Pure Imagination

If Ame was forced to pick a time in her life when she'd been happy, as in truly happy and not just happy-by-proxy, she would have to pick the month she'd spent as part of gang.

'Gang' made them sound far more dramatic than they actually were. They were only a bunch of teenagers who hung around the back of the school where the hall monitors couldn't be bothered to patrol, and bared their teeth at anyone who came close to them. They were the angry loners, the outcasts outside of the school social order, the kids no one else knew how to treat right so they treated each other right instead.

There'd been Maia, half Native American and half Japanese who liked to string beads into her hair and had never been able to lose her mother's accent even as she became fluent in a whole new language. Sora, who had been outed as a lesbian by a particularly vicious boy after she'd turned him down. Akihito, a gentle giant of a boy on the autism spectrum who braided flower crowns during recess and could rattle off every constellation in the summer sky. Izumi, the ferocious leader, whose only crime was being curvier than every other girl in their grade, and for that sin she'd been branded a slut.

For the first few days, Ame had felt awkward being with them. As sad as it might sound, she wasn't used to having friends. Of course she'd had a social group, a couple of people to sit with at lunch, a few contact details on her phone and SNS, but they hadn't been friends. They had been a camouflage, a way to blend in with the masses.

Ame remembered being angry, but more than that, she remembered being free to be angry. Sitting side-by-side with Sora and Izumi, she could rant and punch trees and they would nod understandingly, chiming in with their own injustices like a chorus. With Akihito she didn't have to swallow her emotions and paste on a happy expression, because he always asked her to explain how she was feeling. He hadn't been a fan of eye contact but he didn't mind holding hands. The day Maia had taught her a Seminole lullaby and helped her convert the lilting melody into notes for a violin, Ame had almost wept.

(Honestly it hadn't sounded very good, some songs were meant to be sung, and Maia had always had the nicest voice)

It had been a wild month. Days of skipping classes and nights of graffiti, of turning up to school in messy uniforms and loose hair. Izumi had almost convinced them to get tattoos but eventually they'd all settled on piercings.

In the present, Ame pressed her incisors to her now healed tongue, feeling the little indent that was the only leftover from that time. She smiled to herself. She wondered where they all were now and whether Izumi had actually ended up marrying Akihito like she'd always promised she would.

The countryside fell away as the lift took them higher and higher up the mountains. Ame peered out the window and spotted a few people trekking up the mountain before they were covered by a thin sheet of clouds.

"So some people actually took the long way around," Jax commented, holding his phone up to take a selfie with his back to the skyline. Their trip to SanrioLand had been four days ago and he was still carrying the after-effects of it with him which included, but were not limited to: a ChocoCat phone case, a Kuromi sweatshirt, and a Cinnamoroll keychain that he'd claimed was a present for his girlfriend but had happily clipped to his backpack.

Lily shoved her hand in front of his face, ruining the picture. "Are you going to buy your girlfriend anything on this trip at all or are we going to get home and find you repurposing one of the plushies into a present?"

"Rude? I have never been that irresponsible ever in my life."

"I will recount the entirety of mom's last birthday in front of God, Ame, and this entire trolley car of strangers, don't even test me."

Hana sighed softly but pointedly. "Isn't it great when families can get together and get along instead of threatening each other in public?"

"Don't know, can't relate," Ame quipped back without taking her eyes off the pixelated baby on screen.

Sora made a sound like a donkey choking on grass. "Oh you'd know a thing or two about that. What did you get for Ema? Or did you spend all your money on tamagotchi accessories at that gacha?"

Her cheeks went pink and Ame surreptitiously slid the egg-shaped toy back into her bag. "I got her a custom shirt and some earrings." The shirt was a sulphur blue tank top with the words Lazy Beaches in black cursive font. Ame had her own, an electric yellow crop top with the words Queen Bee Supreme. "And I didn't spend that much money on the tamagotchis. They were just cute."

Lily poked the furry troll toy dangling from Ame's backpack and snickered. "Adorable. Honestly, someone would think you'd never played with a gacha toy!"

Ame froze, mentally flashing back to the months spent saving up pocket money and the pittance she made from weekend jobs, all spent on food and presents for Ema. It was hard to admit sometimes that a lot of her own hangups had been self-inflicted but she was getting better at working through it.

A therapist would probably help the process but haha, several hundred feet in the air was not the place to be thinking about such issues. "Ha, yeah, that would be weird. Speaking of literally anything else, who wants to try the black sesame ice cream they serve up there?"

"There's sesame ice cream at the top of Mount Fuji?!"

"Lily you're allergic to sesame please."

oOo

Although all the brothers were attempting to give her space, Ukyo had offered to pick Ame up at the end of her trip and bring her to the vacation home. While she had originally turned him down – planning to take a taxi from the airport after dropping off Lily, Jax and their assorted plushie siblings – a quick glance at her wallet and heavy suitcases quickly had her dialling Ukyo's number.

Almost three hours later Ame spotted his familiar figure strolling into the KEIO hotel lobby. He looked tired and a little rumpled from the long car ride. She winced. "Sorry for calling you out all this way."

He gave her his customary gentle smile, his blue eyes softening behind the wire rimmed glasses. "Don't worry about it. We're family, right? I wouldn't be much of an older brother if I made you ride all that way on your own." He grabbed her largest suitcase and began dragging it out, leaving Ame to scramble after him with her backpack and miniature case. "So how was your trip? Did you have fun?"

"It was! I took so many pictures!" Ame chattered, watching him load her stuff into the car boot and slam it shut. "Are we leaving immediately? Like right now?"

Ukyo's brows wrinkled. "I was planning to. Why?"

Ame shifted and folded her arms across her chest. "I just feel bad about making you drive all this way and then immediately driving back. Let's get something to eat first, just for a few minutes. If we leave before 4pm it'll still be bright outside by the time we make it to Yatsugatake."

As if to confirm her statement, Ukyo glance down at his watch nervously. "I mean, if you're sure-!"

He interrupted himself with a noiseless gasp of shock when warm hands wrapped around his wrist and started tugging him away from the car. "There's a restaurant right across the street. I'll show you all the pictures I took on my phone!"

Ukyo was ashamed to know that he wasn't over her. It's hard to know that the person you love doesn't love you back, or doesn't love you the way you want to be loved, but it is harder to know that your feelings for that person too are not only unrequited, but they are also wrong. Especially when the reason for why they are wrong is something you had no say in.

Had they met in another time, had their parents never met and gotten married, Ukyo was certain he could have stolen Ame's heart. A young woman like her, so outwardly cutting yet so painfully caring, she needed someone who would take care of her. At least, that was what he thought.

He'd pictured it before, in his weaker moments. Flashed back to that one moment they'd spent cooking, now with his arms wrapped around her waist and the curve of her hips accentuated by the tight straps of an apron. He pictured her long hair pulled up, exposing the tender skin of her neck and shoulders.

He'd pictured so many things that would never happen, but imagination was all he had at the moment. You can't really decide who you love, what appeals to you. Wouldn't life be much, much easier if humans could do that? If there was a switch one could flip, a dial to spin, a button to push so that it wouldn't hurt so much to recall the twisted sneer on Ame's face when she'd screamed her disgust and made it clear where she stood.

It could get better, Ukyo knew that. People fell out of love all the time. Like a flower, if you stopped cultivating it, if you assumed that love in and of itself could sustain itself, it could wither away into something more manageable. Still, it would be hard to let go, especially if he had to see her everyday, and he was unwilling to not do that.

So he would keep this to himself, keep his fantasies in his mind where they couldn't hurt anyone, and enjoy the heat of warm hands around his own.

This story isn't me tearing the boys apart for loving Ema and Ame (except you Fuuto, you are not valid), I know this is a fucked situation for everyone. You can't control how people feel and tbh if Ema had said, at any point in the series, that she felt something outside of familial love for them then I would rolled with it because then it would have been a consensual, two-way street.

Also I watched the Valentine OVA for this chapter bc I wanted to see what Ukyo's fantasies were like. The answer to that is "potentially creepy" because you can't dream of getting an underage girl drunk and then kissing her while she's almost passed out without me calling CPS. Am I just the wrong demographic for this? We'll be sending our top reporter to find out, more on this story at 6. *blasts the BBC news outro at max volume*