[Fanfic, 100% Orange Juice] Watchdog

Genre: Friendship
Length: 2332 words

B/D: Well, I meant to work on a FFVII story. You can see how that turned out. Yuki gets introduced.

The warm sun through thick, heavy windows. A close heat. She feels sweat on the nape of her neck, loosens the scarf at her throat. Her ears are pricked for the sound of a bell, two flat taps of the hammer before a ringing cry that echoes up and down the hallways of the school. She’s had her fill of class, and of homework, and of the tireless hand-wringing of her teachers and of the strange, ever present face of the caretaker. She has business to attend to. When the moment comes, she can’t suppress the habitual wag of her tail. She packs her things quickly and clumsily, stuffs handfuls of notepaper into her satchel.

“You’ll break your pencils,” Syura warns, smiling as always. She spent the whole class playing games on her phone under the desk – probably some racing game with tilt controls. Tilt controls are Syura’s new fad, a passion that will envelop her for maybe three weeks before evaporating, as if it were never there. Three weeks, QP knows, is enough time to create some half-finished, bug-ridden, programmer art laden facsimile of a demo that she will later be forced to play.

“It’s Friday,” she says, by way of response, and carries on cramming pencils into her bag. She rarely ever draws anything, but she does enjoy chewing the ends. Pencils with erasers on them are the highest form of heresy she can imagine. When she occasionally succumbs to the temptation to do a sketch, she is always struck by how unwieldy the pencil feels in her hand, how the lines never seem to behave quite the way she wants them to, how the paper is a poor substitute for the canvas of her mind. No doubt she would improve with practice, but part of her is already resigned to never being an artist. Perhaps she’s simply too happy-go-lucky for something requiring so much dedication.

“I know, I know. You’re busy after school on Fridays,” Syura sighs, and leans against her desk. She loosens her collar, fans her slender neck with her hand. As always, her uniform is crumpled. Her parents are never home, and her attempts at using an iron herself have been less than satisfactory. Still, QP thinks, it gives her a certain mad scientist air to go with her all-consuming passion for creating games. (QP’s opinions are, perhaps, a little charitable; common consensus is that the effect is less ‘mad scientist’ and more ‘dragged to school through a hedge’.) “Make it up to me tomorrow. Let me tie your hair in pigtails again.”

She grimaces, but agrees. An accord has been struck, and Syura’s odd whims satisfied; the rest of the day is to do what she wishes, without distractions. Their goodbyes are the quick, affectionate goodbyes of old friends who will see each other again soon.

As one, the collective student body rushes out into the warm air and breathes deeply, greedily, as a swimmer breathes after their first big dive. A day where the sun shines even after class is a beautiful treasure, not to be wasted. QP trails behind them, sticking largely to pools of shade beneath shop awnings and cool dark alleyways. She’s no fan of the heat. If she were a dog – a real dog, with four paws and a collar – her nose would dry out and she’d just lie on the ground, panting. As it is, she just looks forward to a shower when she gets home, and changing into something less stuffy than her school uniform. In her heart, she wishes she could take to the sky, and enjoy the cooler air near the clouds, but it would attract too much attention.

It isn’t that what she’s doing is wrong, of course. In fact, it’s something of a public service. But it’s… sensitive. Not the kind of thing she wants to advertise. It’s more of a routine, nowadays. A show of form. Either that, or a mess she’s gotten herself into that she hasn’t figured out how to escape yet.

Slowly, she makes her way towards the outskirts of the city, where the shops begin to look less and less appealing, and the people more and more shabby. There is a greyness about the place, that persists even in the height of summer, never dulled by sunshine or papered over by rain or snow. For want of a better word, it feels tired. It has done ever since she was a child, when she wandered into one of the run-down little pet shops and fussed over their rabbits. The owner, although initially annoyed, had eventually been swept away by her enthusiasm and had even given her a box of juice when she left.

Today, she winds through the streets away from the pet shop, towards an old bar that looks as though it has seen better days (and has looked that way since it was built). Burnt orange bricks with crumbling mortar, and a barely functional neon sign: those are what mark out the Tread and Thimble. She assumes it was once the Thread and Thimble, but the H has been gone for as long as she can remember – as if it had never existed at all. It’s the kind of place that has six different draught beers, but nobody is stupid enough to try them.

She steps inside, letting the swing doors close heavily behind her. The first time she came her, she was terrified. It was not the kind of place where beautiful women, like herself, were supposed to venture. But as Friday upon Friday passed, she began to realise that the character of the bar was not unlike the rest of the area – cantankerous, but legitimately trying to drag itself upwards hand over hand and fist over fist.

She’s greeted by the crack of snooker balls being broken, the first shot of a brand-new game. She hears the distinctive but chaotic pattern of thuds as a formation of balls scatters and bounces against the soft baize cushions. It’s a very clean break. Very efficient. She hears a lone ball fall into a pocket, and knows at once who it must have been.

Leaning over the table – almost lounging – is Yuki, dressed casually in a black vest and tight, dark jeans. Her fingers, supporting the tip of the cue in an open bridge, are long and slender, like her bared arms. She looks lithe, graceful. Adult. A pang of jealousy settles itself in QP’s heart. It annoys her that even though Yuki is a bully, she has a type of beauty that neither herself nor Syura can ever really hope to aspire to.

“You came again,” Yuki says, without looking at her. Her voice is low, for a woman’s, with just the faintest touch of a burr. It always seems as though there is a rolling growl in her words, a subtle hint of aggression. Maybe she’s just purring, QP thinks, but there’s not really much to purr about. “Teddy. It’s a hot day. Get the little girl a lemonade.”

There it is. The playful way she does something, just to raise QP’s hackles. She feels a low growl building in her throat. “Hey! In a couple of years, I’ll be just as big as you. Maybe even bigger,” she says, although nobody pays her much mind. The bartender has already begun to move, tossing ice in a glass and filling it with swift motions. He slides the drink across the length of the bar in a practised motion, and it slides to a halt in front of her.

“You’re already bigger than me across the waist,” Yuki says, scratching her cheek. She takes a careless shot, and another ball is claimed by the side pocket. “Hey, Teddy. Didn’t I say to get a sippy cup for her?”

“I heard she got mad and wrecked a shop downtown the other week. Her friend ran it,” Teddy says, shrugging his broad shoulders. “I don’t have money to replace the bar.”

“That was different,” she says, trying her best to be comforting. “I had to deal with a stalker that day. I won’t wreck your bar, Mr. Teddy.”

“Stalker, huh? No accounting for taste. You know what you should, kid?” Yuki asks, sending another ball spiralling with a grand flourish. It’s a little too grand, and the target doesn’t quite reach the pot. She hisses, before clicking her tongue against her teeth and continuing. “Join Waruda. You join my organisation, and I can guarantee you’ll never see that stalker again. I ever teach you how to gaslight somebody?”

QP shakes her head, folds her arms a little defensively. “It doesn’t matter how many times you ask. I’m not joining.”

“Worth a shot,” the cat shrugs. “Drink your lemonade, kid. It’d look suspicious if you died of dehydration in the same room as me.”

She pouts, but the day is too hot, and the bar too stuffy, to argue any further. She gives the barman a sidelong glance. “Mr Teddy? May I please have a straw?”

It’s almost impossible to see the barman’s smile beneath his moustache, but it’s there. He rummages around in the cubby-holes behind the bar before eventually producing a plastic silly-straw with a corkscrew loop in the middle, which he hands to her with strange gravity. “You’re a good kid.”

“I know. That’s the problem. If she weren’t such a goody-two shoes, she could be my third in command. Maybe even second in command, if she grows a brain,” Yuki grouses. Her opponent has missed his shot, and she’s capitalising on the opportunity furiously. “Why do you even keep coming here, if you’re not going to join?”

It’s a fair question, and one that QP has found asking herself. The bar is well out of her way. She has no friends here, no real interest in snooker or darts or whatever other bar games Yuki likes to play. She could be at home, eating pudding, or with Aru or Syura or Krila. Instead, she’s here.

“You’re dangerous, and it’s my job to keep an eye on you.”

Yuki snorts as she hits the ball; if she weren’t playing a game, it probably would have been a full-blown laugh. “Your job, huh? But only on Fridays after school, and only if I helpfully agree to come to the same place every week. Boy, the world’s really in trouble when you gotta get a real job and can’t watch me play games once a week.”

QP takes a long sip of her lemonade, relishes the icy chill working its way to her stomach. “Shut up. What would you even make me do in Waruda, anyway? I don’t like cheating or hurting people.”

Yuki turns and gives her a devilish smirk. For a moment, she looks dazzling. But her vest top is clinging to her body, and she has the beginnings of a tan on the tip of her nose; the heat affects her like it does anybody else.

“That’s the beauty of it, squirt. I’d have you do nothing. Absolutely nothing. Just set you up on a little payroll from some of our casino heists. Nothing big enough to be suspicious. Just enough to keep you with a good supply of pudding and a place to live. And then, when the time comes for Waruda to make our move? You just sit back, and keep doing nothing. No interfering, no adventures. You just say you were sick that day. Nobody could blame you.”

“Everybody wins?” QP asks, with a sarcastic edge in her voice.

Yuki returns to the table, and pots the last balls in quick succession. She’s been messing around the whole time, and her opponent knows it. “There’s no such thing as ‘everybody wins’, kid. Life’s like a game, and every game has a loser.”

“Video games don’t have a loser,” QP says loyally, Syura’s little ahoge appearing in her mind’s eye.

“In video games, the loser is always you. You either lose to the game, or you beat the game and lose your entertainment,” Yuki shrugs. “Here, take a cue. I’m going to teach you how to break. It’s an important life skill.”

“Is it really?” she asks, taking a cue anyway. The cat quickly resets the balls, with motions she’s practised a thousand times, and before long QP is leaning across the table, the cue between the points of her fingers, weighing her shot.

“Sure it is. You know why I’m in Waruda, an organisation for bad kids? Because when I was in school, I never wanted to study. All I wanted to do was play. When I left school, I still just wanted to play, so they called me a bad adult – because I didn’t wanna grind my life away doing something I didn’t enjoy. You ever hear of ‘karoshi’? Death through over work. That’s the kind of world we live in,” Yuki says, and for once her voice sounds sad and far-away. “And the schools I hated are still there, producing diligent, goody-two shoes kids like you who grow up and get sucked into the machine.”

“You sound super biased. Besides, I’m too laid back to be diligent,” QP says, after a moment.

“Good. Stay that way. Don’t quit playing when you get to be an adult, and we might just get along even if we’re not on the same side. Here,” she says, leaning over the table to match QP’s profile, putting her long, elegant fingers over QP’s childish hands. “Hold the cue further down, like this.”

In a fluid movement, the ball is struck and the break complete. Not as clean, or as elegant, but still done. Yuki’s hand lingers over QP’s for just a moment longer, before she goes to the other end of her table and takes up her customary title as the rival. A rival, Yuki thinks, is just another name for a teacher – and she’s going to teach QP how to play, and how to lose.

A/N: I wanted to get a little bit of the cat and dog feel of QP and Yuki, but retain the fairly light-hearted feel of the universe here. Hopefully I got it right.