the smell of breakfast drifts into his nose. He lets the blanket fall onto the cushions of the couch in a pile, and trails across the lab and down the stairs in the corner to investigate his kitchen.
On the little round table nestled under the stairs is a plate of donuts--fresh, it smells like--and a note. Aiba reaches for the first donut--glazed with something yellow that smells like lemon--with one hand, and reaches down with the other to grab the note.
Jun's characteristic imperial swirl says "Remember to sleep in your bed tonight. And please eat, Aiba!", and neither of those are anything Aiba hasn't heard before. Below it, though, is Nino's scrawl. Usually Nino just invades the house when he's worried, demanding to hear about Aiba's work on automating the gliders they used as children.
"Aiba-san, I heard some news you might want to hear. Meet me at Naga-nii's. Nino."
Aiba chuckles around the next donut, a simple sugar because Jun knows he can't handle too much flavor and really get the best out of it. By the time he's finished the third donut and finished debating with himself about saving the other three for a midnight snack, the grandfather clock on the floor above him is ringing nine, which means it's time to get to work, before it gets too hot and he has to close the curtains on the five great, tall windows surrounding his workspace. Aiba's always worked best in natural sunlight versus the half-dim artificial light of his lanterns (even if he did invent them). If he has to spend hours bent over gears, trying to improve on the flight system of the gliders, then he's going to do it in a way that makes him comfortable. He cracks his wrists as he settles on his workbench.
It's time to get to work--for now, anyway.
---
Nagase's restaurant--technically it's a teahouse, but anyone who knows the proprietor's propensity for loudness (and public drunkeness) can attest Skyship doesn't deserve the title. Aiba steps inside the bustling familiar place, and by the time he's finished tugging off his coat and adjusting the cuffs of his shirt, Nagase's concierge Ohno has stepped into the front room.
"Oh-chan," Aiba greets, letting Ohno take his coat and hang it up, grinning widely at the older man. Ohno has been a constant in Nagase's restaurant for as long as Aiba can remember, a lackadaisical orphan taken in by Nagase after Nagase came home from the seas. Ohno's as close to a right hand man as Nagase gets--though to be honest no one was sure how either of them got anything done.
"Aiba-chan," Ohno answers, eventually, with his usual distracted fondness. Ohno seems a step behind everyone else, though it's not for lack of mental capacity or anything. Mostly it seems like he's too busy seeing too much for everyone else, or so Aiba thinks. "Kazu has a private room in the back."
"Fancy," Aiba says, amused, "did he beat Naga-nii at cards again?"
"Dice, I think," Ohno corrects him, and knocks on the door to the private room once, twice.
"Come in," a voice that can only be Nino's responds, and Aiba bounds in in good cheer. Nino is settled on the couch in the corner, boots piled under the end table and his feet curled up under his body. Both of his small hands are wrapped around a mug almost too big for them. Through the room drifts the signature scent of Jun's coffee, the only way there would be anything but tea (or, well, beer) in Nagase's 'esteemed establishment'.
Aiba grins at Nino, who only offers him a deadpan stare over the mug. "Come in," Nino says, "but close the door behind you, wouldn't want any bitter losers sneaking in."
The last is directed clearly over Aiba's shoulder, and Nagase can be heard grumbling about how he 'owns the damn place' at the end of the hall. Aiba shakes his head, giggles bubbling up as he settles at the other end of the couch, unbuckling his boots and tugging his feet from them before bending his left ankle under his knee. Next to the coffee dispenser--a special unit Nagase had commissioned from Aiba especially--is a plate of sandwiches, cucumber from the look of it, and Aiba plucks one from it to chew on while Nino prepares himself to talk about whatever he called Aiba in for.
Three sandwich halves later, Nino still doesn't seem ready to talk. "Nino," Aiba says, drawing the syllables out into a whine, "what's wrong?"
"I got a letter from Sho-kun," Nino says, slowly.
Aiba's chewing stops. "...did you?" he asks, weakly, "what does it say?"
"Sho-kun..." Nino pauses pointedly, "is fine. He's working as a telegraph operator now."
Aiba's smile widens impossibly slowly until it's nearly splitting his face. "So he's alive?! He survived the cruiser crash?!"
Aiba can't hold in the joy--he leaps forward and tangles his limbs around Nino, ignoring Nino's warnings about his coffee, and squeezes for a good, long moment.
He calms down, enough to loosen his grip and let Nino put his coffee cup down, but there's a grin on his face. "Yeah, Masaki, he survived the cruiser crash. All whole, even."
Aiba wipes his eyes, momentarily overcome. Sho had left for the army at nineteen, trying to escape the family pressure to take over their real estate business. He'd sent Nino letters every week, at first, telling about how freaky it was to float in the air and how he was finally getting at least acceptable at being a soldier, until they only get a letter saying he was going off to battle, and then nothing for nearly two years now. Aiba had always held that door open in his heart, because he'd grown up with Sho and Nino and Jun and Ohno, and finding out one of then had died was too much for him.
Nino elbows him into a more comfortable breathing position, and it's only when Aiba finally reaches out to grab another sandwich half that Nino speaks again.
"So how's fixing the tellyphone going?"
"It's a telephone," Aiba corrects automatically.
"That's what I said. Tellyphone. Have you gotten the talky part fixed yet?"
"The talky part works much better now," Aiba says, around a mouthful of cucumber and buttered bread, and swallows pointedly before he continues, "I think. I can't really test it on my own, though..."
"This is the part where I offer to let you fix the receiver you gave me and call me on it," Nino muses, aloud.
"Yep!"
"How are you going to fix it in my flat? And it's too big to cycle back up the mountain, you don't even have a basket on your bicycle..."
"Did someone say heavy things?"
"Naga-nii, how long have you been standing outside the door?" Nino complains.
"The whole time, pretty much," Nagase says, opening the door and peeking his head inside. The owner of Skyship is a fairly massive man, well built and sloppily dressed in clothes that are too nice for him. He grins, completely shameless as always, at them, and throws the door open.
"Is business really that slow at this hour?" Nino asks, eyebrow raised.
"There isn't much call for beer--or sake, what kind of Japanese people are these guys--at noon," Nagase answers, and he seems legitimately regretful about the idea that anyone would turn down alcohol, ever.
He steps inside the room. The heavy prosthetic part of his right leg makes a noisy, painful creak when he steps on it, and Aiba's nose scrunches up. Nagase had always refused to tell them how he'd lost half of his right leg, besides that it had been in '82. Ohno was the only one who seemed to know anything about it, and even then only small parts. That was why Nagase had hired Ohno on in the first place--he'd inherited his mother's teahouse when he came back home, but running the place with only one working leg was difficult even for a man of Nagase's impressive energy and determination. Aiba had crafted the gear-heavy, moving prosthetic when he'd first moved from his family's restaurant in the town proper to his new home at the top of the mountain, as a gift for letting the five of them hang out in the back.
"That shouldn't be making that noise," Aiba says, sitting up and forward, "sit down."
"Oh, Aiba, it's fine," Nagase answers, but when Aiba gets up and pushes him gently toward the couch he goes.
"Do you have to fix him?" Nino asks, "I like knowing he's coming. It means I can escape--ow!"
Nino and Nagase fall into mostly good-natured arguing while Aiba kneels down to tug the cover from the shin of the mechanism off. He fiddles with a lever and squints, then jerks the foot around.
"Oh, I see," he says, and begins rooting through his pockets for something to use to poke around under the gears at the ankle. He finds a single chopstick in his left sleeve, and after a moment of inspection to make sure there wasn't anything on it, he deems it acceptable.
"The gear at the ankle is blocked by--what is this?"
Nagase looks sheepish. "A cream puff," he says, "I wanted to save it for later."
Aiba throws the old pastry at him, groaning. Nagase pulls the prosthetic back on, strapping it over his thigh, and picks up the cream puff. He looks at it, considering for a long moment, and then pops it into his mouth.
"That's disgusting," Nino says, putting his coffee mug down and pulling a face.
"It's still good!" Nagase says around the mouthful, and waves a merry goodbye as he trots out.
Aiba can't hold back at least a little laughter, and Nino snorts once the door swings shut.
"Did... Sho-chan say anything else in his letter?" Aiba asks.
Nino makes a face. "He said he heard that, uh, that he'd met Murakami at the telegraph center. Maru and Yasu started up their courier business after all, and Ryo-chan is piloting the newest cruiser model."
"Shibutani-kun'll be happy to hear that," Aiba says, thinking of Nino's next door neighbor.
"Probably," Nino agrees, "I didn't tell him yet, thought you might want to know first."
"Did he hear anything about... anyone else?" Aiba asks, hoping.
Nino looks sad for him. "Nothing," he says, "at least, nothing that Hina mentioned."
Aiba nods, putting on a happy face. "I'm sure he's fine," he says, and unfolds himself from the floor. "Come on, then, I have to fix your receiver--what did you do with it?"
"I put a cream puff in it."
---
Aiba crawls into his bed, halfway wishing he hadn't promised Jun and Nino he'd sleep in a bed tonight. There were twenty-five steps around the circular perimeter of the lab up to the loft where his bed was perched, and he'd felt every single one of them in his exhausted trudge up the stairs.
He remembers the summer Kimitaka and his family rolled into town. It had been right after the Americans and their steamboats and airships had landed in Japan, an unstoppable force of technology and their so-called Manifest Destiny. The Yokoyamas--three brothers and their parents--had moved into the neighborhood next to Aiba's when they were mutually twelve, in a neighborhood filled with Osaka transplants looking to get away from the American military presence and the high smokestacks of the Osaka shipyards. Chiba was a popular destination largely because it was already filled with people moving out of Tokyo for much the same reasons, so the growing group of loud Kansai kids around the neighborhood was nothing surprising. When Kimitaka's mother opened up a laundry service, Aiba's mother had sent him by to drop off a bag of dirty dish towels from the family restaurant, and when Kimitaka had answered the door they'd wound up friends. At sixteen, however, Kimitaka's father disappeared, and Kimitaka took it upon himself to support his family the only way he could. He'd left with only a note saying he'd be back someday, and the only indication he was even still alive were the continuing checks to his mother.
Aiba curled up under the blankets. Aiba Masaki's philosophy for life was that as long as you were still alive you could be happy, so knowing that Kimitaka was at least alive was enough to keep him from marching across the continent and finding the idiot. Knowing that Hina-chan--who had been Kimitaka's closest friend--hadn't mentioned him was disheartening.
"Well, nothing you can do about it in the middle of the night," he declares to the silence of the house, and shut his eyes experimentally.
He's asleep for an hour, perhaps two, before the storm begins. The heavy drive of the rain is a comfort, at first, but then the thunder and the wind starts, and Aiba sits up, rubbing at his temples. Abruptly, a crash from below made him scurry to his feet, looking down below to the lab, and the fact that he hadn't actually closed the windows had him running down the stairs. At the bottom, he very nearly fell--there was already water all over the floor--but he caught himself just in time. There were five great windows, tall affairs with curtains that came down when he pulled a lever, each controlled by a simple wind-up closing mechanism. He usually closed them all before he went to bed, but the weather had been so nice when he finally got home he hadn't bothered--clearly a mistake. He stepped carefully over a puddle and righted his half-finished world map on his way to wind up the windows. By the time he'd gotten through four of the five, he was soaked almost entirely through on his right side, an unfortunate side effect of walking around in a circle. When he reached the fifth window, he discovered the mechanism was damaged, and he had to fight against it. A crack of lightning above him--he looked up--and the flash of it illuminates--something. Aiba squints at the sky, and another flash of lightning clearly shows an airship of some kind, and it's not going up. It's going down. Toward the mountain. Toward a crash. Aiba turns and speeds across the lab, stepping over a fallen bookcase, and nearly flat out runs down the stairs, toward the front door. He remembers to put on shoes, half-buckling them, and then he's off, ignoring the fact that he's going to be sick for a week after this for sure.
The airship is sinking fast now, close enough that he can see it sinking even without the lightning as a nightlight. By the time Aiba makes it from his house at the base of the mountain to halfway up the muddy trail, the airship has landed--if by 'lands' Aiba meant 'crashes in a messy fashion'.
"HELLO?" he calls, into the wind, a useless attempt to feel like he's doing something helpful. He ducks between two trees toward the last place he'd seen the falling machine.
By the time he finds the crashed airship, the storm has calmed down some. Aiba draws in a breath when he sees the ruined machine--it's a mess of broken wings and smoking exposed mechanisms. Aiba rushes to the scene, tugging back the wing and digging through the mess around the cockpit. He runs his fingers over the door hidden over the wing, and tugs on the safety release--Aiba remembers working on a similar system as a commission when he'd decided he didn't want to be a restaurant chef.
"Hello, are you okay? Excuse me! Hey! Can you hear me? Are you awake?"
The pilot is wearing the dark blue of the Japanese Imperial Fleet, his dark hair long over his eyes and eyes shut. He's collapsed against the other side of the ship, but Aiba can't see any blood--which might be good or bad. Aiba leans carefully forward into the cockpit, and shakes the shoulder of the pilot desperately. "Hey!" he says, and the pilot jerks, grunting. "Wake up!"
"Wha--" the pilot's eyes flutter.
"Come on, wake up! We have to get you out of here!"
"I--what--" The young man seems at least barely awake now, a groggy, still nearly unconscious kind of awake, but he responds when Aiba tugs on the sleeve of his jacket, and he's able to help Aiba unbuckle the harness over his chest so that Aiba can pull him out of it. The young man manages to stumble out of the ship, but his weight seems too much for him and Aiba has to get an arm around his chest, half-holding him up.
"Woah, okay, I got you," Aiba says, "come on, can you walk at all?"
It's a long trip back down toward the house, but Aiba manages to get the young man to the couch and under a pile of blankets nearly as think as the couch. The young man struggles to stay awake as Aiba walks around the room lowering the curtains and closing that last open window.
"Go to sleep," Aiba tells him, wringing out his own shirt with a sigh.
"I--only if you do, too."
"Trying to bargain?! We barely know each other!" Aiba grins, though. "Cleaning up can wait for the morning, I guess."
The young man fades from consciousness after that, and Aiba reaches out to brush the hair from the young man's face. It's easier to see what he looks like now that there's an actual light-source, and Aiba's eyes widen when something dawns on him.
Abruptly, Aiba stands, turning around and reaching for the wet jacket he'd piled on the edge of his worktable when he'd put the young man on the couch. He opens it up, tugging at the shoulders of the coat. There's no mistake--the neat standard kanji of the last name on the pocket of the coat isn't lying.
Yokoyama Kimitaka--or, well, Yuu, apparently--is asleep on his couch.
---
Aiba falls asleep in his bed, like he promised Jun and Nino, but he sleeps fitfully, waking repeatedly over the course of the night to check on his guest. He wakes for good with the sun, and when he goes downstairs he discovers Kimitaka has developed a fever. By the time he's finished brewing tea and eaten one of his remaining donuts, the sun is trailing through the curtains again. He sets the tray down next to the couch and pulls up a chair.
"Hey, wake up," he hisses, "Kimitaka-kun!"
Kimitaka stirs, slowly. "What'd you call me?" he asks, fuzzy.
"Kimitaka-kun?"
"How d'you... know that name?"
"We grew up together, Yokocho," Aiba says, dipping into another old nickname.
"Shit, Aiba?"
"So you do remember me," Aiba says, thankful for that at least.
"How could I forget," Kimitaka grumbles, "I got that letter you sent to Army Command, you know."
"The one where I told you happy birthday and that you're an enormous moron?" Aiba guesses.
"Yeah, yeah that one. I wanted to write you back and tell you to shut up but... it seemed wrong."
Aiba scowls, shoving the cup of tea into the other man's hands. "Drink," he orders, "I have a lab to clean up."
"Aye aye," Kimitaka says, "for what it's worth, I'm sorry for leaving so suddenly."
"Well, you're back for now, at least."
"And, uh... don't call me Kimitaka."
Aiba puffs out his cheeks, annoyed now. "Why?" he whines.
"I like Yoko better," Kimitaka answers, looking into his teacup. He sounds so melancholy Aiba has to give in (at least for now).
"Will do, Yokocho~"
"That's not any better..."
---
Aiba stands, hands on his hips and a grin wide across his face. "Finally done," he announces, looking at the freshly ordered experiments and half-finished inventions set up on his various tables. He turns on his heel to ask K-Yoko, he tells himself, Yoko--if he wants lunch, and smiles fondly. Yoko is asleep again, blanket tugged up under his cheek. Aiba crosses the room on mostly-soft feet and tugs the blanket over Yoko's legs.
He'll make lunch and then wake his houseguest.
---
It's a slow week of recovery. Evidently Yoko's landing had been just gentle enough to keep him from anything worse than deep bruises across his chest, a cold, and a killer headache. He nearly trips down the stairs from the lap to the main floor at one point, but beyond that he settles back into Aiba's life fairly comfortably. As the week draws to a close and Yoko finds his strength back, his eyes drift more and more often toward the windows in the lab, until finally he interrupts Aiba's work fixing the tall grandfather clock in his sitting room.
"Where's... where's my ship?"
"Still up on the mountain, I guess," Aiba says, "no one really comes out here unless they're looking for me, and I made it into town yesterday to make sure they all know I'm alive."
"I need to get back to her--I need to get back to base, eventually, but I should start with the ship."
"The wings were broken--do you know how to fix an airship like that?"
Yoko seems sheepish. "I know a little--enough to keep her flight-ready..."
"If you haul her to a safer spot, I'll fix her," Aiba says.
"What? No, I can't let you do that. You've already saved my life."
"Please," Aiba turns to look at him, "it would be the most exciting thing ever to work on a military airship! Think of everything I could learn..."
"All right, all right, but only if you'll let me pick up the chores around the house."
"Well, only if you really want to..."
"I want to. I want to help you out somehow. Okay? So it's a deal?"
Aiba thinks for a good, long moment. He'd wanted to get back to work on the telephone, if he could, but there was so much opportunity in looking at someone else's work, and he had time, didn't he? He'd been laughed out of the inventor's convention in Kyoto for his telephone ideas, it wasn't like he was competing with anyone.
"It's a deal," he agrees, and Yoko's milliwatt smile tells him it was a good choice.
He looks at the ship, and realizes it might have, in fact, been a bad choice after all. The starboard wing is busted up, the wire and canvas torn and cracked, but the core of the pipe holding it to the airship's body is nearly undamaged. The port side, however, was nearly taken sheer off, and he'll have to find a way to strengthen the place where he intends to reconnect the wing. The engine has damage all along the front from the crash, but the parts are easily replicated and Aiba begins setting aside the gears and pistons necessary almost immediately. Thankfully, the aether-generator that's the source of flight for all flying machines is intact, so he doesn't need to use his painstakingly collected aether to repower the airship.
Yoko picks up sweeping and scrubbing with remarkable aplomb--his 'lie about my age' plan had apparently not gone over as well as he'd hoped when he'd left for the navy, and they'd had him scrubbing decks until he was good and legally aged, no matter how well he'd done in an airship when the older guys had let him take one out for a spin. Now, he explains to Aiba conversationally as he cleans the windows and Aiba bends over a smelting iron and a piece of wing, he gets to be the older guy keeping an eye out for restless kids looking to fly.
"Well," he corrects, "I do when I'm actually on the ship."
Aiba's been resisting from asking this question for days now, but he sees the opportunity now and can't hold back. "Where do you serve, anyway?" he asks.
Yoko doesn't even falter. "The TOKIO, with Admiral Matsuoka."
"Really?! That's the most advanced ship in the fleet~ she has the biggest aether generator in the whole world!"
"I know."
"And she can hold up to three hundred passengers and crew! That's crazy!"
"I know."
"And the wingspan is as wide as--"
"AIBA. I know."
Aiba grins. "Sorry," he answers.
"'s fine," Yoko answers, looking a little embarrassed, "she's, uh, she's a good ship. Good crew, too, mostly."
"Mostly," Aiba agrees, "you're on it, after all."
Yoko throws his sponge at him.
---
Yoko shakes him awake in the morning.
"Aiba," he hisses.
"Whaaaaaat?" Aiba manages, burrowing deeper into his pillow.
"Do you want miso?"
"Huh?"
"Do you want miso for breakfast?"
"Sure," Aiba mumbles, reaching out blindly to grab Yoko's sleeve, "but later. Sleep!"
"Aibacchi, let go of my shirt," Yoko grumbles, with a certain fondness, "I'll call you when it's ready--don't go back to sleep, oi!"
Yoko calls him down an hour later, looking awkward. "How much did you want that miso?" he asks.
"Why?" Aiba asks, narrowing his eyes suspiciously.
"No reason," Yoko answers, voice high and nervous.
"Yoko!"
"I... uh... I messed it up. Three times." Yoko scrubs at his face, flushed to his ears in embarrassment.
Aiba giggles despite himself. "Give it me," he says, and pushes past Yoko anyway, sniffing the bowl of soup seriously. There's something wrong with it, to be sure--it smells off--but judging by the fact that Aiba's never-used recipe book is open on the counter he tried kind of hard. So Aiba picks up the bowl--it can't be that bad--and tilts it toward his lips.
"Thanks for the meal," he says, and goes bottoms-up.
Okay, maybe it can be that bad. Aiba hacks as he swallows it down, and Yoko bustles over to smack his back. Aiba forces a smile. "It was fine!" he says.
"It was terrible, I tried it," Yoko answers, rolling his eyes. His hand is still pressed to the center of Aiba's back, his fingertips perfectly still on Aiba's shoulder blade. Aiba reaches out to pat Yoko's shoulder, and abruptly they both realize how close they are. They separate, Aiba taking the empty bowl to the counter and Yoko going to the table to sit and eat. Aiba escapes to work on
the airship as soon as he can.
---
The ring of the doorbell comes as a surprise. Yoko is outside, doing the gardening Aiba is far too easily distracted to do on his own, so Aiba has to answer the door himself.
"Yo~"
"Nino-chan," Aiba says, "what are you doing here?"
"Checking up on you," Nino answers, "you forgot to come down and look at this thing." He has the second telephone cradled in his arms. Aiba blinks, and then Nino is shoving it into his arms.
"O-oh," Aiba says, "I completely forgot, I was working on other things!"
Nino's eyes narrow as he follows Aiba up the stares. "Are you feeling okay?" he asks, pointedly, "you look a little scatterbrained. Even for you."
"I'm fine!" Aiba says, quickly, "really, Nino-chan, just distracted, there's so much for me to work on and so little time to do it~" Yoko has asked him not to mention his houseguest--just in case it got to the wrong ears. The Tokio isn't at war yet, Yoko had said, but that didn't change the fact that Japan was at war with China off the coast.
"I mean... if you're sure," Nino says, "are you coming to dinner this weekend?"
"Ah, yes, that's this weekend isn't it," Aiba muses, putting the telephone down on the table with a thump. He rubs his hands on his thighs, thinking, and remembers Nino had asked him a question.
"Oh, yes, I'll be there. Don't worry~"
"Don't make the juice again," Nino orders.
"But it was good!"
"To Oh-chan."
"That's enough for me! Ow--all right all right! I'll make the gelatin." Aiba dances away from Nino while he says it, thinking about all the fun he usually has with the gelatin molds he'd made.
"Not if you want anyone to eat it, you're not," Nino answers, settling on the work bench and scowling.
"Nino-chan is the meanest~" Aiba complains to the ceiling, sliding onto the bench next to Nino and poking him in the cheek.
"Stop it," Nino says, "what else are you working on?"
"Strengthening aluminum by layering it," Aiba answers.
Nino nods slowly. He usually gets the gist of what Aiba babbles on about from one moment to the next, but he's a novelist, not a scientist, and the extent of his interest is what he can use in the plot of his next book. He lets Aiba go on about the structural integrity of repaired aluminum for fifteen minutes before he excuses himself. Aiba walks him down the stairs, and it's only once they're at the door that Nino reaches into the pocket of his waistcoat and unveils Jun's latest gift, a bag of western style hard candy.
"What flavor is it?"
"I don't know, Aiba, he wouldn't give me any," Nino answers, rolling his eyes.
Aiba has the bag open in a moment, and presses one into Nino's palm. "Thank you for coming to see me," he says, bright and pleasant.
Nino shrugs. "'s fine. Don't get yourself all cooped up in here all the time, okay? You're the kind of guy who needs to see people."
"Everyone needs to see people," Aiba scolds, "yes, even you."
"Eh, the life of a hermit suits me just fine. Bye, Aiba."
"But what does it do?" Yoko asks, eyebrows furrowed as he looks at the telephone curiously, "you never explained it to me." He's sitting cross-legged on the floor and playing with one of the two telephones while Aiba sits at the table and works on the so-called 'talky part' of the damaged one Nino had delivered earlier.
"You talk into that end--"Aiba points it out--"and the sound comes out at this end--"he lifts his end of the phone.
"But how?" Yoko demands.
It's something Aiba has heard before. He uncurls from where he's been hunched over the telephone for a good half hour, and pads across the room to the china cabinet he's converted to store old stuff. A pair of paper tubes connected by a piece of yarn is piled behind a broken raygun and a machine spider with only seven legs, and Aiba plucks it loose. "Okay so the way it works is kind of like the way these work," Aiba begins to explain.
"What are they?" Yoko asks, blinking, and Aiba laughs, sitting across from Yoko and handing him one of the tubes.
"Put it up to your ear," Aiba says, motioning. Yoko raises an eyebrow and does what he's told after a moment. Aiba lifts his end to his lips and whispers, "Kimi~taka~"
"I told you to stop calling me that!" Yoko complains.
"I'm sorry?" Aiba answers, moving the tube to his ear, "what was that? I can't hear you!"
Yoko scowls, and brings the tube to his mouth. "I said," he says, "cut it out."
Aiba nods, throwing up a thumbs-up for Yoko, "cut it out? But it barely got here!"
Yoko giggles.
"Masaki," Yoko says into his cup, his voice low. The sound curls in Aiba's ear, and Aiba shivers. He looks up at Yoko, who's ducked his head low, his hair dark over his eyes.
"Yokocho," he echoes, after a moment of silence.
"...never mind," Yoko says, shaking himself off.
Aiba's fingers tighten around the paper tube so much that it begins to crumple--Aiba smooths it out hurriedly. "Yokocho," he says, putting it behind him, "wanna know a secret?"
"...do I?" answers Yoko, looking wary.
".....I farted."
"AIBA!"
Outside, Nino takes a moment to congratulate his sense of suspicion--paranoia, Jun always calls it, but Jun doesn't know what he's talking about. Then again Nino's not sure if he likes being right. There's clearly been something off about Aiba lately--Nino hadn't been lying when he'd called Aiba the kind of guy who needed to talk to people to live, and Aiba had been distracted or absent for two weeks now--but knowing that he's... harboring somebody? Harboring a childhood friend whose family thinks he might be dead? Keeping it a secret from everybody--though Nino knows that the moment Aiba spilled it to anybody he'd have to spill it to everybody he meets (which makes Aiba the best kind of secretkeeper, most of the time)? Sitting close together on the floor and giggling secrets between heated looks that make Nino uncomfortable to look at?
Nino goes home and stares at an empty manuscript.
---
Aiba works late into the night, and while usually Yoko gives up and falls asleep on the couch, snores punctuating Aiba's distracted humming, tonight he stays up, playing with the yarn and paper telephone and looking out the window. Finally Aiba's splitting headache is too bad for him to keep working, and he stands, stretching. "I'm going to bed," he tells Yoko over his shoulder, and Yoko looks back at him from where he's been leaning out the windowsill. Yoko nods, silently, and turns back toward the sky. He looks so lonely Aiba can't help but walk across the room and wrap his arms around Yoko.
"Slumber party?" Aiba offers, remembering years of fighting over who got the good futon and not actually sleeping much.
Yoko looks at him, long black hair half-covering sleepy eyes, and answers, "Only if you keep your hands to yourself this time."
"That was only the once," Aiba sniffs, leading the way up the stairs to the loft, "you're still angry about it?!"
"Yes, I am," Yoko answers, sounding mostly serious.
Aiba rolls his eyes and sets about unbuttoning the cuffs of his shirt while Yoko fluffs pillows and gets comfortable. By the time he's finished laying his clothes over the back of the single chair in the room, pulling on a yukata (he's mostly made the transition to western wear--it's easier to work on an invention in a tightly buttoned shirt--but some things will just always be more comfortable), and slid into the bed, Yoko is half asleep next to him.
"Stay up past your bedtime?" Aiba teases, and Yoko sticks his tongue out at Aiba.
"Lights out on ship is 10, so yes, I'd say I am up 'past my bedtime'," Yoko answers, "sorry I like sleeping on a regular schedule."
"When is lights on?" Aiba asks, curious.
"It changes depending on what time sunrise is," Yoko says, "or if I'm on rotation for something that has a night shift, I guess."
"What do you do on the ship?" Aiba asks, wide awake and excited now.
"A bunch of stuff--I mean I fly my little ship, but that's a support ship, that's for supply runs and pickups and suppressing fire during airship battles, but otherwise I do whatever they need me to do. I worked in the mess when I first started, but I'm not really a great cook. I do a bunch of stuff for the maintenance team, keep the aether generator area clean and fix the wing mechanisms, they break all the time because they wings are so big..."
"Ah, Yokocho is so important~"
"I am not. Anybody can do all of that stuff."
"No, Yokocho is important," Aiba repeats, serious. He leans his head on his palm to look at Yoko, somber now. "Why did you leave without saying goodbye?"
"I didn't want anybody to stop me," Yoko answers.
"No, Yokocho, why did you leave without saying goodbye to me?" Aiba clarifies.
Yoko sighs. "I figured... I figured that if I saw you I wouldn't be able to leave, okay."
"Yoko, what does that..."
"I was a kid full of feelings I didn't understand. Don't--don't make me spell it out, Masaki, please--"
Aiba wants to press him for the truth, more than anything. But the way Yoko says his first name, low and intimate and pleading somehow, warms him inside, and he reaches out to ruffle Yoko's hair.
"You called me Masaki~" he chirps.
"Stop it with that stupid face."
"It's dark, you can't see my face!"
"I know what face you're making."
"I'm going to kick you out of the bed," Aiba threatens, and laughs when Yoko grabs his hip.
"You're welcome to try," Yoko challenges, which sparks a wrestling match that ends with Yoko forcing Aiba half-off the bed and grinning in triumph (Aiba can feel the smile against his shoulder).
"I give, I give," Aiba groans, "I can't breathe, get off me--"
Yoko hauls him back onto the bed, and they pant at each other for a moment with matching grins before they manage to calm down. Aiba piles himself half-atop Yoko, feeling brave and touchy and happy, and says, "good night," into Yoko's throat. Yoko's heartbeat is heavy under his cheek, and Aiba's pretty sure his own can be heard echoing through the whole house. Aiba's afraid to move, afraid to stay still. Finally Yoko's hand comes down on his shoulder, and that's enough to keep Aiba from rolling over to the other side of the bed.
---
"Yokoyama," Nino says from the kitchen table when Yoko comes down to make breakfast. Yoko's in the middle of looking for the bag of rice, and he squawks, turning around.
"Ahhhhh--Nino?"
"Yo," Nino answers, sitting back in his chair and crossing his legs at the knee, "fancy seeing you around here."
Yoko's fingers twitch. "Uh... yeah," he says, fidgeting.
"What are you doing here, Yoko? Why haven't you been into town to see your family? Why is Aiba lying? For you?"
Yoko looks pained, thoughtful. "I can't see her," he says, and Nino kind of believes it, "if I see her it'll kill me, Nino, I can't go back until the job I left to do is done, I can't come home and then leave again. I know this sucks, that I shouldn't have done it this way, but it's all I've got right now."
"What, and Aiba is no big deal?"
"Aiba understands. He's always--he rescued me. Saved my life, maybe. Aiba is different."
"You know he's kind of isolated himself up here since you left? His parents said they'd build him a wing off the back of the restaurant but he told them he had to get away from everybody. Because of you."
"Clearly he didn't succeed very well, he talks about going into town and seeing you and Matsumoto-kun and Ohno-san all the time!"
"And since you've been here he's been down once," Nino answers, voice taut, "he was doing okay and then you crashed--literally!--back into his life. He's been working on that telephone for a year now--did you know they kicked him out of university because of that thing? And now he's spending his time on--what? You? Your ship?"
"If I could fix it myself I would," Yoko answers, flushed with emotion, shame and anger and guilt all at once, "but I can't, okay, and I'll be out of his life soon enough and you can have him back, all right? Do you think I wanted to land here and ruin his life?"
Nino's fingers press into the tabletop. "When will it be done?" he asks, quietly.
"Soon," Yoko answers, sighing, "I can see it all over his face."
"If you leave without saying goodbye I'm going to track you down and fill your pants with pudding again," Nino tells him, which breaks the tension just enough to make Yoko's lips quirk.
"Have you written the great Japanese novel?" Yoko asks.
Nino scratches his head. "Almost," he says, "almost."
"I read the one about the guy who worked in the restaurant," Yoko says, turning around and going back to rooting for the bowls.
"You know how to read?" Nino asks, and Yoko groans.
"Am I serving you breakfast?" Yoko demands.
"No, you'll probably spit it in," Nino muses, "...don't tell Aiba I was here?"
"I don't want to think about you any more than I have to," Yoko agrees, and Nino laughs his way out.
---
"Wait, you want me to send this in a telegram?" Aiba asks, looking at the mess of letters and numbers, "are you sure?"
"Yes," answers Yoko, "that's what I want you to send. Exactly like that, Aiba, I mean it."
"Okay, okay," Aiba answers, "am I going to get an answer today?"
"You should," Yoko answers, "she wasn't far from here."
"All right, I'll be back--can you finish looking at the engine?"
"Will do. Have a good day~"
Aiba sends the telegraph easy enough--predictably he gets a weird look from the girl who works at the post office--and decides to wait in town for a reply. He leaves the post office, thinking, and turns on his heel toward the Skyship. He's not going to go have beer with Nagase and Oh-chan, though--across the street from Skyship is Jun's bakery, the Bambino. The glass-front elegant shop was always busy, though that was equal parts Jun's extraordinary baking and candy-making skills and his charismatic personality (and face), and Aiba has to duck around a pair of chattering schoolgirls to get inside.
"Jun-pon~" he calls, waving, and Jun stands up from his taffy-making machine at the nickname.
"Aiba-chan," he calls back, smiling, "I'll be with you in a minute."
"Take as long as you need, I'm waiting for a telegram," Aiba answers, and bends over the glass case where Jun's cakes are displayed. He pulls his tongue between his lips, eying all of the cakes in turn, from the chocolate-frosted mousse-filled creation covered in sprinkles at one end to the dainty white lemon-filled cake at the other end.
"Looking for something special?" Jun asks, leaning on the counter, "having a gala I'm not invited to?"
"Of course," Aiba answers, "a costume ball in my lab!"
Jun laughs, and Aiba joins him.
"Having an old friend over for dinner," Aiba says, finally, "he's only here for another day so I thought we'd have something special with dinner."
"Anyone I know?" Jun asks, blandly.
"Probably not," Aiba answers, "the family moved away a while ago."
"All right," Jun answers, "what does he like?"
"Pudding," Aiba says, immediately, "he likes pudding."
"So, what, I should make a cake with pudding in it?"
"Exactly!" Aiba chirps, "Jun-pon is so smart~"
Jun rubs at his forehead momentarily, but then he turns and starts back toward the kitchen, talking to himself.
So Aiba goes home with a cake box in one hand and a gibberish telegraph in the other, ignoring the fact that Yoko will be leaving in two days at the latest.
"Honey, I'm home," Aiba calls, and Yoko grunts from the kitchen counter, his back toward Aiba.
"Let's eat in the parlor this time," Aiba says, putting the box of cake on the kitchen table and the telegraph atop the box, "we eat in the kitchen every night."
"I forgot you have a parlor," Yoko confesses, "do you even use it for anything?"
"Seeing my mother," Aiba answers, shrugging, "I bought this place from an American woman who wanted to use it as a fashionable get-away cabin, she wanted a western parlor for parties." He steps up from the kitchen to the circular back of the first floor, lighting the lanterns in the parlor-cum-dining room and opening windows. The parlor is rarely used, and it shows in the way the couch is puffy of newness and there's a line of dust along the side table in the portion of the room he uses as a dining room.
"Dinner is mostly done," Yoko calls, "set the table?"
"Of course," Aiba calls back, and goes to the rarely-used china cabinet to fetch plates and the nice chopstick sets.
Yoko finishes putting the food down on the table, and cocks his head. "Aiba, it's a big table, why are we sitting so close together?"
Aiba laughs. "What, so we have to yell at each other across the table?"
Yoko considers it, and sits down at Aiba's right elbow.
"What's in the box in the kitchen?" he asks, when they're mostly finished, making a game now of putting stuff they don't want on each other's plates and stealing what they do.
"Jun-pon made a cake," Aiba answers.
Yoko doesn't ask what they're commemorating.
"Wait, is this cake filled with pudding?! Aiba, you're the best ever," Yoko manages around two full cheeks of cake and pudding, looking as happy as a pig in a mudpit. Or a Yoko in a pudding pit, Aiba thinks, and laughs when Yoko manages to get pudding on his nose.
"I know I am. Wait, you have--" he reaches out and wipes it off with his thumb, fingertips brushing against Yoko's cheek, and pulls back as if burned, wiping his thumb on his napkin.
After they've finished the cake--and it's a fight to get the last few bites down--they flop on the floor in the parlor together.
"Finishing the cake all at once was a bad choice," Aiba groans, holding his stomach and shutting his eyes.
"You're telling me," Yoko murmurs, lying on his side with one of his knees pressed against Aiba's thigh, "ugh, I forgot how filling cake is."
"Do they not feed you cake in the navy?" Aiba asks, squeezing one eye open.
"I don't know if I'd call it cake," Yoko says, "more like 'a pile of paper covered in frosting'."
"That's not cake, that's torture," Aiba agrees, and Yoko laughs.
"Oh, ow," he immediately says, "I don't want to move~"
"Me neither," Aiba answers.
They lay there for an hour, maybe, in a space between sleep and unbearably painful wakefulness, until the ringing of the clock wakes Aiba.
"I got a reply for your telegraph," he says, carefully.
Yoko sits up, looking serious. "Oh," he answers, "I guess I should, uh, take a look at it?"
"I did wait around for it, after all," Aiba answers, and they drag themselves off the floor together.
"What does it say?" Aiba asks, peering over Yoko's shoulder at the piece of paper.
"Admiral Matsuoka says the Tokio is grounded northwest of Tokyo, because of a problem with the aegen," Yoko translates carefully, "and he says if I think you can do anything about it I should bring you, because no one else has been able to figure anything out."
Aiba's eyes are bright when he grabs Yoko's arm and turns him around. "You're taking me with you, right?" he demands, "I spent most of my time at university working on aether generators, they're just so interesting and and and Yokocho!!!"
"Stop giving me the puppy face, I'll take you with," Yoko answers, sighing heavily, "just remember to tell people you're going away."
"Ah, right," Aiba says, "well, I'll have to think of an excuse while I finish working tomorrow."
"Tomorrow," Yoko says, raising an eyebrow, "it'll be done tomorrow?"
"Unless I blow something up putting the aegen back into the engine tomorrow," Aiba answers, "which, okay, certainly possible, but let's have a little faith, shall we?" He offers Yoko a bright grin.
Part 2
Delivered by: greatfountain
Title: Skyship
Groups/Pairings: Arashi, Kanjani8, Tokio, Becky, Haruna Ai / Aiba Masaki/Yokoyama Yuu, mentions of Matsuoka Masahiro/Haruna Ai
Rating: PG-13 for implications
Warnings: Historical-steampunk AU, butchering of science
Summary: Aiba Masaki is an inventor living in the mountains of Chiba. When Yokoyama Yuu, airship pilot, crashes back into his life--literally--he's not sure what to think.
Notes: This is set in Chiba, Japan, in roughly the year 1894. Cultural and historical notes: there are vague references to real historical events, most prominently the conflict over influence in Korea. Knowledge of the First Sino-Japanese War isn't necessary to enjoy this, though. :D? For the sake of world-building several individuals have been aged up or down from their real-life personas. Thank you to my beta, H, for her help, and our lovely mods for their hard work. Kara, I really really really hope you enjoy this!
Aiba wakes when the sun saunters through the curtains of the tall window across the lab and lights up his face. There's a blanket tucked about his shoulders he doesn't remember bringing to the couch when he'd collapsed on it, and a warm fondness for Jun fills him up to match the warmth in the room. He swings his feet from the end of the couch to the floor, and the deceptive cool of the wood is a pleasant surprise. He stands, stretching lazily, and then turns his attention to the blanket, folding it lengthwise once, but then the smell of breakfast drifts into his nose. He lets the blanket fall onto the cushions of the couch in a pile, and trails across the lab and down the stairs in the corner to investigate his kitchen.
On the little round table nestled under the stairs is a plate of donuts--fresh, it smells like--and a note. Aiba reaches for the first donut--glazed with something yellow that smells like lemon--with one hand, and reaches down with the other to grab the note.
Jun's characteristic imperial swirl says "Remember to sleep in your bed tonight. And please eat, Aiba!", and neither of those are anything Aiba hasn't heard before. Below it, though, is Nino's scrawl. Usually Nino just invades the house when he's worried, demanding to hear about Aiba's work on automating the gliders they used as children.
"Aiba-san, I heard some news you might want to hear. Meet me at Naga-nii's. Nino."
Aiba chuckles around the next donut, a simple sugar because Jun knows he can't handle too much flavor and really get the best out of it. By the time he's finished the third donut and finished debating with himself about saving the other three for a midnight snack, the grandfather clock on the floor above him is ringing nine, which means it's time to get to work, before it gets too hot and he has to close the curtains on the five great, tall windows surrounding his workspace. Aiba's always worked best in natural sunlight versus the half-dim artificial light of his lanterns (even if he did invent them). If he has to spend hours bent over gears, trying to improve on the flight system of the gliders, then he's going to do it in a way that makes him comfortable. He cracks his wrists as he settles on his workbench.
It's time to get to work--for now, anyway.
---
Nagase's restaurant--technically it's a teahouse, but anyone who knows the proprietor's propensity for loudness (and public drunkeness) can attest Skyship doesn't deserve the title. Aiba steps inside the bustling familiar place, and by the time he's finished tugging off his coat and adjusting the cuffs of his shirt, Nagase's concierge Ohno has stepped into the front room.
"Oh-chan," Aiba greets, letting Ohno take his coat and hang it up, grinning widely at the older man. Ohno has been a constant in Nagase's restaurant for as long as Aiba can remember, a lackadaisical orphan taken in by Nagase after Nagase came home from the seas. Ohno's as close to a right hand man as Nagase gets--though to be honest no one was sure how either of them got anything done.
"Aiba-chan," Ohno answers, eventually, with his usual distracted fondness. Ohno seems a step behind everyone else, though it's not for lack of mental capacity or anything. Mostly it seems like he's too busy seeing too much for everyone else, or so Aiba thinks. "Kazu has a private room in the back."
"Fancy," Aiba says, amused, "did he beat Naga-nii at cards again?"
"Dice, I think," Ohno corrects him, and knocks on the door to the private room once, twice.
"Come in," a voice that can only be Nino's responds, and Aiba bounds in in good cheer. Nino is settled on the couch in the corner, boots piled under the end table and his feet curled up under his body. Both of his small hands are wrapped around a mug almost too big for them. Through the room drifts the signature scent of Jun's coffee, the only way there would be anything but tea (or, well, beer) in Nagase's 'esteemed establishment'.
Aiba grins at Nino, who only offers him a deadpan stare over the mug. "Come in," Nino says, "but close the door behind you, wouldn't want any bitter losers sneaking in."
The last is directed clearly over Aiba's shoulder, and Nagase can be heard grumbling about how he 'owns the damn place' at the end of the hall. Aiba shakes his head, giggles bubbling up as he settles at the other end of the couch, unbuckling his boots and tugging his feet from them before bending his left ankle under his knee. Next to the coffee dispenser--a special unit Nagase had commissioned from Aiba especially--is a plate of sandwiches, cucumber from the look of it, and Aiba plucks one from it to chew on while Nino prepares himself to talk about whatever he called Aiba in for.
Three sandwich halves later, Nino still doesn't seem ready to talk. "Nino," Aiba says, drawing the syllables out into a whine, "what's wrong?"
"I got a letter from Sho-kun," Nino says, slowly.
Aiba's chewing stops. "...did you?" he asks, weakly, "what does it say?"
"Sho-kun..." Nino pauses pointedly, "is fine. He's working as a telegraph operator now."
Aiba's smile widens impossibly slowly until it's nearly splitting his face. "So he's alive?! He survived the cruiser crash?!"
Aiba can't hold in the joy--he leaps forward and tangles his limbs around Nino, ignoring Nino's warnings about his coffee, and squeezes for a good, long moment.
He calms down, enough to loosen his grip and let Nino put his coffee cup down, but there's a grin on his face. "Yeah, Masaki, he survived the cruiser crash. All whole, even."
Aiba wipes his eyes, momentarily overcome. Sho had left for the army at nineteen, trying to escape the family pressure to take over their real estate business. He'd sent Nino letters every week, at first, telling about how freaky it was to float in the air and how he was finally getting at least acceptable at being a soldier, until they only get a letter saying he was going off to battle, and then nothing for nearly two years now. Aiba had always held that door open in his heart, because he'd grown up with Sho and Nino and Jun and Ohno, and finding out one of then had died was too much for him.
Nino elbows him into a more comfortable breathing position, and it's only when Aiba finally reaches out to grab another sandwich half that Nino speaks again.
"So how's fixing the tellyphone going?"
"It's a telephone," Aiba corrects automatically.
"That's what I said. Tellyphone. Have you gotten the talky part fixed yet?"
"The talky part works much better now," Aiba says, around a mouthful of cucumber and buttered bread, and swallows pointedly before he continues, "I think. I can't really test it on my own, though..."
"This is the part where I offer to let you fix the receiver you gave me and call me on it," Nino muses, aloud.
"Yep!"
"How are you going to fix it in my flat? And it's too big to cycle back up the mountain, you don't even have a basket on your bicycle..."
"Did someone say heavy things?"
"Naga-nii, how long have you been standing outside the door?" Nino complains.
"The whole time, pretty much," Nagase says, opening the door and peeking his head inside. The owner of Skyship is a fairly massive man, well built and sloppily dressed in clothes that are too nice for him. He grins, completely shameless as always, at them, and throws the door open.
"Is business really that slow at this hour?" Nino asks, eyebrow raised.
"There isn't much call for beer--or sake, what kind of Japanese people are these guys--at noon," Nagase answers, and he seems legitimately regretful about the idea that anyone would turn down alcohol, ever.
He steps inside the room. The heavy prosthetic part of his right leg makes a noisy, painful creak when he steps on it, and Aiba's nose scrunches up. Nagase had always refused to tell them how he'd lost half of his right leg, besides that it had been in '82. Ohno was the only one who seemed to know anything about it, and even then only small parts. That was why Nagase had hired Ohno on in the first place--he'd inherited his mother's teahouse when he came back home, but running the place with only one working leg was difficult even for a man of Nagase's impressive energy and determination. Aiba had crafted the gear-heavy, moving prosthetic when he'd first moved from his family's restaurant in the town proper to his new home at the top of the mountain, as a gift for letting the five of them hang out in the back.
"That shouldn't be making that noise," Aiba says, sitting up and forward, "sit down."
"Oh, Aiba, it's fine," Nagase answers, but when Aiba gets up and pushes him gently toward the couch he goes.
"Do you have to fix him?" Nino asks, "I like knowing he's coming. It means I can escape--ow!"
Nino and Nagase fall into mostly good-natured arguing while Aiba kneels down to tug the cover from the shin of the mechanism off. He fiddles with a lever and squints, then jerks the foot around.
"Oh, I see," he says, and begins rooting through his pockets for something to use to poke around under the gears at the ankle. He finds a single chopstick in his left sleeve, and after a moment of inspection to make sure there wasn't anything on it, he deems it acceptable.
"The gear at the ankle is blocked by--what is this?"
Nagase looks sheepish. "A cream puff," he says, "I wanted to save it for later."
Aiba throws the old pastry at him, groaning. Nagase pulls the prosthetic back on, strapping it over his thigh, and picks up the cream puff. He looks at it, considering for a long moment, and then pops it into his mouth.
"That's disgusting," Nino says, putting his coffee mug down and pulling a face.
"It's still good!" Nagase says around the mouthful, and waves a merry goodbye as he trots out.
Aiba can't hold back at least a little laughter, and Nino snorts once the door swings shut.
"Did... Sho-chan say anything else in his letter?" Aiba asks.
Nino makes a face. "He said he heard that, uh, that he'd met Murakami at the telegraph center. Maru and Yasu started up their courier business after all, and Ryo-chan is piloting the newest cruiser model."
"Shibutani-kun'll be happy to hear that," Aiba says, thinking of Nino's next door neighbor.
"Probably," Nino agrees, "I didn't tell him yet, thought you might want to know first."
"Did he hear anything about... anyone else?" Aiba asks, hoping.
Nino looks sad for him. "Nothing," he says, "at least, nothing that Hina mentioned."
Aiba nods, putting on a happy face. "I'm sure he's fine," he says, and unfolds himself from the floor. "Come on, then, I have to fix your receiver--what did you do with it?"
"I put a cream puff in it."
---
Aiba crawls into his bed, halfway wishing he hadn't promised Jun and Nino he'd sleep in a bed tonight. There were twenty-five steps around the circular perimeter of the lab up to the loft where his bed was perched, and he'd felt every single one of them in his exhausted trudge up the stairs.
He remembers the summer Kimitaka and his family rolled into town. It had been right after the Americans and their steamboats and airships had landed in Japan, an unstoppable force of technology and their so-called Manifest Destiny. The Yokoyamas--three brothers and their parents--had moved into the neighborhood next to Aiba's when they were mutually twelve, in a neighborhood filled with Osaka transplants looking to get away from the American military presence and the high smokestacks of the Osaka shipyards. Chiba was a popular destination largely because it was already filled with people moving out of Tokyo for much the same reasons, so the growing group of loud Kansai kids around the neighborhood was nothing surprising. When Kimitaka's mother opened up a laundry service, Aiba's mother had sent him by to drop off a bag of dirty dish towels from the family restaurant, and when Kimitaka had answered the door they'd wound up friends. At sixteen, however, Kimitaka's father disappeared, and Kimitaka took it upon himself to support his family the only way he could. He'd left with only a note saying he'd be back someday, and the only indication he was even still alive were the continuing checks to his mother.
Aiba curled up under the blankets. Aiba Masaki's philosophy for life was that as long as you were still alive you could be happy, so knowing that Kimitaka was at least alive was enough to keep him from marching across the continent and finding the idiot. Knowing that Hina-chan--who had been Kimitaka's closest friend--hadn't mentioned him was disheartening.
"Well, nothing you can do about it in the middle of the night," he declares to the silence of the house, and shut his eyes experimentally.
He's asleep for an hour, perhaps two, before the storm begins. The heavy drive of the rain is a comfort, at first, but then the thunder and the wind starts, and Aiba sits up, rubbing at his temples. Abruptly, a crash from below made him scurry to his feet, looking down below to the lab, and the fact that he hadn't actually closed the windows had him running down the stairs. At the bottom, he very nearly fell--there was already water all over the floor--but he caught himself just in time. There were five great windows, tall affairs with curtains that came down when he pulled a lever, each controlled by a simple wind-up closing mechanism. He usually closed them all before he went to bed, but the weather had been so nice when he finally got home he hadn't bothered--clearly a mistake. He stepped carefully over a puddle and righted his half-finished world map on his way to wind up the windows. By the time he'd gotten through four of the five, he was soaked almost entirely through on his right side, an unfortunate side effect of walking around in a circle. When he reached the fifth window, he discovered the mechanism was damaged, and he had to fight against it. A crack of lightning above him--he looked up--and the flash of it illuminates--something. Aiba squints at the sky, and another flash of lightning clearly shows an airship of some kind, and it's not going up. It's going down. Toward the mountain. Toward a crash. Aiba turns and speeds across the lab, stepping over a fallen bookcase, and nearly flat out runs down the stairs, toward the front door. He remembers to put on shoes, half-buckling them, and then he's off, ignoring the fact that he's going to be sick for a week after this for sure.
The airship is sinking fast now, close enough that he can see it sinking even without the lightning as a nightlight. By the time Aiba makes it from his house at the base of the mountain to halfway up the muddy trail, the airship has landed--if by 'lands' Aiba meant 'crashes in a messy fashion'.
"HELLO?" he calls, into the wind, a useless attempt to feel like he's doing something helpful. He ducks between two trees toward the last place he'd seen the falling machine.
By the time he finds the crashed airship, the storm has calmed down some. Aiba draws in a breath when he sees the ruined machine--it's a mess of broken wings and smoking exposed mechanisms. Aiba rushes to the scene, tugging back the wing and digging through the mess around the cockpit. He runs his fingers over the door hidden over the wing, and tugs on the safety release--Aiba remembers working on a similar system as a commission when he'd decided he didn't want to be a restaurant chef.
"Hello, are you okay? Excuse me! Hey! Can you hear me? Are you awake?"
The pilot is wearing the dark blue of the Japanese Imperial Fleet, his dark hair long over his eyes and eyes shut. He's collapsed against the other side of the ship, but Aiba can't see any blood--which might be good or bad. Aiba leans carefully forward into the cockpit, and shakes the shoulder of the pilot desperately. "Hey!" he says, and the pilot jerks, grunting. "Wake up!"
"Wha--" the pilot's eyes flutter.
"Come on, wake up! We have to get you out of here!"
"I--what--" The young man seems at least barely awake now, a groggy, still nearly unconscious kind of awake, but he responds when Aiba tugs on the sleeve of his jacket, and he's able to help Aiba unbuckle the harness over his chest so that Aiba can pull him out of it. The young man manages to stumble out of the ship, but his weight seems too much for him and Aiba has to get an arm around his chest, half-holding him up.
"Woah, okay, I got you," Aiba says, "come on, can you walk at all?"
It's a long trip back down toward the house, but Aiba manages to get the young man to the couch and under a pile of blankets nearly as think as the couch. The young man struggles to stay awake as Aiba walks around the room lowering the curtains and closing that last open window.
"Go to sleep," Aiba tells him, wringing out his own shirt with a sigh.
"I--only if you do, too."
"Trying to bargain?! We barely know each other!" Aiba grins, though. "Cleaning up can wait for the morning, I guess."
The young man fades from consciousness after that, and Aiba reaches out to brush the hair from the young man's face. It's easier to see what he looks like now that there's an actual light-source, and Aiba's eyes widen when something dawns on him.
Abruptly, Aiba stands, turning around and reaching for the wet jacket he'd piled on the edge of his worktable when he'd put the young man on the couch. He opens it up, tugging at the shoulders of the coat. There's no mistake--the neat standard kanji of the last name on the pocket of the coat isn't lying.
Yokoyama Kimitaka--or, well, Yuu, apparently--is asleep on his couch.
---
Aiba falls asleep in his bed, like he promised Jun and Nino, but he sleeps fitfully, waking repeatedly over the course of the night to check on his guest. He wakes for good with the sun, and when he goes downstairs he discovers Kimitaka has developed a fever. By the time he's finished brewing tea and eaten one of his remaining donuts, the sun is trailing through the curtains again. He sets the tray down next to the couch and pulls up a chair.
"Hey, wake up," he hisses, "Kimitaka-kun!"
Kimitaka stirs, slowly. "What'd you call me?" he asks, fuzzy.
"Kimitaka-kun?"
"How d'you... know that name?"
"We grew up together, Yokocho," Aiba says, dipping into another old nickname.
"Shit, Aiba?"
"So you do remember me," Aiba says, thankful for that at least.
"How could I forget," Kimitaka grumbles, "I got that letter you sent to Army Command, you know."
"The one where I told you happy birthday and that you're an enormous moron?" Aiba guesses.
"Yeah, yeah that one. I wanted to write you back and tell you to shut up but... it seemed wrong."
Aiba scowls, shoving the cup of tea into the other man's hands. "Drink," he orders, "I have a lab to clean up."
"Aye aye," Kimitaka says, "for what it's worth, I'm sorry for leaving so suddenly."
"Well, you're back for now, at least."
"And, uh... don't call me Kimitaka."
Aiba puffs out his cheeks, annoyed now. "Why?" he whines.
"I like Yoko better," Kimitaka answers, looking into his teacup. He sounds so melancholy Aiba has to give in (at least for now).
"Will do, Yokocho~"
"That's not any better..."
---
Aiba stands, hands on his hips and a grin wide across his face. "Finally done," he announces, looking at the freshly ordered experiments and half-finished inventions set up on his various tables. He turns on his heel to ask K-Yoko, he tells himself, Yoko--if he wants lunch, and smiles fondly. Yoko is asleep again, blanket tugged up under his cheek. Aiba crosses the room on mostly-soft feet and tugs the blanket over Yoko's legs.
He'll make lunch and then wake his houseguest.
---
It's a slow week of recovery. Evidently Yoko's landing had been just gentle enough to keep him from anything worse than deep bruises across his chest, a cold, and a killer headache. He nearly trips down the stairs from the lap to the main floor at one point, but beyond that he settles back into Aiba's life fairly comfortably. As the week draws to a close and Yoko finds his strength back, his eyes drift more and more often toward the windows in the lab, until finally he interrupts Aiba's work fixing the tall grandfather clock in his sitting room.
"Where's... where's my ship?"
"Still up on the mountain, I guess," Aiba says, "no one really comes out here unless they're looking for me, and I made it into town yesterday to make sure they all know I'm alive."
"I need to get back to her--I need to get back to base, eventually, but I should start with the ship."
"The wings were broken--do you know how to fix an airship like that?"
Yoko seems sheepish. "I know a little--enough to keep her flight-ready..."
"If you haul her to a safer spot, I'll fix her," Aiba says.
"What? No, I can't let you do that. You've already saved my life."
"Please," Aiba turns to look at him, "it would be the most exciting thing ever to work on a military airship! Think of everything I could learn..."
"All right, all right, but only if you'll let me pick up the chores around the house."
"Well, only if you really want to..."
"I want to. I want to help you out somehow. Okay? So it's a deal?"
Aiba thinks for a good, long moment. He'd wanted to get back to work on the telephone, if he could, but there was so much opportunity in looking at someone else's work, and he had time, didn't he? He'd been laughed out of the inventor's convention in Kyoto for his telephone ideas, it wasn't like he was competing with anyone.
"It's a deal," he agrees, and Yoko's milliwatt smile tells him it was a good choice.
He looks at the ship, and realizes it might have, in fact, been a bad choice after all. The starboard wing is busted up, the wire and canvas torn and cracked, but the core of the pipe holding it to the airship's body is nearly undamaged. The port side, however, was nearly taken sheer off, and he'll have to find a way to strengthen the place where he intends to reconnect the wing. The engine has damage all along the front from the crash, but the parts are easily replicated and Aiba begins setting aside the gears and pistons necessary almost immediately. Thankfully, the aether-generator that's the source of flight for all flying machines is intact, so he doesn't need to use his painstakingly collected aether to repower the airship.
Yoko picks up sweeping and scrubbing with remarkable aplomb--his 'lie about my age' plan had apparently not gone over as well as he'd hoped when he'd left for the navy, and they'd had him scrubbing decks until he was good and legally aged, no matter how well he'd done in an airship when the older guys had let him take one out for a spin. Now, he explains to Aiba conversationally as he cleans the windows and Aiba bends over a smelting iron and a piece of wing, he gets to be the older guy keeping an eye out for restless kids looking to fly.
"Well," he corrects, "I do when I'm actually on the ship."
Aiba's been resisting from asking this question for days now, but he sees the opportunity now and can't hold back. "Where do you serve, anyway?" he asks.
Yoko doesn't even falter. "The TOKIO, with Admiral Matsuoka."
"Really?! That's the most advanced ship in the fleet~ she has the biggest aether generator in the whole world!"
"I know."
"And she can hold up to three hundred passengers and crew! That's crazy!"
"I know."
"And the wingspan is as wide as--"
"AIBA. I know."
Aiba grins. "Sorry," he answers.
"'s fine," Yoko answers, looking a little embarrassed, "she's, uh, she's a good ship. Good crew, too, mostly."
"Mostly," Aiba agrees, "you're on it, after all."
Yoko throws his sponge at him.
---
Yoko shakes him awake in the morning.
"Aiba," he hisses.
"Whaaaaaat?" Aiba manages, burrowing deeper into his pillow.
"Do you want miso?"
"Huh?"
"Do you want miso for breakfast?"
"Sure," Aiba mumbles, reaching out blindly to grab Yoko's sleeve, "but later. Sleep!"
"Aibacchi, let go of my shirt," Yoko grumbles, with a certain fondness, "I'll call you when it's ready--don't go back to sleep, oi!"
Yoko calls him down an hour later, looking awkward. "How much did you want that miso?" he asks.
"Why?" Aiba asks, narrowing his eyes suspiciously.
"No reason," Yoko answers, voice high and nervous.
"Yoko!"
"I... uh... I messed it up. Three times." Yoko scrubs at his face, flushed to his ears in embarrassment.
Aiba giggles despite himself. "Give it me," he says, and pushes past Yoko anyway, sniffing the bowl of soup seriously. There's something wrong with it, to be sure--it smells off--but judging by the fact that Aiba's never-used recipe book is open on the counter he tried kind of hard. So Aiba picks up the bowl--it can't be that bad--and tilts it toward his lips.
"Thanks for the meal," he says, and goes bottoms-up.
Okay, maybe it can be that bad. Aiba hacks as he swallows it down, and Yoko bustles over to smack his back. Aiba forces a smile. "It was fine!" he says.
"It was terrible, I tried it," Yoko answers, rolling his eyes. His hand is still pressed to the center of Aiba's back, his fingertips perfectly still on Aiba's shoulder blade. Aiba reaches out to pat Yoko's shoulder, and abruptly they both realize how close they are. They separate, Aiba taking the empty bowl to the counter and Yoko going to the table to sit and eat. Aiba escapes to work on
the airship as soon as he can.
---
The ring of the doorbell comes as a surprise. Yoko is outside, doing the gardening Aiba is far too easily distracted to do on his own, so Aiba has to answer the door himself.
"Yo~"
"Nino-chan," Aiba says, "what are you doing here?"
"Checking up on you," Nino answers, "you forgot to come down and look at this thing." He has the second telephone cradled in his arms. Aiba blinks, and then Nino is shoving it into his arms.
"O-oh," Aiba says, "I completely forgot, I was working on other things!"
Nino's eyes narrow as he follows Aiba up the stares. "Are you feeling okay?" he asks, pointedly, "you look a little scatterbrained. Even for you."
"I'm fine!" Aiba says, quickly, "really, Nino-chan, just distracted, there's so much for me to work on and so little time to do it~" Yoko has asked him not to mention his houseguest--just in case it got to the wrong ears. The Tokio isn't at war yet, Yoko had said, but that didn't change the fact that Japan was at war with China off the coast.
"I mean... if you're sure," Nino says, "are you coming to dinner this weekend?"
"Ah, yes, that's this weekend isn't it," Aiba muses, putting the telephone down on the table with a thump. He rubs his hands on his thighs, thinking, and remembers Nino had asked him a question.
"Oh, yes, I'll be there. Don't worry~"
"Don't make the juice again," Nino orders.
"But it was good!"
"To Oh-chan."
"That's enough for me! Ow--all right all right! I'll make the gelatin." Aiba dances away from Nino while he says it, thinking about all the fun he usually has with the gelatin molds he'd made.
"Not if you want anyone to eat it, you're not," Nino answers, settling on the work bench and scowling.
"Nino-chan is the meanest~" Aiba complains to the ceiling, sliding onto the bench next to Nino and poking him in the cheek.
"Stop it," Nino says, "what else are you working on?"
"Strengthening aluminum by layering it," Aiba answers.
Nino nods slowly. He usually gets the gist of what Aiba babbles on about from one moment to the next, but he's a novelist, not a scientist, and the extent of his interest is what he can use in the plot of his next book. He lets Aiba go on about the structural integrity of repaired aluminum for fifteen minutes before he excuses himself. Aiba walks him down the stairs, and it's only once they're at the door that Nino reaches into the pocket of his waistcoat and unveils Jun's latest gift, a bag of western style hard candy.
"What flavor is it?"
"I don't know, Aiba, he wouldn't give me any," Nino answers, rolling his eyes.
Aiba has the bag open in a moment, and presses one into Nino's palm. "Thank you for coming to see me," he says, bright and pleasant.
Nino shrugs. "'s fine. Don't get yourself all cooped up in here all the time, okay? You're the kind of guy who needs to see people."
"Everyone needs to see people," Aiba scolds, "yes, even you."
"Eh, the life of a hermit suits me just fine. Bye, Aiba."
"But what does it do?" Yoko asks, eyebrows furrowed as he looks at the telephone curiously, "you never explained it to me." He's sitting cross-legged on the floor and playing with one of the two telephones while Aiba sits at the table and works on the so-called 'talky part' of the damaged one Nino had delivered earlier.
"You talk into that end--"Aiba points it out--"and the sound comes out at this end--"he lifts his end of the phone.
"But how?" Yoko demands.
It's something Aiba has heard before. He uncurls from where he's been hunched over the telephone for a good half hour, and pads across the room to the china cabinet he's converted to store old stuff. A pair of paper tubes connected by a piece of yarn is piled behind a broken raygun and a machine spider with only seven legs, and Aiba plucks it loose. "Okay so the way it works is kind of like the way these work," Aiba begins to explain.
"What are they?" Yoko asks, blinking, and Aiba laughs, sitting across from Yoko and handing him one of the tubes.
"Put it up to your ear," Aiba says, motioning. Yoko raises an eyebrow and does what he's told after a moment. Aiba lifts his end to his lips and whispers, "Kimi~taka~"
"I told you to stop calling me that!" Yoko complains.
"I'm sorry?" Aiba answers, moving the tube to his ear, "what was that? I can't hear you!"
Yoko scowls, and brings the tube to his mouth. "I said," he says, "cut it out."
Aiba nods, throwing up a thumbs-up for Yoko, "cut it out? But it barely got here!"
Yoko giggles.
"Masaki," Yoko says into his cup, his voice low. The sound curls in Aiba's ear, and Aiba shivers. He looks up at Yoko, who's ducked his head low, his hair dark over his eyes.
"Yokocho," he echoes, after a moment of silence.
"...never mind," Yoko says, shaking himself off.
Aiba's fingers tighten around the paper tube so much that it begins to crumple--Aiba smooths it out hurriedly. "Yokocho," he says, putting it behind him, "wanna know a secret?"
"...do I?" answers Yoko, looking wary.
".....I farted."
"AIBA!"
Outside, Nino takes a moment to congratulate his sense of suspicion--paranoia, Jun always calls it, but Jun doesn't know what he's talking about. Then again Nino's not sure if he likes being right. There's clearly been something off about Aiba lately--Nino hadn't been lying when he'd called Aiba the kind of guy who needed to talk to people to live, and Aiba had been distracted or absent for two weeks now--but knowing that he's... harboring somebody? Harboring a childhood friend whose family thinks he might be dead? Keeping it a secret from everybody--though Nino knows that the moment Aiba spilled it to anybody he'd have to spill it to everybody he meets (which makes Aiba the best kind of secretkeeper, most of the time)? Sitting close together on the floor and giggling secrets between heated looks that make Nino uncomfortable to look at?
Nino goes home and stares at an empty manuscript.
---
Aiba works late into the night, and while usually Yoko gives up and falls asleep on the couch, snores punctuating Aiba's distracted humming, tonight he stays up, playing with the yarn and paper telephone and looking out the window. Finally Aiba's splitting headache is too bad for him to keep working, and he stands, stretching. "I'm going to bed," he tells Yoko over his shoulder, and Yoko looks back at him from where he's been leaning out the windowsill. Yoko nods, silently, and turns back toward the sky. He looks so lonely Aiba can't help but walk across the room and wrap his arms around Yoko.
"Slumber party?" Aiba offers, remembering years of fighting over who got the good futon and not actually sleeping much.
Yoko looks at him, long black hair half-covering sleepy eyes, and answers, "Only if you keep your hands to yourself this time."
"That was only the once," Aiba sniffs, leading the way up the stairs to the loft, "you're still angry about it?!"
"Yes, I am," Yoko answers, sounding mostly serious.
Aiba rolls his eyes and sets about unbuttoning the cuffs of his shirt while Yoko fluffs pillows and gets comfortable. By the time he's finished laying his clothes over the back of the single chair in the room, pulling on a yukata (he's mostly made the transition to western wear--it's easier to work on an invention in a tightly buttoned shirt--but some things will just always be more comfortable), and slid into the bed, Yoko is half asleep next to him.
"Stay up past your bedtime?" Aiba teases, and Yoko sticks his tongue out at Aiba.
"Lights out on ship is 10, so yes, I'd say I am up 'past my bedtime'," Yoko answers, "sorry I like sleeping on a regular schedule."
"When is lights on?" Aiba asks, curious.
"It changes depending on what time sunrise is," Yoko says, "or if I'm on rotation for something that has a night shift, I guess."
"What do you do on the ship?" Aiba asks, wide awake and excited now.
"A bunch of stuff--I mean I fly my little ship, but that's a support ship, that's for supply runs and pickups and suppressing fire during airship battles, but otherwise I do whatever they need me to do. I worked in the mess when I first started, but I'm not really a great cook. I do a bunch of stuff for the maintenance team, keep the aether generator area clean and fix the wing mechanisms, they break all the time because they wings are so big..."
"Ah, Yokocho is so important~"
"I am not. Anybody can do all of that stuff."
"No, Yokocho is important," Aiba repeats, serious. He leans his head on his palm to look at Yoko, somber now. "Why did you leave without saying goodbye?"
"I didn't want anybody to stop me," Yoko answers.
"No, Yokocho, why did you leave without saying goodbye to me?" Aiba clarifies.
Yoko sighs. "I figured... I figured that if I saw you I wouldn't be able to leave, okay."
"Yoko, what does that..."
"I was a kid full of feelings I didn't understand. Don't--don't make me spell it out, Masaki, please--"
Aiba wants to press him for the truth, more than anything. But the way Yoko says his first name, low and intimate and pleading somehow, warms him inside, and he reaches out to ruffle Yoko's hair.
"You called me Masaki~" he chirps.
"Stop it with that stupid face."
"It's dark, you can't see my face!"
"I know what face you're making."
"I'm going to kick you out of the bed," Aiba threatens, and laughs when Yoko grabs his hip.
"You're welcome to try," Yoko challenges, which sparks a wrestling match that ends with Yoko forcing Aiba half-off the bed and grinning in triumph (Aiba can feel the smile against his shoulder).
"I give, I give," Aiba groans, "I can't breathe, get off me--"
Yoko hauls him back onto the bed, and they pant at each other for a moment with matching grins before they manage to calm down. Aiba piles himself half-atop Yoko, feeling brave and touchy and happy, and says, "good night," into Yoko's throat. Yoko's heartbeat is heavy under his cheek, and Aiba's pretty sure his own can be heard echoing through the whole house. Aiba's afraid to move, afraid to stay still. Finally Yoko's hand comes down on his shoulder, and that's enough to keep Aiba from rolling over to the other side of the bed.
---
"Yokoyama," Nino says from the kitchen table when Yoko comes down to make breakfast. Yoko's in the middle of looking for the bag of rice, and he squawks, turning around.
"Ahhhhh--Nino?"
"Yo," Nino answers, sitting back in his chair and crossing his legs at the knee, "fancy seeing you around here."
Yoko's fingers twitch. "Uh... yeah," he says, fidgeting.
"What are you doing here, Yoko? Why haven't you been into town to see your family? Why is Aiba lying? For you?"
Yoko looks pained, thoughtful. "I can't see her," he says, and Nino kind of believes it, "if I see her it'll kill me, Nino, I can't go back until the job I left to do is done, I can't come home and then leave again. I know this sucks, that I shouldn't have done it this way, but it's all I've got right now."
"What, and Aiba is no big deal?"
"Aiba understands. He's always--he rescued me. Saved my life, maybe. Aiba is different."
"You know he's kind of isolated himself up here since you left? His parents said they'd build him a wing off the back of the restaurant but he told them he had to get away from everybody. Because of you."
"Clearly he didn't succeed very well, he talks about going into town and seeing you and Matsumoto-kun and Ohno-san all the time!"
"And since you've been here he's been down once," Nino answers, voice taut, "he was doing okay and then you crashed--literally!--back into his life. He's been working on that telephone for a year now--did you know they kicked him out of university because of that thing? And now he's spending his time on--what? You? Your ship?"
"If I could fix it myself I would," Yoko answers, flushed with emotion, shame and anger and guilt all at once, "but I can't, okay, and I'll be out of his life soon enough and you can have him back, all right? Do you think I wanted to land here and ruin his life?"
Nino's fingers press into the tabletop. "When will it be done?" he asks, quietly.
"Soon," Yoko answers, sighing, "I can see it all over his face."
"If you leave without saying goodbye I'm going to track you down and fill your pants with pudding again," Nino tells him, which breaks the tension just enough to make Yoko's lips quirk.
"Have you written the great Japanese novel?" Yoko asks.
Nino scratches his head. "Almost," he says, "almost."
"I read the one about the guy who worked in the restaurant," Yoko says, turning around and going back to rooting for the bowls.
"You know how to read?" Nino asks, and Yoko groans.
"Am I serving you breakfast?" Yoko demands.
"No, you'll probably spit it in," Nino muses, "...don't tell Aiba I was here?"
"I don't want to think about you any more than I have to," Yoko agrees, and Nino laughs his way out.
---
"Wait, you want me to send this in a telegram?" Aiba asks, looking at the mess of letters and numbers, "are you sure?"
"Yes," answers Yoko, "that's what I want you to send. Exactly like that, Aiba, I mean it."
"Okay, okay," Aiba answers, "am I going to get an answer today?"
"You should," Yoko answers, "she wasn't far from here."
"All right, I'll be back--can you finish looking at the engine?"
"Will do. Have a good day~"
Aiba sends the telegraph easy enough--predictably he gets a weird look from the girl who works at the post office--and decides to wait in town for a reply. He leaves the post office, thinking, and turns on his heel toward the Skyship. He's not going to go have beer with Nagase and Oh-chan, though--across the street from Skyship is Jun's bakery, the Bambino. The glass-front elegant shop was always busy, though that was equal parts Jun's extraordinary baking and candy-making skills and his charismatic personality (and face), and Aiba has to duck around a pair of chattering schoolgirls to get inside.
"Jun-pon~" he calls, waving, and Jun stands up from his taffy-making machine at the nickname.
"Aiba-chan," he calls back, smiling, "I'll be with you in a minute."
"Take as long as you need, I'm waiting for a telegram," Aiba answers, and bends over the glass case where Jun's cakes are displayed. He pulls his tongue between his lips, eying all of the cakes in turn, from the chocolate-frosted mousse-filled creation covered in sprinkles at one end to the dainty white lemon-filled cake at the other end.
"Looking for something special?" Jun asks, leaning on the counter, "having a gala I'm not invited to?"
"Of course," Aiba answers, "a costume ball in my lab!"
Jun laughs, and Aiba joins him.
"Having an old friend over for dinner," Aiba says, finally, "he's only here for another day so I thought we'd have something special with dinner."
"Anyone I know?" Jun asks, blandly.
"Probably not," Aiba answers, "the family moved away a while ago."
"All right," Jun answers, "what does he like?"
"Pudding," Aiba says, immediately, "he likes pudding."
"So, what, I should make a cake with pudding in it?"
"Exactly!" Aiba chirps, "Jun-pon is so smart~"
Jun rubs at his forehead momentarily, but then he turns and starts back toward the kitchen, talking to himself.
So Aiba goes home with a cake box in one hand and a gibberish telegraph in the other, ignoring the fact that Yoko will be leaving in two days at the latest.
"Honey, I'm home," Aiba calls, and Yoko grunts from the kitchen counter, his back toward Aiba.
"Let's eat in the parlor this time," Aiba says, putting the box of cake on the kitchen table and the telegraph atop the box, "we eat in the kitchen every night."
"I forgot you have a parlor," Yoko confesses, "do you even use it for anything?"
"Seeing my mother," Aiba answers, shrugging, "I bought this place from an American woman who wanted to use it as a fashionable get-away cabin, she wanted a western parlor for parties." He steps up from the kitchen to the circular back of the first floor, lighting the lanterns in the parlor-cum-dining room and opening windows. The parlor is rarely used, and it shows in the way the couch is puffy of newness and there's a line of dust along the side table in the portion of the room he uses as a dining room.
"Dinner is mostly done," Yoko calls, "set the table?"
"Of course," Aiba calls back, and goes to the rarely-used china cabinet to fetch plates and the nice chopstick sets.
Yoko finishes putting the food down on the table, and cocks his head. "Aiba, it's a big table, why are we sitting so close together?"
Aiba laughs. "What, so we have to yell at each other across the table?"
Yoko considers it, and sits down at Aiba's right elbow.
"What's in the box in the kitchen?" he asks, when they're mostly finished, making a game now of putting stuff they don't want on each other's plates and stealing what they do.
"Jun-pon made a cake," Aiba answers.
Yoko doesn't ask what they're commemorating.
"Wait, is this cake filled with pudding?! Aiba, you're the best ever," Yoko manages around two full cheeks of cake and pudding, looking as happy as a pig in a mudpit. Or a Yoko in a pudding pit, Aiba thinks, and laughs when Yoko manages to get pudding on his nose.
"I know I am. Wait, you have--" he reaches out and wipes it off with his thumb, fingertips brushing against Yoko's cheek, and pulls back as if burned, wiping his thumb on his napkin.
After they've finished the cake--and it's a fight to get the last few bites down--they flop on the floor in the parlor together.
"Finishing the cake all at once was a bad choice," Aiba groans, holding his stomach and shutting his eyes.
"You're telling me," Yoko murmurs, lying on his side with one of his knees pressed against Aiba's thigh, "ugh, I forgot how filling cake is."
"Do they not feed you cake in the navy?" Aiba asks, squeezing one eye open.
"I don't know if I'd call it cake," Yoko says, "more like 'a pile of paper covered in frosting'."
"That's not cake, that's torture," Aiba agrees, and Yoko laughs.
"Oh, ow," he immediately says, "I don't want to move~"
"Me neither," Aiba answers.
They lay there for an hour, maybe, in a space between sleep and unbearably painful wakefulness, until the ringing of the clock wakes Aiba.
"I got a reply for your telegraph," he says, carefully.
Yoko sits up, looking serious. "Oh," he answers, "I guess I should, uh, take a look at it?"
"I did wait around for it, after all," Aiba answers, and they drag themselves off the floor together.
"What does it say?" Aiba asks, peering over Yoko's shoulder at the piece of paper.
"Admiral Matsuoka says the Tokio is grounded northwest of Tokyo, because of a problem with the aegen," Yoko translates carefully, "and he says if I think you can do anything about it I should bring you, because no one else has been able to figure anything out."
Aiba's eyes are bright when he grabs Yoko's arm and turns him around. "You're taking me with you, right?" he demands, "I spent most of my time at university working on aether generators, they're just so interesting and and and Yokocho!!!"
"Stop giving me the puppy face, I'll take you with," Yoko answers, sighing heavily, "just remember to tell people you're going away."
"Ah, right," Aiba says, "well, I'll have to think of an excuse while I finish working tomorrow."
"Tomorrow," Yoko says, raising an eyebrow, "it'll be done tomorrow?"
"Unless I blow something up putting the aegen back into the engine tomorrow," Aiba answers, "which, okay, certainly possible, but let's have a little faith, shall we?" He offers Yoko a bright grin.
Part 2