"You did a lot to make me feel welcome in a time where the concept of /friendship/ was still very unfamiliar. It... means a lot."
“Ah ... Did I?” Their walk along the Samegawa is long despite the chill air that usually encourages him to hurry home as quickly as possible. Back then he’d seen Naoto’s Shadow and understood in a way that he hadn’t with the others. Maybe it was because he’d spent the better part of a year at that point caring fiercely about all the people he promised not to get close to, learning to pick out insecurities and draw them out into the open so that he might try to soothe them, but ...
There was something about Naoto’s struggle back then. There’s something about it now. “Well ... Making friends is hard.” As he walks, Yu casts his eyes first out at the water, then to the ground a bit beyond her, as if he can’t quite look her in the eyes just yet. “You have to open yourself up, even when it means you might get hurt. That’s that hardest part.” Yu pauses, lips slightly apart, as if there was something else he was going to add. He turns his gaze forward again. “When I first came to Inaba, I promised that I wouldn’t get close to anyone. Because of that.” His voice is impossibly soft, barely a whisper over the winter breeze. His eyes are lifted, focused on something far on the horizon. “They saved me from that. That’s why I...”
It almost makes him ache to talk about himself. He shouldn’t turn the focus on his own difficulties when Naoto is expressing such gratitude ... But when he looks at her, she’s watching him, too. Steady. Interested. Encouraging. His chest tightens with an unfamiliar anxiety before he finishes, weaker than he’d like a leader to sound, “Isn’t it great to have friends...?”
