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“Something’s up with Weiss and Dad.”
Yonah looks up from her coloring book to see her brother staring out at the garden, a scowl on his face.
It’s one of the few days that all three family members are in the village for the entire day— their father has been traveling a lot lately on a search to find a cure for Yonah’s disease, and her brother is always working at the blacksmith’s stall in the shopping district (and making essentially pocket change, but money is money)— and it’s thanks to peculiar weather outside. The sky is full of threateningly dark clouds, a rarity in the area they live in, and they aren’t particularly well equipped to deal with rain, much less an entire storm. So instead of their usual routines, the two opt to stay home with Yonah for the day and try to prepare for the upcoming downpour.
While her brother is supposed to be busy organizing their supplies, their father is outside trying to harvest everything and anything that’ll be ready to eat from now until the next couple of days, before they’re drowned by the rain. He has Weiss to assist him, a friend (Yonah thinks, since they hang around each other so often that they must be friends) he made a few months ago at the Lost Shrine, so the process should go smoothly— especially when Weiss is a book with the power to summon gigantic hands to hold vegetables in. But for the past fifteen minutes or so, Yonah’s brother has gone from occasionally glancing out the kitchen window, to outright glaring daggers at the oblivious duo.
Yonah gets up from the kitchen table and walks over to where her brother is standing, and does her best to peek over the windowsill along with him. “What’s up with them?” She asks, not being able to really see anything other than the brick of their own house. “Are they fighting?”
Her brother grabs her by the waist and hoists her up so she can see what he sees.
They aren’t arguing, from what Yonah can tell. In fact, she can see that her father is laughing, and laughing pretty hard, at that, so they’re most likely just having a nice conversation. Weiss has one hand summoned to hold a sack for the vegetables they’re collecting, and he has another one summoned that’s resting gently on her father’s lower back. That makes Yonah wonder if he’s pulled something, but judging from how easily her father continues to get up, move to the next plant, and crouch back down, he seems completely fine. Weiss’s hand just remains there… and he floats rather close to her father, as well.
Yonah watches for a moment before saying her thoughts aloud. “Hmmn… I don’t get it.”
Her brother sets her back down onto the floor with a sigh. “You might be too young to get it,” he replies.
“What? What is it, then?”
“Nevermind.”
Yonah lets out a groan. Leave it to her family members to be the first ones to withhold information from her over everyone else. Diligently, though, she decides to go back to her coloring book, not wanting to start a spat with her brother over nothing. It’s rare enough that he’s home, so the last thing she wants to do is make him angry and give him a reason to stay out later on any day other than this one.
The coloring doesn’t last much longer, anyways, because there's suddenly a loud rumble in the sky that makes a Shade’s wail sound like near silence. It’s powerful enough that Yonah swears she feels the house shake— she looks over from where she’s sitting to find a cookbook has moved from its place on the kitchen shelf, nearly teetering off its edge.
The door to the house swings open before she can get up to put it back.
“It’s gonna start pouring any second now,” her father remarks to Weiss and the rest of his family as they walk in. The sack of collected crops is now in his hands rather than the book’s, and it looks full to the brim. Carefully, he lifts it high and places it gently on the kitchen table, in front of Yonah’s coloring book, then dusts his hands off on his pants— there’s dirt all over his hands and knees, probably because he had been on the ground for the better half of the hour.
“Clean your hands at the sink!” Her brother chides him from the pantry. It seems he’s still annoyed at the two of them judging by the tone of his voice, which is rougher than he’s usually able to get away with when it comes to their father. But rather than lecture him for his tone, their father just chuckles and makes his way to the kitchen sink to clean himself off. He must be in a good mood, despite the storm on its way.
“Did you get everything you needed?” Yonah asks. “From the garden, I mean.”
“Everything we could possibly scrounge up,” Weiss replies in her father’s stead.
“Sure took a while,” her brother huffs.
“What? It only took 40 minutes. Probably less,” her father says, bar of soap on his hands so he can lather up.
The boy shuts the cabinet he’s peering into, then, his face twinged pink. He seems to be trying to put on an angry face, but it looks like he’s more embarrassed than anything else.
“It would have taken even less time,” Yonah’s brother says, voice wavering, “if you two weren’t out there flirting .”
Yonah’s head shoots up from the table, and their father fumbles the bar of soap in his hands.
They both have very calm reactions in comparison to Weiss, who flutters his pages and nearly bounces around the room in his shock.
“If we weren’t what?! What are you—“
And there’s a flash of light, and the loudest BOOM Yonah has ever heard, and the rain starts coming down in buckets.
The wind that follows is enough to knock some of the candles’ flames out inside the house— after all, their “windows” are really just holes in the walls, so they’re susceptible to the elements of the outdoors that manage to slip past the windowsills and thensome. No one even bothers to begin the process of relighting the candles out of the thought that they might just get blown out again. In fact, no one even moves. The entire conversation is paused, the four of them awed by the sounds and sensations of the storm occurring outside.
Yonah stares at one of the windows from where she sits and watches bits of rain hit the windowsill and bounce into the house. In the back of her head, she realizes that this is the first big storm she can ever recall happening in her lifetime. It’s almost a surreal feeling. If she wasn’t sick, she would run outside just to stand in the rainfall and absorb the moment.
But that silent observation of the rain gets ruined after a few moments, when Weiss decides to ask, “You were saying, lad?”, pointedly toward Yonah’s brother.
Instead of responding, the boy goes upstairs with a huff.
Yonah tunes back into the conversation, trying to figure out what the heart of the matter is. Nier said Dad and Weissey were flirting? With who? She puts a hand to her cheek and tries to think up some possibilities.
People don’t stop by their home because of Yonah’s sickness, for fear of it being contagious. It’s already unlikely that anyone would come to their front gate, much less go into their garden… The only people that have ever done that before were Devola and Popola, but Yonah doesn’t think that her father would go as far to flirt with either of the twins, considering he’d never done that kind of thing to them before, and he was waaaaay older than them, anyways. After all, they weren’t moms, but he was a dad, so he had to be way older than them.
Oh, but there’s that moment from before, she remembers. When she had peeked out the window earlier, it was just the two of them there.
So if no one stopped by…
“I get it!” Yonah exclaims, grabbing her father’s and Weiss’s attention unwittingly. The two of them seemed to have been discussing something with each other, their backs turned to Yonah initially before her outburst. But whether it was because of her own thoughts being too loud or the sound of the rain drowning them out, she hadn’t heard whatever they might have been saying, and she didn’t particularly care, either.
She raises both of her arms in the air and smiles. “He’s saying you were flirting with each other!”
The reaction from one half of the two men is immediate. Weiss drops a foot in the air in shock, then flies toward Yonah at a breakneck pace. “Now, see here! We were doing no such thing!” He protests, stopping just short of having his cover hit her right in the face. Weiss getting so up close and personal would be overwhelming and maybe even intimidating, if he weren’t a book.
“Hmmn, I dunno,” Yonah muses, half-teasing, “if Nier believes it, it’s most likely true.”
“The lad is clearly delusional! This weather has gotten to his head.”
“But in the garden, you both were really close…”
“Because we were having a conversation, a completely normal conversation!”
“Weissey, being embarrassed only makes the situation worse.”
“E-Embarrassed?! The great Grimoire Weiss knows no such thing as embarrassment!”
Yonah grabs Weiss with both of her hands and pulls him to the side so he’s out of her view. She can feel him struggling in her grip, but she knows it’s a useless endeavor, anyways. He can’t break out of her hold without potentially hurting her, meaning he can’t break out of her hold period — her father would explode at the mere thought of her just scraping her knee and having it be someone’s fault, so if Weiss were to use magic to try and wiggle his way out, who knows what would happen? Neither of them are willing to find out.
So, while Weiss is trying to escape with sheer physical force alone, Yonah calls out, “Dad, what do you think—“
And then she shuts up, because she sees her father is flushed bright red from the tip of his nose all the way to his ears, not looking in her direction.
He doesn’t say a word, but he doesn’t need to for Yonah to know that her brother hit the nail on the head.
Yonah drops Weiss in her surprise, and, in Weiss’s own, he ends up clattering to the floor.
...Well, it’s not like Yonah has a problem with the situation.
Weiss seems nice, from what little she knew about him— anyone who’s a companion of her father’s has to be, or else they wouldn’t be a very good friend. Yes, it might be a little weird that Weiss is a book and her father isn’t, but there are plenty of fairytales Yonah’s read where someone falls in love with a way more powerful, non-human magical being, too. If a prince falling in love with a dragon is fine, it’s probably fine for a regular person and a book to like each other. That’s how she rationalizes the scenario in her head.
But while Yonah is watching the storm rage from the upstairs window, her brother seems quite annoyed by the situation.
“I mean, he’s— they haven’t even known each other that long!” Her brother says, pacing the room. His voice is hushed, because their father is still downstairs with Weiss, making dinner for the three of them. After Yonah had seen his flushed face, she had quickly abandoned her station at the kitchen table and made a point to say the two “could have alone time” before scampering upstairs, despite Weiss’s continuing protests. Yonah had pretended not to hear him over the pouring rain.
Her brother crosses his arms. Whether he’s aware that Yonah isn’t really listening or not, he keeps speaking regardless. “T-They can’t just… date!” He huffs. “You know, if I was the one who went to the Lost Shrine, I bet Dad wouldn’t want me near a sealed away, ancient book! It’s dangerous!”
Aside from doing her best to make it up across the bridge before it, Yonah’s memory of the Lost Shrine stops short of the entrance and picks back up when her father had saved her— her brother had been made to stay home in case she came back. Yonah felt bad about the whole affair, given that she put herself and others in danger, but at the same time, it allowed her father to meet Weiss, who might end up having the cure for her disease with the Sealed Verses, so it wasn’t all bad. That’s probably another reason why she doesn’t particularly mind the current situation.
There’s another rumble outside that makes the house tremble on its supports. Yonah grabs a blanket from off to the side and brings it up around herself so she doesn’t catch cold, having the fabric cover nearly everything but her eyes. “Weissey doesn’t seem bad,” she says, not taking her eyes off the outside. The rain hitting the stream by the shopping district makes her wonder if it’ll overflow. “Are you being mean because he’s a book?”
With a sigh, her brother sits on the chair beside her. He gives a tug of the blanket she’s got around her so he can get under it as well, as it’s big enough to share. Yonah lifts her arm up, and her brother shimmies next to her, lets out another sigh, and rests his chin on the windowsill.
“What if I came home with a magic boyfriend? What would you think?” He asks.
“I think that would be cool,” Yonah replies, because she does think that.
He hits her lightly on the head. “No, you should think that it would be dangerous! You wouldn’t know what he was capable of!”
“But you would know, right?” Yonah flicks his hand in retaliation. “After all, you wouldn’t like-like anyone unless you knew them well.”
That actually makes him pause to think. When Yonah put it like that, it made him sound like the unreasonable one.
But then he just sighs. “Dad and Weiss have only known each other for… two months-ish. That’s too short.”
“Didn’t the flower lady in the shopping district get married to her husband after only knowing him for a week? I remember Dad told me that once,” Yonah replied.
Her brother rolls his eyes. “Still…”
“And the guy in front of the library is totally in love with Popola, even though they’ve hardly spoken…”
“Yeah, but that’s…”
“And there was that one time you liked that one girl that moved away, and you never even talked to her—“
Yonah ends up getting silenced by her brother putting his hands over her mouth, face bright red. Maybe mentioning his unrequited love for a girl that ended up moving to Seafront just as he was getting the courage to confess was crossing the line a little bit, but it continued to prove Yonah’s point. She grabs her brother’s hands and pulls them off of her, a sly smile on her face. “See? You’re being mean for no reason, and you know it,” she sticks her tongue out. A sudden gust of wind brings some raindrops inside, and one manages to land on her tongue, startling her for a moment.
Meanwhile, her brother just lets out an annoyed sigh. He pulls back his hands from Yonah’s grasp, and one subconsciously drifts to the necklace he has around his neck, where his fingers start to fiddle with the jewel that’s on the chain.
Technically, it isn’t a jewel, but instead something made to look like one— from far away, it looks more like the tooth of an animal, what with how light colored it is. From what she was told, it was the ashes of their mother, condensed into an ornament. Yonah has a necklace of her own that looks exactly like her brother’s, but she hasn’t worn it yet, mainly because it feels more grown-up than what she’s used to. When she gets better, she wants to go shopping for a nice, grown-up outfit that will suit the accessory, not her usual nightgown.
On the other hand, her brother wore his every day, never taking it off, even when going to sleep. The chain already needed replacement twice because of its frequent use. And so, since he wore it so often, it was common for him to mess with it, twirling the jewel between his fingers whenever he was nervous or having his mind drift off.
But if Yonah stops to think, maybe him fiddling with the necklace right now is deeper than just his usual tick...
“Is it because of Mom?” Yonah asks.
Her brother tilts his head.
“...Maybe. A little bit.”
Well, then, that made sense, probably. Yonah didn’t really mind the relationship because she had never seen their father with anyone else, and her brother did because he had memories of their mother.
“When Mom died,” her brother suddenly starts, “it ruined Dad. Cried for days, barely ate, all of that kind of stuff.”
Yonah can't picture her father crying at all. Even the thought of him moping around, she has a hard time believing. But the way her brother looks out of the window with her, with a sadness in his eyes she hasn’t ever seen before, makes her shut up before she even knows what she wants to say. “I guess I’m just worried about… seeing him upset over that again,” he squeezes the jewel in his hand. “I don’t want that to happen to him twice.”
Slightly panicked that he knows something she doesn’t, Yonah leans over. “Are you saying Weissey’s gonna die?”
“I mean, I dunno. But it could happen, right? I mean, he’s a book, so maybe he could catch fire or something...” He replies. “So I think it’d be better for Dad to not… date Weiss, if it might make him sad one day.”
And a silence goes over the two of them, the haze of the rain and thunder in the background.
In the back of her mind, Yonah disagrees. Their mother’s death made their father sad, but that didn’t make it all not worth it, either. Obviously, he misses her, and maybe it really did upset him when she died, but there were tons of great memories they had together, too. While she was around, she made him happy, and that’s what mattered most. It would be like that with Weiss, too, wouldn’t it?
But Yonah doesn’t speak out against her brother, because even though he doesn’t say anything more, it’s clear that the topic of their mother is a sensitive one to him, even if he himself doesn’t know it.
So the two of them sit in front of the window watching the lightning flash over the village, and wait for their father to call them for dinner.
The rain keeps falling.
Dinner goes well enough. Rather than bring up any previous comments about his relationship with Yonah’s father, Weiss talks about work-related things they have to do in some place called the Junk Heap. Yonah’s too busy eating to contribute to any discussion, though it’s not like she would have anything to say, what with how she hasn’t been outside the village much. Meanwhile, her brother hasn’t warmed up very much, but he isn’t actively trying to bicker with Weiss, so that’s definitely a positive. The four of them eat their dinner without any arguments breaking out— well, Weiss doesn’t eat so much as drink from a small cup of something dark and kind of weird smelling, with the fluids flying up in the air and being absorbed by his cover, but still.
Throughout the dinner, Yonah keeps her eye on the window in their kitchen, watching the outside. The thunder and lightning had stopped by the time her father had just about finished making their dinner, but the rain still falls and falls, though not as heavy as it was when it had started.
Some part of Yonah wishes that it won’t stop falling at all, if only so everyone could stay in the house tomorrow, too, but she knows that that would be too much to ask for…
Eventually, Yonah finishes her food, washes her plate, and then heads back upstairs to watch the rain fall from the window there. Her brother makes up some random excuse to leave the house to go to the library for a while, despite their father’s protests and the raging weather outside. He wouldn’t spend the night there or anything, he insisted— Yonah figures he probably only went so he could vent to Popola and maybe borrow a book while there. Hopefully, he won't catch a cold during his trek up. Or fall down the hill coming back home.
After a particularly strong gust of wind blew a collection of raindrops into her face, Yonah gets up from her spot and paces around the window, thinking. It’s the first time in a while Yonah’s been left alone with her father rather than her brother at home, so maybe it’s in her best interest to try to talk to him about the situation at hand…
She tiptoes over to the staircase and starts to creep down slowly. The downstairs, where her father and Weiss are, is quiet, which is almost ominous, considering how much they were talking earlier in the day. The only indication that they’re down there seems to be the faint glow of a covered lantern that hangs at the bottom of the stairs.
“Hey, Dad?” Yonah calls out as she walks. There isn’t a response, so she waits until she’s reached the bottom to repeat herself, feet staying on the final step rather than touching the ground floor.
Her father turns around the second time, a bell pepper in his hand. Judging from the varied spread of crops on the kitchen table, he’s probably figuring out what to use next before they inevitably go bad, hence the silence. Weiss is laying on the table, as well, under a small pile of wheat, though he doesn’t seem bothered by this predicament. It almost looks like a blanket over him… Yonah has to stifle a laugh, because while it looks funny, she needs to be serious.
“Yeah, Yonah?” Her father replies.
Yonah swings herself back and forth in place.
“...If you like Weissey, I think that’s okay,” she says.
As quick as a spell, Yonah’s father quickly slams his hand down on Weiss before he can get up to say or do anything. Whether that actually prevents him from doing either, the intent of his action is clear, so Weiss doesn’t move or speak. From where Yonah stands at the back of the room, she just assumes that there was a bug on Weiss that her father tried to squish just then.
“...Thanks, Yonah,” he says.
“Nier needs more convincing, but I think you can do it,” Yonah leans forward on the final step, as if debating completely descending the staircase or not. “Um, it has to do with Mom, sort of, so I can’t convince him… But if you talk to him, I think it would be good.”
Hearing that, Yonah’s father nervously scratches his head with the bell pepper still in his hand. Yonah can tell that he might have expected that to be the case, judging by the lack of surprise and nonchalant acceptance. “...Well, I’ll talk to him about it,” he mumbles. “He’s like your mother. I can’t change his mind overnight.”
Yonah doesn’t respond to that comment, given she has no idea what her mother was and wasn’t like, but feels relieved that the two will talk things out later. After much internal deliberation, Yonah hops off the last step and walks over, hands behind her back. When she reaches the table, she stares out at all the vegetables her father’s gathered, then decides to pluck a single tomato from a small pile. Tomatoes weren’t exactly her favorite, but when her father used them, they tasted pretty good. Maybe he’d use one or two of these tomorrow.
Stream of consciousness getting the better of her, Yonah keeps looking at the tomato in her hands and then speaks about something completely unrelated. “...So, if you marry Weissey, how’s that gonna work? He can’t put on a suit. Do they make special suits for books?” She asks as if she were discussing the weather outside.
While Yonah’s too busy looking at the vegetables, she can’t look up to see that her father has an expression on his face that conveys he’d rather die than talk about this with her. It’s partially his fault for not raising her to have much of a filter when it came to sensitive topics, but at the same time, this is such a specific sensitive topic that Yonah might not have known not to say anything anyways. That’s the way a child’s mind works.
Under Yonah’s father’s hand, Weiss shakes as though he wants to be free of his grasp. But instead, her father presses down even harder to keep the book in place. “T-That’s… Uh…” is all her father can think to reply with in the moment.
Yonah peers closer, to where her father’s hand is pushing Weiss down on the table. His cover is hard, with no moving parts, so Yonah has questions about the logistics of that, as well. She puts the tomato in her hands on the mid section of Weiss’s cover that isn’t blocked by her fathers hand, where she can see some part of his “face” that has a part that vaguely looks like a “mouth”. Only vaguely, though. The intent she had with putting the tomato on that spot in particular was so she could see if Weiss would start to eat it, but instead, the tomato rolls off and onto the table.
She scrunches up her face, unsatisfied. “And how do you kiss? Does he have a mouth? The one on his face didn’t open just now, so—“
“Yonah,” her father puts the bell pepper down and shifts hands, so that one now holds Weiss down while the now free one gently nudges her a step back. There’s definitely a lot he could say, but if he answers one question of hers, she’d want him to answer at least fifty more, and this is already embarrassing enough. “You don’t have to worry about all that, okay?”
“...Mmmkayyyy,” Yonah sighs, disappointed, but gives up immediately.
After a long pause, Yonah reaches over and squeezes her father by the waist. “Love you,” she murmurs.
Her father leans down to kiss her on the forehead. Yonah can feel just the slightest scratchiness of his stubble, which makes her giggle. “Love you, too,” he says.
And then, Yonah brushes off the wheat laying on top of Weiss, pushes aside her father’s hand with all the might she has (he lets up almost instantly when she realizes what she’s trying to do, anyways), and kisses the very top of Weiss’s cover. “And I love you, Weissey!”
Weiss floats upward, silent. Undoubtedly, he had wanted to say many things in the last couple minutes and refute Yonah at every turn, but her father’s handling of the situation had made that hard to do, and it’s clear now that the previous conversation is over. For a moment Weiss seems dumbfounded, and turns to Yonah’s father, as if wondering what to do.
The look the man gives Weiss is stern enough to make even a Shade freeze in its tracks. Wordlessly, Weiss is instructed to reciprocate Yonah’s gesture or there’ll be hell to pay (also known as a slightly upset Yonah and an extremely angry father).
Weiss leans down and bumps Yonah lightly on the head with the bottom edge of his cover. “Y-Yes. I… also love you, Yonah,” he mumbles.
Hearing that, Yonah throws her hands up in the air and grabs Weiss to pull him into a hug, as if he’s nothing more than a doll. “Yay!”
“Hey, Yonah, why don’t you stay down here and help me count what I’ve got?” Her father asks, completely ignoring Weiss being crushed in her arms. “Go get your notebook, we’ll write down our stock.”
Yonah immediately lets Weiss go, and he floats back up in the air lethargically. “Oh, good idea! I’ll be right back!” She nods, then turns on her heel and bolts upstairs, despite the “No Running In The House” rule they usually keep in place. Her father and Weiss both watch her go, silence between them.
When she’s out of earshot, Weiss flutters his pages and lets out a sigh. “Between you, the lad, and Yonah’s sheer energy, I feel as though I will never get used to this family…” He grumbles.
The man beside him pats him on the top of the cover and laughs. “Eh, give it some more time. You’ll feel right at home eventually.”
”I wonder about that...”