Chương 211: 80. Too Close for Two 3

When I woke up again, the first thing that reached me wasn't light. It was eyes. A lot of them. I frowned, opened mine, still climbing up out of somewhere deep, and found a ring of faces gathered around the bunk. Jess stood at the front, grinning wide enough to split her face in two. D stood next to her, wearing the exact expression of someone who'd just witnessed something historic. Lan had her arms crossed, cool as ever, though the cool had a very clear I knew it running underneath.

Akari stood perfectly straight, like she was filing an on-site observation report. Even Roy was there at the back, not smiling as openly as the rest, but visibly losing the fight to keep his face still — which somehow made it worse. And I was still in the bunk. Worse — I turned my head, and Maki was still right there beside me. Awake, clearly, but just as obviously dragged up out of sleep by this exact same circle of grinning menaces. The eight-person room went silent for two seconds. Then Jess spoke first.

"Oh. You're up?" Her tone was too gentle. The kind of gentle a hitman uses when he asks his target if they slept well. I pushed myself upright, hair a wreck, brain still not fully back online, and managed exactly one thing:"... Morning?"

"Morning?" Jess arched an eyebrow.

"You think you can just throw out one 'morning' and call this whole thing settled?" D chimed in right on cue.

"No, I think Hoshino's running a live test — whether playing dumb from the jump gives her any real shot at surviving long enough to eat breakfast."

"I support that theory," Lan said, cold as ever. I turned my head. Maki was awake too. She was far calmer than I was. Not the pretending nothing happened kind of calm — the real thing. She sat up, tucked a stray lock of hair back behind her ear, and swept her gaze once over the crowd gathered at the bunk. Her expression was steady enough that you'd never guess this wasn't a morning catch-in-the-act — no, a morning tribunal — but just her getting up like any other day, ready for roll call.

Jess clearly clocked how infuriatingly unbothered Maki looked, and it only made her worse.

"Alright, so who wants to explain first?" She spread her hands like a judge calling order.

"Why did I step out for one morning handover and come back to find you two in the same bed?"

"Hoshino's bed, specifically," D added.

"With the curtain drawn," Akari added.

"And you both looked like you slept just fine," Roy added, keeping it very low-key.

"Roy. Not you too." I clutched the blanket, staring at him in tragic betrayal.

"Is there seriously no basic human decency left on this ship?"

"There is," Roy said honestly.

"That's why what I said was already the conservative version."... Damn it. Unarguable. Jess swung around and locked straight onto Maki.

"Kushima. You first." This tale has been pilfered from Royal Road. If found on Amazon, kindly file a report. Maki smoothed the blanket beside her, tone infuriatingly level.

"Nothing to say."

"Nothing to say?!" Jess's voice jumped half an octave.

"You climb out of Hoshino's bed first thing in the morning and tell me there's nothing to say? You're past 'something to say.' At this point you owe us a full incident report." D nearly doubled over.

"A full report. With pre- and post-watch causal analysis." Lan delivered the follow-up strike, cool as ever.

"Better include a timeline appendix." I ground both hands over my face.

"I am begging you. It's not what you think." Jess snapped back to me instantly.

"Oh? Then tell us. What is it?"

"It's just—" I stalled. Because the actual problem was, if I tried to explain it honestly, nothing had really happened. And nothing happened, spoken out loud in front of a room full of people all wearing the exact same grin, tends to sound like the textbook definition of a cover story. While I was still trying to build a sentence, Maki got there first.

"She was about to drop after the watch." The room went quiet for two beats. Maki kept going, same flat tone.

"I didn't want someone passing out in the corridor, or falling off the ladder halfway up her own bunk. So I told her to get in." Jess narrowed her eyes.

"... That's it?"

"That's it."

"You just went and waited for her in Hoshino's bed. That's it."

"She was spacing out," Maki said, face blank.

"If I hadn't gone in first, she'd have stood there contemplating the meaning of life for ten minutes." D let out a soft, extremely punchable "Ohhh—" I glared at him immediately.

"That 'oh' was completely unnecessary."

"No," D pressed a hand to his chest, all academic sincerity.

"I just think the real depth of Kushima's statement isn't they slept together. It's that she'd already calculated exactly how long Hoshino would stand there spacing out. That's a very deep level of observation."

"Shut up," I said.

"I'd love to," Jess said.

"But right now I genuinely cannot." She stared at me, eyes getting brighter by the second.

"So you two really just lay there under a blanket and talked?" I choked. Because — yes. That was true. The problem is, yes, that's true coming straight from the person it happened to always sounds infinitely worse. I cleared my throat, trying to cough myself into something resembling innocence.

"... Yes." Jess spun to D immediately.

"Log it."

"Logged." D nodded with great ceremony.

"Key testimony: lay under a blanket and just talked." Lan leaned against the bedframe, voice drifting over cold.

"The more official it sounds, the more suspicious it is." Roy finally lost the fight and laughed, quiet and helpless. Akari was the calmest one in the room. She looked at me, then at Maki, like she was compiling a final assessment.

"From a risk-management standpoint, preventing someone from losing consciousness alone after night watch is entirely reasonable." My eyes lit up.

"See — Akari gets it—""However," she finished, without an ounce of mercy, "from a group-perception standpoint, it's extremely dangerous."... Great. Thanks. That support did absolutely nothing for me. Jess's grin turned downright wicked.

"You hear that? Extremely dangerous." I hugged my pillow and seriously weighed whether I could suffocate myself fast enough to respawn before breakfast. The killing blow, in the end, came from Aida. She walked in from outside right at that moment, terminal and handover board in hand. She took in the ring of spectators around the bunks, then the state of me and Maki, and didn't so much as twitch an eyebrow. She just asked, mildly:"So. Court in session?" Jess spun around.

"Senior, perfect timing."

"No, terrible timing." Aida dropped the board on the desk with the efficiency of someone snapping a ration bar in half.

"Because if you all stand around them for ten more minutes, breakfast is going to be over." That landed harder than any logical argument could have. Because everyone in this room knew missing breakfast on the Yukikaze was the kind of thing that invited divine punishment. Jess looked thoroughly unsatisfied.

"But I still have questions."

"Ask them at breakfast," Aida said.

"What if they dodge?"

"Then interrogate them between bites," D offered instantly.

"Excellent suggestion," Jess said, nodding with total sincerity. I genuinely considered rolling off the bed and strangling him. Just as everyone started to scatter, Maki added, out of nowhere:"I was the one who told her to get in." Every foot in the room stopped. She sat on the edge of the bunk, tone unchanged, but her eyes dead level.

"You've got a problem with it, take it up with me." For one second, the entire room actually went still. Because the blast radius on that line was a completely different category than we just slept in the same bed. I turned to look at her. My heart, the traitor, skipped.... Kushima Maki. Do you have any idea how much worse that just made everything?

Jess opened her mouth, and her first reflex wasn't another barrage — it was one long, slow, deeply loaded "Ohhhh—" D turned his face away entirely, laughing past the point of looking human. The morning tribunal was finally suspended — not closed, only suspended — when Aida announced that anyone not out the door in five minutes was getting personally signed up for dish duty. Not over. Just paused. I knew exactly what that meant. There was no universe in which this group let it go.

Especially not the part where Maki and I had crawled out of the exact same bed. And as it turned out, my read on their collective character was accurate to a heartbreaking degree.