Controlee

74. Iron Grip

Rule 27: People will let you down.

"Otsuka lived with you guys for a while, right?" Yamada and Aizawa were suspicious the moment Oboro came up to them. Sure, it'd been a while since they saw their friend regularly enough to know his mannerisms, but they could still see when he was up to something and this boy was most definitely up to something.

"She was with us almost since the beginning of the year, yeah," Yamada answered slowly, a frown drawing his eyebrows together.

"Right." Oboro nodded, keeping it up a little too long to be normal. "So, you know some stuff about her then?"

Yamada felt too much like he was walking into a trap with no idea what exactly the trap entailed or where it awaited him. He decided it was time to quit beating around the bush. "Oboro, what are you up to?"

"Me?" The teen had the gall to look affronted when the three of them had got into far too much trouble for his antics a decade ago. "Nothing at all." A likely story. Oboro crashed his hand over his lips, scratching under his chin. "So like, say," he began, drawing it out so each word lasted a good few seconds, "she was, for example... really fucking touch starved, you'd know why?"

Yamada blinked, struggling to unravel the end bit Oboro had rushed out like if he'd talked any slower, he wouldn't have been allowed to finish. "She's what?"

"Really fucking touch starved." Oboro tilted his head. "You guys didn't notice that?"

Otsuka was touch starved? She'd never been particularly huggy with them, never tried to initiate any kind of contact, really. Yamada supposed she was a little too nervous to initiate, no matter how much she may have wanted to be close. She might not even have realised how much she wanted just a little bit of physical contact. "No."

"Well, any touch I give her she'll repeat back like she wants contact but she doesn't want to do anything unless I do it first so she knows it's ok." That could've been the explanation, or Otsuka could've been waiting for him to do it first because she didn't know how to go about being touchy-feely. "And then if I lean against her or we sit close enough that our knees are touching or anything, she'll very slowly move that little bit closer."

Move that little bit closer, then wait, check the other person was ok, then lean a little, wait, check, move a little more. Yamada had seen her do that, but he hadn't read into it.

"When you ruffle her hair she leans into it rather than ducking away like almost everyone else in the entire world, you guys really didn't notice?"

"No," Yamada admitted. He should've seen it, and now Oboro was pointing it all out at once, it was obvious. He just hadn't connected the dots before.

"Well, she is, so who deprived her of hugs? She's so sweet, and gentle and fluffy and-"

"Fluffy?" Aizawa repeated, one eyebrow raised and his hands slouched into his pockets.

"You pat her head and tell me her hair isn't fluffy."

Yamada had patted her head before, he could not tell him it wasn't fluffy.

"Who would refuse to hug that girl?"

A good question. Unfortunately, the answer was a lot of people, for reasons she forgave far too easily without even a little anger. It was infuriating. "She didn't have many friends growing up," Aizawa provided, relieving Yamada of the duty to answer. Good thing too, he didn't particularly want the duty, not for this.

Oboro looked like he'd inhaled something strange at that too simple explanation, but nodded anyway. "Right, family?"

"Boarding school since she was seven," Yamada managed to get out. "She didn't even leave for the holidays." Yamada had only seen where Otsuka used to live in its scorched, partially-melted, destroyed form. Still, it had seemed so clinical, so cold. To live there, all day, every day, for years, with no break. It sounded like a recipe for some extreme claustrophobia. Yamada could never have survived it. But Otsuka had.