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All Yae wants is one peaceful night. One night without any interruptions so that she could let the heady smoke of her kiseru pipe corrupt her body as she floated to Jupiter soul-first. Yae had run ragged for the last two months, her ankles bruising, as she planned and launched a successful stint earlier this week on the Ragvinder family that buckled their vexing stock manipulation schemes by the knees. Instead of relaxing like she deserved, Yae was plagued by inefficient subordinates who kept on running to her at the first signs of trouble like blood leeches.
First, Gorou couldn’t figure out why several guns from their inventory were missing (the incompetent loser had merely misplaced them and could have easily found them without escalating the issue all the way to the family head). Then, Itto barged into Yae’s office to convince her to implement another one of his idiotic, illogical labor racketeering ideas just as she finished feeding the flame to her pipe and was giddily awaiting to take her first puff of bliss. Now, Sara raps away on her door like a harbinger of ill will, and Yae feels her consciousness slipping away with each staccato heartbeat of Sara’s knocks.
Logically, Yae shouldn’t release her chained anger at Sara for her unwanted interruption. She is Yae’s right hand after all. Sara knows how Yae desperately needs this period of respite and firmly steered Gorou and Itto away from her office, the hallway sweetly echoing with cutting admonishments for disturbing the Yae on her night off. Smoking outside of Yae’s most private spaces meant peeling back her brusque, clunky ankylosaurus armor like an onion and leaving her Achilles heel exposed to outside enemies and inside backstabbers.
Yae pulls her suit jacket on top of her shoulders and loosens her tie before taking another deep breath of smoke and liquid courage and swinging the door open, her displeasure thickly layered on her face.
Sara crinkles her nose at the thick, musky scent clinging onto Yae, and then her mouth moves, shuttering through the words like a 1920s silent movie. Yae’s ringing ears refuse to register the clear-toned syllables. At the brutal onslaught of new information, sobriety dumps itself on top of Yae, cleansing her of any lingering intoxication swimming in her veins.
-
Never in a million years did Yae think she would see her again.
A decade’s worth of time did not treat her as harshly as it did Yae. Each passing day gleefully leeched hues of color from Yae’s hair and alchemized her beautiful sakura pink into a dull steel gray and wore perpetually bleeding cuticles into Yae’s hands due to the immense task of being family head to the hundreds of people beneath her who she promised to protect as family.
Her skin still held taut across her high cheekbones with that arocrastic tilt, but she looked a little simple, like a stranger someone could pass on the street without sparing a second glance for. No one could have guessed that this is the woman who had merged together two of the most vicious, bloodthirsty adversary mafias residing in the Inazuma area of the city into one singular family. The wearying agonies of life had torn her down, the sparkling vigor and charisma that once surrounded her persona when she stood side by side with Yae at the peaked apex of the empire they had built together lost to the wind.
(Yae knew that she could be polished to the highest carat possible again. Scientists pull commonplace carbon dioxide from the crystal sky above and press down 3000 degrees and one million tons to engineer the innermost chemical bonds into diamonds. Yae is also a scientist of sorts; she spent her whole life rubbing carbon cowards into diamond killers. Once, they both burned under heat and pressure and came out sharp, refined, deadly. Rivaled the elegant cutting beauty of the Koh-i-Noor and the Blue Hope. Yae just hopes that her knowledge of the past was enough to bridge the gap in between her illiteracy of the present.)
“E-“ Yae starts.
“Ya-“ Ei cuts off her name and pauses. She clears her throat in a futile attempt to diffuse the tension snaking around them as Yae curls a little into herself, but not enough to be noticed by Ei. “Sorry, you go first.”
Maybe if Ei had stayed, she would have been able to pick up on the minute inflections that throbbed through Yae: the way how only her left brow twitches like a rabbit when she’s greeted by unpleasant news, the way how her chest puffed with pride when Kokomi got into one of the best graduate schools in the country, the way how she tips double the amount at substandard restaurants with the unsaid promise that she will never pay her patronage there again.
If Ei had stayed, they would have never interrupted each other. Ei would have never had to roll a soured apology off of her lips. They used to know each other so well before, had mapped out each inch and mole of their bodies and finished each other’s sentences like it was their first nature, but it had all crumbled into kingdom come when Ei forcefully ripped a hole in their comfortable coexistence with her own hands. Every day of the last decade tugged the tear open a little bit more until Tartarus yawned in the empty void in the middle of them.
“What do you need?” Yae asks because every person that’s come to her is in desperate need, a thirst so unquenchable and drying that they’re willing to turn to the underground mafia with their life in their hands to fulfill it.
Startled bewilderment fills Ei’s eyes, and Yae attempts to conceal a snicker behind her hand. She might not know Ei as well as she once might have, but she knows people. Yae carries the intimate knowledge of how to jump-start people’s inner workings with a couple of well-placed words and how to push buttons without ever getting caught in the trap of trouble by slipping through every opening, no matter how small. They might as well be with the way how Yae wields them against people as if they were knives sheathed on her thigh.
“I missed you,” Ei says gently as if breaking earth-shattering news to a newly christened widow, and the world consumes Yae. Chews her up, its fangs inflicting little paper cuts on her skin with each bite, as the rational thoughts in her mind attempt to catch up to the wild running emotions roaring in her heart. Spits her out as the ground tilts beneath her and up becomes down and left becomes right. A decade of yearning sucker loops Yae through a category 5 hurricane of feelings tipped with harsh winds as if she was nothing more than lost debris and leaves her breathless and aching for a gulp of air.
Ten years ago, Yae had woken up alone after a bitter argument the night before that left blackened ash behind on her tongue. The argument, a little petty thing, was about the finalization of the merger negotiations with the Kamisato family as well as control over their capricious stock manipulation schemes. The bedsheets on Ei’s side were folded crisply, and a single note laid neatly on top of her comforter. Yae’s blood-curdling shrieks had caused Sara, Kokomi, and Yoimiya to come barreling into her room as she dissolved back into carbon, hydrogen, nitrogen, oxygen, phosphorus, and sulfur.
That was the first time Yae’s world had come to a crashing pause, kicking up gravel with its grinding halt, and she had spent the last ten years holding up her own world like Atlas. She spent every moment making it turn with her blood, sweat, and tears. She had experienced so many life-altering moments, but none of them impacted Yae as hard as Ei leaving did.
“You didn’t answer my question,” Yae says, schooling her face into placid indifference despite the emotions flooding through her body. She hopes that no jagged earthquakes tremble across the plains of her forehead and cheeks.
“I fucked up,” Ei mumbles under her breath and flits her eyes away from Yae’s incessant stare.
The speech was robbed from Yae’s throat. Even if she wanted to say something, Yae would find herself unable to come up with a coherent response, her reply limited to stuttering noises. If this was anyone other than Ei, Yae would have purred a sweet sing-song of darling, speak up, I can’t hear you like a chiming canary and reveled in the wicked amusement that washed over her at the person quivering in front of her, body bowed to the floor. But it’s not, so Yae remains word blind.
Ei looks strangled as she attempts to divulge one of her most closely guarded truths into broad daylight from the hidden shadows of her mind as if Ei hasn’t held her tongue tucked tight to the roof of her mouth for a decade straight. As if Yae hasn’t been aching for a decade straight to hear.
Ei takes a deep breath, “I fucked up. Really badly. I shouldn’t have left that day.”
Once upon a time, Yae had dreamed of this day. Ever since it finally sunk into her thick skull that Ei wasn’t coming back, Yae would press play on this scripted delusion in order to lull her into a dreamless sleep. Ei would come back and apologize for leaving Yae and beg on her knees like she was worshipping a god she didn’t believe in until her knees bloomed blue-black like the good girl she was. Another woman, perhaps one as beautiful as Ei, would be draped across Yae’s lap like waist beads, peppering patchy plum kisses onto her neck as Yae laughs in Ei’s face, taking a sick hedonistic pleasure in seeing her kicked out of the premises by one of her burliest family members.
Yae would have shown the pathetic Ei begging on the side of the street that she could have built this palace she was in by herself and had continued to build it once she had left. She was surrounded by a sworn family that would die for her, black money that could buy the moon for her, beautiful women that would rip off the jewels dripping from their necks for her, and euphoric substances that would numb her body until she became an illusion. Why would Yae need Ei when she already had everything she wanted?
Yae had carried this dream close to her heart like a newborn baby for weeks straight, but a year turned into two, two into five, and five into ten. By the second year, Yae had given up on this middle schooler revenge fantasy. Her precarious position as the family head had forced Yae to stop entertaining the make-believe people floating inside of her head. She had far more pressing issues such as working out drug routes with the Adepti family and stopping the Fatui family from killing her family members for merely going onto their side of the city for business.
“My sister was sick. Cancer.” Ei elaborates. “You never questioned me once how I had so much money.
My family is the Raiden family. They moved from Japan to Singapore in the 19th century and settled down when it was only swamped land after moving the family business of banking and shipping there. They became so wealthy and prestigious over the next couple of centuries that they could afford to hide from the public. That’s why you’ve never heard of them before.
I never liked my family, and I made sure my parents knew by leaving the schools they put me in for a local government school and fucked as many women as I wanted to. They never cared about me much. Makoto was the golden child, and I was the kagemusha or the spare child. But when my sister died, they had to keep up appearances. They always kept tabs about what I was doing even when I left and reached out to me once Makoto became terminal. They gave me one week to say my goodbyes so that I could replace Makoto, or they would have massacred everyone in the family to get me. They would have killed you .”
A deep exhale shudders out of Ei, and she continues, baring her heart on her sleeve, “I thought I could become the perfect daughter I never was when I was young if I followed what my family told me to do, but Makoto told me to live for myself and for her. If it wasn’t for her, I’d still be slaving away there. I promised her that one day I’d come back to you, that I’d come back home . It took ten years for me to get out.”
Yae doesn't say anything. Just crosses the distance separating them in three strong strides. Places her trembling hands gently on Ei’s waist. This is Yae jumping from the bridge, following a ghost of the past. This is a delicate olive branch, a peace offering held out from within her slender fingers.
“Do you still love me?” Yae whispers, looking at Ei. Can Ei feel Yae’s uncertainty traversing the lengths of her fingers out to her waist? It seems almost like an earthquake is running through the ground with the way how her fingers shake.
“I loved you, and I love you still. I’m here now, aren’t I?” Ei wipes a lone tear that Yae didn’t even know was slipping down her cheek.
Ei catches a fleeting smile bursting onto Yae’s lips, ephemeral like a butterfly beat, before Yae buries her head in the crook of Ei’s shoulder. “Even if they killed me, I would have come back to life for you.”
“You’re willing to become a zombie for me? I don’t think you'll look as good as you look right now,” Ei chuckles as her shirt soaks up all of Yae’s tears. She presses a soft kiss to Yae’s hair, breathing the summer sweetness and the bitter strawberries of her scent.
“Excuse you, I’d make a very sexy zombie,” Yae squawks, and Ei’s laughter shakes both of them.