KINTSUGI ⊳jin sakai x yuna

さんじゅういち (thirty one)

Having four people and only two mats is by no means ideal. It's promptly decided that Michio should have one of them all for himself — he is the one who has suffered the most injuries, after all. Benjiro insists that he needs nothing more than a sack of rice as a pillow to get some sleep. And he also insists on sleeping outside with his brother, right beside the onsen. Michio has a stuffy nose, and he figures the damp, warm air will do him some good.

That leaves Jin and Yuna with one mat.

To be completely honest, he'd love to be the one to use it. But he's not that selfish, and, also, he figures that the fish and rice he's eaten for dinner will help lull him to sleep quickly enough either way. (For a while at least. Some nightmare will come to haunt him a little while after midnight, and that is undoubtable by now.)

"You take it, and I'll sleep like Benjiro." Jin gestures at the mat insistently, and Yuna scoffs.

"Never in a hundred years would I have guessed that a samurai lord would give up his mat for me," She jokes. "But I don't need it. I'm used to sleeping on the ground. You take it."

"You've caught us dinner this evening," Jin argues. "You deserve it."

With an annoyed, chastising look, which he is sure would have convinced most people to retreat, she says his name on a tone that leaves no room for disagreements. "Jin."

To intimidate him even further, she steps a little closer, her head tipped up to meet his gaze. She's half a step away, Jin can see every minuscule expression in her dark brown eyes. In the low, warm evening light, her pupils are blown wide, and even her warm irises seem pitch black. It takes him a second more than usual to get himself to pay attention to the disagreement at hand instead of Yuna.

Jin's not that easy to persuade. Trying to mirror her expression, he takes that half-step between them, closes their distance. "Yuna," He answers on the same tone as her, defiance evident in spite of his calm demeanor.

Too close, he realizes the very next second. He's too close to her, he can even feel the warmth irradiating from her, can smell her familiar scent of campfire and grass. He realizes that he misses yesterday night, when they weren't having a childish fight like this one, but instead fell asleep in each-other's arms.

Benjiro speaks up from outside the house, and Jin startles, moving away from Yuna. He thought the boys had already been asleep.

"Hey, don't mind me. I need a bigger pillow." The boy enters the room, small sack of rice in hand. He kneels beside the bigger sack of rice and starts filling some more of it into the one that he had been using as a pillow. A few seconds of silence pass before he looks up at both Jin and Yuna, eyes darting back and forth between the two of them. "Did I, uh...interrupt something?"

"No," Yuna clarifies before Jin can. "Lord Sakai was just being very stubborn about not using the mat."

"Because you deserve to sleep well, especially after catching us dinner tonight," Jin retorts back to his old argument, then gives Benjiro a meaningful look. He hopes the boy can decipher his silent message, which practically screams 'back me up'.

Whether he did or didn't understand, he certainly acts like he didn't. With a nonchalant shrug, he pats the smaller sack of rice to test its firmness. Satisfied, he stands up. "Look, I don't get how you're fighting about who isn't going to take the mat, but—" He looks between the two of them, pondering his words. "You could just, uh, you know. Share it. It's how me and Michio settle things usually."

Sharing is not a bad idea in itself, but the matter of the fact is that the mat was made for one person only. To fit two people on it, the concept of personal space would have to be thrown out completely.