[Fanfic, 100% OJ] Cactus

Genre: Slice of Life

Words: 3852

B/D: The companion piece to Balcony, focusing more on Sham and Sora.

Sora had set two stipulations when she invited Sham to her house. The first was that she treat the door with kindness and respect. The door was Suguri’s oldest friend, a handsome and venerable plane of wood, and even Nath (who had every excuse to be heavy-handed, given that she had only recently gotten hands) had learned to knock gently when she called.

The second was that Sham had to bring a cactus, because they had gotten a new coffee table and they needed a cactus for it. Why it had to be a cactus Sham had no idea, but Sora was emphatic about the need for one. Nath, she said, was allowed to not put a cactus on her coffee table because she had a cat, but they had no such excuse. It was mandatory. They should have put one in the box, Sora had told her darkly.

So it was that Sham found herself face to face with Suguri’s door, armed only with a small, round succulent that she had tucked under her arm and tried not to stick herself with. (Small, round and succulent were often words used to describe Sham herself, although never within earshot). It was a cold, clear morning, one that she had mostly spent traipsing around a garden centre, and her knuckles were already a little red when she knocked the door.

As soon as her hand touched the door, it swung open to reveal Sora, who was still very much in her pajamas and who had a hairbrush dangling freely from her locks. Her hair, as she had informed Sham many times, was very strong. One hairbrush was barely even a challenge; she could suspend up to five hairbrushes simultaneously with her force of will alone. Her eyes looked first at Sham’s face, and then at the cactus under her arm, and she seemed overjoyed to see both.

“Sham,” she said, stepping out of the door and onto the dirt path leading to the house. She winced slightly when her bare feet hit the cold mud. “You’re right on time. You can have breakfast. Come in.”

To begin with, Sham was actually half an hour early, and second, it was almost noon. Third, even if it had been a reputable time to be having breakfast, would she have been denied one if she’d actually turned up on time? Such were the mysteries of Sora, which she seemed to produce magically from her mouth whenever she spoke.

“Do I get a hug?” Sham asked. She hadn’t necessarily been promised a hug, but she had been informed that hugs, in Suguri’s household, were abundant. In fact, Hime had said, they had so many that they simply couldn’t get rid of them fast enough; although demand was high, the supply far outstripped it. It would be a public service to help them work through their hug surplus, Sham thought, and it was one she was willing to provide.

“You’re holding a cactus,” Sora pointed out. It was a fair point, considering the business end was pointed squarely at her chest.

She led Sham into the house and to the living room, which was just as magical an arrangement of clutter as she’d been led to believe. One corner of the room was dominated by half-finished knitting, arranged around, in front of and on top of an old, highbacked armchair. There was a bookshelf that also seemed to be a door, and next to it a loveseat, sequestered away in a corner. In the middle of the room was a coffee table, but the only available seat was a well-worn beanbag, which Sora drifted to as if pulled by magnetism. Near the wall, there was a cushion and a set of tools, laid out with a sense of orderly precision, alongside the shell of some small machine.

“That’s Suguri’s,” Sora explained as Sham’s eyes drifted to it. “She brings things back sometimes. Like a magpie. That used to be a sewing machine, and she’s recycling it into…” A small pause. “Probably another sewing machine.” She patted the coffee table impatiently. “Let’s install the cactus.”

This was a longer and more difficult task than Sham expected it to be, because Sora was adamant that the cactus needed to be in the exact centre of the table, and spent a minute or two making the necessary fine adjustments. Hime, she said, would be more impressed if it was exactly centred. They had gotten a coffee table and a cactus, a picture had been installed in Suguri’s bedroom (of what, Sham didn’t venture to ask), and Suguri had learned bacon and was attempting to learn eggs. This was Progress, that Hime would definitely enjoy the fruits of when she got back.

“What’s its name?” Sora asked, plucking the hairbrush from where it had stuck and resuming her task.

“Huh?”

“The cactus.”

“Ehhh? I was supposed to name it?”

“Mm. It’s a living thing. We’re adopting it, so it needs a name.”

There wasn’t, Sham realised, a great deal she could say to that. She’d been known to name her robots, and one time she had named a toaster. It had been a great toaster, and in her opinion it deserved one, but living things probably deserved one even more. (Her toaster was called Pop-Tart, a somewhat unfortunate name for something in the idol business).

“How about… um… Spike?”

Sora narrowed her eyes, and Sham understood this to mean that her naming privileges had been rescinded. This, frankly, was something of a relief.

She wondered, dimly, if the fact that there was a coffee table meant she would be receiving coffee, before deciding that the answer was ‘no’. The coffee table was there to put the cactus on, and the cactus was there because you couldn’t have a coffee table without one. It was logic – pure, simple, beautiful. Circular, too, as logic tended to become around Sora.

“Here,” she said, holding out her hand for Sora’s hairbrush. “Why don’t I do your hair for you? I bet I can make it look super cute.”

Sora considered this. On one hand, she took good care of her hair. On the other hand, there was rather a lot of it, and it was very good at staying in the exact same style no matter what she did to it. She’d been hit in the face by missiles and still not lost those little sideways tufts she had. Maybe Sham, with her idol powers, could help charm her hair into submission. She nodded, passed the brush over, and closed her eyes.

As she began to pass the brush through Sora’s hair, slowly, softly, Sham began to talk.

She wasn’t, by nature, a loud person. Not really. But she wasn’t a quiet person, either. There was barely a moment when she wasn’t making some kind of sound; she hummed to herself, drummed with her fingers, made conversation with her robots or with animals. Nature abhorred a vacuum, and Sham had grown to abhor a silence.

Sora liked that. It was different to being around Suguri and Nath, who were usually silent unless they had something definite to say. Even Hime, loquacious by nature, sometimes lapsed into long periods of quiet that Sora could never bring herself to break. It wasn’t like that with Sham. She would speak to you, and at low volumes her voice was mellow and pleasant, like an ocean lapping against the shore.

She could talk about anything, too. Anything at all. If Sora had thought to look, she could have seen thousands of interviews with Sham – or some other idol who looked and spoke suspiciously like her – talking about everything under the sun. As an idol, first she had learned to sing, and then, later, to speak; over ten thousand years, she had achieved a mastery of her voice that perhaps no other person on Earth could match.

The only problem was that it was all too easy to let the sound wash over you and relax, and consequently, Sora had no idea what she was talking about.

She was sure she had heard the word ‘robots’ five minutes ago, which had a breathless undercurrent of excitement when Sham said it. For Sora, robots existed mostly as things that she had once shot at and didn’t have to shoot any more of. She was, Suguri had told her very seriously, retired. From now on, her job was to enjoy the world she’d saved. Now Sham had gone on a tangent about dinosaurs, a topic Sora was more enthusiastic about.

“What’s the best dinosaur?” she asked. This was her favourite question to ask people about anything new. If they could answer it, she got valuable information, and it was a good question because it had elicited a good answer. If not, it was a good question because good questions were always difficult to answer. Either way, she won.

“Ooh, I think it’s a stegosaurus. They were herbivores so they were probably peaceful, and they had these teeny-tiny brains, so they might have been a bit silly. I could totally imagine them as these big old dojikko dinosaurs… that’s kinda cute, don’t you think?”

“Hm,” Sora replied, seemingly accepting the logic. “What about a T .rex?”

“Well… They’re pretty impressive, but I don’t really think you can call them cute, right…?”

“But they have little stubby arms. That’s cute.”

“But… they were so big.”

“Big things can be cute. Like bears.”

Sham frowned. The first time Sora had said bears were cute, she’d assumed she meant… well, teddy bears. Plush toys that were round and cuddly. But then she had been to the zoo with Nath, and returned with a camera roll that contained three pictures of bears for every one picture of anything else – pictures that she showed Sham one by one, with what passed for excited commentary. She seemed to particularly enjoy it whenever she caught a bear standing on its hind legs. (The other pictures were shared between lions – also an apparent favourite, because she identified with their shaggy manes – her own fingers, and Nath.) If she found the plush toys cute at all, it was only because they reminded her of the 300 kilogram killing machine that it represented.

Still, she reminded herself, Sora was probably still one of those unfortunate souls who believed cuteness was subjective. She was ten thousand years old, after all. She didn’t know that in the enlightened present, there existed a detailed and intricate scale for measuring cuteness, on which Sham scored many points and stubby T. rex arms did not.

Sora could be educated about the true nature of cuteness some other time. For now, Sham just filed the details away in her brain for further reference, adding them to an ever-growing store.

She had realised, after talking to Suguri at Nath’s beach house, that she didn’t really know Sora. She knew Sora, the concept – the stout-hearted warrior who, rather than fight half the world in the name of victory, chose to fight the whole world in the name of peace. She knew her as a sleeping face in a life support pod, her mouth always cast in a faint frown. She knew her as an inspiration, a muse, a hero.

In other words, she knew what Sora was, but not who she was, and so far those turned out to have been two very different things. She loved animals, winced at loud noises, asked a thousand questions and always seemed pleased with the answers. She was a slow speaker and a heavy sleeper, whose train of logic ran along unpredictable tracks. In short, she had begun to blossom from a thing, an idea, into a person, and that was the part Sham was trying to tease out and understand.

She was just beginning to tease Sora’s hair into three strands so it could be braided when Suguri barrelled down the stairs at top speed, wearing pajama bottoms and a men’s shirt that was inside out. She looked around frantically before locking eyes with Sora.

“Sora, Hime’s on her way. Please greet her while I get started on the breakfast in bed,” she instructed.

“No.” Sora turned the full power of her gaze on Suguri. “Hime will wait as long as she needs to for breakfast in bed, but she’ll want a hug as soon as she gets in. That’s your job.”

Suguri didn’t know when hug harvesting became her official job, but it struck her that it was perhaps the best job in the world. She was about to say as much when a pair of keys rattled in the door.

“Oh, my,” said a muffled voice. “It seems the cold has made the lock stick.”

The rattling continued, slowly growing more insistent.

“Hm. What a tricky conundrum… I suppose I shall have to do away with my mittens. I can’t do anything in mittens.”

The rattling became almost violent, accompanied by an occasional but very distinct thump, consistent with the sound of a door being kicked. Then it fell utterly silent.

“My, my. Well, the only thing left to do is shoot the lock off, I suppose. Such a shame.”

It was at this point that Suguri recovered herself and rushed forward to save her fixtures and fittings from Hime’s wrath. Sham got up to follow her, but Sora caught her hand, shaking her head disapprovingly (and destroying the proto-braid that Sham had spent the last five minutes coaxing into existence).

“Let them canoodle,” she said, gravely. Probably more gravely than the word ‘canoodle’ really deserved to be said. “It’s good for the environment.”

How Suguri and Hime canoodling would benefit the ecology was a question Sham was deeply interested in, but didn’t have the chance to answer; the two re-entered the living room, wrapped in an embrace that was halfway between a hug and a tango. To say that Hime looked smug as she piloted Suguri into the living room would have been quite unfair, but she definitely seemed more pleased than was strictly permissible in modern society.

“Ah… you know, it really is such a small thing, but it feels wonderful to be back home. Lovely to see you, Sham. I shan’t pose, if you’ll forgive me… I feel my star power is quite high enough for the moment.” She took a moment to throw herself into a sweeping dancer’s dip, entrusting her whole weight to Suguri, which – in Sham’s humble opinion – was definitely posing. She sprang back upright, gave a satisfied little smile, and broke the embrace with a look that promised more in the future. “Now, I hope you three have been behaving yourselves?”

This was a question that everybody in the room, as if by prior agreement, studiously refused to answer.

“I see… Well, I trust you’ve at least been having fun, then?”

This question was met more enthusiastically, at least by Sora. “Mm. Sham’s fixing my hair today. She says I’ll look like a princess. I’m not sure which one yet.”

“Sleeping Beauty,” Sham answered.

“Oh. Well, you certainly sleep enough for the position, but I’ll leave the question of beauty for others to pursue,” Hime teased. Her smile, however, hinted that anybody who said Sora was less than beautiful would be rewarded with a generous helping of sisterly wrath. “Well, I suppose I shall leave you to it. I’ll tell you all about my trip later, of course, but for now I’ll make us all some lunch.”

“Wait.” Sora’s face assumed a beatific smile, like a buddha experiencing a brief flash of enlightenment. “Suguri wanted you to get into bed.”

“Oh!” Hime pressed the back of her hand to her forehead, and swooned in a way that was almost certainly an act. Almost. “Had I known my absence would breed this much fondness, I’d have taken a trip much sooner. I don’t suppose Suguri would like to tell me this herself? In private, perhaps? So I can enjoy it properly?”

The grey-haired girl fixed Sora with a scowl. “...I was going to make you breakfast. In bed. I’ve been practising all week.”

“Oh…” Hime said, and made a show of being disappointed. “You know, Suguri, that’s a streak of cruelty I wouldn’t have expected from you. Crushing the hopes of an innocent young maiden like that…”

“You’re not ‘young’. And you weren’t hoping for anything innocent.”

“Oho. Guilty on all counts, I'm afraid.”

Their conversation began to fall into an easy rhythm, the comfortable back-and-forth of a married couple. There were no grand declarations of love, no dramatic accounts of who had missed whom the most. But, Sham couldn’t help but notice, Hime’s attention was so taken up that she didn’t even remark on the new coffee table, or the cactus sitting proudly in the centre of it.

Then, the idol had a quiet revelation.

“Oh my gosh,” she murmured, staring at Sora’s expression. “You were trying to tease them, weren’t you? That’s your teasing face!

Sora’s smile remained angelic. “I don’t have a teasing face.”

“You do! You totally do! You’re teasing me right now!”

“...It’s your imagination.”

At no point did Sora’s face lose the aura of cherubic innocence, until Sham very gently poked her cheek. For most people, this would have been akin to walking up to a nuclear missile and smacking it with a stick. Sure, it probably wouldn’t go off, because it actually took quite a lot of science to make a nuclear explosion, but why would you take the chance? To that question Sham had found an answer, and the answer was that Sora’s cheeks were very soft. The smile became a puzzled kind of frown, and stayed that way even when Sham hurriedly resumed her amateur hairstyling. She had strayed into the forbidden land; forgiveness would surely come, but not quite so easily.

She still, however, had her soothing voice to fall back on, and before long she was speaking with the same comforting rhythm as before. Sora’s expression grew sleepier, even as Sham re-brushed the tangles from her hair; after a while, Suguri tiptoed up the stairs with a plate of bacon and what had, presumably, once been eggs. The house became quiet and peaceful again.

The door knocked once more.

Sora shifted uncomfortably. It was rare for them to get two unexpected knocks in one day. It was probably, she decided, marketing people, which were usually Hime’s job. But they were easy enough to deal with.

“Wait here. I’ll get it,” she told Sham. She stood up slowly and carefully, knowing that her hair would seize any sudden movement as an excuse to bounce back into its original formation and waste all of Sham’s effort. Sham watched her go, leaning back; her shoulders had gotten stiff.

“Hello. We don’t want any–” she heard Sora say from the hallway, and then – “…Nath. I didn’t know you were coming today.”

Sham sat up. She hadn’t been expecting to hear Nath’s voice – cool, deep, sonorous. In her heart of hearts, she was a little annoyed by it. It was true that the more, the merrier, but she had… well, wanted to spend a little time with just Sora and her. To get to know each other. It was harder to do with an audience. It always was.

“…Yeah. Hime crashed at my place on the way home, and invited me. I slept a little late, though.”

“It’s okay. I need your naming powers. We’ve got a cactus.”

“…Naming powers? For the record, you were the one who named the cat. I just went along with it.”

“Sham wanted to call it Spike, but I don’t like it. I want something that sticks in your head more.”

“Have you ever touched a cactus? The spikes stick just about everywhere.”

“Ooh. Good pun. I was thinking I’d call it Pumpkin.”

“…That’s just false advertising.”

“That’s what makes it memorable.”

They fell into step so easily, she thought. They had a shared understanding that she had yet to achieve. When they came to the living room they were walking shoulder-to-shoulder, and it just reminder her that she’d spent most of the day staring at Sora’s back. So far behind. So little time to catch up.

“Hey, Sham.” Nath raised a hand in greeting, a bag slung clumsily over her arm. There was just a ripple of hesitation when she spoke. It felt awkward. “What have you two been up to?”

“Not much,” she admitted. “I’ve been doing her hair.”

“It’s relaxing,” Sora added.

“I see,” Nath said slowly. After a moment, she smiled. “Well, you’ve been doing a good job. She looks like a princess.”

Despite herself, Sham puffed her chest out. “Well… ahaha. If you hang around backstage with the stylists, you pick things up. And I’m actually a qualified hairdresser and cosmetologist, y’know? I’ve worked in the industry on every level!”

“Which princess do I look like?”

“Mm. Hard to pick just one. A lot of princesses had long, blonde hair.” She sat down heavily, and began to rummage around in her bag before pulling out a brightly-coloured magazine. “Sora, here. I stopped by the comic shop before I came and picked up your usual.”

Sora sat down so quickly that there was an audible thump. Today, in her opinion, was becoming a very good day. She had company, she had a comic, she had a cactus and she had a coffee table on which to put it. What more could she need?

“Thank you. This is a good issue,” she said, despite not even having opened it. “I get to see the thrilling conclusion.”

“To what? Last issue didn’t even have a cliffhanger.”

“That doesn’t mean it won’t have a thrilling conclusion somewhere. I just have to look for it.” She turned to look at Sham with green eyes that glittered with excitement. “Sham, have you read this one? It’s about biplanes, which are super primitive flying machines. They have propellers and everything. You like propellers,” she said, with such confidence that Sham couldn’t bring herself to refute it.

“A-ahaha. Well, I mean… I never really got comics, I guess. There’s too much continuity, so I can never tell what’s going on. It’d be super disorientating to start right in the middle of a plotline.”

“…Don’t worry about that. This one only started recently,” Nath said. “Sora and I have all the back issues. We’ll get you caught up in no time.”

Sham smiled, and realised that the next few hours of her life were going to be an education. She still wasn’t into comics, but that didn’t really matter. What mattered was that they were, however clumsily, trying to include her. She still didn’t know Sora as well as she wanted to, and she knew Nath even less. But they were reaching out to her, just as much as she was reaching out to them – and not just because she had brought a cactus. She could appreciate that.

This was Sora’s house, full of the things and the people that she loved. For the next few hours, she was among them.

A/N: This story more or less ended up as an excuse for my dumb, goofy Sora to do the things she does. It did, however, end up having the whole Suguri/Sora storyline core cast, no matter how briefly.