Loose Threads

Ozaki had a way of saying 'excuse me' that wasn't a question.

"Excuse me. Those don't go there."

Ryouta looked at the cart. Then back at the shelf. "The label says J through—"

"The label is wrong. I've been telling them about that label since March."

"...Right."

"March," Ozaki said again, as if Ryouta hadn't heard him the first time.

Ryouta counted the spines of each book in the cart. Nine. Taking a deep breath in — to calm himself down — he put the whole stack down, and left to get drink of water he didn't want.

The fountain was by the bathrooms, where it was cool and nobody seemed to be around. Ryouta bent as he pressed the button and chugged the water from the steady stream. As he pulled away, he stood there with his hand lingered on the button, the steady stream of water now only trickled slowly, as he lost himself in his thoughts.

It had been a few years since he'd kept that door shut. After his parents passed away, he had never gone back. But one old man shouting at a kid was all it took for him to loosen his grip on the door he had gotten so good at holding tightly shut. Of course, he could always hear the voice behind the door but he had never let it slip out. Yet, something about the old man with a grudge against a label had nearly made him go off the hinges again.

'Not again,' decided Ryouta firmly as he let go of the water fountain button and straightened his posture. He would keep his mouth shut and his hands busy and that would be the end of it. With a firm resolve in his eyes, he walked back to the cart.

***

"You're brooding," Futaba said, materializing at his elbow with a stack of returns. "You've got the brooding face right now."

"I don't have a brooding face." said Ryouta with a small frown. "I don't have any kind of different faces."

"You've got several. And the one you've got right now is where you're arguing with yourself and losing."

"That's not—" He stopped more out of surprise than chagrin. "Kindly shelve your books instead of figuring out my faces, Miss Sakamoto"

She grinned as she took Ryouta's push as a confirmation and got back to shelving her books while humming a merry tune.

"Okay, okay, everyone, big announcement!" Ai had climbed halfway onto the front desk, holding a laminated sheet over her head. "New system! I've divided everything into three kinds of jobs. Shelves — that's the returns cart, the books go back where they came from," Ai quickly glanced around to see a certain grumpy old man missing from the crowd as she continued, "And yes, the labels are correct, Ozaki-san is wrong about the labels."

Ryouta snorted as Ai went on.

"Reading corner — that's the kids, the best one out of all three jobs. And finally, Setup. That would be the tables, chairs, juice, and putting it all away again. The most boring one out of all. We will have two people on each, and we rotate, so nobody has to do setup until their soul leaves their body."

She turned the sheet around so they could all admire it. "I color-coded it. There are tabs. Isn't it beautiful!?"

"It's the most beautiful thing I have ever seen," Ryuuji said, hand on his heart. "Somewhere a tree gave its life so that we might know, at all times, whether we are Shelves or Setup. On my funeral, could you bury me with that holy script?"

Completely ignoring his remarks, Ai continued.

"Reading corner is Hinata-senpai and me. Shelves is Baka-yuuji and Futaba-senpai. Setup is Shizu and Ryouta-senpai—"

"Trade you," Ryuuji said.

Ryouta glanced up. "Huh?"

"I wanna do Setup. You're taller than me, so the shelves are kinder to you. Plus I have a history with setting up table, don't ask about it, it's a whole thing."

Ryouta wondered what history his younger was talking about as he reluctantly agreed.

"...Sure."

"Done!" Ai was writing before Ryouta even agreed, crossing out, rewriting, entirely delighted that her system was already being used exactly as designed.

Shizu looked quietly at Ryuuji from the donation box. Nobody else had seemed to notice what she did. It had taken about ten seconds, and it had been very smooth, and it had been happening in one form or another for three weeks — Futaba and Ryuuji —the two of them quietly trying to stay out of each other's way like you'd steer around a pothole.

When Shizu looked at Futaba, she noticed how Futaba hadn't said anything at all. She just pursed her lips for a second before returning back to her normal face.

Futaba turned around to look at Shizu as if she knew the girl in the donation box corner was staring at her. Shizu jumped, taken aback as Futaba smiled at her.

"Shizu." Futaba tipped her chin gently at the doorway Ryuuji had just wailed his way through. "Setup's that way."

"I... umm. Okay."

Shizu scurried behind Ryuuji as Futaba watched her the whole way, then turned back to the chart where she saw Ryuuji's name crossed out and replaced with Ryouta, and did a quiet little sigh to herself.

***

The storeroom was through the main hall, which meant going past the act of war.

"It has a latch," Ryuuji reported, from underneath the table. "I have found the latch. The latch is decorative. The latch is a lie."

"Pull the bar out first," Ryouta said, wheeling the empty cart past him.

"I am pulling the bar." Metal shrieked. "The bar is complicit."

He'd been at it for four minutes and still hadn't been able to figure the table out. He could have asked for help three and a half minutes ago.

Ai went by him with an armload of cushions without breaking stride.

"If you die without figuring out this table, I'll make sure to mention that in your funeral instead of my chart."

"My funeral? Oh no. I'll figure it out before—"

"Shizu, do you think Ryuuji will figure it out in this century?"

"...Um," said Shizu.

She was standing three feet from the table, holding one end of a chair she'd finished unfolding two minutes ago. She'd been looking at the latch for a while.

"It's... um..." Very quietly. "The other one."

Ryuuji looked confused and frankly, a little crazy — his hair everywhere. "The other what?"

"The other latch. There's two. You have to press the far one or the near one won't—" Everyone was looking at her now. Her voice got smaller with every word, like she was backing out of the sentence. "...release. Sorry."

Ryuuji pressed the far latch.

The table unfolded, sweetly, instantly, with a small satisfied click, and stood there on four legs like it had never caused a problem in its life.

Ryuuji dropped to his knees.

"Master."

"Oh— please don't—"

"I gave that table the best minutes of my life. I bled for that table—"

"You didn't bleed—"

"Emotionally, Shizu. Which is worse." He had her by both shoulders. "You whispered at it and it obeyed. Teach me. I'll pay. I have four hundred yen and the respect of no one."

Shizu made a sound that wasn't quite a laugh, and went red to the ears, and didn't push him off.

"Ryuuji." said Ai, not looking up. "Let go of the girl. You're scaring her."

"He's not," said Shizu.

It came out loud. Louder than usual. Her hands went over her mouth and she looked at the floor, and Ryuuji beamed at her like she'd handed him something, while Ai stopped mid-cushion and turned around with her whole face lit up. She smiled at Shizu proudly as the timid girl escaped Ryuuji's loose grip and busied herself with another chair.

***

Shelf 4 looked the neatest.

It had been shelved that morning by someone who'd gotten the picture books in order — spines lined up in almost perfect symmetry, arranged alphabetically even by the second and third letters. By the time Ryouta got there with the cart, Futaba had been standing in front of it for two minutes with her jaw set.

"That's a really neat shelf," he said.

"No. It's not there yet. It's not fine."

"But nobody's going to—"

"I'm going to." She was already pulling them out, three at a time, stacking them on his cart. "If you do a thing you do it right. Otherwise why even do it."

"Because Ai has a chart and I fear her."

"Then fear her properly."

He laughed as Futaba let out a small smile, breaking out from her focused gaze on the shelf. They began shelving like clockwork — read the spine, find the gap, slide it home. She handed him a book without being asked. He took it without asking. The synergy between the two had grown much more since spring. Ryouta hadn't decided to trust her suddenly one day. It had just happened, the way the good things did, before he could get a handle on it.

The back stacks were the quiet part of the library. High shelves, low light, the reading corner turned down to a hum a room away.

"You've been weird since last week," she said, not looking up.

Ryouta stopped for a second. His gaze fell to the ground.

"I yelled at the librarian in front of fifteen people."

"Fifteen people who agreed with you." She passed him another book, nudging it on his waist to make him look up. "He made a six-year-old cry over a stack of picture books."

"That's not the point."

"Then what's the point?"

He fit a book into its place. Squared it. Fit another. "The point is... I didn't decide to. It just... came out. A part of me that I don't want to show."

She went quiet beside him. Not the empty kind — the kind where someone's picking their words because they've understood more than you meant to hand them.

"You know what I thought, though," she said as she set the last book down and turned around, and there was none of the teasing left in her. "When I met you in spring? You would never have done that. You would have seen the kid crying and looked at the floor and pretended you were busy. You were so... closed. Like you were trying to take up as little room in the world as possible. Like you were hoping nobody'd notice you were in it."

"Futaba—"

"Let me finish." Her voice went uneven. "And now you're the guy who stands between a scary old man and a crying kid and actually says something. You let it show now. What you feel. You didn't used to let anything show at all." She beamed at him. "I like it. That you're... I don't know. More you, out loud. That's all. I'm proud of you. For real."

And that was the mistake.

Because she looked at him like that, unguarded, warm all the way through, the voice in his head rolled over to his tongue. It didn't ask. It never had.

The grin that crossed Ryouta's face was not his careful grin. It was one Futaba had never seen — easy, certain, and his eyes sparkling with a hint of amusement and naughty.

"So you've been thinking about me since spring, huh?"

Futaba's breath caught.

The color climbed up from her neck and into her face all at once, and for a second she just stood there with her mouth slightly open and nothing coming out of it.

In an instant, Ryouta realized what he had said. He felt the warmth that had seeped in his heart by Futaba's words go out and the cold pour in to fill the space, and he was already stepping back, already too far. "S... Sorry, I didn't— that came out—"

"It's fine," she replied quickly as she flipped away from Ryouta and towards her cart.

"It's not—"

"It's fine." Futaba held the cart tight, her knuckles white on the handle and head looking towards the wheels. "You're being weird. I told you that you were being weird. Go do setup or something."

"Fu—"

But she was already gone, the cart rattling ahead of her, out toward the light where the other people were happily working and none of them were him.

From the next room over, Ryuuji laughed at something.

Ryouta stood in the stacks with his hand still on the shelf and listened to the cackle come down the aisle — bright and dumb and completely unguarded, the laugh of a kid who had become used to shrugging away his pain with humor.

Three weeks. It had only been three weeks since Ryuuji and Futaba had broken up.

Nobody in the club had said the word or maybe even realized it, except for a few. They just didn't stand next to each other anymore, and they were both so pleasant about it that half the room had spent three weeks wondering whether anything had happened at all.

And the older brother had leaned into a bookshelf and flirted with his younger brother's ex-girlfriend.

Ryouta pressed the heel of his hand against his eyes until he saw sparks. He had just decided to shut up and busy himself with work today. It hadn't even been a full day before he ended up breaking his own promise to himself. His decisive stance from the morning had turned into slump in his shoulders and the look of guilt plastered on his face.

Spring.

Spring was when he'd met her. Spring was also when she'd started going out with Ryuuji — the entire reason why Futaba approached him at all. He had never allowed himself to outright cross a boundary. Not in any single interaction with Futaba had he ever acted like that. Yet the voice in his head laughed.

'It was a small little tease, no? What're you so worried about?'

'That's what you do,' he thought, with the flat clarity of something you've suspected for ages and only just let yourself say. 'You wait until something matters. Then you take the worst things in me and put them out where they'll do the most damage.'

He put his forehead against the cool metal of the shelf and stayed there until he could get used to the unbearable laughing of the voice in his head.

"Senpai! There you are—" Ai came around the end of the aisle, bright as the afternoon, with no idea what she'd walked into. "Your brother's been adopted by a folding table, Shizu talked, Shizu talked loudly, it was the best thing that has ever happened in this building and you missed it! And now Ozaki's doing the thing with the chairs and someone has to be tall enough to do it. So we need you — you're the tallest one out of us after all. Come on!"

She had his sleeve and was already towing him out into the light and the noise, talking the whole way, and Ryouta let himself be towed, because being dragged into daylight by Ai Tanaka was easier than climbing out alone.

***

The last of the children went out the doors at four in a great tide, and the reading corner was suddenly wrecked and silent and drifted with cushions.

Hinata stayed to tidy. She liked tidying. It gave her hands something to do while her eyes and ears observed.

She'd watched it from the corner, earlier. She couldn't hear the words, of course, but, she didn't need them anyway. Futaba coming out of the stacks red to her ears, looking at no one. Ryouta not coming out at all. And then a few minutes after, Ai dragging a listless Ryouta out from the shelves.

She watched him stop in the doorway. Take a breath. Gather it all up off the floor of himself — the guilt, the heat, whatever had happened back there — and by the time he followed Ai again it was gone, all of it, packed away under something Hinata had come to hate — the expressionless, mellow face of Ryouta Ito.

Twice now.

The old man last week. And now this, whatever this had been. It wasn't anger — anger had been the shape of it the first time, but anger was never the cause. Both times it had come up in the same instant; the instant something caught him with his guard down. The old man had ambushed him with a crying child. Futaba had ambushed him with something else. 

It didn't matter what. What mattered was the ambush. He braced that door with both hands, all day, every day, and he was good at it. Better than she'd expected.

But a braced door only holds against what you see coming. So the answer was simple.

Hinata stood in the empty room with a cushion in her arms as the gears in her head finally clicked. She set the cushion down and crossed to the front desk, where the chart hung in the low gold light of the sunset. Color-coded. Tabbed. Names by the slot — who worked where, who stood beside whom, all of it written by a trusting girl's careful hand.

She drew a fingertip down the column of names. Slowly. The way you'd trace a road on a map. Or a seam you meant to open.

"It really is beautiful, Ai-chan," she said, to no one at all.

Not long now before her wish came true. But she had never needed long.

She'd only ever needed a way in.