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Ichiji was born first, a little after 6PM. Niji came four minutes later. Sanji, at about twenty-past, and Yonji was the last, almost half an hour later than Ichiji. All in all, no more than a ten-minute difference between two consecutive twins and hardly half an hour between the first and the last.
Two decades later, it still baffles Sora how big of an impact those few minutes made.
Ichiji has always taken great pride in being “the firstborn son”. He would always boss his brothers around (still does, sometimes), parading around with his head held high like a little prince. He would explain to anyone who cared to listen that he was the eldest, and the most responsible of the four, and should they ever need anything from them they’d have to talk to him because he was the leader. Now that he’s older, he doesn’t like to be reminded of his most childlike behaviour—but he still does, as far as Sora’s aware, believe himself to be generally better than his twins.
Niji hates this bullshit of Ichiji’s with the fire of a thousand suns and always yells at him when he tries to play the elder card—then turns and does the exact same thing to Sanji and Yonji. He tried to explain to Sora once how the four minutes between Ichiji and him were nothing, really, but the ten minutes between him and Sanji meant the world. Overall, Niji considers himself to be as great as (if not greater) than Ichiji, and superior in every way to the younger twins.
Sanji, for his part, has always tried to detach himself from their dynamic. He’s the most independent of the four, and so he doesn’t let himself follow their game—usually. He will look out for Yonji with extra care, sometimes, with the tired attitude of a worried older brother; and he’ll sometimes talk back to Ichiji and Niji with the petulancy of an entitled younger sibling. Sora doubts he’s aware of how he's behaving when he falls into these habits, but she finds it so endearing she's committed not to tell him.
And Yonji, well, he’s one who cares little for pretty much everything that goes on around him, and that includes his twins. He doesn’t seem to mind being looked down on for being “the baby”, and in fact he sometimes exploits that perception to his benefit. It doesn’t work on Reiju (who considers all of them dumb babies and generally ignores them), but the other three do more often than not fall for it.
It’s an odd dynamic for siblings born only minutes apart, but they’ve had it pretty much since they gained self-consciousness and Sora is more than used to it after so many years. Baffled, yes, but used to it.
(She sometimes wonders if it was something Judge managed to beat into them sometime after the divorce but before she got full custody, but the idea leaves her so distraught she’d rather not think too much about it.)
Zeff told her once it was probably due to the names.
“You can’t just name them after the order they were born in and not expect them to build their entire personalities around that,” he’d said as he poured her more wine.
“It’s not their entire personalities,” she protested, accepting her glass back and swirling it before taking a sip. Then, after a moment of hard thinking: “Sanji likes cooking.”
“That he does,” Zeff fondly rolled his eyes. That very morning he’d taken the then-six-year-old into yet another tour around the Baratie kitchen—and Sora knew he wasn’t much of a children’s person and he put up with her spawn only because he really, really liked her, but she also knew that he’d grown a very soft spot for Sanji.
Maybe he was right, to a certain degree. Maybe her sons would never have adopted this dynamic if they weren’t made hyper aware of who was older than whom, even if it was a matter of minutes. Maybe.
It’s twenty years too late to regret their given names, though. And she likes them anyway. Plus, it’s not like she minds that they behave this way—not when all of them have worse issues to work on—and she does, admittedly, take advantage of it on occasion. (It’s just too easy, pressing the right buttons and saying the right words that get each of them to do what she wants them to.) It may not be ideal, but it’s not entirely dysfunctional either, so Sora just counts herself lucky and carries on.
***
Sora loves Beren.
He’s been Zeff’s sous chef and best friend for decades now, and quickly warmed up to her after they started dating. He would babysit the children so they could go out on dates, his patience with them not to be overlooked, and he was Zeff’s best man at their wedding. He tends to be quiet, but can be hysterically funny when he does speak up; he’s observant and detailist and he’s family, really.
He’s the closest thing Zeff has to a brother and the kids have always loved their Uncle Beren. He’s very dear to Sora and she loves him very, very much.
She’d also strangle him, sometimes.
She really, really wants to strangle him on the quiet afternoon of March 2nd, after they’ve just had a relatively peaceful family lunch to celebrate the quadruplets’ 21st birthday, when he takes a drag of his cigarette and, out of nowhere and completely unprompted, he says:
“I watched an interesting documentary the other day. Did you know that in Medieval Europe the second-born twin was considered the eldest?”
The silence that follows his statement is heavy, thick with tension. Zeff’s eyes widen in panic as Sora’s hands clench around her cup of tea; Reiju hides an amused smile behind her hand. The boys blink at their uncle’s words, brains working at full speed to process this new information. As Ichiji’s brow furrows unpleasantly and Yonji’s mouth twists into a self-satisfied smirk, Sora braces herself and thinks that, honestly, Beren should’ve known better.
“What kind of fucking bullshit is that?” Ichiji finally snaps, fully offended, and the outburst is so unlike himself that Sora forgets to scold him for the language.
“The second-born was higher up in the uterus and so had been conceived first,” Beren explains with a carefree shrug. "That was their reasoning."
“Bullshit,” Ichiji scoffs, just as Yonji quips: “Well, it makes sense.”
Sora is silently grateful that Ichiji only glares daggers at his twin and doesn’t actually throw them.
“It doesn’t make any sense,” he protests, indignant. “The firstborn is clearly older!”
“That’s just your opinion,” Yonji quips back.
“It’s everyone’s opinion! It’s been this way since forever!”
“Not in the Middle Ages it wasn’t.”
She’s never seen Ichiji look so agitated before. Her eldest (her… youngest-by-Middle-Age-standards?) has always been the most composed of all her children, calm-minded and hard to rile up—the way he’s flushing now is completely new, cheeks and ears coloured bright red in anger and embarrassment. Jaw clenched, his lips are pursed hard into a pale, thin line, and Sora could swear she sees a few veins pop along his neck and forehead.
“People in the Middle Ages believed the Earth was flat,” Ichiji fires back after a moment.
“Some people still think that today,” Niji refutes him with a shit-eating grin, which makes Ichiji flush even darker.
“Whose side are you on?” he growls at his younger (...maybe elder?) twin.
“I’m still undecided.”
Oh, Sora thinks she understands Niji’s dilemma just fine. He’s so not happy with being knocked one step down in their hierarchy, the idea of being below Sanji and Yonji nothing short of humiliating to him—but being over Ichiji, however… It’s tantalizing enough to make the aforementioned humiliation worth withstanding. Or, worth considering. She can see his eyes narrowed behind his glasses as his gaze flies between Ichiji and Yonji, his brain no doubt weighing the pros and cons of aligning with either of them.
There’s a very amused half-smile on Beren’s usually bitch-resting face. He’s done this on purpose, Sora realizes, and oh yes. She’s definitely going to strangle him.
***
“You gotta admit this is so much fun,” Beren tells her, not seeming to mind how red and swollen his ear is after she’s pinched and twisted it in vicious revenge.
“Fun?” Sora hisses back.
It is, admittedly, a little bit fun. But she won’t admit it, lest he comes up with something even worse for next year.
Ichiji has been screaming and raging at Yonji for about an hour now, calling him names and trying to give arguments from multiple points of view. Yonji, for his part, doesn’t seem to want to convince Ichiji more than he’s simply enjoying riling him up with increasingly ridiculous statements. Sora thought they’d have run out of twists and tangents by now, but the dispute is still going strong, the issue of “when does life as a human being begin” being tackled with biological, theological and philosophical approaches on equal measure. If she wasn’t busy being angry at Beren, Sora might have even been proud of her children for their debating capabilities.
“I’m a little bummed this one didn’t join, though,” Beren laments, tilting his head to point. At his side, Sanji gives him an unimpressed look as he takes a drag from his cigarette.
“I’m not going down to the mud with that lot,” he deadpans.
“You were always the most level-headed of the four,” Zeff grumbles, making a visible effort to tune out the screaming match between his stepsons. There have been, from his part, a few unsuccessful attempts at peacefully stopping the fight before, but at this point he looks ready to knock them out and be done with it.
“But don’t you have an opinion?” Reiju asks her brother. She looks almost as entertained by the whole debacle as Beren, though she’s also been a bit grumpy since Sora confiscated her phone after she started recording.
“It’s a pointless argument and I don’t care,” Sanji answers with a careless shrug. “It’s not like it matters either way.”
“Okay, but if you had to choose?” Beren presses with a sly smirk that only falters for a second when Sora kicks him under the table.
“Hm.” Sanji hums in thought, smoking silently as he absently watches his twins argue, and after a few moments he sentences: "I think I'd rather we stayed the way we were."
"You'd support Ichiji over Yonji?" Reiju gasps in exaggerated dramatism.
"I'm not supporting anyone," Sanji rolls his eyes. "I only said we were just fine.
"But also, I don't want to be the middle child," he adds after a beat, his eyes finding his twins again. "Look how that one turned out."
Everyone follows his gaze to look at Niji, who has joined the chaotic quarrel on the side of chaos. Rather than picking a side, he's decided to simply keep adding fuel to the fire, supporting whichever brother starts running low on arguments only to immediately betray him and join forces with the other. He's thriving, looking nothing if not delighted by the madness he's contributing to.
Yes, alright. Sora loves Niji dearly, but there's no denying he's a colossal asshole.
"No, no, he's right," he's saying to Ichiji, that all-teeth grin of his gleaming as he pats Yonji's shoulder.
"We're not moving this celebration to July!" Ichiji howls back, looking one more stupid comment away from a mental breakdown. "It's a fucking birthday, not a conceptionday!"
"No, but you see—" Yonji tries to argue.
"I'm not throwing a party to celebrate that my parents fucked!"
"What do you think a birthday is?"
For a moment, Sora fears Ichiji is going to beat Yonji up. She's been dreading them getting physical practically since the beginning—the only reason she hasn't kicked Beren out for this 'prank' of his is that, if it comes to it, he's going to be the one to intervene to stop her children from tearing each other’s throats apart.
"It's a celebration of your birth, you moronic lettuce!"
No one in the audience can fully suppress an amused little laugh. Zeff looks like he's completely given up, face buried mournfully on both hands as his shoulders shake in either laughter or weeping. Reiju and Sanji are having a silent conversation with glances, shaking their heads and chuckling quietly at their brothers. Beren grins at Sora, green eyes sparkling behind the waves of his bangs, and is with an unbearable amount of cheek that he says:
"Come on. It's fun."
"I'm going to run you over with my car," she fires back without real bite.
He laughs loudly, though not loud enough to cover Ichiji's angry scream:
"I'M STILL THE FIRSTBORN!! FUCK YOU!!"
