Full Dosage

(Shin's PoV)

—

Akane had barely lifted her finger off the intercom button before we heard the elevator start climbing.

She stood at the open door with her arms crossed, boots planted, wearing the expression of a woman preparing to receive a natural disaster she had personally invited.

"Whatever she says in the first thirty seconds," she said without turning around, "ignore it."

"Why? Is it that bad?" I asked, curious.

"She's been alone in her studio since yesterday afternoon with nothing but this appointment to look forward to. Whatever comes out of that elevator is going to be about six hours of stored-up enthusiasm arriving all at once. She's always been like this, so prepare for her dopamine release." Akane smirked.

Then, the elevator chimed.

The doors opened, and Hoshiko came out of them at a speed that was frankly unsafe for a corridor, boots hammering the floor, a box of chocolates the size of a briefcase held above her head like a trophy, with every silver ring on her ears catching the hallway light at once.

"MY PEOPLE."

She didn't slow down at the doorway, and she kicked her boots off without breaking stride, in one practiced motion that told me she'd done it in this exact spot a hundred times before.

Then, she hit both of us at full speed and got an arm around each of our shoulders and pulled us into a single crushing three-person hug in the middle of Akane's entryway.

The chocolate box ended up somewhere against the back of my head.

"How are my only two favorite people in the whole world? Ehh? EHH?" She shook us both, hard enough that my forehead knocked into Akane's temple. "Look at you! Both of you! In one room! At the same time! Do you have any idea how rare this event is for me? Do you?"

"Hoshiko," Akane said, muffled somewhere in the shearling of her jacket. "My spine."

"Your spine is fine. Your spine has never been better." She squeezed harder. "Oh, and I brought chocolates as you asked. I brought so many chocolates that the man at the counter asked if it was for an office. And I said no, it's for two people, and he looked at me with genuine concern. Damn." She giggled.

"That's because it's a concerning amount of chocolate," Akane said.

"It's an appropriate amount of chocolate for your appetite and the first real social outing of my adult life, baby wolf, and I won't be shamed about it in my own—" She suddenly stopped, pulled back a few centimeters, and then squinted at me. "Wait. Hold on. Hold on."

She took hold of my chin and turned my head to the side, examining my ear the way she'd examined it in her studio, under a much better light and with much more professional intent.

"Healing beautifully," she declared. "Look at that. No swelling, no crust, no idiot behavior. You've been cleaning it properly, right?" Hoshiko said.

"Twice a day," I said.

"I remind him to take care of it, because he's stupid," Akane said flatly, freeing herself and taking the chocolate box out of Hoshiko's hand before it could injure anyone.

"Akane!" I protested. 

"Silence, Ghost Boy," She smiled mischievously.

"Great!" Hoshiko then clutched her chest with both hands, staggering backward against the wall. "Yuki's little middle school friend grew up into a man who can take care of himself. Wow. I could weep. I've had clients in their thirties come back three weeks later with an ear like a boiled dumpling and no explanation."

"Please stop saying boiled dumpling," Akane said.

"I say it to everyone. It's a public health message." She pushed off the wall, took a long look around the apartment, and let out a satisfied sigh at the amber lamps and the guitar wall and the smell of sandalwood, the way you do walking into a room you've missed. "God, it's good in here. Every time. Okay. Shoes back on, both of you, we're close to the end of the day, and I have a very tight schedule of doing absolutely nothing in a specific order."

Then, the chocolates went on the coffee table, unopened.

Akane looked at the box for a second on her way out, then reached back and moved it two centimeters so it sat square with the table edge, and I decided not to say anything about that.

The evening had gone properly cold by the time we came out of her building, the kind of cold that gets under a jacket collar on the first breath.

The neon over the district had woken up while we were inside, and the pavement was throwing it back in long stripes of electric blue and poison green.

Hoshiko took a lungful of it and looked genuinely delighted.

"So it's like this outside," she said. "On a Sunday. In the evening. People just walk around."

"That's what people do," Akane said. "And that's what we are doing right now."

"I know what people do, wolf, I've read about it." She fell into step between us, hands in her pockets. "It's different when you're in it, that's all. My whole routine is studio, apartment, studio, apartment, gaming, sleep. I've been having full conversations with my sterilizer."

"What does it say back, Yuki?" I asked, curious.

"It beeps. Very supportively. But the conversations are far more interesting than the ones I have with my clients. At least it doesn't treat me like a psychologist," Hoshiko giggled.

She was quiet for almost eight seconds after that, which I would later learn was close to her personal record, and then she turned her head to look at the two of us with an expression I should have recognized as a warning.

"So," she said. "When are you getting married?"

I choked.

"Because I want to be clear that I'm not asking as a bystander," she went on, ignoring the noise I'd made entirely. "I'm asking as a stakeholder. I'm asking as the person who put ink on both of you. That's basically a legal claim."

"Hoshiko—" I said, panicked.

"And I want to be godmother, and that's non-negotiable. First child. I've already decided." She held up her hands, framing something invisible in the air. "Also, I should help pick the name. Obviously. Because you two are going to name that poor kid something like Ren and then the child has to walk around explaining it forever—"

"We're too young, Yuki!" I said, and my voice came out about a full tone higher than I intended.

Both of them looked at me.

Akane, walking on my other side with her hands in her hoodie pocket, tilted her head and considered the question with the seriousness of a woman reviewing a contract.

"We already live together," she said. "We're basically married anyway, aren't we?"

Hoshiko stopped walking.

I actually watched her face do the whole thing in sequence: surprise, delight, and then a slow, extremely dangerous smile spreading across it from one side to the other.

"Yeah," she said. "Yeah, yeah, yeah. Of course. Of course you are." She started walking again, hands back in her pockets, her voice pitched into pure innocence. "Silly me. My mistake. So the wedding's just paperwork at this point."

"Essentially," Akane smirked.

"And the child." Hoshiko continued.

"That's a different conversation,"Akane replied.

"But not a no conversation," Hoshiko giggled.

"Hoshiko," Akane called her out. She was probably getting flustered too.

"I'm hearing 'not a no'—" Yuki added.

"Keep walking, fox." My girlfriend commanded.

Neither of them looked at me for the rest of that walk, which was a mercy, because I could feel the heat sitting in my whole face and I had absolutely no idea what to say.

Somewhere in there Akane's hand found mine in the cold, and she didn't say anything about it, and neither did I.

The shop was two districts over, down a half-flight of stairs off a side street, in a basement space that smelled of dust and old leather and clove.

Akane went quiet when we walked in. Not shy, exactly.

Her eyes went across the racks the way a mechanic's eyes go across an engine, and I understood that this was a place of genuine cultural significance to her and that any joke I made here would follow me for years.

Hoshiko, on the other hand, had no such reverence.

"RIGHT." She clapped once, and three separate customers looked up. "Come on, baby boy. Fitting room. Now."

"I haven't chosen anything yet, Yuki. Let me—" I tried to speak.

"You're not choosing anything. That's the whole reason you're here." She was already moving down the first rack, pulling hangers out at a rate I found alarming. "Do you know what you look like right now? You look like a boy in a school uniform who took the jacket off. That's your entire aesthetic. So, first step: removal of a jacket."

"That's not—"

"Wolf, back me up." She said, her voice menacing.

Akane took a moment, looking me over with her head slightly tilted.

"She's right," she said.

"You literally dress me on weekends," I said.

"I dress you in my clothes. That's not the same as you having clothes." She pulled something off a rack, held it up, put it back. "You've got three basic shirts except the hoodies that now are mine, Shin. Three. They're identical. I've counted them twice, and I'm counting them again next week."

What followed was, from my side of the fitting room curtain, about forty minutes of receiving garments over a rail from two women who discovered around minute eight that they violently disagreed with each other.

"Try this one," Hoshiko said, smiling. "It will be perfect on you." 

I looked at it. A leather jacket with more hardware than fabric, a standing collar, and straps whose purpose I could not determine even after examining them.

"Hoshiko," Akane said from outside. "No."

"It's a statement," Hoshiko said.

"It's not his statement. Look at his face, then look at that jacket, and tell me those two objects belong to the same person."

"That's the point! Contrast! You dress like a knife, so he gets to be the bigger knife—"

"He's not a knife. Not at all." Akane smiled, looking at me for an instant, before turning her gaze back to Hoshiko.

"Then what is he?" Yuki asked, curious.

There was a pause outside the curtain.

"Mmmh... He's the room the knife gets put down in, you can say," Akane said.

Then, silence.

"...Okay, that was foul," Hoshiko said. "That was genuinely upsetting to hear out loud. I need you to know I felt that in my stomach. Try the jacket anyway, baby boy, I want to prove her wrong."

Akane sighed and pinched the bridge of her nose, like she was saying, "She's impossible..."

So, I tried the jacket since I had no choice.

Then, after a few minutes, I came out. All three of us looked at it in the mirror.

"Yeah, no," Hoshiko said instantly.

"Thank you," I replied.

"You look like the bassist in a band that's about to break up over money." She was already back at the rack. "Fine. FINE. We do it the wolf's way. Show me your vision, then."

Akane's vision took longer.

She didn't hand me anything for a while. She went along the rack with one hand trailing across the shoulders of the hangers, slow, and every few seconds she'd glance back at me.

Not at the clothes, but at me, standing there, at my actual shape and the way I was standing in the middle of the shop with my hands in my pockets.

"The problem," she said, mostly to herself, "is that this whole shop is loud. And he isn't. Put him in loud, and the clothes wear him instead."

"So he grows into it," Hoshiko said.

"That's how you end up with a boy in a costume. And I don't want him in a costume." She pulled a hanger, considered, put it back. "I want him in clothes. He's already got a personality, but he never knew it. That's the whole problem with him. He's had one this entire time, and he's been keeping it under three identical dark shirts like a very boring witness protection program."

Then she found the jacket.

It wasn't loud at all. Dark, slightly oversized, heavy cotton with a matte finish that swallowed the light instead of throwing it back, clean lines, stand collar, no hardware but the buttons.

She held it against my chest without asking, stepped back, and her eyes narrowed the way they do when she's checking a number.

Then she built the rest around it, fast, as she'd already had it in her head before we walked in.

A charcoal long-sleeve with proper weight to it. Dark trousers cut narrower than anything I owned.

And boots, not aggressive ones, just a solid dark pair with a low heel that changed how I stood before I'd taken a full step.

"Go," she said, and pushed me into the fitting room.

I stayed in there longer than I needed to once I had it all on, because the person in the mirror was recognizably me and I couldn't work out what had changed.

I had the same face, the same hair... same everything.

The clothes fit, which I realized I had never actually experienced before, and the whole thing had a shape, and the shape was mine, and I had no idea what to do with that.

Then, I pulled the curtain back, and in that moment, Hoshiko's eyebrows went up.

Akane didn't say anything at all. She looked at me for four or five seconds with nothing readable on her face, then walked over and adjusted the jacket collar by maybe half a centimeter, which it didn't need, and stepped back again.

"Yeah," she said quietly, and that was the entire review.

"Yeah?" Hoshiko threw both hands up. "That's it? I have personally listened to you talk for eleven consecutive minutes about a belt."

"Yeah," Akane repeated, still looking at me, and something in her voice put the heat right back in my face where it had been earlier. "That's the one."

Then she grabbed an armful off the nearest rack and disappeared into the fitting room, calling over her shoulder, "Don't let him take it off, because I know he will."

The shop got quiet after the curtain rattled shut.

Hoshiko drifted along the rack with her tattooed hands moving hanger to hanger, not really looking at anything, and after a while she said, at about a third of her usual volume:

"You know, you're the first person she's ever brought with her anywhere."

I looked over.

"I don't mean here. I mean anywhere." She lifted a sleeve, examined it without seeing it, and then let it drop. "Two years I've had her in my chair. She started showing up at fifteen, and she came alone. Every single session. Fifteen, sixteen, seventeen. The first thing I ever put on her was that moth on her collarbone. She looked in the mirror afterward and told me, very quietly, that she needed it to survive. She was fifteen. I didn't ask what she meant. I didn't have to."

She turned a hanger around, then the next one.

"But... I still remember that Snake. Damn. Four hours on the chest piece. Nobody in my waiting room. Nobody outside. Nobody to call after." She glanced up. "I've been doing this for years. You know how many people I've had in that chair with nobody at all? Not a friend, not a parent, not somebody sitting in a car outside?"

She held up one finger.

I didn't say anything, mostly because I couldn't.

"That day she went into shock about ninety minutes in. Hadn't eaten anything in two days, and she went out cold on my table." Hoshiko's mouth twisted. "I brought her round and told her we were stopping, that she'd come back another afternoon, and we'd finish it properly. And she said no. She wanted it done that day."

"Why?"

"I asked her the same thing." She looked at the fitting room curtain. "She said, 'Because if I walk out of here without it, I have to go home unprotected. And this pain is nothing unbearable.'"

Something turned over hard in my chest.

"So I know what that snake is," Hoshiko said. "I drew it. I know what every piece of it means because she told me on my table with a needle in her ribs and no reason left to hold anything back. And I know what that house did to her, all of it, the father and the mother and that Kenji, because for two years I was the only one who knew what Akane had to suffer."

She finally turned to look at me straight on, arms folded, and the loudness was completely gone out of her.

"Many months ago she came in for a touch-up, and she talked about a boy for nine straight minutes. Unprompted." She raised her eyebrows. "Nine, Shin. I timed it, because I was in genuine physical distress. This is a girl who once sat in my chair for four hours and used eleven words total. I counted those too."

"And... What did she say?" I asked.

"Doesn't matter. It wasn't about the words." Hoshiko shrugged one shoulder. "It was that she said anything at all. That's the whole report."

She then reached over and flicked my new collar straight, the exact half-centimeter correction Akane had made ten minutes earlier, which I suspect is where Akane learned it.

"When you walked into my studio, and I found out that the boy she'd been talking about was you," she said. "Do you understand how insane that is? Out of every person in this city." Her voice caught for a fraction of a second, and she covered it by clearing her throat. "I lost you in middle school because Kurone decided I wasn't allowed to be your friend, and I lost school along with it, and I built a whole life out of the pieces. And then, years later, the girl who kept me company through all of it turns out to be dating you. Just wow."

"Yuki—"

"Don't." She held up a hand, laughing at herself. "Don't do the sincere thing; you did it in my studio, and I nearly cried in front of a client. I have a reputation."

"You cried at a manga panel in front of me when we were in middle school." I teased.

"That panel was devastating, Shin, and I stand by it." She wiped under one eye with the heel of her hand, still laughing. "Whatever. The point is this. Whatever it is you're doing, keep doing it and stand by Akane. She deserves some happiness after everything she's been through."

"I'm not going anywhere," I said.

"I know you won't, especially after sleeping with her," She jabbed a finger into my sternum anyway. "But I'm still contractually obliged to threaten you. Fox rules. And—"

Then, the curtain rattled.

And her volume came straight back like somebody had thrown a switch.

"Did I interrupt something?" Akane asked, with a menacing smile on her face.

Hoshiko immediately waved her arms defensively.

"N-Nooo!" She took a deep breath. "OKAY LET'S SEE IT — oh. Oh. Wolf. Turn around. Turn around—"

And after that, they continued to test many clothes on me before we walked out.

—

The pizza place was four minutes' walk from the shop, a narrow room with a wood oven at the back and a man at the counter who threw dough like it had insulted his family personally.

While we were eating, Akane finished two-thirds of a pizza and then opened hostilities against mine.

"You're not going to finish that." She said. "I'm 100% sure about that."

I already knew where this was going.

"I'm eating it right now, Bakanashi." I teased. "I won't let you steal my food again."

"You're eating it slowly. In nature, that's a sign of weakness." She said, not moving her gaze from my pizza.

"Wolf," Hoshiko said, without looking up from her own plate, "let the boy eat. He needs to grow up."

"I'm taxing him. Being his girlfriend is difficult, and I'm giving him a chance to show his love for me. Love is sharing and caring, right? Especially when it comes to feeding your girlfriend." Akane said, with a proud, mischievous smile on her face.

"Love is also putting someone's love before ours. So show your love to me, too, Akane," I said, smirking. "I will finish that in front of you. Entirely."

Hoshiko set her glass down with the deliberate air of somebody who had been waiting all evening for the right moment, and said:

"Has she told you about the amp?" She asked, looking at me.

Akane's head came up. "No. Hoshiko. Don't."

"He should know about the amp." Hoshiko smiled.

"He should not know about the amp. Not at all." Akane said menacingly.

"When she was fifteen," Hoshiko said, leaning across the table toward me, "she saved for four months for a secondhand amp. Four months. Carried it home on the train by herself because asking anyone for help was apparently worse than death. Got it up to the fourth floor in three separate trips and had to sit down on the stairs between each one because the elevator was broken."

"Hoshiko..." Akane's face darkened, but I was too curious.

"Continue, please. She never told me about these things." I said, gently caressing Akane's thigh under the table.

"Well... she plugged it in... and blew the breaker for the entire floor." Hoshiko was grinning now, both elbows on the table. "Sunday evening. Every apartment dark. And instead of admitting anything, this one goes downstairs, knocks on four separate doors, and informs every neighbor that the building's wiring is a public safety hazard, and they should complain to the landlord together."

"It was a hazard," Akane said, crossing her arms.

"They wrote a petition, Shin. A signed petition. She organized a tenants' movement to cover up her own amplifier. When she told me about that, I almost fell out of a chair."

I put my head in my hands.

"The funniest part? It worked," Akane said with enormous dignity. "They rewired the whole fourth floor. Everyone benefited. I'm essentially a community organizer."

"You're essentially a war criminal," I said, drinking a cup of cola.

"I'm a war criminal who improved everyone's electrical safety," Akane said proudly. "They still thank me."

I was laughing hard enough that the man at the counter looked over, and across the table Akane caught my eye and for about a second dropped the performance completely and just looked pleased. Not smug. Pleased, in a small quiet way, because she was being made fun of at a table by two people who liked her, and I don't think that had happened many times in her life.

After enjoying our dinner together and talking about funny stories of our lives, Hoshiko left us at the corner near the station.

She hugged Akane hard enough to lift her onto her toes and held on for a good four seconds longer than she needed to, and when she let go she pointed two fingers at her own eyes and then at me, and then ruined it by immediately hugging me too.

"Next Sunday," she said, into my shoulder. "I'm serious. I've got the manga boxed up already; it's been sitting by the door. Volumes you can't get anymore."

"Next Sunday," I said.

"Say it properly," Hoshiko said, smiling warmly.

"Next Sunday, Yuki." I smiled.

Then, she made a small strangled noise, shoved me off, told both of us we were disgusting, and walked away into the crowd with her hands jammed in her pockets, still talking to herself.

After that, Akane looked at me, grabbed my sleeve, and said, "Shin..." Her voice was softer than usual.

"What is it, Akane?" I asked.

"Nothing bad, but... I feel like I always needed a day like this. It's... strange." She said. "It's a beautiful sensation. Well... I guess my hate toward the entire population has dropped from 98% to a miserable 95%." She then joked, grabbing my hand and resting her head on my chest.

"We're really making progress, then..." I said, kissing the top of her head.

"Yeah... I just hope you won't get bored of me once you become popular." She said, squeezing my hand.

"I'm pretty sure that I won't. You're too beautiful." I said, reassuring her.

"Dumbhead..." She looked up at me, smiling and leaning close to me. "Shall we go home now? I... need to recharge my energy." She whispered in my ear...