#lordy loo

She starts getting messages from her European contacts within the day. The publicity of the practical exam was supposed to give her more time, but instead it’s made them all nervous, hand-wringing cowards. Suddenly the assurances they’d been happy to accept before aren’t enough. Suddenly she’s an unreliable partner, and they need more proof of commitment. Suddenly they all want to speak with her father, instead.

Natsumi won’t let them. It’s that simple. She can handle it. She has to handle it. It’s not any different than it was before, it’s just that her timetable is shortened now, that’s all.

The next morning, a car comes to pick her and Peko up for spring vacation. Most of the other students will stay to watch the rest of the exams, but Natsumi doesn’t care what any of them have cooked up. There’s too much left for her to do now, anyway.

The ride back is long, and silent except for the insistent buzzing of Natsumi’s phone. Emails and texts and, once, a call from her contact in Marseille that boils down to an hour of him trying to pressure a better cut out of her.

She puts her phone back in her bag after that, and ignores it for the rest of the trip.

The front gates of the compound are beautiful in early spring, when the cherry trees are budding but not yet blooming. She likes it when there’s a mix of colors: the green and pink from the trees against the deep red of the gate.

The blossoms must be late this year, though: she can’t make out the pink until the car pulls up right to the gate, and even then it’s only because she’s looking for it. They might be further along by the end of her vacation, but then again, there’s a better chance she’ll miss it entirely.

Only Fuyuhiko is waiting when the car pulls up the drive to the main house. He looks sullen, squinting into the sun with his arms crossed. It isn’t as if she expected the same sort of entourage she had as when she left for school, but even for summer break her parents and her aunt had been there to greet her, too.

She knows it’s not an accident or an oversight.

Natsumi rolls down the window to stick her head out. “Gee, be more of a welcome wagon, huh?”

“Will you just get out of the car already?”

The driver takes Natsumi’s bags up into the house. Fuyuhiko tussles with Peko over hers (“I’ve been standing out here all damn morning, at least give me something to do,”) until she relents.

(She takes them back when she parts ways with them at the staff quarters. "I'll see you soon, young mistress." She bows at the waist, and it’s already strange to be separated from her during the day.)

The house is quiet. The staff smile and bow politely to her when they pass (“Welcome home, young mistress,”) but there’s no urgency to their routines. Everything is clean, but not spotless. The kitchen is empty in the late afternoon lull between lunch and dinner.

It’s normal for a Thursday, but not for her homecoming.

When they reach the study, she says, “They’re not here, are they?”

Fuyuhiko grimaces. His shoulders hunch when he shoves his hands deeper in his pockets. “They’re in Seoul,” he tells her. “‘Emergency business trip’. They’re supposed to be back by the middle of the week.”

She hates that some part of her is still surprised, when she knows she shouldn’t be. “Figures,” she says, and flops back onto the cushions of the couch. “Not like that’s something worth telling me ahead of time.”

“Look, they’re—”

“You wanna play cards?” she interrupts. She swings her legs off the couch and reaches for the top desk drawer. “Everyone at school sucks. I’m so rusty you might actually have a chance of beating me this time.”

It’s so transparent it’s almost painful. She knows that; he must know it, too. He sits down next to her anyway, legs crossed under him on the couch.

“So,” he says, after she’s started to deal the cards between them. “You gonna tell me what happened?”

She loses count. She has to poke through his to see how many she’s given him already. “What happened with what?”

“Don’t give me that crap. You know what I’m talking about.”

“There’s nothing to say,” Natsumi tells him. “I couldn’t get her to say yes to a partnership. That’s it.” She nudges his cards toward him. “Now play.”

“Bullshit. You expect me to believe that?”

“Well, it’s what happened!” she snaps. “So yeah! I do!”

He doesn’t buy it. (It was admittedly not her best.) She can feel him staring at the side of her head, so she focuses on her hand. It’s garbage. “You’re telling me that you— you— couldn’t convince her. Last year you convinced an elementary school teacher to run for us out the back of the school playground.”

“That one wasn’t even hard,” Natsumi mutters. “He was up to his ears in gambling debts, all anybody needed was eyes to see that.”

“And you couldn’t find an angle on the princess,” he goes on. “Nothing? You had Peko running around for two goddamn weeks and you couldn’t find anything?”

“Jeez,” she tries, laughing, “If this is about Peko, for the last time—”

That doesn’t work either. He doesn’t flinch or flush or even look away. Maybe she’s just lost her touch. “Don’t try to pull that shit on me. You know what this is about. What the fuck is going on, Natsumi?”

“Just—” She winces when her voice cracks. “Don’t. Okay? It’s fine. I’m handling it.” He squints at her. “I don’t want to talk about it.”

He lets it go, but only just barely. She lays her cards on the table before he can change his mind.

He’s frowning when he lays his cards down over hers. “I win,” he says. “Deal ‘em again.”

*

She takes her old SLR camera out into the garden, because she feels like it. She’d found it on one of the shelves in her bedroom, dusty and obsolete, but workable. The plum trees are in full bloom, unlike the cherry trees outside, and they’ve scattered white and pink petals all across the little artificial pond at the center of the courtyard. It's pretty, and she’s always preferred taking pictures of nature over portraits of people.

Natsumi crouches down to take a close-up of one of the koi carp investigating a blossom spinning on the surface of the water. It opens its mouth wide and flares its gills, and when she snaps the picture it looks like it’s about to swallow the little blossom whole. The camera has clear focus and a powerful zoom; even this dumb photo of a fish comes out better than anything she’s snapped on her phone in the past year. She sits back on her heels to take another picture of the tree over her head, the plum blossoms dappled in light and shadow.

A plum tree is beautiful in its own way no matter what time of year it is; people are flighty and performative, especially in pictures. It’s easier for a person to ruin a good picture than a flower or a cat or a mountain.

She sits on one of the garden benches to page her way through her photos. It was always Koizumi who was obsessed with taking pictures of people, back in their middle school photography club. Of course people liked that better; everyone likes to see photos of themselves. Natsumi never bought into it. Koizumi’s pictures were always simple, inoffensive, safe. Social media pictures.

Through the open shōji she can see her brother and Peko standing together just inside the house. He’s telling her a story while he helps her set out plates and cups for an afternoon snack; Natsumi can tell because he keeps waving his hands around, even when Peko reaches for something he’s holding. He says something that makes her smile, and there’s a moment where both of them are smiling at each other and neither of them are saying anything.

Natsumi frames them in her camera’s viewfinder, but by the time she presses the shutter the moment’s already passed. It’s not a bad picture— it’s still cute and the image is crisp, and anything that preserves her brother’s dopey smile is good in her opinion— but it still isn’t right. You can’t boil people or relationships down into a single image, that’s what she’s said from the beginning. She doesn’t know how Koizumi does it, or why she even bothers.

Maybe that’s the difference between her and Koizumi, though. Maybe that’s why Hope’s Peak saw Ultimate talent in her pictures and not Natsumi’s.

Fuyuhiko and Peko bring a plate of Peko’s dango out to her. (That is, Fuyuhiko does, after he takes one from where Peko has it balanced on her forearm.) He doesn’t say anything when he sits down next to her, just holds it out for her to take. Natsumi takes a picture of it before she does.

(Peko isn’t supposed to cook, it’s not her role in the household, but she likes it, and her dango are Natsumi’s favorites, so she does it anyway.)

Fuyuhiko scoots over to give Peko room to sit next to him, and he pokes Natsumi with his elbow until she scoots, too. The three of them are more squished on this bench now than they used to be when they were kids, but that doesn’t matter. Natsumi holds her food in her lap while she plays with the camera’s built-in filters. “How is that thing, anyway?” he asks her, mouth half full. “I figured you weren’t ever gonna use it again.”

Natsumi picks a filter with bright, oversaturated colors, and lets the camera drop on its strap around her neck so she can eat. “Eh. It’s okay, I guess.”

“’Okay’? The fuck is that supposed to mean?”

“It means what it sounds like! Jeez, you’re the one who asked.”

“It’s old, but it’s not like it’s a piece of crap. Gimme that.” He jerks the camera toward him and flips through her pictures, one by one. “How many different pictures can you take of bushes?”

Peko leans over to look; the bottom of one of her braids brushes against his shoulder. “I like them,” she says.

Natsumi feels her brother go very still. The strap tugs around her neck when he tries to pull the camera over to give Peko more room, but Natsumi doesn’t give him any slack.

“I mean, sure. They’re… pretty, I guess.”

“The garden is well-maintained. But the young mistress does more than just photograph the flowers.”

“That doesn’t make any goddamn sense.” He taps the ‘next’ button with the edge of his thumb to scroll through all the pictures. “Look, it’s a flower. Look, there’s three flowers. Flower, flower, fish, flower—”

He lands on the picture of the two of them inside the house. Natsumi nearly laughs and chokes when he pulls abruptly down on the camera’s strap, like hiding it against his stomach is somehow better than the alternative.

Then her phone buzzes in her breast pocket.

It’s a phone call, not a text or an email, and she doesn’t need to look to know it’s coming from an international number. She lets it ring out anyway. She’s tired. She just wants to take pictures and laugh at her brother’s expression when he sees the stupid faces he makes in them.

The call goes to voicemail. She has enough time to bite another dango off the stick before it starts to ring again.

She pulls it out of her pocket. Greece.

Her camera jerks out of Fuyuhiko’s hands when she stands. He frowns up at her. “What the hell? Where are you going?”

“I have to take this.” The number stares up at her from the screen. She can see the icon for the previous missed call in the corner. He’s definitely going to ask her for an explanation, and she definitely has to have one.

“Who is it?”

“Don’t worry about it! Here, go take some of your own if you think you can do so much better.” She swings the strap off her neck and dumps it over his.

“Natsumi—”

“Let’s go, Peko.”

Peko gets up to follow, but not before she lingers, just a second too long.

Natsumi doubts her brother even notices.

*

She loses three of the contracts before dinner.

They all think she’s weak, but none of them are brave enough to tell her that’s why they’re welching. The Croatians tell her that they’d decided to go in another direction. The French make up some bullshit about shipping costs and the viability of the market in Asia. The Spaniards say they “don’t like where the wind is blowing.”

She tries everything she can think of. She ups their cuts. She promises no-charge protection and guaranteed legal immunity. She flirts. She shouts. She holds her knife in one hand and mentally pages through Peko’s forms while she talks about how the Kuzuryuu Clan responds to being disappointed.

Her contact in A Coruña hangs up on her, and she throws her phone across the room.

The bottom left edge hits the floor at an awkward angle and sends a spider web of cracks out over the screen. She considers just leaving it there, broken and useless in the corner, but then the screen lights up again behind all the cracks, and she can’t just ignore it. She scoops it back up on her way out of the room.

The kitchen staff sets out dinner in the smaller family dining room (ginger pork, the chef tells her with a broad smile and clasped hands, her favorite). Their parents have their designated seats on one side of the table, and the children have theirs on the other; even with two of them empty, neither she nor Fuyuhiko feel like upsetting that configuration. They kneel together at the table, and Natsumi sticks Fuyuhiko with her chopsticks when he tries to take the bigger serving of the pork. Peko takes her place behind Natsumi’s seat, hands folded in her lap.

The silence is stifling. Fuyuhiko keeps looking at her. (She has no idea how he made it this far in this family without learning any kind of subtlety.) She tries to focus on just getting through her dinner so she can get back to work.

Her phone starts to buzz in her pocket. She drops her chopsticks to answer it, but her hand only makes it far enough to rub the inside corner of her right eye.

Fuyuhiko says, “Natsumi.”

The call rings out, and she feels it buzz again with a voicemail. She thinks about excusing herself to go listen to it, but by now it’s nearly pointless, isn’t it? There’s no point in pretending this is doable anymore.

“I had dirt on the princess of Novoselic and I didn’t use it,” she says into her bowl.

He’s mid-bite when she says it. He chews slowly, and then all he has to say is, “What?”

She doesn’t look at him. She pushes a single grain of rice in a circle around the lip of the bowl. “Are you deaf now, too? I said I could have blackmailed Sonia Nevermind into taking the deal and I didn’t. That’s why I almost failed, all right? Since you wanted to know so bad.” Her voice wobbles. She won’t let it crack again. “They said it wasn’t good enough that I had it but didn’t do anything with it.”

He’s silent for too long. She wants to see the face he’s making but can’t bring herself to look. “Fuck, Natsumi,” he says finally. “Why the hell would you do something like that?”

Her grain of rice is a third of the way around her bowl. She slows it down. “Does it matter? It’s over. It happened.”

“Uh, considering you had millions riding on it, yeah, I think it kinda fucking matters.” He’s rubbing at his face. She manages to look at him, sideways. “I thought you already confirmed all those contracts?”

“I did.” He jerks his head back to look at her, eyebrows high. “It’s fine! Everybody’s getting what they paid for.“ She looks back down at her grain of rice. “For now.”

“And how exactly are you pulling that off? I thought Novoselic was supposed to be your silver bullet.”

“You think I’d do something this big without a backup plan?” It doesn’t come out the way she wants it to. It sounds too much like an actual question. “Rin’s got her people handling it.”

He groans. “Rin is? Are you fucking kidding me?”

“It’s fine! She has people moving worse things across the border all the time.”

“That’s not the point! There’s no way her and her gaggle of gun nuts are going to be able to keep up once the rest of these contracts start kicking in.”

“It’s plan B. It was never supposed to be permanent.” The rice has already made two laps by now, so she picks at her napkin instead. For once in her life she misses the paper ones from Hope’s Peak’s dining hall; it’d be a lot more satisfying if it tore. “That’s why I need your help, obviously.”

“My help,” he repeats.

She nods.

He doesn’t say anything else. He drops his chopsticks onto his plate with a clatter, and stands up from the table.

Her stomach clenches. “Where are you going?”

“To make some phone calls, since we’ve apparently got a lot of fuckin’ work to do,” he answers. “What’re you wasting time for?” He picks up his plate, and cradles his cup in the crook of his arm. One of the kitchen staff steps forward to help him with the dishes, but he waves him off. “Come on. We’re taking the rest of this to-go.”

Peko helps them carry the serving platters.

*

They turn one of the smaller spare rooms into a war room. All the furniture gets stowed away except for the low table at the center. (And every single pillow Natsumi owns, which she gets Peko to bring in before Fuyuhiko can tell her not to. If they’re going to be up all night, she might as well be comfortable.) They set up both their laptops and pool all the relevant paper documents they have: hard copies of old contracts and new ones, historical data on moving product through the region, things Natsumi’s read so many times she’s sure she’ll remember them for the rest of her life. The floor turns into a mess of charge cables, USB cords, and unorganized papers.

Natsumi focuses on renegotiating the remaining contracts, and Fuyuhiko focuses on securing longer term shipping partners. Peko drops in and out all afternoon; first she has training, then the rest of her chores. When she is in the room with them, she lets them bounce ideas and frustrations off her, sometimes at the same time.

Fuyuhiko waves over his shoulder at her when she comes back after being gone for a few hours. He’s bent over one of the folders Natsumi put together at school. “Hey,” he says, “How long do you have?” He rubs the space between his eyes with the flat of his hand. “And how in the fuck do you keep track of anything like this, Natsumi?”

She sticks her tongue out at him.

“The rest of the night,” Peko answers. When he only looks at her, she points at the window. “Most everyone has gone to bed, Fuyuhiko-sama.”

“Oh,” he says. “Right. Good.”

They keep going for hours after that. Natsumi dozes off somewhere around three in the morning. She doesn’t sleep for very long, or very deeply; she can make out the sound of people talking around her before she’s properly awake. Even whispering, her brother is too loud.

“—just listen to me, for once?” Fuyuhiko is saying. “I’ll make sure she doesn’t wake up with a neck cramp or something, if that’s what you’re so worried about.”

“That’s not necessary. I’ll stay with her. You should get some sleep.”

“Peko, you got up at four this morning.”

“You don’t need to worry. I can stay awake for up to thirty-six hours without any loss of faculties.”

“That’s not what I…. Are you hearing what I’m saying at all? She was running you all over the damn place even when you were at school. You deserve to have a break too, you know.”

Peko doesn’t answer, or if she does, Natsumi can’t hear it. She feels the tatami tug when Fuyuhiko shifts his weight. “Listen,” he says, his voice wound tight with frustration, and he’s actually quiet this time, enough that Natsumi has to strain to hear him, “I said I wouldn’t argue with you about this again, and I’m not. All right? That’s not what this is about. All I’m saying is you should sleep if you’re tired.”

Peko still doesn’t say anything. Natsumi understands why before Fuyuhiko does; she can feel Peko looking at her. It at least took her longer than normal to notice.

Natsumi stretches her toes and sniffles into her elbow. She makes as much of a production of it as possible, so that Fuyuhiko doesn’t have any excuse not to be paying attention. She throws in a big yawn and some exaggerated blinking for good measure.

Right on cue, he clams up. When she sits up to rub at her eyes she spies them sitting close enough together that their knees are almost touching, before he scoots back across the floor.

“Jerks,” Natsumi whines. “You didn’t wake me up! I can’t sleep yet, there’s still stuff to do.”

“You’re not going to get anywhere with anyone if you’re falling asleep on the phone, dumbass.”

Natsumi jumps on the opening. It’s too easy, sometimes. “Good point! Hey, Peko, there’s energy drinks in the mini fridge in my room. Can you go get them?”

Peko rises to her feet in a single, smooth motion. “Yes, young mistress.” Fuyuhiko doesn’t look up at her when she steps around him to get to the door.

Natsumi counts to ten in her head after Peko slides the shōji closed, and then she shoves her laptop over so she can lean both elbows on the table. “So! What’s going on with you and Peko?”

Fuyuhiko does his best not to rise to her bait, but she can read him better than he thinks she can. His eyes flick to her face, even if it’s only for a second, and his opposite hand curls into a loose fist. “The hell are you talking about?”

She pokes the lid of his laptop with one finger; he forces it back up with the heel of his hand. “Are you seriously still this dense?” He lifts his eyes enough to glare at her over the top edge of the screen. She sighs at the ceiling. “I wasn’t asleep, dummy.”

That does the trick. He flushes up to his ears. “You were eavesdropping? Goddammit, how childish can you be?”

“I was sleeping until you woke me up. It’s not my fault you don’t know how to whisper.” She puts her chin in both hands. “Don’t change the subject. Are you guys fighting about something?”

He grits his teeth. She can see where the muscles jump in his jaw. “No.”

“You’re a crappy liar. I dunno what Peko would even want to argue about, though. It sounded to me—”

“Well, it wasn’t,” he snaps. “It’s fine, all right? So just leave it alone.” He slams the keys of his laptop harder than he needs to. “Not like it was any of your fucking business to start out with.”

She could push it. She usually does. Usually he wants the opportunity to rant and complain to her and just doesn’t want to admit it, but this time feels different. She was only teasing, but the way he hunches his shoulders over his keyboard makes her think she touched a real nerve. Which would be fine; usually he’d talk to her about those things, too.

Not this time, maybe.

“Fine,” she says eventually. “Be like that.” She sits up to fluff the pillow under her belly. “But if you like her that much, you should at least do something about it.”

“For the love of—”

“I’m not teasing, I’m being serious.”

He stands up from the table too fast; he ends up knocking his knees against the edge of it. He plucks his phone from where it’s set near her elbow. “It doesn’t work like that,” he says. His face is pinched as he dials. “How do you still not get that?”

He turns his back on her before she can say anything. He doesn’t look at her again after the line connects, even though she spends his entire conversation glaring at the back of his head. He’s right: she doesn’t get it. She’s never understood how one person can be so determined to stand in his own way when what he wants is right in front of him.

Peko comes back with a four pack of drinks. Fuyuhiko drinks two of them and spends the rest of the night on the phone.

*

The second night starts out worse than the first.

They settle on creating a shipping network in lieu of the central waypoint Novoselic would have been. It’s more expensive and involves pulling manpower from other groups, but it also opens doors to more deals in other regions and protects them from having a single point of failure, which was the whole problem in the first place. (That, and hiring a bunch of incompetents.)

It also means sweet talking a whole lot of people into doing what they want.

Fuyuhiko gets into a shouting match with a potential partner at two thirty in the morning, while Natsumi tries to salvage the last of the Greece contracts over email. He paces the room in tight circles, the phone wedged between his ear and his shoulder so that his hands are free to page through numbers and percentages and projections.

“Listen here, fucker, I didn’t ask for a goddamn laundry list of your excuses, all right? … ‘Cause it’s not a fucking reason, that’s why! Yeah. Yes. … Like hell it is! I’ve given you those numbers six fucking times now, and they all say the same goddamn thing! ... Are you kidding me? That’s bullshit. … What? ... How is your fuck up supposed to be our fault? Yeah, your fuck up, asshole, you fuckin’ heard me.”

Natsumi isn’t sure which one of them hangs up, but someone does; Fuyuhiko jerks the phone away from his ear and hurls it into the pile of pillows she constructed on the floor. He doesn’t bother going digging for it; he just flops back on top of them, too, one arm thrown over his eyes.

Even still, they’ve made progress. Decent progress, even: it’s looking like they’ll definitely save the existing business in the region, if not improve on it.

That doesn’t change the fact that this is a joke compared to what it was supposed to be. She doesn’t feel like congratulating herself for staying above water when she was the one cutting holes in the bottom of the boat. They’re wasting all this time and energy, for what? Because she wanted to be Sonia Nevermind’s friend? Sonia hasn’t even texted her once since spring vacation started. It’s beyond pathetic.

Natsumi stares at the blank counter of her inbox until her eyes hurt. Her head feels hazy and her chest feels tight, and it just comes out: “It should be you. You know?”

Fuyuhiko shifts his arm to peer at her.

She wants to slap the lid of the laptop shut, if just for the satisfaction of it. If something comes in, her phone will go off; there’s no reason for her to keep watching it like a lifeline. She still doesn’t, though. “Leading the clan. Hope’s Peak. It should be you, not me.”

He sits up. She rubs at her eyes so at least later she can pretend they’re red because she hasn’t slept.

“I’m sorry,” he says, “did you not listen to a single fucking word of the phone call I was just on?”

“Yeah, I did,” she snaps back. “And if it’d been you, you wouldn’t have had to talk to that dumbass at all.”

“You’re right. I wouldn’t have had to talk to him, because I wouldn’t have had the guts to get this far in the first place.” She doesn’t realize he’s gotten up until he leans down and snaps her laptop shut for her. “Seriously, Natsumi?”

“You were right about Niijima.”

“That doesn’t mean I should be the one calling the shots all the time.” He drops down to sit cross-legged next to her, and rubs both hands into his forehead. “And even if it did, I don’t want to anyway. So you’re stuck with it.”

She goes quiet. It feels lighter than it did before, at least, like they’re actually taking a break instead of just gearing up for the next wave. She slouches in her sweatshirt until the hood rides up past her ears. “Why not?” she asks, quiet. “You’d be good at it.”

He laughs, a rush of air through his nose. “No, I wouldn’t.” He scrubs one hand back through his hair. “Are you kidding? The only reason I’m halfway decent at any of this shit is because of you.”

Her phone pings. It’s her contact in Athens, agreeing to her terms. There are some strict counter-terms, but nothing the two of them can’t manage.

Fuyuhiko bumps her shoulder with his. “See?” He pushes himself up to standing, and wanders back over to the pillows to go diving for his phone. “Now cut it out with the self-pitying shit. We’ve got work to do.”

*

Their parents arrive back from Seoul early in the morning. Natsumi couldn’t have slept more than one or two hours; the sky is still dark when Peko nudges her awake, one firm hand on her shoulder.

“I apologize, young mistress,” she says. She keeps her voice soft; Natsumi struggles to understand why, her mind still murky and sleep-addled, until her eyes adjust enough to make out her brother passed out on the other futon. “But Master Kuzuryuu has called for you.”

Natsumi finds her feet, and is able to navigate her way out of the room without waking Fuyuhiko or tripping over the precarious tangle of laptop cords. She’s still dressed in the same jeans and sweatshirt she was wearing last night, but if her father asked to see her as soon as he got in, then there’s already not enough time to change. She flattens down the wrinkles in her clothes as best she can, ties the mess of her hair into a high ponytail, and tries in vain to rub the sleep out of her eyes.

Her father is waiting for her in one of the smaller gardens near the back of the house. It’s not much more than a few flowering bushes and a carefully designed arrangement of stones, but it’s quiet, and most importantly, private. He’s standing at the center, inspecting a white-petaled flower in one big hand.

He never smokes his cigarettes in the gardens, but he must have had one just before coming; Natsumi can smell acrid smoke still clinging to his clothes when he turns toward her. He twists the flower off the plant, and lifts it in the direction of the small, decorative bench that acts as the garden’s centerpiece. She takes the cue to sit.

“You and your brother have been busy,” he says.

She falters, even though she should have known better. Of course he’d know about what they were doing. There’s no reason he wouldn’t, and her father has never pulled a punch in her life. “Yeah,” she says, “We were making some— arrangements. For the contracts I was working on. That’s all.”

“Covering for your mistake,” he says in plain, even tones, “you mean.”

Natsumi nearly swallows her tongue. She laughs instead to give herself more time to think, and reaches up to smooth back a wisp of hair that’s fallen loose from her ponytail. “Dad, it’s fine.” No one would ever call her father a warm person, but today there’s no give in his stare at all. Her words trip on the way out of her throat. “It— There was a hiccup, okay? Yeah. But we’re still clearing a bigger profit in that region than we were before. If you look at the contracts me and Fuyu-chan put together, I think—”

“You think I want to hear about contracts?”

Her train of thought evaporates. She’d had a speech ready in her head, one she’d been rehearsing since the car ride home from school. It was about how she was making money for them, not losing it, even if it hadn’t gone the way she’d planned. It was about expansions and alliances and how she’d saved the ones she did, and not at all about the ones she didn’t. It was about contracts.

“I don’t—” He doesn’t give her any prompt or leading hint. Frustration flares in her belly. “Well, that’s what we were working on! So what, then?”

It’s the wrong answer. His eyes narrow. “What did I say to you when you left for school, Natsumi? The clan is watching. The world is watching.” He makes an expansive hand gesture, the flower held in his palm like a goblet. “You said you understood. That you were ready for the responsibility.”

She doesn’t understand, until she does. “Is this about my exam?” He levels a stare at her, which as much of an answer as she needs. She has to hold on to the bottom of her seat to keep from springing out of it. “My grade is fine! I handled it!”

“‘Handled,’” he echoes. “Is that what you call that public display of desperation? ‘Handling’ the situation?”

“I— Those judges were—”

“You made a sub-par presentation and you knew it,” he says over her. He hasn’t even raised his voice. She thinks if she were shouting he’d still drown her out. “After the scene you made, the rest of the world knows it, too. This isn’t about money, Natsumi. This is about you.” The last of her protest shrivels in her throat. “Is that the woman you’ve become? Someone who makes excuses? Someone who blames others for her own mistakes?

“Tell me, do you think this clan deserves a woman like that as its leader?”

Natsumi’s cheeks are burning. She drops her head to hide them, spending a moment to wish she hadn’t tied her hair back, and says nothing.

Her father answers for her, his voice like ice: “No.”

She’s never seen him angry before. Not like this, quiet and unyielding, and especially never towards her. He gets into shouting arguments with Fuyuhiko on the regular, and his fights with their mother have drawn blood more times than Natsumi can count, but she’s always been her father’s little girl. The clan’s princess. His expectations for her have always been high, but only because she’s always met them. She could run circles around Fuyuhiko with the slack she’s given, and she’s known it for most of her life.

Maybe that changed when she started at Hope’s Peak. Maybe that should have been obvious to her from the beginning. She feels like a stupid dog at the end of a leash, who doesn’t know when it’s been drawn back against its throat.

“So I miscalculated,” she mutters, her head low. “Once. One time.”

Her father pulls a slim pack of cigarettes from his breast pocket, and slides one out to hold between his teeth. He won’t light it until he’s out of the garden. “I see,” he says. “And do you think your ratio of good intentions will stop our people from whispering behind your back, when the time comes?”

Natsumi’s throat feels tight, so she only shakes her head. Her cousin Yuina already does whisper behind her back. She’s not naive enough to think there aren’t others.

How many more do now?

“There’s no room for you to act like a child anymore,” her father is saying. “You are a leader now. You represent this family. You represent me. You represent all the people who will serve under you someday. At some point you need to understand that the decisions you make affect more than just yourself.“

He drops the flower on the ground. He doesn’t crush it under his shoe, or sweep it behind the rocks; he just leaves it there to interrupt the aesthetic of the space until it rots.

“Go wash up,” he tells her. The sky above them has faded to pale pinks, blues, and golds. “It’s time for breakfast.”

*

She goes back to her room and splashes cold water on her face until her cheeks are ruddy. Her eyes are still red around the edges and purple underneath, but that’s fine; the point is, it wakes her up. Everything else she fixes with makeup: dark liner around her eyes, pale powder on her cheeks, and lots and lots of concealer. She twists her hair out of its ponytail and brushes it out smooth. She throws her jeans and sweatshirt into the laundry basket and pulls her favorite black dress from her closet.

She hasn’t been feeling like herself. She hasn’t been herself. That changes now.

Peko is waiting for her outside her bedroom. She bows when Natsumi steps out into the hall. “Good morning, young mistress.” Natsumi jerks her chin when she passes; Peko nods and falls into step behind her.

Fuyuhiko is already sitting when they get to the dining room. He’s changed his clothes, at least, but his hair is still rumpled and he looks like he’s one too-long blink away from falling asleep right there at the table. She reaches out to muss the back of his head when she kneels down next to him, and he doesn’t manage much more than a jerk of his shoulders and a muttered, “Fuck off.”

He livens up when the food starts to come out; the kitchen staff set out plates of grilled salmon and bowls of rice and fresh greens in advance of their parents coming to the table, and he sits up straighter to get a better look at each of them when they come out.

Anxiety bubbles in her chest. “Hey,” she says, on impulse. “You’d help me if I needed it, right?”

“I sure hope so,” he answers. He’s preoccupied with maneuvering the bowl of pickled plums closer to his side of the table. “‘Cause otherwise I don’t know what the fuck I’ve been doing the past couple days.”

Their parents come into the dining room together, their father in the same suit, and their mother in a shining white and gold kimono. They look pristine, the both of them, even though they must have been up hours before her, and travelling for most of it.

She waits for her opportunity. It needs to be near the end of breakfast, when everyone is in the best mood possible, but that involves waiting until the end of breakfast. She’s too anxious to enjoy her food and too nauseous to pretend, so she takes only a small piece of fish and only picks at her rice.

(Fuyuhiko notices. She can see him looking at her from the corner of her eye, his eyebrows pinched together. She doesn’t look back.)

“I want to ask for something,” she says, finally, when she can’t put it off anymore. “For school.”

Their mother sets her chopsticks down delicately. She lifts her chin. “It’s good to hear you’re beginning to take school seriously, Natsumi,” she says. “What is it?”

She made the mistake of not committing to the right choice once. She’s not going to do it again. She twists her fingers together under the table, and keeps her eyes forward when she says, “I want Fuyuhiko to enroll at Hope’s Peak with me.”

Fuyuhiko chokes on his soup.

“Your brother wasn’t scouted for enrollment,” their father says. His gaze doesn’t break from hers even while Fuyuhiko pounds his chest. “Hope’s Peak doesn’t allow unscouted transfers.”

She knows he knows the answer. He’s testing her resolve, because that’s where she failed before. She tosses her hair. “Obviously,” she says. “He doesn’t need to enroll in the main course. There’s another branch of the school with open enrollment. All we’d have to do is pay the tuition. Boom, done.”

“You have your tool with you already,” their mother offers. “Is she not fulfilling her duties?”

Peko is silent and still behind her. “It’s not that,” Natsumi says. “Peko does what I need her to do, but it’s not like she can do everything. It’s a different skill set.” She finds firm ground. “I need them both.”

Their parents look at each other. They’re considering. Natsumi holds her breath.

“Hey!” Fuyuhiko has both hands balled into fists on the table. His knuckles are white. “Don’t I get a say in this?”

Their father looks at him. His gaze is heavy, but her brother doesn’t bend under the weight of it. “You have an objection, Fuyuhiko?”

“Yeah, I got an objection. I got a lot of objections.” He sits up on his heels, and counts them off on his fingers. “It’s a waste of money, for one. The Reserve Course is the most blatant money grab I’ve ever seen. It’s only there for Hope’s Peak to dupe as many pathetic morons as they can into shelling out. For two, there’s nothing I can do that the two of them can’t do already. It makes more sense for me to stay here. For three—” His tone is vicious. Natsumi can feel his glare on the side of her face. “I don’t fucking want to go.”

Their mother’s dagger-glare does cow him, at least a little. “Language.” He ducks his head and glares sideways instead.

“Natsumi.” Their father’s gaze turns on her. “Your brother has voiced concerns. Do you believe his services are still necessary?”

Fuyuhiko is staring at her. Natsumi focuses on their father, his face like stone and his eyes like steel. She can be that. She has to be that. Bending wasn’t ingenuity, it was weakness. She knows that now.

She breathes in, and her voice doesn’t shake at all when she says, “Yes.”

“Explain that to him.”

Turning her head makes her feel like there’s a weight attached to the bottom of her skull. It turns out there’s steel in her brother’s eyes, too, but it isn’t cold like their father’s. It’s searing.

“We can cover the cost,” she tells him. “And I can’t be everywhere at once. You can help better there than you can here.” And the clan comes first, her mind supplies, but the words stick in her throat. “And we’re a good team,” she says instead, and she hates the way her voice wilts.

His face twists. It’s like he’s smelled something sour, or like he’s found cheese in his dinner; like she’s disgusted him down to his core. He slams both hands down on the table to stand up, and it sends cups and cutlery clattering together. “Bullshit.”

Fuyuhiko would never hurt her. She knows that. Everyone in the room knows that. Not because they don’t fight; they do. The whole family does, and always has. (When he was nine he sprained his wrist after she shoved him off the low branch of a tree for teasing her about losing a climbing race.) But he’s too gentle, with her and with everyone. Always has been.

She’s running on no sleep today, though, and so is he. Her nerves are stripped raw, and when he looms over her, fury in his face, she flinches.

That single flutter of her eyelashes is all it takes to put Peko on her feet. She’s expressly forbidden from drawing her weapon on any member of the Kuzuryuu family, but Peko is enough of a weapon on her own for that not to matter. One moment Natsumi is staring up at her brother while her cup is still spinning on the table, and the next Peko’s shoulder cuts between them.

The room is silent. Their parents just sit there and watch, like this was the predictable twist of some television drama and they’re disappointed it met their expectations. Her brother is the only one apparently wound up enough to be surprised, and he jerks back, momentum broken.

Peko doesn’t follow him, but she also doesn’t budge from where she’s standing in his space. “Fuyuhiko-sama,” she says, her voice low. “Please sit back down.”

He stares up into her face for a long, tense moment. Whatever he’s looking for there, he doesn’t find it; the anger in his expression cracks with something else. “Get out—” he spits, every word dragged painfully out through the trap of his teeth, “—of my fucking face.”

Peko does not move.

Natsumi says, “Stand down.” It’s only then that Peko obeys, her place taken again behind Natsumi’s seat. Peko’s head is low and her eyes are downcast, but Fuyuhiko isn’t looking at her anyway. He isn’t looking at anyone; he stares at the back wall without blinking, shoulders drawn together and both fists clenched so tight there’s no way he won’t leave marks.

“Then we’re in agreement,” their father says. Fuyuhiko doesn’t look at him, either. “The both of you will return to Hope’s Peak for the new school year. The rest will be handled.”

Fuyuhiko turns on his heel and walks out. The shōji rattles in its frame when he forces his way through, and he just leaves it like that: half-open, drawing a draft in from the walkway outside.