Fruits Basket, Yuki/Machi, Snowdrops
The apartment is small and clean, well-kept. It's so respectable that Yuki feels intensely awkward, at first, about doing this; the same way that Machi, shifting cheap furniture around, dusting the lofty aluminium bookshelves, looks strange and out of place, only playing house. He ties a hanging basket to the window, and the flowerbox on the sill blooms out in a bright myriad of colours over the thin rails of the balcony, carefully tended. Machi tells him that, perhaps, he is happy now because he has finally learnt to nurture people, to see their beauty, the way he can with plants; and some flowers are poisonous, some have thorns. One perseveres anyway; he thinks she's right, as she is about many things.
The autumn before they moved in he and Machi walked down a long avenue with cars swirling dirty water round their feet, jumping puddles, with the wind whistling in their ears and the pavement a rustling scarlet mass of maple leaves, thousands and thousands of them. He brushed some out of her hair, afterwards. The strands of it, fine and familiar in his fingers, shone a deeper and more permanent gold against the tree's fading glory.
It is not the modern thing to get married, not so young, not now, and he doesn't want to expose her to full family scrutiny just yet. So they pool the small resources of second-year students, and move out of the cramped university education and to a room three floors above ground level, over the busy street. He doesn't touch his old savings account for something better, grander. It was a bribe for good behaviour, a bribe for being shut in the dark with his mad god, for being the Rat instead of the boy. They play at equality, and more seriously at leaving parents and old lack of love behind. He's not quite sure how to treat her, nor she him, but he tries, he's happy; the attempt is more than anyone once made for him, before Honda Tohru.
The modern thing is also, perhaps, to sleep together, right away, and about that they're slower. Yuki learns, gradually, the language of touch, and Machi that she is beautiful, but at the university their classmates seem to blunder from mattress and mattress, and talk crudely, regretfully afterward. They don't want to break anything. For a while, admiring their handiwork, the cool wooden floor no longer a mess of cardboard boxes and mixed belongings, they feel the sudden heaviness of obligation, but it vanishes with jokes and practicalities. The futon has been unrolled for a long time when Yuki comes and sits by Machi, holds her hand in his and leans in, a hair's-breadth from a kiss, like a question mark inked in the air between them.
He wants to put their clothes aside when they slip out of them, but Machi is quick and intent, and the warm woollen coats, the cotton shirt and filmy blouse and the pale net of Machi's stockings are strewn under them like a nest; their movements make the litter of fabric rustle and slide under them, the remnants of their public selves.
She pulls him down onto her, into her, and the moment is so clearly, painfully tender that he can scarcely move; her pulse flickers sharp and fragile under his fingers, the softness of her skin and the jut of her hipbone and the pale dot of her breast seem as though they will break beneath his weight. But he holds her anyway, hanging onto that miracle of an embrace, and the whole world thaws to warmth and sweetness.