GetBackers doesn't belong to me. Sad but true.
This story began as a oneshot, but I kinda fell in love with the idea of the Get Backer crew as parents. If you've already read The Cat and the Old Man, head over to chapter two. Although comments are always appreciated, thanks for reading, whether you review or not. I hope you enjoy it.
And just to keep everybody straight: Kaminari belongs to Ginji X Himiko (wierd? I'll explain later); Riye belongs to Ban X Natsumi, Katsu belongs to Shido X Madoka, and Satoshi is Paul's son. I haven't exactly picked out a mom for him... yet...
The Cat and the Old Man
"Riye-chan!" Kaminari flung her arms around the much smaller girl, unknowingly crushing Riye's damaged left shoulder. "You're okay?" She began frantically eyeing Riye for blood, thankfully too excited to notice the careful manner in which Riye held herself.
"Of course I'm okay, idiot," Riye retorted, earning a reproachful pout from the tall, blonde Kaminari. To which she responded with a bold wink. "Don't you know me at all?"
"You had a little help," Katsu Fuyuki reminded her sourly. In her excitement, Kaminari hadn't noticed the dark-haired man leaning against the wall of the Honky Tonk. Seeing him now, she flashed a brilliant smile in his direction.
"Katsu-kun!"
"Can it, monkey-boy," Riye said, throwing a dirty look over her shoulder. She hid a wince as Kaminari grabbed her hand to lead her to the bar. A nasty gash over her left shoulder blade throbbed incessantly and her right ankle had been badly bruised, maybe even sprained, so it was difficult to move without alerting Kaminari to her injuries.
"Not even a thank you. How typical."
Riye jerked free of Kaminari's grasp to wheel on the tall boy behind her. Her body protested; she mentally told it to shut up. "You bastard, you almost got me killed back there."
"You would have been killed if I hadn't shown up, Riye-chan." He raised his eyebrows at her mockingly.
"Nobody told you to stick a chan on my name, Fuyuki," she snarled. "And I was doing perfectly fine on my own."
"You have such an aversion to suffixes, Riye-chan. It's very disrespectful."
"I have an aversion to you, Fuyuki."
"Feeling's mutual." He shoved himself off the wall and sauntered toward the exit. "Take care, Kam-chan," he called over his shoulder from the doorway.
The use of Kaminari's private nickname sent Riye into a rare temper. "Nobody calls her that but me, you filthy animal!"
"Ciao." He left, leaving a fuming Riye behind.
"He doesn't really call me that, Riye-chan. He just does it to upset you. Because you go out of your way to aggravate him." Kaminari sighed theatrically. "You two are always at each other's throats. I really wish you'd try to get along, for my sake, if nothing else."
Riye scowled. "It's his fault. That sorry jerk, he knows just where all my buttons are, doesn't he?"
Kaminari smiled with amusement, and her dark eyes laughed wickedly. "I wonder."
Riye shifted uncomfortably in her seat at the bar, but for once could think of nothing to say.
"Are you two finished scaring away my customers?" The son of the Honky Tonk's owner crossed his arms, his eyes stern.
"Sorry, Sato-kun," Kaminari apologized quickly. Riye raised her hands in surrender, forcing herself to make the gesture look natural despite the pain that raced down her arm from her shoulder.
"Slow night, Satoshi?" The man was several years older than Kaminari and Riye, and a couple of years older than Fuyuki Katsu. Riye smothered a grin. Kaminari had always had a little crush on the redhead behind the counter and got nervous anytime it seemed like he was annoyed with her. Couldn't blame her. Satoshi Wan's strawberry curls and pretty lavender eyes were enough to make most women get a little flustered.
"I think it's the heat," he shrugged. "Or maybe you witch kids just curse us with bad luck."
"Bull. There's never anyone in this dump." Riye snorted. She accidently knocked her foot against the barstool and couldn't hide her wince.
"No one of any significance," he agreed, with a meaningful look at Riye. She would have argued the point – Riye Midou never took an insult lying down – but her phone jangled loudly in her pocket.
"You've reached the great Riye Midou-sama," she answered, with a pointed glare at Satoshi. After listening for a moment, she rolled her eyes and held the phone out to Kaminari. "Your dad. Your phone must be dead again, Kam-chan."
"Daddy!" Kaminari greeted him with her usual high spirits. The voice that straggled out from the phone, mechanized as it was, matched hers for enthusiasm. Riye and Satoshi exchanged amused looks. Kaminari had come by her sweet, exuberant personality honestly. Fortunate girl had also been blessed with good looks and never lacked for friends.
She retreated to a booth and jabbered excitedly on the phone for several minutes, but the throbbing in Riye's shoulder and her ankle had become too intense for Kaminari's best friend to pay much attention.
"Did you hear, Riye-chan?" Kaminari's eyes glowed with anticipation. "Daddy's coming to take me to that new horror flick, the one with the mummy, you know?" As she prattled on, Riye tried to insert the appropriate "hmmms" or "reallys?" or "yeahs" into the conversation, but she was really beginning to feel the effects of the day's fight. Even so, she couldn't help smiling at her friend's excitement. Girl got as worked up over a night out with her old man as she did for dates with the school heartthrobs.
Her old man, on the other hand…
Well, they were close; there was no doubt about that. Probably nobody understood them as well as they understood each other, except Kaminari and Ginji. But just as Kaminari had inherited her loveable character from her father, so had Riye inherited her own father's argumentative belligerence. It was inevitable that they would butt heads.
"Ah! He's here! Gotta go, Riye-chan – and you're sure you okay?" Kaminari raced toward the door, sparing a second for her friend.
"I'm fine, don't worry. Have a good time, Kam-chan."
Kaminari's father waved at her through the window, she used her right hand to wave back.
"So. How bad is it?" Satoshi had somehow snuck up to sit beside her at the bar.
"Eh?"
"You're bleeding, kiddo." She turned an angry glare on the blood that was beginning to seep through her shirt.
"Dammit. If that stupid monkey-trainer didn't know how to properly tie a bandage, he should have let me do it for myself," she muttered. She looked up frankly at the redhead.
"Don't tell my old man, Sato-kun." Unfortunately, Satoshi's eyes weren't on her.
"Don't tell your old man what, Riye?" The cool voice from the doorway was calm. It would have been better if he'd yelled; Midou Ban, like his daughter, was naturally a loud, antagonistic kind of person. This controlled seriousness was bad. He was furious.
Riye turned slowly to watch his approach. If his demeanor was cold, his eyes certainly were not. A blue storm raged behind his sunglasses.
"That I put tonight's dinner on your tab?" Damn. It wasn't supposed to be a question.
"Is that right." That was supposed to be a question. It wasn't. He stood at her left, staring coldly at her.
"It's not that…" She yelped as her father's grip descended on her bloody shoulder. He wasn't exerting even a fraction of his true strength, but the pressure put her off the bar stool and on her knees.
"Sato-kun, I'll be borrowing the men's room for a bit. Sorry." He hauled her to her feet and shoved a hand in the small of her back, forcing her to walk toward the back of the restaurant.
He locked the bathroom door behind them. Paul Wan kept a first aid kit in the cabinet under the sink; her father pulled it out and set it on the countertop. After carefully pulling her hair aside, he ripped apart the back of her shirt to reveal the blood-soaked bandage beneath. She held the remains of her blouse to her chest as he stood behind her, peeling away the dressing.
"What," he asked slowly, "what exactly were you thinking?"
"They had something that belonged to me. I wanted it back," she answered, opting for honesty.
Evidently that wasn't the correct response.
"I could have gotten the damned cat back for you, Riye!" The loud words grated like sandpaper on flesh, and Riye shuddered. The loss of control the outburst signified stunned her, even frightened her.
She looked at the floor, suddenly ashamed.
He doused the ragged wound on her shoulder with alcohol. It stung madly, but she refused to flinch.
"It's mom's precious cat. I was ashamed that someone had been able to take it from me." The admission came reluctantly to Riye; her voice caught in her throat and she had to struggle not to allow her voice to crack.
His hands gripped her upper arms tightly, but not painfully. Bending over her, he rested his forehead against the back of her head. His breath ruffled her hair, and she relaxed a little.
"Your mother would rather lose the cat than you, brat." She breathed a little easier hearing the frustration in his voice. Anything was better than that raw fury before.
"I had to get it back." Abruptly she began to explain, because now that he had calmed down a little, she knew he would understand. She turned to look up at him; he dwarfed her by a good nine inches. He raised his brows, but didn't interrupt. "It was my mistake and I had to fix it – not you, and not Ginji. Me."
His long-fingered hands were suddenly around her waist, and before she knew it, he'd deposited her on the countertop beside the first-aid kit, and had turned her around to face the mirror. She drew her knees up to her chest as he began to bandage her wound.
"Hold your damned hair out of the way, won't you?" he groused, and she wrapped her hands around the dark locks he'd tossed over her right shoulder. He began to lay big squares of sterile cloth over the gash.
"After all that, you did get it back, didn't you?" The quiet question surprised her, and she dipped her fingers into the cargo pocket of her pants, reaching for the old cat charm to show the spoils of her fight. Withdrawing it caused the pant leg to slide up a little, revealing the ugly bruise on her ankle in the mirror.
She could see her father's reflected scowl and smiled contritely. "Oh, yeah…" Riye cradled the charm in her fingers, holding up the ruins of her shirt at the same time.
He finished up with her shoulder, neatly taping the white bandages into place. Spinning her around on the countertop, he crouched to examine her ankle. It had swollen considerably since monkey-boy had first knocked her over on his way into the fight. Of course, if he hadn't, the knife wound on her shoulder would have landed across her throat.
Her dad sighed, and for a moment looked a lot older than his forty-one years. "I can't tell if it's sprained or fractured," he confessed. "So I guess our next stop is the emergency room."
Riye suppressed a groan; he wouldn't have any patience with her complaints tonight. Even if he hated hospitals as much as she did. But her distaste must have shown anyway, because he smiled wryly up at her, and the too-old… something… that had settled on him vanished. "That's what you get, brat."
She tried to step down from the countertop, but he was too fast for her. The same way Katsu Fuyuki had carried her back from the Yakuza warehouse, her old man picked her up now. "Until we know what's wrong with your ankle, you'd probably better not walk on it."
"Dad." She shook her head. He'd gone into his cocky, irritating do-as-I-say-or-you'll-regret-it mode. At least he wasn't really mad anymore.
She unlocked the door for him, and he carried her out of the bathroom, much to the titillation of the crowd that had gathered in the Honky Tonk. Good-looking guy, close to middle-aged, carrying a teenager with a scrap of cloth over her bra…
"Maybe we really are a curse on this place," Riye muttered under her breath.
"Two to go, Satoshi," her dad called. Either he hadn't noticed the funny looks they were getting, or he just didn't care. Satoshi saw, but he kept his mouth shut as he poured them each a styrofoam cup full of black coffee. He gave them to Riye, who held them as her father carried her to the car.
"You must have been right on Ginji's tail," Riye noted, watching the Honky Tonk fade into the background.
Her dad nodded. They rode in silence for several minutes.
"Riye." There was a seriousness in his tone now – not the cold, implacable severity of earlier, but a warning to pay attention.
She turned to look at him, but he kept his eyes on the road. "I'm listening."
"Why didn't you take Kaminari with you?" Strange question. 'What were you thinking' had sounded a lot more like the Midou Ban Riye had grown up with.
She considered it. "Because I didn't want her to get hurt."
"She's a tough kid."
"She's too sweet."
"So's Ginji, but I'd have taken him with me." Riye turned that over in her head for a minute, but couldn't reason her way through it.
She poked him in the side. "I don't follow. Make your point, old man."
He inhaled deeply, and Riye knew instictively that he wanted a cigarette, although he'd "quit" almost four years ago. "You don't trust her?"
"It's not that," she answered immediately. "Not at all. It's just…" She turned to watch the road too. "It's just that this was something I could handle on my own. She'd have come if I'd asked her to. When I called her, after the monkey-boy showed up and we scattered the rest of the Yakuza, she was angry that I hadn't told her. But you know Kaminari – she never stays mad long. She was just happy I was okay by the time we got to the Honky Tonk."
"So you didn't tell her because…" He waited.
"Because it seemed like a lot to ask for, when it was something I could do by myself."
He pulled over into a little gas station, went in, and came back with a pack of Marlboros. "Don't tell your mother."
Riye grinned. "I won't tell if you won't."
"Deal." He lit up and took a long drag. "Riye." There was that serious note again.
"Yeah?"
"You should have taken her with you." Riye waited for an explanation.
Her dad took another drag and blew smoke out the window. "Don't walk in front of me; I may not follow. Don't walk behind me; I may not lead. Just walk beside me – "
"And be my friend," she finished. "Camus."
"Being friends means not having to go it alone, Riye, even when you're able to. It also means not letting your friends do stupid shit without you – Kaminari was right to be angry."
Well, if he was in the mood for quotes: "A friend is someone who will bail you out of jail; a best friend is the person sitting next to you saying 'Damn, that was fun?'" Riye quipped. Her dad had closed his eyes and leaned back on the headrest. A faint smile touched his mouth, showing a flash of the white teeth that gripped his cigarette.
"Something like that."
"So the next time I take on the Yakuza," she said dryly, "I should be sure to drag Kaminari into it with me?"
"I'm hoping she'll have sense enough to prevent a next time. You're supposed to be the smart one, kid, so it worries me that I have to rely on her to keep you out of trouble." The smile remained on his lips, robbing his words of any sting they might have carried. They sat quietly for a minute or two.
"So you seriously would have asked Ginji for help doing something stupid like this, old man?"
"Not if pigs flew over a western sunrise on a cold day in hell." She stared at him, confused. His smile widened, though he kept his eyes closed.
"But then, he knows me well enough that I'd never have to ask."
"Oh." She turned away, suddenly dispirited, though she wasn't quite sure why. She hadn't wanted Kaminari's help, after all. But it would have been nice if she'd guessed…
Her dad clonked the back of her head with a loose fist. She winced and turned around. "Did you know she was already at the Honky Tonk when you called her, genius? Who do you think called Fuyuki and sent him after you? She was on her way, calling everyone she could think of, and he happened to be a lot closer than she was. He sent her back to the Honky Tonk to wait for you. And when you got there, she tried her best not to let you see how worried she was – because she didn't want to start a fight that might hurt you even more."
Taken aback, Riye could do nothing but stare at the amused smirk on her dad's face for several minutes. He finally crushed his cigarette and pulled back onto the highway, headed toward the hospital.
"I am such an idiot," Riye groaned finally, face in her hands.
A long-fingered hand gently ruffled her hair. "Yeah. But you come by it honest."