Work Text:
Dinner is always quiet at the Zaizen household; not because there’s nothing to say, but because both siblings simply prefer to eat in peace. Akira occasionally asks if Aoi had a good day at school, she replies with “it was fine, how was work” to which he replies with a noncommittal “decent” and they both nod and return to their food. The television is usually on in the background, with Akira glancing at it from time to time to check the Nikkei stock numbers, and when SOL Technologies posts strong numbers night after night he nods again and returns to his rice.
But tonight isn’t a normal night at the Zaizen household.
Akira works late, so Aoi prepares dinner. It’s not a task she performs often; Akira had always gone out of his way to make sure that she is cared for, and that includes cooking and bringing home dinner. She tries a simple stir-fry but forgets to turn on the rice cooker while cutting the vegetables and can’t find any soy sauce. So when her brother comes home, the rice isn’t ready and the vegetables are bland.
She has often felt like a burden to her brother, that he works so hard for her while she can’t do anything for him, and her heart sinks when he takes his shoes off at the door and calls out a greeting.
“You made dinner?” He sounds a little surprised, and her face turns pink.
“I tried,” she replies quietly, “but we don’t have any soy sauce.”
Instead of adopting a pitying smile like he used to every time she tried and failed to impress him, he grimaces and places a hand to his forehead. “Oh… that’s my fault, I forgot to pick some up even though it was on my list.” She tries to hide the tiny smile but he notices and places his hand reassuringly on her shoulder. “Good thing I know a few substitutes for sauces.”
Once, he would tell her to go relax while he finished cooking, but he asks if she can help, so she watches him mix ingredients together in the skillet and pulls bottles and jars out of cabinets for him. Soon, the vegetables are simmering in a brown sauce and the rice cooker flashes done.
It’s nice, she thinks, not feeling like she’s holding him back. It’s something simple, cooking dinner, but as she watches him, she sees how shadowed his eyes are and knows he appreciates it all the same.
“I’ll set the table,” she volunteers, and Akira gives her a warm smile of thanks. She finishes right when he does, and he brings the bowls full of food to the table.
“Thank you for preparing this meal,” he says as they sit across from one another at the tiny table.
“Thank you for finishing it,” she replies, and they begin to eat.
Dinner starts off normal. They eat in near silence, the television droning in the background about the news of the day. There’s been near-constant discussion on the news about Link VRAINS and the Hanoi Tower incident and Aoi has learned to ignore it completely. It had been hard enough to be humiliated by a creep like Spectre without having to watch Blue Angel’s body crash to the ground on repeat for two months. Akira doesn’t take it as well, and talks over it with a louder voice than normal.
“How was school?”
It’s their normal routine. He asks, she responds, she asks, he responds, they both return in silence to their food and clean up in silence and she goes to work on her homework in silence.
Instead, she replies with “we got a new member of Duel Club today.”
Akira’s hand freezes halfway to his mouth and he lifts his eyebrows in surprise. “Oh? Are they good?”
She remembers the first time he’d come to Duel Club—not as someone who was genuinely interested in it, she’d thought at the time—and how his entire deck was normal, first generation monsters.
There was something more to him, she’d thought at the time, and when he returned after a few weeks he’d seemed genuinely interested in joining. There’s still something more to him.
“His deck is awful,” she says, “but he’s… quiet.” She was going to say nice, but even though he was polite toward her, some of her classmates muttered about how aloof and dismissive he was whenever anyone tried to converse with him. Shima in particular railed about how he never seemed to pay attention when Shima tried talking to him about VRAINS.
Like me, she thinks.
“Is he trying to learn to be a better duelist?” Akira asks.
“He’s a very quick learner.”
“That’s good. What’s his name?”
“Fujiki. Fujiki Yusaku.”
“Fujiki...” Akira squints at the ceiling. “Ah… that’s right, that was the boy that came to visit you in the hospital...”
Aoi looks up in surprise. “He did?”
“Yes, he seemed concerned.”
“Oh...” Aoi turns her attention to her food again. Uncharacteristic of him, she thinks, but he’s kind to her so maybe he would be interested in being friends… “That was nice of him.”
“It was.”
They fall into a comfortable silence again, the television switching over to a story about puppies, which Aoi listens to with mild interest, before turning over to the night’s stock market numbers.
“The Dow opens down one hundred points with the NASDAQ down two and three tenths of a percent,” the anchor drones, and Akira stiffens, “and the Nikkei closed down nearly four percent, with stock in SOL Technologies dropping after recent events with the Knights of Hanoi and--”
Aoi turns off the television.
Akira stares at his plate, hand shaking.
“Are things bad at work?” she asks in a quiet voice.
No, he would normally say, but today seems to be different between them so he whispers “a bit.”
She sits back down and watches him pick at his food. “Is there anything I can do?” There’s not, she knows; she’s a loner high school student who masquerades as a charismatic virtual idol in her free time, not a person who knows much of anything about how businesses operate, but her brother smiles tenderly at her nonetheless.
“Once all the management shakeup ends, things should be back to normal,” he says. “I’m fine where I am,” he adds, correctly reading her tense expression. “I was demoted enough that I wasn’t directly responsible for any of the things that happened in the VRAINS.”
She’s thinking up a way to apologize for being the reason, at least in part, for his demotion in the first place, but her thoughts are interrupted by a knock at the door that causes both of them to jump in their chairs.
“I’ll get it,” she says, as she’s closer, and when she opens the door, Ema is there in a casual t-shirt and short shorts.
“Hi, Aoi!” She smiles and waves. “Is your brother home?”
Her brother hadn’t mentioned inviting Ema over, and at any rate had never brought a lady (or anyone, really) over, so Aoi can only conclude she’d come over unannounced.
“Um… yes… come in?”
She stands back to allow Ema to enter. It takes Ema a minute to pull off her thigh-high boots that don’t quite touch the bottom of her shorts, and after kind of tossing them in front of the door heads into the dining room like she owns the place.
There’s a clatter as Akira drops his chopsticks on his plate. “Wh-”
Aoi sits back down and resumes slowly picking her way through her dinner, trying to ignore the awkward tension in the room with the unexpected arrival of her brother’s unorthodox “business” associate.
“Where’s mine?” Ema asks, pointing at his plate with one hand while resting the other on her hip.
“You just invited yourself over!” Akira says irritably.
Aoi eats faster.
“And look at this!” Ema gestures at the table. “Two chairs? There are four sides to this table and there are only two chairs? I thought you were good at math? How many sides does a rectangle have, Zaizen?”
Akira mutters something about there are only two people in this household but Ema is not appeased.
“Where am I supposed to sit, Zaizen?”
“Maybe, again, you should call before showing up unannounced!”
Aoi has watched enough terrible daytime television while pretending to be sick to avoid going to school that she knows where this is going. “I’m almost done and you can have my seat, Miss Ema,” she says, trying to pick up as many vegetables as possible at once.
“Oh no, no, no,” Ema says soothingly, patting Aoi on the shoulder. “Don’t eat too fast, sweetie. Stay here, I just wanna chat with you.”
And she promptly plops herself on Akira’s lap.
All Aoi can see of her brother is the top of his head and his arms, spread out in what she assumes is utter disbelief, as Ema takes his hand and uses it to pick up food, which she eats from his own chopsticks.
“Tasty!” Ema smiles at Aoi, who at this point is wondering whether she should just leave the room. “Did you make this?”
“Aoi did,” Akira says in a muffled voice.
“I wasn’t talking to you,” Ema replies sweetly.
Her brother huffs but stops trying to push Ema from his lap. Aoi imagines him scowling at the back of her head.
“It’s very tasty.” Ema drinks out of Akira’s cup.
“Thank you, but my brother had to fix it up.”
“Don’t shortchange yourself, honey.” Ema continues to use Akira’s hand to shovel food into her mouth. He seems to have resigned himself to this fate. “You’re plenty talented without having to put yourself down to diminish your accomplishments.”
Aoi continues to stare intently at her plate, though it is nearly empty now.
“Anyway,” Ema says through a mouthful of food, “how was school?”
She’s a bit startled by this question; it’s a simple one, one she had already answered, but it feels awkward answering with the same response she’d given her brother, so she mumbles “fine” without looking up.
Ema is undeterred. “What’s your favorite class?”
“Um…” Aoi has to think about it for a moment. “Literature.” She hopes Ema doesn’t ask about her favorite book, since it was hard enough to have Spectre ruin the book about Blue Angel for her, but naturally Ema asks anyway, leaving Aoi wishing she could melt into the floor.
“Okay,” Akira interrupts, finally finding the wherewithal to remove Ema from his lap, “time to clean up.”
Aoi feels a rush of gratitude toward her brother as she gets up and gathers the empty plates.
“You’re no fun, Zaizen,” Ema pouts, settling back into his vacated chair. “I just wanted to chat with your darling sister.”
“Another time,” Akira calls from the kitchen. “Aoi has homework to do.”
“It’s Friday.”
“Lots of homework.”
Akira stands at the sink and washes dishes before handing them off to Aoi, who dries them and puts them back in the cabinets. It’s a nice routine, she thinks; washing dishes takes half the time and is less tedious when working with someone else. Her brother, for his part, doesn’t seem angry or genuinely annoyed by Ema’s sudden appearance; rather, he looks unusually pouty.
When he returns to the dining area, she can hear him usher her out, and her protesting.
“I just got here!”
“Maybe next time you’ll call first.”
“Please, like you’ll even let me come over if I ask.”
“Good night, Ema.”
The door closes and Aoi peeks around the corner in time to see her brother sigh dramatically at the door.
She can’t even stifle a smile this time.
It was a long day at work; the fallout from the Hanoi Tower is still wreaking havoc on the internal affairs of SOL Technologies. Akira does everything he can to keep his own division functioning as normally as possible but dealing with upper administration is still taxing.
(He hopes, for Aoi’s sake, that he’ll be able to move back up in the company soon.)
When he gets home, he slips out of his shoes and rubs the back of his neck wearily, ignoring the robot’s annoyingly formal welcome, and almost trips over a pair of shoes.
Biting back a curse, he looks down at them. They’re not his, nor are they Aoi’s. And they’re too big to be Ema’s.
“I’m home,” he says cautiously.
“Welcome home,” Aoi calls from the dining room, and when he walks in, he freezes.
It’s the boy from the hospital, the one he mistook for Aoi’s boyfriend (wishful thinking, he supposed), sitting in a chair that hadn’t been there that morning, eating what appeared to be several hotdogs.
“Hi,” the boy—Fujiki Yusaku—says, waving casually.
“Hello,” Akira says slowly.
“Fujiki brought over some dinner,” Aoi explains. “He’s helping me with physics homework.”
Torn between relief that Aoi (for the first time in her life) had brought someone over, wariness about her eating hotdogs for dinner, and abandonment over her not asking for his help with her homework on a subject he was quite good at, he instead manages only to ask the one burning question that doesn’t really matter.
“Where’d this chair come from?”
Aoi takes a sip of juice. “I bought it.”
“Today?” Akira takes his seat across from Aoi and next to Fujiki.
“Yes, he saw I was having trouble with physics and asked if I needed help, so I invited him over.”
“And you… bought this chair on the way?”
“He… needed a place to sit,” Aoi replies carefully. Her voice is polite but Akira’s blood freezes at the thought of Ema sitting on his lap, and the meaning behind Aoi’s carefully worded reply is obvious, even if she would never utter the words he’s not sitting on my lap.
“I see.” Akira reaches for a hotdog. They eat in silence for a few minutes before Akira takes a stab at conversation. “So, Fujiki, how… how is school?”
“Fine,” Fujiki says without looking up.
Akira glances between the boy and his sister, who are sitting in a relaxed, comfortable silence, and he sighs.
They’re too alike, he decides, but at least Fujiki wasn’t like Ema Bessho.