Chapter Text
Muichiro shouldn’t get his hopes up.
Its plumage is right, its size is right, and the season is right. But warblers are tricky like that. They all look right if you delude yourself enough. Muichiro squints into his binoculars, but he doesn’t expect it to tell him anything. The only way to tell the species of warblers apart is-
The bird tips back its head and begins to chatter. And Muichiro is not given to such displays, but a wide, slow smile spreads across his face.
It pauses, starts up again, each burst of sound like the phrase of a song. The perfectly ordinary and nearly-identical species he was worried this bird might belong to don’t phrase their calls that way.
His gut was not wrong about this Kamchatka Leaf Warbler.
Normally, he’d stop to jot it down somewhere. At least, given how unusual it is to spot that species this far south, he’d report the sighting to the database he likes. But Muichiro does not do either of those things. He keeps his binoculars trained on that nondescript brown blob and that smile stays firmly stretched across his face.
It doesn’t matter that it looks no different than the Japanese Leaf Warblers he sees almost every day. It’s not. This is something altogether more exciting. This is a bird that probably hatched far to the north, Sakhalin or the westernmost reaches of the Russian mainland, and then got lost enough to wind up all the way down here in the park nearest his university in Tokyo, and that is something worth paying attention to.
Maybe the only thing worth paying attention to.
Muichiro is not thinking about the fact that he’s still smiling when he makes it back to the Wisteria Sharehouse. He is also not thinking about the binoculars still hanging around his neck, tells he’d usually think to stash away before he went back home. He doesn’t need to field the irritating questions they would inevitably provoke. But today, Muichiro’s head is full of the Kamchatka Leaf Warbler, and he walks through the front door and into the kitchen on the way to his attic bedroom without realizing that it’s far from empty.
“Muichiro?” asks a voice it doesn’t initially occur to Muichiro to try to place. “What’s up?”
At first he lets the sound of his name bounce off of him, which is what he usually does. But then it’s called again. Then a gentle, calloused hand touches his shoulder.
“Muichiro,” Mitsuri asks again, “what’s up?”
Oh, Muichiro thinks miserably. People live here, don’t they.
“Hello,” he says, with as little emotion as he can manage, because perhaps if he can exhibit one social grace he’ll be exempt from all the others.
“Hey,” Mitsuri says, then, “what’re the binoculars for?”
Muichiro reddens. “Why are my binoculars of interest?”
“Well, you had to have been looking at somethin’, didn’t you?”
Muichiro looks warily at Mitsuri for a moment.
As far as housemates go, Mitsuri is all right. She’s noisy, but she lets him eat her cooking sometimes. And her obligations to the gymnastics team keep her out of the house so much that he finds her excess of energy much more manageable than he might if he were constantly subjected to it. She’s definitely not going to make fun of him.
But she’ll also tell everyone, because that’s the kind of person Mitsuri is, and this would be horrific beyond comprehension.
“No,” he tells her.
Then she gives up, blessedly, and he retreats up the stairs. He’s got an assignment for his Python class, and sure, maybe he’d prefer to bask in the Kamchatka Leaf Warbler for hours, but there’s stuff to do. There’s always stuff to do. Mitsuri, if she is wise, will know this and refrain from asking any further questions.
If he would be so lucky.
**
“What does no mean?” Obanai’s eyes narrow. “He was doing something.”
“He obviously didn’t want to talk about it.” Mitsuri pauses to pull another caramel out of the box, examining the candy as she unwraps it and tries to decide how best to answer. “But I can’t imagine he was really doing anything shady, can you?”
“Hm,” Shinobu cuts in, reaching across the kitchen island to steal one of Mitsuri’s caramels. “I wouldn’t think so, either.”
Obanai’s expression is unchanged. “Then what was he doing walking around with binoculars?”
“I don’t know, couldn’t it have been anything?” Mitsuri tries to smile. “There are all kinds of things you can do with binoculars, you know?”
Still, Obanai looks troubled. “Are there?”
“You sure are worried about this, Iguro,” Shinobu says with a smile that fools neither of them. “You wouldn’t happen to know something about our little friend that we don’t?”
Obanai flushes. “It’s not like I talk to him.”
“But?” Shinobu prompts.
“I don’t know anything, it’s just weird.”
Mitsuri gives him one of those looks that always make him turn bright-red. “I bet he was just too embarrassed to tell me.”
Obanai can’t even look at either of the girls. “What? That he was looking through people’s windows?”
“I doubt it’s that, Iguro,” Shinobu says lightly.
“I didn’t-“
When Shinobu’s smile is just a little too sweet, she starts to look like a shark. Even Mitsuri, who’s not the subject of her censure, flushes. “I’m sure your lady’s honor is perfectly uncompromised.”
Mitsuri has never seen Obanai so red in the face. She doubts he’s ever seen her so red, either.
“Don’t be mean, Shinobu,” Mitsuri chides her, but her voice is the only thing steady about her. “It’s not like-“
“Maybe you should ask him,” Shinobu interrupts her, turning to go. “Maybe he’d open up a little more to one of the guys.”
Then she’s gone, and Obanai is trying valiantly not to look at Mitsuri, and Mitsuri is trying valiantly not to look at him.
“Um,” Obanai stammers. “Uh.”
“It’s...it’s okay,” Mitsuri manages to reply. “You know how Shinobu is.”
“Yeah.”
“He wasn’t doing anything, I’m sure.”
“I’m not.”
“Well, I am.”
Obanai opens and closes his mouth like a fish until he seems to conclude that he’s not going to get anywhere with this and then concedes with a sigh.
**
The people on the BirdLog message board are very excited indeed about Muichiro’s Kamchatka Leaf Warbler.
He’s very good this time, and he doesn’t log on until his Python homework is submitted, but it’s just about all he’s thinking about until he can. Then he finally gets to log his sighting, and the flurry of excited messages from fellow bird enthusiasts keeps him happily occupied until such time as Uzui decides that Muichiro’s life is just too good to be allowed to continue this way.
“Oi,” he says, throwing Muichiro’s door nearly off its hinges. “It true you’re a peeping Tom?”
Muichiro pales.
“A what?”
**
“That would’ve been a story,” Uzui says, slinging his arm over the back of the couch. “Our little prodigy having that kind of side to him.”
Then he claps Muichiro’s shoulder with such force that he winces, and Mitsuri gives him a worried look. Muichiro is left to wonder how it is that none of the more sound-minded housemates have shown up yet – just Mitsuri, who apparently started all of this, and Obanai, who follows her everywhere whether he wants anyone to know it or not – to remind them that this whole display is a horribly inappropriate use of their advantage in age.
Shinazugawa would probably drag Uzui out by the ear.
But, of course, no one appears, and this does not, in fact, occur.
“I still don’t know why I’m here,” Muichiro says flatly.
“My fault,” Mitsuri says, smiling the same what-can-you-do smile she gives her teammates when she lands with a foot out of bounds during her floor routine. “I just wondered why you didn’t want to tell me why you had binoculars earlier, and I...got a little curious.”
Muichiro’s face burns. “Curious?”
“Well, it’s just that you don’t talk much about yourself, and I really wanted to know...”
“And then Iguro got it in his head you were peeping on his girl,” Sanemi adds from his room down the hall, poking his head through the door and then withdrawing before he slams it again.
Apparently this is all the assistance that Shinazugawa intends to give. A pity. Usually he’s good about that, telling off the older ones who get a little too comfortable to remember that Muichiro’s no older than the average high school second-year.
Not this time, evidently.
“I told him you weren’t,” Mitsuri insists. “I’m sorry that-“
“I was birdwatching.”
Muichiro’s not entirely sure what he could possibly have done to give anybody the idea that he was some kind of pervert. He’s also not sure how one exchange with Mitsuri in which he revealed absolutely nothing could have snowballed this way. But there’s little hope now of inducing everyone to leave him alone, unless they know how uneventful the answer really is.
So he takes a very deep breath and adds, “I was thinking about the Kamchatka Leaf Warbler.”
Six blank stares meet Muichiro’s.
“It’s very rare in this area,” he mumbles, wishing he could fold in on himself until he shrank to the size of an ant. “I got distracted.”
Everyone is still quiet, which would be a very welcome thing if Muichiro weren’t so certain it was soon going to be followed by a barrage of comments. Maybe laughter. He can’t say he honestly knows his housemates well enough yet to trust that they’re not going to.
In a way, Muichiro knows he ought to be grateful for the Wisteria Houseshare. The rent is exceedingly low, the group there had taken him in when the university refused to because he couldn’t find another student who was not yet of age to share a room with, and they’re all very grateful to have gotten an eighth housemate to put up in the attic after the last one graduated. He has his own room up in the attic and somebody always has extra food to pass along.
But it is also a house inhabited by seven much-older strangers who have all known each other for no less than two years each, some of them much longer. Some are four or five years his senior. Most treat him like a child. It’s full of unspoken agreements and inside jokes that Muichiro can’t begin to unravel. Uzui, more than once, has tried to pay Muichiro to complete any assignment of his that involves the smallest bit of math. And they all have the strangest ideas about getting to know him.
Frankly, Muichiro prefers the birds.
It’s not the coursework that makes arriving at university two years ahead of the typical schedule troublesome. That part is all right.
It’s all of these noisy tall people who think he’s fun to play with.
“Wait,” Mitsuri says. “Birdwatching?”
Muichiro nods.
“Stop,” she gasps. “That’s so sweet.”
“Huh...?”
Muichiro doesn’t know what’s happening yet when Mitsuri squeals and throws herself across the couch, ignoring Uzui’s awkward presence between them, to fling her arms around Muichiro’s neck.
“That is,” she says, “the cutest thing I’ve ever heard in my life!”
Iguro is glaring.
“Kanroji-san,” Muichiro says timidly.
“I told you guys,” Mitsuri goes on. “I told you!”
“Kanroji-san,” he repeats, “would you please let go of me?”
**
The Wisteria Sharehouse is full of go-getters.
Sometimes that means they’re never in. Mitsuri seems to come home only to eat, and Muichiro doesn’t think he’s ever seen her study between practice, conditioning, meets, and “mandatory socials” (he’s willing to bet money Mitsuri arranges them all herself) with her gymnastics teammates. Shinobu logs more hours in the lab at her research job than he thinks is likely legal. Sanemi works nearly full-time hours, Kyoujuro is on the boards of about six different clubs, and no one even wants to ask where Uzui is always slinking off to.
But sometimes it means they’re never out, which means that Muichiro is never quite alone around here.
He’s usually in his bedroom when not out chasing rare birds. It’s as much a necessity as it is a choice: first-year science classes are notoriously designed to weed out the students who won’t be able to keep up. But, truth be told, he would rather not be up in the attic if he had the choice.
It’s drafty, a little dusty, and not very well-lit. He’s grateful for the privacy he gets up here, but that’s about it. And that’s what makes it so troublesome that he isn’t the only person in the Wisteria Sharehouse who tends to stick close to home.
Practically every time Muichiro comes downstairs on a weekday before six in the evening, he’s met with a beady stare from Giyuu at the kitchen table directly across from the staircase. It never lasts long – just enough for Giyuu to identify the strange individual who’s just appeared from the heavens of the upstairs and then turn back to his textbook or his laptop or his chicken-scratch notes – but it unnerves Muichiro all the same.
And sometimes he risks coming into the kitchen for a glass of water to find Iguro getting out the mice he feeds his pet snake, which is even more unnerving.
It had only taken a few such incidents for Muichiro to invest in one of those filtering water bottles he could fill from the bathroom sink.
And those are the quiet hours. As soon as it hits six, workdays and sports practices and club meetings tend to wrap up, and people tend to start trickling back in until Muichiro has absolutely no choice but to disappear into the attic if he wants any peace and quiet.
He could, of course, try to go out onto the ratty old balcony next to Shinobu’s room. But it should probably be condemned, and Shinobu would never let him, and besides, it’s too cold out this time of year. Sometimes he’s willing to bear the risk of Giyuu or Iguro passing by in the middle of the day in order to study where there’s light that did not come from a bulb. At night, there’s absolutely no chance of this. So: the attic it is.
But not tonight.
He’s supposed to be studying for a physics exam in two weeks. And he’s said this. Everyone is supposed to be leaving him alone. But he doesn’t quite make it back upstairs in time, and this is a mistake he thinks he’s going to live to regret.
There may be two weeks until the exam, but Muichiro hardly thinks he can afford a lengthy dinner break. And he loses track of so much time, eating Kyoujurou’s extra weekly meal prep at a snail’s pace while he works at a problem he can’t get his head around, that it’s well past six by the time he realizes he should be in hiding by now.
There is a dry-erase calendar stuck with magnets to the refrigerator door that Kyoujurou had intended to keep track of everyone’s schedules. In truth, he and Mitsuri are the only people who ever put anything on it, and by most of the house it goes soundly ignored. But if Muichiro had bothered to look at it, he would know that Kyoujurou’s club fair commitment that day ended at six-thirty. Maybe then he would’ve been a little more vigilant.
But no.
When Kyoujurou makes it back home, Muichiro is so absorbed in this impossible equation that he doesn’t even hear him enter. And he doesn’t know to anticipate the frighteningly strong hand that claps his shoulder when the offending housemate sneaks up behind him.
“Muichiro-kun!” Kyoujurou greets him, at his usual volume of about-twelve-decibels-too-loud. “Look at that focus. Love to see it!”
Muichiro would not ordinarily say he believes in any such thing as a soul. At this precise moment, though, he might have to make an exception, because his has never been so determined to exit his body.
“Rengoku-senpai,” he says, the flatness of his voice at total odds with the feeling that he might go into cardiac arrest and keel over any moment, “please don’t sneak up on me.”
“Ah, sorry.” Kyoujurou chuckles. “I’m not used to seeing you downstairs in the evenings.”
“I’m studying.”
“I see that!”
Kyoujurou, Muichiro has concluded, is not capable of speaking without implying an exclamation mark at the end of every sentence. This tendency is doing nothing for Muichiro’s nerves, which, it must be said, were already not doing especially well.
“Yes,” Muichiro says, closing his laptop, and then his textbook over a pencil like a bookmark. He does not, in his haste, remember that he actually never finished his food.
This is his second mistake.
“What?” Kyoujurou asks, apparently astonished. “I haven’t had a meal prep come out this well in months!”
Oh.
He did make these bulgogi bowls.
Muichiro had blissfully forgotten all about that.
“It was very good,” he says, though if he’s honest he has no memory at all of the taste. Eating at all was meant more as a concession to his brain’s annoying need for fuel than anything else. “Thank you for letting me eat some.”
“Some?” Kyoujurou peers into the half-empty bowl. “You’re a growing boy, Muichiro, you need-“
“He wants to be left alone.” A huff, then. “Obviously.”
Shinazugawa came back from his work shift an hour ago, but this is the first Muichiro is seeing of him. Now he’s rummaging through the fridge for something, and Muichiro watches him with interest he doesn’t have so he won’t have to meet Kyoujurou’s eyes.
“He’s got to take care of himself,” Kyoujurou says. He is using the kind of voice now that makes it incredibly apparent why he’d been a co-founder of a club whose sole function is to wait around outside of parties to give free rides to drunk students too plastered to make it home. “Someone’s got to make sure he learns his life skills.”
“What are you, his dad?”
“And he does this all the time, you know, forgetting to eat.” Kyoujurou, not having learned from the first time, claps Muichiro’s shoulder again. “A boy can’t do nothing but study, you know.”
What wonderful luck it is for Muichiro that Iguro decides to wander into the room just in time to catch that sentence and nothing else.
“He doesn’t only study,” Iguro says, implying in his tone that he’s rather unhappy to have learned this fact. “Apparently he goes birdwatching.”
Muichiro concludes that this would be a lovely time for any available higher power to strike him down.
“Oh?”
Muichiro dares to glance up. He should have known not to, because the sparkle in Kyoujurou’s eyes means absolutely nothing that he wants to think about.
“Iguro,” Shinazugawa says sharply.
“What? He said it himself.”
“Iguro.”
Shinazugawa actually likes Iguro, as far as Muichiro is aware. Shinobu says this is because both of them are haters. So this rare show of hostility is of mild interest, and from it Muichiro gathers that Iguro has probably crossed some line.
Not that that means anything to Muichiro when, as far as he’s concerned, everybody here has crossed about eight of them in the last five minutes.
“Really!” Kyoujurou says after a moment, no less chipper for the awkward silence. “I had no idea you had such interesting hobbies, Muichiro-kun!”
Do you always talk like you’re leading a pep rally?, Muichiro thinks. But this is a disguise-thought, one he sees through fairly readily, because his face doesn’t usually heat up if what he really feels is disdain.
He’s probably supposed to say something about this, but he does not. He’s desperate enough to shove another mouthful of Kyoujurou’s now-lukewarm bulgogi into his mouth just for the excuse.
“Fresh air is very good for you,” Kyoujurou goes on. Leave it to him to fill any silence to overflowing. “It’s good to hear that you don’t spend all your time up in that attic.”
“It probably has asbestos,” Iguro says in what sounds oddly like agreement.
“Probably!” Kyoujurou chuckles. “Well, what’s life without a little risk?”
“Now you’re contradicting yourself,” Iguro says flatly.
“No need to play the contrarian, Iguro, we’ve got enough of those.” Kyoujurou claps Iguro’s shoulder this time. “But isn’t it good to know our kouhai has-“
“No,” Iguro interrupts him.
“-a healthy work-life balance?”
At which juncture Muichiro finally makes up his mind to disappear.
Work-life balance. Right.
**
Somebody finds Muichiro’s BirdLog account.
This should not be remotely possible. There is absolutely nothing on that account that identifies him. There must be someone – truth be told, Muichiro can’t for the life of him remember what anybody here is majoring in – who studies computer science and knows how to do such suspicious things with them.
Because otherwise he wouldn’t go downstairs the next morning to an interrogation.
“Morning, Mui-kun,” Mitsuri starts, innocent enough. “Or should I say Kasumitori_003?”
Muichiro flushes out to the tips of his ears.
“Aw, it’s nothing to be embarrassed by.” Mitsuri’s hands curl around a steaming mug of tea. “You’ve got a pretty impressive life list.”
There is something so deeply surreal about hearing Mitsuri use birding jargon that for a moment he simply blinks at her. The implication that she’s been reading up makes him feel like crawling under the floor tiles and curling up there to die, but as this is presently not an option, he opts for his usual unresponsiveness.
“Aw, no credit for knowing what a life list is?” Mitsuri sighs good-naturedly. “Fine, fine. I’ll leave you alone.”
Except she only manages to do it for ten minutes.
“Say, Mui-kun,” she says, long after Muichiro has forgotten she was there. “When do you usually go?”
“Huh?”
“Birdwatching?”
“I...I don’t.”
Mitsuri frowns. “Muichiro.”
“Have a schedule,” he says.
“Oh.”
“I go whenever.”
“Hm, I see.”
“Yeah.”
“Well, I’d love to tag along sometime.”
Muichiro eyes her out of the corners of his eyes. Somehow he can’t imagine Mitsuri standing still long enough to find a bird, much less identify it. And he really doubts she would enjoy it very much.
But Muichiro is not so dense that he can’t recognize an effort at kindness when he sees it, so he doesn’t say this. She’ll forget about it, anyway, and he doubts their schedules will ever overlap even if she doesn’t.
“Okay,” is all he says.
**
The passage of time does not land on Muichiro the way it does everybody else.
With little to occupy his days but schoolwork, the days he doesn’t have classes don’t feel especially different from the days when he does. All of it’s just spent studying, anyway. So he doesn’t pick Sunday morning as his time to go to his favorite bird-spotting park because it’s a day off or anything like that.
It’s no more a day off than a Tuesday. He’ll have to get back to studying when he’s had his fill of not being in the attic. But the weather is nice this morning, and even Muichiro isn’t made of stone. He’d like to see the sun a little before it disappears for the winter.
Just his luck that Sunday’s also the one day Mitsuri has no gymnastics obligations whatsoever.
He’s not even thinking about her when he stops in the kitchen for a snack on the way out. It’s why he’s already wearing his binoculars around his neck, not imagining there’s any reason to hide them at eight in the morning on a Sunday. Too bad he forgot that early-morning workouts have made Mitsuri a fiendishly early riser.
“Oh!”, she greets him, before he’s even noticed she’s there. “Are you going out birding?”
Well, at least she used the right term.
“No,” he says.
“Muichiro.”
He flushes and says nothing.
“I won’t come if you really don’t want me to,” Mitsuri tells him. “But wouldn’t it be nice to have somebody to go with?”
No, he rather quickly decides. But he also has no desire to be rude, and in his failure to account for her probable presence, Mitsuri won fair and square. So he shakes his head silently, ignores her excited squealing, musters all his patience when she dashes off calling something about Iguro, and returns a moment later with the said individual looking rather worse for the wear.
The comments that everybody makes under their breath about Iguro and his particular fondness for a certain invader of Muichiro’s peaceful bird walk must have some merit if he’s actually dragged himself out of bed for this.
Not that he looks especially happy about it, granted. But Muichiro doesn’t see his eyes drift from Mitsuri’s face once – not on the walk to the train station, not as they ride the four stops out to the station, not once they arrive at the park. He doesn’t ask for an explanation of what birdwatching entails, he doesn’t complain about its uselessness as an activity. He doesn’t even give Muichiro any black looks.
Amazing.
Mitsuri may be a horrible birder, asking no questions and looking approximately nowhere that a bird might reasonably be expected to be, but she is clearly very powerful.
Muichiro briefly considers leaving them at the duck pond. But this fails utterly, because the Mandarin Ducks are starting to fly in for the winter, and although it’s the nondescript, challenging birds that Muichiro likes best, there are very few things more satisfying to look at than a Mandarin Duck.
They’re lovely birds. Even Mitsuri appears to appreciate this, even though she earns herself a deadly glare from Muichiro for insinuating that next time they all ought to bring a loaf of bread to feed them.
“They’re wild animals,” he informs her. “And bread is bad for their digestion.”
“Oh.” Mitsuri looks a little disappointed, then brightens. “Well, is there something healthier to feed them?”
“No.”
Peas, actually. But he’d rather not enable Mitsuri to intervene in the natural life cycle of these poor ducks just because she thinks they’re cute.
“Peas,” Iguro says after a pensive moment.
“Don’t feed wildlife,” Muichiro counters.
“Peas.”
“Wow, really? Peas?”
“Peas,” Iguro says for the third time.
“Gosh, how do you even know that?”
Iguro shrugs.
“So cool,” Mitsuri says. “I dunno where you even keep all that stuff you have up there.” She taps Iguro’s head and giggles. “Sure doesn’t look like it fits all the stuff you know.”
Muichiro does not believe in spontaneous human combustion. It’s stupid and it’s pseudoscientific and he just doesn’t go in for things like that. But it’s also clearly about to happen to Iguro, so maybe he ought to reevaluate that position.
After he makes his exit, of course.
They’ll be able to say they saw some birds, at least. They’ll get the impression that birding is a matter of sitting on the bench in front of the duck pond mooning at each other and come back reporting an outing so utterly unexciting that no one else could possibly want to join. It’ll really work out beautifully if they just stay where they are.
But Muichiro just doesn’t have that kind of luck, it seems. He’s got his binoculars trained on a particularly handsome kingfisher in a copse of trees next to the pond when the telltale sound of giggling comes back into earshot.
“Ooh, you see something good?” Mitsuri calls, and the kingfisher’s head turns.
Muichiro hisses under his breath. He’s lucky it didn’t fly away.
“Shush,” he whispers. “You’re going to scare them off.”
“Oh,” she whispers back. “Sorry.”
“It’s a kingfisher,” he says, somewhat in spite of himself. “I think the same one comes here pretty often.”
“A kingfisher.” Mitsuri says the name like she’s trying it on for size. “Cool name, don’t you think?”
“Hm.”
Iguro, blessedly, does not have anything to add to this conversation.
“You always come to this park?” Mitsuri asks.
“Kanroji-san,” he asks in return, “are you even looking?”
“Well, I don’t have binoculars, so...”
“It’s not a microbe,” Muichiro says. “You can see it with the naked eye.”
“Did you just make a joke?”
“No...?”
“You totally just made a joke!” Mitsuri’s voice, to his immense vexation, rises in pitch again. “I’ve never heard you do that before!”
“Kanroji-san.” Muichiro summons all his patience, which is truly not much. “The point of birdwatching is to watch the birds.”
“Even I know that.”
“So if you would like to come with me,” he says, “then I would like you to do that.”
**
Mitsuri comes away from her morning out with one impressively bad picture of a kingfisher which is zoomed all the way in and nearly unidentifiable as a bird at all. She proudly parades it in front of everyone she comes across for the next four hours, some of them twice.
Muichiro starts for the attic around the time she is excitedly proselytizing about the wonders of birding (which she barely even did) to a bemused Uzui.
“And,” she says triumphantly, “Muichiro even says there’s a flock of feral parakeets around here!”
Uzui might mean to say something to that, but he doesn’t get the chance. Neither does Muichiro go up to his room. Such is the common reaction when Tomioka Giyuu lifts his head from his usual work at the kitchen table during somebody else’s conversation and looks at the people conversing in such a way as to suggest he might actually have been listening.
“Feral like no one is feeding them,” he asks, “or feral like they attack people?”
It really is the most bafflingly dumb question.
The fact that it was pressing enough to Giyuu to prompt him to speak is even more baffling, but also perhaps the most remarkable thing Muichiro has ever heard of.
He’s horrified to find himself getting ready to explain.
**
The Wisteria Sharehouse is no stranger to rumor, and Muichiro knows most of the important ones by now. That Uzui has no less than four girlfriends whose names he will not disclose to anyone. That any food that disappears from the fridge is being fed to Iguro’s snake, and that Mitsuri is just taking the fall for it because she likes him too much for her own good. That Shinobu is keeping arsenic tablets for blind dates who take liberties in that locked metal box in her closet. That Sanemi blocked Shinobu’s older sister, whose graduation had left the open bed Muichiro now occupies, because he wants to call her so badly he’s practically purple in the face with it and he won’t admit it even to himself. That Muichiro himself is an orphan and some shady billionaire is paying for his upkeep because he’s a child genius.
There are lots of rumors around here. Lots of them are true, and a handful or not. And now word is getting around the Wisteria Sharehouse that Muichiro knows where to find a flock of killer parakeets.
Even Shinazugawa is eager to learn more about this. It may be the only thing he’s approached Muichiro for directly since he arrived here.
This is precisely why he didn’t want to inform Mitsuri where he’d been that day she caught him coming in with binoculars around his neck. But there’s very little he can do about that now, and the consequences of being careless must be borne whether he feels like it or not.
Mostly by ignoring them. This is a solid tactic.
But it does not work, because tucked in amongst all those club board meetings is a three-hour sliver of blank white on Kyoujurou’s part of the weekly calendar beginning at eleven in the morning on Tuesdays. And Muichiro, who lacks a natural gift for sneaking around and incessantly forgets that he’s supposed to check that thing before he comes downstairs to study if he wants to escape with his sanity, is plugging away at physics problems that are only starting to make a little more sense now when Kyoujurou appears wearing athletic clothes and a broad grin.
“You got class comin’ up?” he asks Muichiro, who unwisely admits, “no.”
“Perfect!” Kyojurou beams at him. “I was just thinking it was a nice morning for some fresh air, isn’t it?”
“I’m studying.”
“How long have you been at that, six hours?” Kyoujurou frowns, then grins again. “You could use a break.”
“No, I’m okay.”
“Ah, but wouldn’t you rather go visit your killer parrot friends?”
“Parakeets.” Muichiro doesn’t even look up from his scratch paper as he corrects him. “And they don’t kill anything.”
“Hm, I’m not sure if I should be more disappointed or relieved.”
“Why would you be disappointed...?”
“I was expecting danger, you know. Some real peril.”
“They’re harmless.”
“Ah, well.” He pats Muichiro’s shoulder. “After Mitsuri came back with such glowing reviews...”
Of what?
But Muichiro knows now that this is not a question he ought to ask. Best now just to resign himself, because if there’s one thing besides spreading a rumor that the Wisteria Sharehouse can do, it’s jump on a bandwagon. And all he can do is pretend he doesn’t hear it clattering down the road at his heels. It’ll all blow over, and until then he has little choice but to dodge questions and accept invitations only to show everybody how little they’re going to like his hobby of choice.
It's his own fault, after all.