ANYWAY I loved this so hard I wrote you a thing for it in return, @lunapress
OBVIOUSLY I’m hoping to bribe you into more of this lol. Is it working at all? xD.
First to go was, as was honestly probably to be expected, her every last inhibition.
“Usagi,” he’d snorted adorably, all side-eye to the inbuilt webcam of his screen as he tapped away, focused on his other screen. “Can’t you at least pretend you’re paying attention?“
She snorted right back and lifted her Nintendo Switch a little higher. While he was still working at
8pm during a pandemic like a nerd, she had the very difficult decision to make whether to keep the Lost Woods Zelda theme she’s created for her village or to switch to Trololo.
“Like how you pretend you don’t just call me for my cat?” She raised an eyebrow above her Switch, smirking shamelessly, but didn’t look away from her game.
And so she saw the answering eye roll only in the corner of her eye, really, and hoped it was affectionate. His sigh sounded affectionate anyway, even through the tinny sound of her laptop.
She bit her lip, and knocked her elbow to the side because she really tried to throw that flutter in her chest. And then did get violently thrown from it and screeched a little, because her elbow had almost knocked her drink both over her laptop and his designs scattered across her tiny foldaway kitchen table. The designs he had mailed to her. Like in the actual mail. So she wouldn’t have to go out and get her ass to Akiba in a pandemic just to buy new cartridges for her outdated printer.
By the time she whooshed out a breath in relief, he was smiling at her screen.
And her heart palpitated again, and this was all kind of silly. She didn’t even know him. Had never seen him at work before they were thrown in this project together and met for it in this strange, strange, newly so routine way for the first time.
This was all strange. She didn’t know why he kept calling. She was in Marketing. He didn’t need her for the Design. Maybe he was really lonely?
And also really, really pretty.
She lifted her Switch a little higher as he continued to type.
“You work too much,” she mumbled absentmindedly.
She reached out blindly, stuck her blue pick in another little pino cube, and popped it in her mouth where it immediately melted on her tongue to the click-click-clickety-click of his fingers on his keyboard.
She probably should make more of an effort. He was cute. A little exasperated with her. Ten leagues out of hers. Maybe twenty. She should probably pretend to be a bit more… normal. Sophisticated. Maybe then she might have a shot.
But of course she wasn’t. She’d tried for the first two weeks and here she sat, cookie crumbles and Animal Crossing, and he kept calling anyway. So, really, it kinda was his fault.
He must be really, really bored out of his mind to keep calling her.
“You could visit me in my village, you know?” she said as Isabelle sang Trololo back at her.
This time she looked just in time to catch the withering look he threw at her.
She grinned, threw him a wink, and he rolled his eyes again but swiveled around in his swively chair and looked at the screen fully again, that silly, silly virtual beach background behind him fraying a little at the edges of his bookcase.
“Speaking of your cat,” Mamoru said with a playful little smile. “I haven’t seen her today.”
This time, the eye roll came from Usagi. And yet, wordlessly, she pushed her laptop closed halfway: so the camera would angle right into her lap. Right where her cat was softly purring in her sleep as loudly and rhythmically as the system fan in her laptop. The same way she had for most of the evening so far. Luna could be very sweet when she wanted.
“Oh, uh…” came his stutter through her speaker and she frowned. And when she popped the screen back up, he was… was that a blush?
She looked down at her lap, wondering what that was about… and almost wanted to facepalm.
Right. No pants. Just her pink panties with the kisses print. Why wouldn’t she flash those at her colleague who she’d never ever seen in person?
Week 5. It took her five weeks to do something as embarrassing as that, at least.
So yeah, professionalism had been thrown out the window a while ago. But he knew that. It was literally in her screen name today. Tsukino Usagi, No Pants.
His cheeks were red and he no longer looked at the screen. Instead, he was suddenly very, very focused on typing and looking at that other screen.
Where in the beginning they had set in the most sterile parts of their apartments, business clothes and straight spines and saying -san and thank you for your time a lot, by week 6, she took him with her into her bed.
His image on her screen, anyway - as she lay on her stomach and forced him to watch Terrace House with her while he still occasionally typed away, and at other times dropped the act altogether. She could see sweatpants there that one time and it felt a little like a victory.
That one time when he took the laptop into the kitchen with him as he prepared his way too fancy dinner and she ate her third ice cream cup, and watched him navigate around the place as she explained to him calmly who was dating who and who was also really into them.
Was this weird? This wasn’t weird, right?
Staring at Luna long enough, in the beginning of this weird thing, Mamoru had been kind of convinced he once saved Luna from a truck when he was younger, but Usagi wasn’t sure if he was shitting her or trying to flirt or whatnot.
She’d scrapped the flirting notion soon enough, though. Seven weeks in, Usagi knew him better than that after hours and hours of near-constant video chat.
He didn’t seem like the flirting type. In fact, he was absolutely proper. Not at all as forward as some of the guys she usually talked to, and for a hot minute she wondered if he might be gay, and frowned at the way her stomach flopped to that.
He did tease her a lot. But unless he flirted like he was in second grade (and he was just way too pretty for that), she guessed she was probably not his type.
Either way, a few weeks in, he was kind of… the best thing that could have happened to her in this situation. Regardless of the fact he was dramatically, ridiculously nice to look at through that screen, he was also the novel toy in an endless sea of boring four walls, and at the same time groundingly, preciously calm in a this ambiguous new weird world that was both freaking her out and boring her to death.
“Fine,” she sighed, and clicked on the documentary he’d picked out, scowling at his victorious, smug grin. Him in his single’s apartment in Azabujuban, and her in hers, both in bed and counting down from three to click play at the same time, both on different ends of the same train station, so close and yet so far.
Had she ever run into him on the street and just not known? Had they been on the same train? They must have, right? Working at the same place in Ikebukuro, living so close together?
She really wished so hard she would have known him sooner. Wished so hard she’d had him all her life.
“You eat like a preschooler left home alone for too long,” Mamoru scolded her and her supercup blueberry cheesecake as he moved so confidently and prettily around his kitchen once more.
“You just don’t know what’s good. This is the best ice cream in the world,” she said, dug her spoon in the right way - the way she got ice cream, cookie crumbles, cheesecake and blueberry jelly on her spoon in exactly the right ratio, stuck it in her mouth exaggeratedly, and mmhhed about it way too much.
He scoffed and cut his vegetables.
“Besides,” Usagi mumbled, and picked up her Switch again. “I can’t cook.”
She saw him look at her, but didn’t look back. Only when he resumed his chopping did she turn her Switch around to the screen for him to see.
“Look,” Usagi announced proudly. “I’m wearing your clothes!”
Mamoru frowned, all the confusion fluttering across that pretty, pretty face, and leaned closer to the screen with a furrowed brow to the backdrop of his steaming kitchen, only for his facial features to dissolve into a full body glower once he saw what he was supposed to see - and she dissolved into helpless giggles.
Because her avatar was wearing the ugly green jacket and purple pants combo he’d only worn once, four weeks into this, and she had not stopped teasing him about henceforth.
When she answered her call sniffling, he was all wide-eyed concern and soothing voice.
But this was a pandemic, and her mom’s friend was in the hospital, and she couldn’t go home to hug her Mama who was worried, and this was all really, really scary when she stopped to think about it, and today she’d stopped to think about it.
And she’d also gone into work to get all her work mail like she had to once per week, and no one was there but their secretary at the admissions desk, the whole usually so bustling building an absolute ghost town, and she’d now gotten so used to it and also, she was all out of supercup blueberry cheesecake and the supermarket she did her weekly shop at didn’t have any.
And he listened while she cried for both the big and scary and the small and mundane things about this that felt so weirdly alike in level of tear-worthiness.
When her phone rang and she read his name, a day later, she was confused for a second. He’d never actually called her outside of zoom.
She picked up on the third ring, and his voice carried like he was somewhere outdoors.
“Check your door,” he said, and his voice was … so very sweet.
“Just check it,” he repeated with a small chuckle.
And so she padded along the hardwood floor with her phone tucked between her shoulder and chin, stepped down into her genkan and opened her door with a fluttering heart. For a brief, insane second thinking she would find him there.
He wasn’t, of course. No one was.
But instead, there was a big plastic bag hanging from her doorknob.
She frowned, lifted it off of it, and gasped right into it.
It was filled to the brim with cups and cups of frozen supercup blueberry cheesecake.
“What?!” she screeched into her phone, shocked. Moved.
“I was doing my weekly shopping anyway,” he said, almost sheepishly.
She carried it into the kitchen. But when she unpacked it, screeching into her phone, her heart jumped. Because it wasn’t only her favorite ice cream.
There were also two boxes of tupperware filled with homemade food. And a note on top with heating instructions written in the neatest script she’d ever laid eyes on. And it all clogged up her throat almost painfully.
And yet, instead of thanking him profusely, instead of bursting into tears, she whispered,
“You were… You were here?”
It came out so oddly sad.
"Ok, how do I visit you?”
She started almost violently, staring wide-eyed at her screen when his video finally caught up and switched on, too.
And then she deflated when he held up a Nintendo Switch of his own.
“What?!” she screeched, hopping with her naked knees on her bed and lifting herself up as if she wanted to jump into her screen. “You actually bought one?!”
He shrugged, gave her that small, secretive, infuriatingly ambiguous smile.
“Yeah,” Mamoru said, Nook Inc. already babbling from his screen. “You need to walk me through this.”
“Is this weird?” she asked with her cheek resting in her folded arms, her eyes too close to the screen.
She didn’t even pretend to want to do anything else tonight.
“Why should it be weird?” He was gazing right back at her. Maybe even the same way.
She wanted so badly to crawl through that screen.
She was the most honest and the most stupid when she was sleepy and on the phone in the dark in her bed.
“Mhmmm?” He breathed back. Sleepy and rumbly and making her belly coil just thinking how he looked lying in his bed in the dark, his phone next to him with her voice, too.
Deep, deep, rhythmic breaths. Did he fall asleep?
“What if…” she dared anyway. “What if I like you?” she whispered. “Like really, really liked you.”
And his breath stuttered and he didn’t say anything, just breathed on, slow and deep, but she was suddenly sure he was awake.
It was more than two months and two weeks into this nightmare world when she got the dreaded call from the local branch of her public health department.
The one lone woman who manned the desk at their office building was infected. The one person she saw once per week. Who they all saw once per week. They all had to go and get tested.
The procedure itself felt so weirdly novel and routine at once. She stood in line at a small hut in front of Juuban General Hospital, right in front, plastic flaps and plexiglass screens. Someone in protective gear handed out swabs and she had to stand in front of one of the screens and two mirrors as she put it down, down, down her throat, another down her nose, a doctor watching through the screen if she did it right.
And then she put her mask back on, got a slip with an ID and the instructions when to check for results, and walked back, and wondered all the while if Mamoru might be anywhere near. He needed to get tested, too, after all.
She found out she tested negative two hours after he did.
He smiled big and bright into her screen and all the while her heart hammered.
It took her a little while to voice the thought.
“Hey…” she said, and licked her lips. She was trying so hard at nonchalance and knew she was failing spectacularly. “You don’t have it,” she said like a dummy.
“Yeah…?” he said with a small smile, the one that lifted higher on one side and his eyebrow right along. The one that said, ‘Am I missing something or are you being dumb again?’
“I don’t have it, either,” she said slowly.
And slowly, so, so, slowly, judging by how his features slipped, he finally seemed to get what she was trying to hint at.
But he said nothing, just stared at her a little slack-jawed, and so she bit her lip and said it anyway.
“Do you… want to…” she started, voice trembling, “want to come over?”
Mamoru was at her door half an hour later and wearing something else than he did when she saw him on zoom - something way more chic than sweatpants and a T-shirt. And he was smelling like fresh shower.
“Wow,” she breathed like a dumbass instead of saying ‘Hi’.
“What?” he said with a frown, and it shot through her.
Because this was his voice. This was him. Here. Here.
She swallowed. “I… didn’t realise you were so tall,” she said like an absolute weirdo.
But his lips crooked up, and he ran a hand through his hair like she’d seen him do a lot.
“I didn’t realise you were so short.”
She frowned. Frowned, frowned, frowned. Dug her hands into her cute sundress because obviously, she’d changed as well, and frowned as she watched him walk around her small apartment with his hands stuffed into his pockets and so, so mute.
They usually never ran out of anything to talk about. And yet now they couldn’t seem to find the words, and so he moved, and moved, and moved. Looked at trinkets and photos and her unimpressive bookshelf full of shoujo manga, and never once into her eyes.
And yet her stupid heart was running away from her.
Her eyes zeroed in on his fingers as they brushed along her swiveling chair, at the way his long legs folded into it. In her space. It was only when Luna hopped into his lap that he barked out a laugh, as if he’d forgotten she existed, and met her eyes in surprised delight.
Here. He was here. Luna in his lap where she usually sat. Right there. His ridiculously long fingers carding through her cat’s fur. He swiveled around in her chair, looked at her shelf that he only ever saw through his screen, right behind where he now sat, and seemed to realise the same.
And when she met his eyes, she stood way closer to him, and his eyes were much, much wider.
Luna meowed loudly in protest and jumped when he lurged from her chair. When his hands flew into Usagi’s hair and cradled her face and his lips pretty much crashed into hers and she whimpered and melted at the spot.
And so did he, when she walked him slowly, slowly back to her bed and he collapsed on top of her, and she decided she wouldn’t spend the rest of this quarantine alone, and she also would never ever again stop kissing this man.
