Apple: Kemono Jihen: Fanfic: Sour but Sweet

[almach]

Title: Sour but Sweet
Fandom: Kemono Jihen
Pairing: Yui/Akira
Rating: PG
Length: 1838 words
Content notes: Sibling incest and background homophobia (but this is actually fluff)
Summary: Akira convinces Yui to try sour apple candy for the first time, with mixed results.
Author notes: Established relationship, set at some handwavey point in the future. I let a random number generator tell me which prompt to write for this round, and as soon as I looked up the number in the spreadsheet and saw the word "apple", I knew exactly how I wanted to start this fic :)

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It was a warm Friday in early summer, and the restaurant where Yui worked had closed after the lunch rush ended, giving everyone an extra half-day off before their official vacation started. It had taken a bit of back-and-forth for Akira to figure out how the two of them were going to spend their sudden influx of free time—Yui wanted to see more of the city but stubbornly refused to submit to Akira’s plea to visit the mall, while Akira didn’t want to do anything that would involve a lot of standing around outside in the sun—but eventually they settled on meeting up at a well-shaded park.

As soon as Akira spotted Yui waiting on the outskirts of the park, he pushed his sunglasses up onto his forehead and waved to him to get his attention from the other side of the street. At first, Yui looked happy to see him as always, but after Akira crossed the street and greeted him up close, Yui’s expression turned to one of concern, and he asked, “Are you okay?”

“Huh?” Akira blinked up at him in confusion, then instinctively checked the front of his outfit for stains or smudges, frowning as he patted down his white blouse and his mint green pleated skirt. As far as he could see, there wasn’t anything amiss. The skirt was new, but Yui had been there with him when he bought it. “I’m fine, niisan. Why, what’s wrong?”

“Your tongue is green.”

“Oh!” Akira laughed. “It must be from the candy I had before I left. Don’t worry, it’s harmless.” He couldn’t help smiling again as he linked his arm with Yui’s and started to lead him into the park, away from the hum of traffic and the busy sidewalk.

It was easy to forget that his strong and capable big brother was still so new to the world outside the village where they’d grown up. Even though they’d only been apart for a year, Akira sometimes felt like the gulf between them threatened to stretch to infinity. Life moved fast in the city, after all, especially compared to the snow-muffled monotony of their previous existence—but these strange little moments somehow threw the whole situation into even starker relief than Akira had been capable of anticipating when they first reunited.

He felt, however, that it was in some sense a blessing. Even though every little piece of ‘common knowledge’ that Yui lacked was a reminder that a normal childhood had been ripped from them, every opportunity to fill in one of those blanks was an opportunity to celebrate the fact that they had finally made it out of that awful place together.

The trees along either side of the path must have been decades older than the two of them, and in all those years they had grown so tall and broad that their branches met and intertwined above the middle of the path overhead, forming a sort of roof.

Akira and Yui walked for a while under the dappled light and eventually found a park bench. Akira’s short skirt fanned out around him as he sat down, and the slats of the seat pressed into the backs of his bare thighs. The bench was in the shade, and the cool wood felt nice against his skin, almost as refreshing as a breeze.

He rested his head on Yui’s shoulder with a contented sigh. (Being short did have some advantages.)

After a few moments, an idea occurred to him, and he sat up straight, reaching into his purse. He fished a piece of candy out from under the phone accessories and crumpled receipts and held it out to Yui. “Here. Try one.”

Yui took it, but he looked skeptical. “‘Sour apple’?” he read off the label.

Akira nodded. “Go on, see if you like it.” Yui was willing to eat pretty much anything, including some substances that Akira suspected didn’t technically qualify as food. Akira felt there was something ironic about the fact that he’d not only chosen to continue on in a restaurant career, but was actually succeeding at it, with that disposition. Then again, Akira’s own life was essentially a series of accumulated ironies as well, so he knew he was in no position to judge.

Yui carefully peeled apart the wrapper and took a bite out of the lime-green strip of flat chewy candy.

He went through more facial expressions in the span of about ten seconds than he usually went through in an entire day. They were subtle ones—he’d always been reserved and stoic, and it seemed all the more extreme when taken side-by-side with Akira’s effusiveness—but Akira knew him better than anyone, and the progression went something like this: curiosity, then confusion, then surprise, then a new and different type of confusion as the sourness of the candy turned from a mere flavor into a unique physical sensation.

After he chewed and swallowed, he grimaced for a moment, staring at the ground with a vaguely unsettled expression, then turned to Akira, swallowing a second time with the sort of conspicuous effort that one might use to dry-swallow a pill. “What’s in this stuff?”

Akira shrugged. “I dunno. Chemicals?”

Yui contemplated this for a moment. “I thought you didn’t like spicy food.”

“It’s not spicy, it’s sour. It’s totally different.”

“Alright,” Yui said with a little laugh that may have also been a cough, his expression softening. It was clear from his tone that he wasn’t quite convinced but also had no interest in trying to change Akira’s mind. He licked his lips, still looking uncomfortable. “It feels like I ate hot sand.”

“Aw, I’m sorry.” Akira leaned in a little bit closer, letting his gaze drift down to Yui’s lips, where a few crystals of sour flavoring still lingered, half-dampened by his tongue. “Want me to kiss it better?”

Yui’s eyes widened for a moment. “Akira, there’s people,” he said, lowering his voice to barely more than a whisper. On the bench directly opposite them, a man in a cheap suit was engrossed in a book about marketing. Further down the path, a small gaggle of tourists was huddled around a bulletin board advertising upcoming park events, trying without much success to translate the papers on it by pointing their phone cameras at it. No one paid the two of them any mind at all.

“We look like a normal couple, and you know it,” Akira murmured, leaning in even closer. He pressed the side of his thigh against Yui’s, knocking their ankles together underneath the bench. “Just one kiss, niisan? For me?”

Yui sighed, but he was smiling slightly. “Just one,” he said, and then, after one more furtive glance around to make sure no one was watching too closely, he closed the distance between their lips.

He’d been right: the crystals were like sand on his lips, transferring to Akira’s, scraping the corners of his mouth and lightly burning his tongue when he licked them away.

It was a chaste kiss, and a brief one as well, but Akira’s whole body thrummed with the tension that sang between them. Goosebumps spread down his arms in a sudden surge despite the heat.

They stayed in that park for a long time that day. When they finally caught the subway home, Akira found himself having to press his lips together to suppress the urge to giggle at absolutely nothing. Next to him, Yui was having no such problem, but there was a kind of quiet, placid joy about him that Akira would’ve gladly swam in if it were a physical thing.

Akira laced his fingers in between Yui’s and pressed the back of Yui’s hand against his bare thigh. He wasn’t bold enough to place Yui’s hand palm-down on his leg in public, but he didn’t need to: the contact he did make was enough to get Yui to look over at him and flash him an adoring smile, and that was more than enough to make Akira’s heart pound like a stampede.

Whenever Akira had to explain to someone why he ‘dressed like a girl’ (which was a phrasing he resented, anyway—he dressed like himself, he just wanted to be pretty), he always told them that it was just because he liked the way the clothes looked, not because he was actually a girl. And he was telling the truth… just not all of it. The part he left out was how useful it was. Sure, he got some unwanted attention when he was out alone, but when he was out with Yui—big, strong, handsome Yui, who always looked at him like he was the only thing in the whole world that really mattered, and treated him like it too—he felt cherished. Prized.

He didn’t care if it wasn’t particularly progressive to enjoy that being read as a woman usually came hand-in-hand with being read as inherently subordinate to Yui. People who read him as a boy usually assumed that he and Yui had no particular bond between them other than friendship, while people who read him as a girl assumed that he was Yui’s girlfriend, and ever since he’d caught on to this pattern, his old hang-ups about wanting to make sure people knew he was a boy had been falling away at a pace that surprised him.

Introspection didn’t come easily to him, but as far as he could tell, he was much more concerned with making sure that his and Yui’s relationship was legible as something deeper than mere friendship at all than he was with which of the deeper connections between them appeared primary to an arbitrary onlooker. Two people who looked as dissimilar as they did would never have a hope of being parsed as siblings at first glance, so it actually made a peculiar sort of sense to him that he had grown comfortable with being looked at as a girl even though that wasn’t who he actually was.

No one could understand everything about what he and Yui were to each other, but if they understood something, that was good enough for him.

He squeezed Yui’s hand tighter and gave him a coy smile as the subway car rolled to a stop at the station nearest their apartment. “Can we stop at the market? I think we’re out of tofu,” he asked as the two of them stepped out onto the platform.

“Sure, if they’re open.”

Akira checked the clock above the timetable display as they walked past it. “Yeah, we have half an hour,” he said. “Will you carry the bags for me if they’re heavy?” He knew a hint of mischief must be creeping into his expression, and he didn’t bother trying to suppress it.

Yui gave him a look, a look that said ‘I know you’re plenty strong enough, but I’m going to indulge you anyway because you’re cute and I love taking care of you’. “Of course,” he said.