When Satsuki was a very young child, Revocs had a branch that specialized in music production and publishing as part of an experiment. Ragyo found great amusement in having Satsuki sing Evanescence songs, and published them to a worldwide market. Her top hit? "My Imouto", an altered rendition of "My Immortal".
Being robbed of a childhood and the greater part of her teenage years had left Satsuki more than socially awkward when it came to normal everyday things like going out with friends or making plans with a semi-feral freak-of-nature that somehow turned out to be a long-lost sibling. It came as a slight blow to her pride when Ryuko- a person who had spent the majority of her life living as a delinquent, remaining friendless and alone, and knowing the touch of other humans only through trading blows- had managed to be less socially inept than she was. In fact, it stung.
So naturally, she had strived to learn all she could and "catch up", so to speak, with friends and family and the latest trends that had been pervading the world after the life fiber crisis. Quite fittingly, Ryuko was roped into her endeavors, whether it was in taking a day off and having a date in one of the elder's favorite bookstores, or the former President herself riding pillion with the red-streaked delinquent on one of the latter's lengthy rides throughout the Japanese mainland. The need to make up for seventeen years and several-odd months' worth of kinship went unvoiced, but the unspoken desire was easily received and interpreted by the shorter of the two.
And between strenuous periods filled with nothing but work managing Revocs' assets and reforming the company from the inside out, Ryuko would come up to her floor, practically kick the deluxe double doors leading to her private office off its hinges, and generally be a welcome distraction from her seemingly never-ending battle. In fact, the younger would make it a point to "bother" her as much as possible- a feat made easier by the fact that she never bothered to attend college and instead spent her days looking after neighborhood kids and lending a hand in rebuilding after the near-apocalypse. Having came from a similar background as they did, she was an invaluable presence in the eyes of the town elders- a saint that waltzed in one day and somehow managed to quell the destructive rabid fires raging in the hearts of their youth with relative ease. A troubled woman with a troubled past, it was no wonder she had managed to befriend the local ruffians, resonate with their problems, and turn their energies towards something constructive.
It was on the conclusion of one of their dates that Satsuki had finally felt the need to actually explain why she had spent so much time with the small group of people she came to know as friends and family. They were walking home, ice cream cones in hand, one hand in their respective jacket pockets and the other firmly clasping the sugary treat. It was late, and only a handful of businesses had their lights lit. She figures she must have voiced it, because Ryuko stops and gives her a long, confused look. The former President opens her mouth to speak again, but is silenced when Ryuko beats her to it.
"Ya don't need to say anything," the younger sibling says, amused. "I get it, your childhood was absolutely crap, and you didn't exactly have the time to go out and experience the world- what, with planning a thirteen-year long plan to save the entire planet and all from a gigantic ball of yarn. It's fine."
She decorates her statement with ferocious bites to her treat, spraying waffle bits everywhere as she spoke. A twitch of thin lips- a smile so small and subtle that anyone other than her Elites and Ryuko would have attributed it to the shifting shadows in the dim lighting- and Satsuki found herself scoffing in amusement at her sister's rebuttal.
"It's not as if your childhood was picture perfect, either. ...Still, I must thank you for purchasing these. ...I know money has been tight for you, and surely you must have spent weeks saving up just to make today happen."
Another bite. Satsuki watches as Ryuko practically all but shoves her face into the foodstuff, managing to get her nose tipped in the whipped cream topping. She swallows thickly, taking more than a moment to respond as she fought to choke down a bite of waffle between hacking coughs.
"Ah. It's no big deal, really."
They walked for a bit, side by side, until the frozen milk melted and the remainder of the dessert was devoured. They then cut across a park, taking in the hustle and bustle of everyday life from a distance, of blissfully ignorant people whose lives were mercifully spared in the crossfire of fibers-vs-human warfare. Ocean-colored orbs tracked her movements for a while, observing the hybrid as she reveled in the familiar sights and sounds of a land long left behind in her quest for vengeance. And eventually, their owner spoke.
"How were you able to afford that apartment you have right now? I don't recall you using any of the funds I obtained as inheritance."
Ryuko abruptly stopped. Leaves crunched underfoot as the taller of the two sidled up next to her. Old white sneakers scuffed against concrete as a pointed look was shot underneath midnight-blue bangs, and a pregnant silence filled the space between.
"Dad. I got a letter a while back after the legal messes had been sorted out. Turns out he had a pretty good amount of yen allotted to me in his will. I wasn't really paying attention, but I think it was several hundred thousand. Maybe a million or two. ...Maybe more, actually. I mean, it's not like dad was dirt-poor, ya know? How else did you think Nudist Beach got started or how I survived during my years at boarding school when I was a 'demonic vagrant ravaging the streets of Kanto' before… ya know… the whole 'I got to find out who killed my dad' thing? ...It's weird. After I turned five, he… changed... Became less open to me. ...He wasn't hostile or anything, but he kind of stopped acknowledging my existence except when it was dinnertime. If I tried to ask him anything, he just grunted in response. The last real conversation we had was shortly before he dropped me off at Ox Elementary, where I stayed at for a couple years.
I mean, he didn't call me or write letters or anything during my time there, he just sent me a small sum of yen every other week with a post-it note telling me to be sure to eat and study. I guess that's as good as he got to parenting."
Ryuko walked on ahead, leaving a baffled Satsuki standing in the middle of the clearing before she regained her senses and chased after her. Her- no, their- father… That couldn't have been right. From what she remembered, he was very friendly even if his pile of work stretched to the ceiling. But as she gave it more thought, she realized his reasons for alienating his daughter were ever tied to Ragyo. Ragyo, a cruel woman that ordered the murder of her own husband not once, but twice. Ragyo, who would have snatched Ryuko up for her own purposes, had she found out about her still-alive ex-husband's illegal research sooner and divined Ryuko's true status as her second-born and another life fiber-human hybrid.
A question tugged at the back of her mind, and she couldn't resist giving voice to the thought. "Did he… ever mention me at all?"
Ryuko hummed, fishing a toothpick out her pocket and wedging it between the tips of her incisors.
"No, actually. Dad never mentioned that I had a sibling. As far as I knew for about… seventeen years and several-odd months, I was an only child. And then the festival happened, I got my heart ripped out, and suddenly, I found myself with the biggest bunch of sticks-in-the-mud as surprise family members."
The elder laughed, a sound that was matched in volume by the quiet gentle breezes of the wind itself.
"Ironically," Satsuki's lips twitched into an approximation of a smile- all skin, no teeth. "Ragyo had given me the same thing she had taken away."
"Eh?"
"You," the elder clarified, staring into the starry skies above, so blessedly free of the presence of the same life fibers that had torn them apart, haphazardly forced them together in the crudest of manners, and threatened the very fate of the planet two years ago. "In the thirteen years I have spent plotting her downfall, never had I imagined an outcome where I would be reunited with the sibling she had so callously thrown aside, save in death."
Their speech fell silent again, and Ryuko tentatively twined her fingers with Satsuki's own, only relaxing when the latter made a small hum of approval. Any other pair would have been pressured to make small talk, to dissolve some sort of invisible tension between their lips. But it was in silence that the Kiryuin siblings thrived, for the telltale twitches of Satsuki's eyebrows and the flashing glimmers of Ryuko's teeth provided a silent language all but unknown to all but the two of them.
The ex-delinquent's phone buzzed, and she casually whipped it out of her pocket with her free hand, scowling when she received a text message from Hoka, along with a screencap of the social media accounts he had broken into in a fit of boredom.
"Trust the dog to ruin such a poignant conversation…"
One of Satsuki's generous eyebrows shot towards her bangs. "Poignant? I was unaware you had that word in your dictionary."
Ryuko grit her teeth as she texted a reply back. "Ha ha. Very funny, eyebrows. Comedy gold. ...He changed my Twitter handle again. ...And my profile picture too. Ooh, he thinks he's so clever with this one… 'RedBangedBitch', and a shot of my highlight. Classic."
"At least it was better than the last one he gave you." Her face twitched in mock-thought. "What was it again?"
"'Discombobulated melancholy'… no wait, that was my Facebook… He was calling me an emo because of my 'edgy hairstyle and personality'. ...Took away his PDA for a week for that. … Oh, I got it I think it was… ah… um…"
Ryuko's voice trailed off into something less than a mumbled response, cheeks progressively reddening.
"I'm sorry, come again?"
"SuprSndLsBn..."
A small twitch of her brows graced the ex-President's face, and a glimmering twinkle soon took residence in her eyes. "Excuse me?"
"Super sand le… uh… ...forget it. It's a reference to a dumb video I showed him. Parody of an anime that takes like… fifty episodes before anything is done. Wish granting dragons, killer robots… that kind of stuff. Remind me to break into his house and put that disgusting Cheez Whiz stuff in his keyboard, whenever I drop you off."
"No promises."
An irritated 'tch' was the younger's only response. And if the elder strained her ears, she could hear her mumble 'keep your dog on a leash, or he'll find more than his computers messed up...' under her breath. Seeking to distract her, she posed the first question that came to her questing mind.
"Would you have done it again?"
"Hm?"
"If you could go back in time, knowing the exact outcome of your actions here, would you have changed your actions?"
"Wait, do you mean like, me physically going back and being able to interact with my younger self, or…?"
A gentle exhale, and the most patient of smiles- things that ended up in life's Venn diagram as things Satsuki found herself naturally doing more and more in her sister's presence and things that would astound people to see her do to this very day.
"No, I mean you going back in time as however old you were in that time period, but with the knowledge of future events."
A short puff of air disturbed nature's monotony as Ryuko finally understand what she meant.
"I would have advised dad to get a vacation home somewhere outside Japan so that he wouldn't have been there when Nui came. ...Would have tried to get him completely out of the county, actually. Or at the very least, I would have probably found Senketsu sooner and practiced fighting with the scissor sword so I wouldn't have had my ass handed to me the first time I tried to kill you."
Satsuki responded similarly, noting how they would still have publicly clashed with swords and sailor uniforms due to different upbringings, but perhaps would have became better acquainted with each other behind closed doors, where they were able to practice their skills and scheme in private without the threat of Satsuki losing her appearance as Ragyo's loyal lapdog until the festival. They traded scenarios, laughing and joking as the distance between them and their destination grew practically nonexistent.
Satsuki stopped, and Ryuko soon followed suit as well. Parked by the curb and innocently sitting before the siblings was a sleek sport motorcycle, built for illegally tearing down highways at speeds that would make ordinary policemen do spittakes with their coffees as she blazed on by. It was a gift from the Kiryuin heiress herself, painstakingly engineered down to the last detail and unceremoniously parked in front of the unsuspecting younger's apartment on her eighteenth birthday. Any other mortal- sans Mako- would have quivered at the thought of rushing past cars on a motorcycle with Ryuko, a person well known for not looking where she was going half the time, abandoning helmets for the sake of feeling the wind ruffle her dark tresses, and popping wheelies at the least opportune moments. But Satsuki Kiryuin was no mere mortal, and if repeatedly surviving blows that could easily bring buildings to their knees with nothing more than a mere bruise wasn't enough proof of her physical invincibility, surely riding with her little sister and managing to perfectly maintain her sangfroid while whipping past people and cities alike at almost four hundred kilometers per hour would be a legendary feat passed onto children for generations.
The hybrid broke tactile contact with her sibling, fished the keys out of her pants pocket, and twirled them around a finger as she straddled the vehicle and started it up. The roaring purr of the powerful engine was matched by its owner's childlike excitement as she revved it a few times, giddily hooting loudly in euphoria. And when she retracted the kickstand and offered her hand to the waiting sibling, she grinned fiercely, brazenly showing her teeth and letting her prominent canines gleam in the dancing lights.
"Whatd'ya say, sis? Wanna go around again?"
'Sis'. A word that was difficult for the younger to even choke out a mere two years ago. A word that now came to both of their lips without thought, just as easily as their bare names did. 'Satsuki-sama', they would always refer to her as. 'Satsuki-chan' Nonon would say, sometimes. How wonderful it felt to finally have someone know her as just 'Satsuki' and think of her as purely another ordinary person, without title or dictatorial authority.
Satsuki smiled. And without hesitation, she grasped it. Ryuko easily flung her athletic build onto the bike behind her, and the elder pivoted mid-air with military precision, perfectly slotting herself between her sister before her and the vast emptiness that lay behind. Wrapping her arms around the shorter woman's mid-section, she felt a tingling heat rise within her body once more- a pleasant feeling that never went away even as they stole away into the night. 'This', she thought, as they navigated through endless highways, weaving between traffic and leaving behind tracer (and police) lights of red and blue in their wake, 'is what I've always longed for. A family of my own. A sister. A friend...'.
She wouldn't have had it any other way.
「豚ども、一年間よく頑張ったな。ご褒美だ。踏んでやろう。」 ~Kiryuin Satsuki