Chapter Text
Of course it had been Osomatsu to propose the idea. Who else? Still, Choromatsu felt first a wave of apprehension, then a wave of solidarity as glances were exchanged around the room among him and his brothers. The sense that it was not only him and their eldest brother who had had similar ideas cross their mind before was palpable. As usual, there was an implicit understanding among them before anything had even been established.
Osomatsu was shameless to the extreme. Social acceptability and normalcy seemed to have been shoved to the very bottom on his list of priorities. Most of the time it was a detrimental outlook to have, and it could be argued that it was this very mentality that had held the other five of them so far back for so long. But sometimes, it was this same way of thinking and talking and acting that gave the brothers something to rally behind, since it gave voice to the thoughts they tried to ignore.
So far, Choromatsu was too stunned to tell whether this was the good kind of shameless, or the bad.
Eight minutes ago, Osomatsu had entered the upstairs room and announced he had something he wanted to consult with everyone about. Choromatsu had quickly formed a few initial ideas that this ‘something’ could possibly be: it was probably money, or that he had lost something (other than money), or he was just being a little more obnoxious than usual about declaring he was bored and wanted to come up with something to do. Choromatsu figured there was little point to conjecturing any further than that, since his eldest brother rarely beat around the bush about anything, even when it would have been wise to do so.
Uncharacteristically, Osomatsu seemed to be racking his brain for a decent introduction to what he wanted to say. True to his usual self, he had a rough concept he was eager to tell the others about, but had failed to work out any decent way of presenting it ahead of time, and was speaking impromptu before he’d gotten through his first few sentences.
“It’s kinda related to that,” Osomatsu said, pointing to where the whiteboard they’d acquired at some point stood parallel to the west wall of the room. Its usable side wasn’t facing towards them, but Osomatsu’s meaning was clear anyway. There was a crooked graph of sorts drawn in the corner of the whiteboard, sections of which had been erased and re-written several times.
Seven years ago, Osomatsu had entered the upstairs room and announced he had something he wanted to consult with everyone about. They were high schoolers at that time, completely oblivious to what directions their lives were to take in the following years.
Osomatsu loudly apologized for having walked in on Ichimatsu jerking off earlier that day, to which Ichimatsu made no reply. Their first year of high school had been unkind to him, in a way that his family members were able to observe on a daily basis, but that no one knew how to respond to or offer help for. He remained by-and-large silent in almost any situation, and on the occasions he did speak, his voice caught strangely in his throat and came out as if there were scabbed-over scratches being reopened on his vocal chords. His ability to form strings of sentences that made grammatical and logical sense was also suffering, from lack of regular practice. Thus far, Osomatsu had handled this the way he handled most things, the only way he knew how to: by acting like everything was normal. Among the handful of things Ichimatsu felt obligated to reply to, Osomatsu’s apology wasn’t one of them.
Of course, with six pubescent hormonal teenage boys living in one house, walking in on each other was far from a rare occurrence. Osomatsu—who had never once really cared when his left-and-right-handed ventures were interrupted—declared his intent to solve this problem, and hastily drew a graph, the same graph that still rested on the whiteboard in the upstairs room to this day. He made a row for each of their names, in no order other than the order in which the names seemed to have popped into his head. His name was first, Choromatsu’s was second (at which Choromatsu was silently pleased), and so forth, Karamatsu’s being last. He then started to draw columns, got to about ten, examined his work, added a couple more, brought his forearm up to the board as though he were going to erase part of it, paused, then turned around to face his brothers again with a look of self-assurance. Choromatsu looked at his brother’s bad handwriting, rather than at him.
“It’s simple. Kinda like a timesheet. You just indicate when and where you’re gonna do it, make sure nobody else has called it, and then the rest of us won’t go there until it’s clear you’re done. We’ll keep the markings inconsuspicious so mom and dad don’t catch on.” Osomatsu shifted his weight from both feet to one, and swept his gaze across his brother’s faces. “Well?”
Choromatsu first inwardly corrected his brother’s misspelling; he must have meant inconspicuous, or unsuspicious. He then surveyed the other’s faces, before giving any serious thinking space to his own impressions. Todomatsu looked mildly uncomfortable, clearly feeling that this was not a conversation topic he wanted to bring up with any of his brothers, least of all five of them at once. Ichimatsu looked unfazed; on closer inspection, he seemed to be looking nowhere at all, like he was hearing something far-off and was focusing on that instead. Jyushimatsu was, per usual, totally unreadable. Karamatsu was… annoyingly, doing the same thing he was doing, looking left and right to see how he should be acting. He was always like this: he kept quiet until he was certain he’d be on someone’s side, supporting them, as a means of covering up his own indecisiveness. Choromatsu felt pretty confident that if any of his brothers were to argue about the pros and cons of traveling to an underground cave in order to perform a sacrificial blood ritual, he’d hear out both sides impartially until it seemed like someone needed backup.
Having spent those two seconds surveying his brothers, Choromatsu’s instinct to be the follow-up person to Osomatsu’s dialogue—or it could have been Osomatsu telepathically urging him to back him up, it happened too fast for Choromatsu to be sure—prompted him to speak. “Fine. It’s a little awkward, but less so than getting walked in on so often, I think.”
Todomatsu cast him a look, while Jyushimatsu nodded a few times. Then, the younger brother added, “Sure, weirdos. Why not? We can’t possibly get any weirder than we already are, right?” That was about as much assent as they were going to get from him: his deeply internalized need to shame others, even while going along with them, knew no bounds.
Ichimatsu made no reply until Jyushimatsu nudged him, which prompted a shrug from him; he then begrudingly seemed to remember the countless times others had told him they didn’t know what that meant, and shrugged again, but with a slight nod this time. At this, Karamatsu added, “I can feel our brother harmony increasing already.” The unnaturally-deep voice he’d taken to affecting as of late cracked badly during his delivery, and he looked only mildly embarrassed about it.
Osomatsu clapped his hands together, looking satisfied with having fulfilled his role both in getting the agreement of all his brothers on something, and in getting his way.
As became evident over the course of a few short weeks, attempting to schedule jerking off on a time-based scheme was not going to be successful. They were as frisky and hormone-crazy as ever; their endocrine systems playing cruel and unusual jokes on their bodies, their ability to think straight, and on their perception of girls. But trying to schedule a designated time for relieving a fraction of that pent-up sexually-driven stupidity dampened the experience considerably. So times would be reserved then erased later, or forgotten about, or someone would take way too long and prevent others from retrieving things they needed from that room. There was even one time where the brothers watched in horror as their mother returned home, and observed Todomatsu was the only one not downstairs with the others. Despite their best efforts of assuring her he was fine, no need to get him—no wait, he was sick, no need to bother him—no wait, he was taking a nap, no need to wake him up—she went up to check on him. Osomatsu’s shoulders slumped in defeat. Karamatsu looked like he was offering a prayer to a higher power.
The graph fell out of use, but the brothers still retained a newfound sense of respecting each others’ undeniable need to beat off, now that the issue of interrupting each other had been brought so concisely to their attention. Instead, a more casual, verbal method rose out of necessity—it started with Choromatsu (to his now-longstanding regret) declaring in a fit of agitation that he didn’t care any more, he was going upstairs to masturbate, go get your stuff now if you need it, go, and then stormed off. The others, a bit shell-shocked (in their own ways: Osomatsu amused, Karamatsu in awe) at this, watched him go. A couple of them really did go upstairs to grab their backpacks and then scurry back down the stairs to the safety net of the sibling circle, as the door slammed behind them. They looked at each other in silence for a few seconds. Then Ichimatsu let out an ugly snort, which set everyone else off too. The extents they went to suddenly seemed pretty laughable.
The change wasn’t instantaneous, but after that, they basically surrendered themselves to the reality of being six brothers, eight people total, living in a small house, having to constantly share time and space. That wasn’t new: what was, was the newfound ability to almost naturally say, “Could you guys clear out,” or “I’m gonna tie up the bathroom for twenty minutes,” or “I’m thinking of taking a nap soon,” and other such immediately-understood euphemisms. Jyushimatsu and Ichimatsu often forewent the formalities: the former would just run off, or announce “I’m gonna do it!” while holding one of their girly magazines, or something of that sort; the latter would give someone a death stare until they felt obligated enough to say something about it, and it was actually Karamatsu who caught on to that the most quickly, even if he wasn’t the one being stared at.
The brothers fought over pretty much everything you could possibly fight over, so the honest attempt to accommodate for these situations felt almost refreshing to Choromatsu, after he’d recovered somewhat from his despair over the aforementioned episode. His other brothers made it feel pretty normal; and that was, if he was being honest with himself, all it took for it to feel acceptable to him too. He was struck with a certain bizarre feeling at times: like when he noticed the page of the magazine he’d been holding in his right hand was sticky by someone else’s doing, or when they let their conversations trail off into the entirely inappropriate late at night. Such conversations would start with the mundane. Osomatsu bemoaning getting up early tomorrow and asking to copy Choromatsu’s homework; Choromatsu chiding him, but also feeling too comfortable in their futon to put his usual vigor into it; Jyushimatsu asking if he could copy too; Karamatsu humming a lullaby to himself off-tune, which Ichimatsu elbow-jabbed him in the side for. But, if the back-and-forth didn’t die down by a certain point of the night—not any particular time, just some moment at which (Choromatsu conjectured) a shift in circadiam rhythm took place—they could get into some topics that were otherwise never ventured upon.
Which makes it sound much more like a mystical, secretive, soul-searching conversation group than it really was. Topics included whether the others had tasted their own semen or not—Osomatsu, Ichimatsu, and Jyushimatsu had, while Todomatsu said that was gross, Karamatsu admitted it had not occurred to him, and Choromatsu said no (and left out the part that he’d been tempted to several times, but had not gone through with it). Osomatsu tasked them with giving it a go, despite having spent several minutes passionately explaining how gross it was, using an unpalatable variety of recipes and colorful metaphors to describing his experience. Jyushimatsu said he didn’t remember since he’d done it mindlessly when he was 11; Ichimatsu said it could have been worse. They also divulged in intellectual debates over which girl was the hottest out of the grand total of five magazines they’d acquired; what did they think boobs felt like; whether peeing inside a girl was okay or not, and furthermore, would that be hot or not; and how much was a good, standard amount of jizz per orgasm (JPC). Osomatsu recounted his first orgasm, and everyone had to struggle to keep their snorting and giggling down as their eldest brother reenacted his ten-year-old-self (with an affected high-pitched voice) freaking out, thinking he was going to die, and trying to keep the liquid from leaving his body. Ichimatsu said it hadn’t been his first, but he had successfully gotten off humping a pillow, and everyone was genuinely impressed. Even Todomatsu would drop his pretenses and chime in during these conversations, proving that everyone appreciated these late night conferences, found them fairly novel and funny. Choromatsu knew they were being stupid, but it didn’t really matter. It was nice to be in such nonjudgmental, encouraging company; he couldn’t believe he’d found it amongst his own brothers. The dark and the guise of night, the necessary closeness between them due to their shared futon, invited exactly this sort of thing.
By their high school graduation, they had again grown somewhat more self-conscious and secretive about such things. Choromatsu and Todomatsu began to put up resistance once more as they got older, which Karamatsu, unable or unwilling to hold his own, wielded to. Half of them was enough to disrupt the balance of all of them, and so their raunchy after-hour exchanges with each other gradually came to an end. Choromatsu believed this, too, was natural and normal, and felt somewhat uncomfortable looking back and thinking about the things he’d said to his brothers, and what he’d heard his brothers say. It was difficult for him to have a decent handle on how far from the norm a sibling custom like that was, since he was far too self-conscious to venture asking his few school friends about it, so he assumed it was pretty far.
Eight years later, and six seconds ago, Osomatsu had lowered the finger pointed across the room graph-wards and finished talking, and it was during those six seconds that Choromatsu had let the aforementioned memories associated with the graph’s history flit across his mind. He looked at Osomatsu. He realized he hadn’t been breathing quite enough during the period of time he’d been spacing out staring at the self-help book on his lap, before Osomatsu had barged in, eight-years-minus-six-seconds ago. He yawned, sitting up a little bit, and the increased oxygen flow helped bring his vision into focus. “What about it,” Todomatsu asked, not looking up from his phone. He frowned ever so slightly when his phone made a low battery warning noise, but continued scrolling nevertheless.
“I’ve got an idea that’ll help solve our virgin problem.”
This had the intended effect of getting their attention.