Author's Note

Honestly, considering I basically wrote the first chapter to get it out of my head, this one sort of surprised me. Especially because, as I said before, I don't like this pairing much. But I have to admit, Suguha's character was downright beautifully done (in my opinion she was one of the most well-written characters in the series during her spotlight arc), so giving her some love was probably an eventuality.

As usual, I didn't proofread this. I also typed pretty much all of it in two sittings, with about two thirds of it being done in the two hours before these author notes were created. While I won't tell you not to point out mistakes you find (actually, on the contrary, do point the ones you find so I can fix them), I should warn you that they sort of come with the territory.

Also, since I was already making this an AU, I decided to go full throttle and just change anything I felt like changing. As such, it really doesn't resemble canon much anymore. I'm gonna have to see about changing the summary a bit soon to reflect that…

Also, for those wondering, no, Kiriko's family does not live in the same house as canon. I think I mentioned it in chapter one in the narration, but they live in the house that used to be their grandfather's. Since they only moved in recently, the kids also used to go to a different school until when they moved into the new house, which was about a year before the start of the story.

Well, that's enough out of me. Go ahead and read. It should be at least as good as the first chapter, if not a little better because less info dumping.


Even Though We're Sisters

Chapter Two: Superwoman's Kryptonite


"Okay. Good night, Sis."

"Sweet dreams, Sugu."

Before the little sibling could ask, the other teen's left arm wormed its way under her neck as her right fell onto her waist. Suguha shifted in bed so her back faced her sister, then closed her eyes, the fatigue of being awoken from her night's sleep finally catching up to her.

Somewhere in the back of her head, she recognized that sisters sleeping in the same bed at this age was not normal – that many would call it weird. But all things considered, she didn't mind that as a small price for being as close to Kimiko as she was.

Suguha's last thought before drifting off was that she'd gladly pay any price to keep things with her sister as they were.


Suguha awoke to a strong vibration coming from the underside of her pillow, just under her head. Her eyes fluttered open as she slowly became aware of the world around her. The sun was already up and radiant, so that meant it must have been a weekend – she normally set her alarm for around dawn on school days.

The younger sibling reached under the pillow with her left arm and grasped her phone, squeezing the lock button to get the alarm to stop. As she retracted her arm, phone in hand, she felt a pair of arms encircling her waist, so she knew her sister must have moved the lower arm in her sleep.

Fortunately, Kimiko was a very heavy sleeper in most of the standard ways. If she was out, one could vacuum in front of her or even shake her silly, and she wouldn't even stir. Suguha sat up in bed, and the arms around her slid down, but otherwise, her sister didn't move. Next, she swung her legs off the bed before breaking the hold on her by standing up. She turned around to face the sleeping girl, pulled the covers back up to her neck, and spoke as she straightened back up.

"I'll get you up soon, sis." The message was more directed at herself than her sibling, who obviously wouldn't hear it.

To reiterate, in most of the standard ways, Kimiko was a very heavy sleeper. Neither sound nor touch did anything to rouse her, no matter how intense. However, in one other key sense, she woke up with only the smallest of changes: her sense of smell. She could smell breakfast cooking from the complete opposite side of the house – which, Suguha supposed, she would have to anyway, considering the huge distance between the bedrooms and the kitchen.

With a plan for the morning meal already in mind, the younger sibling left her room and made straight for the kitchen.


"Breakfast smells different but good."

This assessment came out of nowhere, the closeness of the sound almost startling Suguha into bumping the skillet off the stove. Even though she narrowly missed that catastrophe, she still nearly jumped half a meter in shock. The voice came from right behind her, so close she could feel the breath on her neck.

The young cook turned around in a flash to glare daggers at her sister. "One of these days, you're going to give me a heart attack because you startled me! What'll you do then?"

"Obviously I'll save you. I am planning to be a doctor, after all." Such confidence, coming from anyone else, would seem like boasting. But she really did have the ability to become truly amazing at whatever she decided to do, so if she said she'd be a doctor, she'd become one of the best.

Kimiko definitely hadn't gotten prepared for the day yet, it seemed. Her lustrous, waist-length black hair, though not tangled as per her hair type, was still very messy, with at least some of the bangs sticking in every direction. She was also wearing the same black t-shirt and loose gray sweat pants as the night before. She always loved to dress in clothes that she could wear both to bed and outside. Though, as Suguha noticed upon closer inspection, she didn't have a bra on, either, so she probably didn't plan to go out in those clothes.

The bedhead only made the difference in height between them look that much more glaring. The older sibling was only one year older, but she was very tall, a little over a hundred seventy-two centimeters. By comparison, the younger sibling had a much more normal height, but that actually made her a little over half a head shorter.

Suguha turned around to focus on the skillet again, so as not to be caught staring. She picked up the skillet by the wooden handle and shook it a bit, flipping the contents over and revealing a beautifully perfect golden brown side. If the younger sibling were to name one thing she could do better than her sister, it would have to be cooking.

… Though, if she were being honest, one only had to have a mild talent for preparing food to be able to outdo Kimiko. She was just plain terrible at it, and no amount of teaching or supervising (save for just doing it for her) could rectify that. But the younger sibling, on the other hand, was an incredible chef in her own right, or so others kept telling her, nearly a goddess when compared to her sister.

All things considered, it was really quite fortunate that Super Woman's little sister happened to be proficient at the one thing that could be considered her Kryptonite.

"I decided to make something different today, so I went with pancakes," Suguha answered the unspoken question of why the meal smelled different than normal. "How many do you want? I've made two so far plus the one in the pan."

"Isn't that a little… fatty?"

"I'm not going to listen to that complaint from someone eighteen centimeters taller than me who is also eight kilos lighter," came the severe rebuttal. "You're too underweight to be making that remark."

"But you're the other extreme. You're overweight by traditional measurements," Kimiko retorted as if she hadn't just been totally dismissed. When she saw the deadly glare being sent her way, the fifteen-year-old quickly clarified her argument to avoid pain. "I-I mean, you still practice kendo, so you've got more muscle than normal. And, uh, your chest is bigger than mine, so…"

"… What?" Why the hell did she even have to bring that up?!

It seemed that even without asking the last question aloud, she was going to get an answer for it. "It may not be a big deal to you, but it's important to me! I'm older, but mine is smaller! And you actually exercise a lot, how does it stay so big with that kind of work out routine?! It's not fair, damn it!"

"It's a huge pain to have a big chest, your size is better!" Kimiko truly did have a better chest size. It was big enough to strongly appeal to men, but small enough to not cause major hassles when she did physical activities. Like the rest of her, her chest was damn near perfect… so much so that it was annoyingly bothersome.

Suguha turned around and grabbed the skillet and flipped the pancake again, finding that the second side was just as perfect as the first. She took the spatula from the counter to the right of the stove, then moved the pot over to the plate of already-cooked pancakes and used the utensil to work the piece of golden art onto it. No matter how intense the conversation got during meal preparation, she always had enough of her attention on the food to know exactly when to tend to it.

In that sense, she mused, she had another advantage over her big sister. Kimiko got insanely good at whatever she put the smallest amount of effort into, but she could only focus on doing one thing at a time. She simply wasn't wired to multitask effectively. However, that inability to split concentration, more often than not, worked to her advantage – using her incredibly intense and streamlined single-route focus, she could master anything she worked at very quickly… except for preparing food, of course.

"I'll ask again," the younger sister pressed, deciding it would be better to drop this particular subject of conversation if she wanted to keep her sanity. "How many pancakes do you want?"

She heard a great sigh coming from behind her. "Two, please."

"Good. Now go set the table while you wait. Mom's at work already, so just set it for two."

"Yes, ma'am," came what sounded like a military-type response. If she were to turn around, Suguha was positive she'd see her big sister giving a mock salute. The younger sibling sighed internally herself at the thought as she grabbed and poured the batter for the fourth and final pancake.


This was one of the primary times that, all things considered, Suguha decided she was grateful that their mother's morning job didn't give her weekends off. She left for work before either of her children got up each day, leaving them majorly to their own devices. While essentially being alone had its fair share of difficulties (before Suguha started regularly making breakfast, her sister was an absolute nightmare to get up every morning), it was due to this distance that their days could be so peaceful.

One could argue that most of Kimiko's resentment towards their mother seemed to originate from how little she was around. But at the same time, they had been finding completely unrelated things to argue about since the older sister developed a personality of her own, which was actually before their mother became a workaholic. So if she were home more, the younger sibling theorized that the house would always be filled with shouting several times a day instead of just once every couple of nights.

This peace of separation was made most apparent in the mornings, especially at breakfast. When the older sibling had just woken up, and because nothing had happened to her yet, she had a much more positive outlook. Usually, this made her smile a lot more often than later in the day, after the ups and downs of life had worn on her.

But this particular day, she didn't seem to be smiling much. She looked pensive – not really negative, but it seemed like she didn't know what to do about something. Which, for her, was beyond unusual, considering she usually had an answer for almost every situation, every outcome, everything anyone ever said to her.

If Suguha were honest with herself, it made her more than a little curious. But right there to outweigh the concern by a full ton, she felt concerned more than anything else. For a while, she wondered how to bring it up and hopefully get her older sister to open up about whatever was troubling her. But then, after a few minutes of thinking about it, a new development occurred that really changed the flow of the battle, so to speak.

"I must really be out of it if you're making such a concerned face while staring at me," Kimiko assessed, shaking her head with a rueful smile. "I may as well ask you about it, just to get a second opinion. I sure as hell haven't dealt with this before, so it's not like mine is worth anything here."

Suguha nodded, grabbing her clear, half-empty glass of tea and beginning to sip from it. She tried not to let her relief at not having to be the one to start the conversation show on her face, but she feared some of it may have gotten through.

"If I'm not totally blunt, I'll just stutter about it forever, so here goes." Well, let it be said, she certainly did know herself well. "Is it weird for two girls to be together? I mean, romantically?"

As one might expect, Suguha's initial reaction was to sputter and spray the tea in her mouth all over her pancakes and shirt. The second reaction came before the first ended and lasted much longer – that of a furious, deep pink blush spreading across her face.

"Wha-what – where did this come from?!" Of all the things she expected to hear, this didn't even remotely resemble any of them…

"Right, that's gonna sound kinda scary taken out of context," the older sibling said, face surprisingly not tinged with red – or at least, not enough of it that it would be noticeable to untrained eyes. "I probably would have freaked out if you asked me, too. I don't have a crush on a girl, just to get that out of the way."

That specification changed the whole dynamic at play. Kimiko wouldn't have thought about it in the first place if the idea hadn't confronted her somehow. Which meant that if she wasn't the one who had a crush on a girl, then it was another girl she knew.

"Tell me the whole story." Really, after bringing it up and clarifying it to this extent, the older sister just had to explain the rest. It would drive her crazy if she didn't figure out what happened to put miss perfect in this situation.

"If that's what you want, okay." This was the older teen's unique and kinder way of saying, 'you win, have it your way'. She normally reserved it solely for when they were arguing, but sometimes she'd say it when she felt extremely pressured, too. This must have been one of those times. "So you know how I play three VRMMOs, right? Well, I have different friends in every one of them, some of whom I've gotten close enough with to meet IRL."

"Go on."

"Well, in Gun Gale Online, one of my friends confessed to me. While that in itself is not unusual, this friend is a girl," Kimiko explained, dropping her fork and resting her head in her just-crossed hands. After a great sigh, she continued. "And one of the ones I know IRL. She goes to the middle school branch of our school, so whenever I go to get you so we can go home, there's a chance I could run into her. I think you may actually be in the same class as her, though I'm pretty sure she has no idea you're my sister. She has black hair with white ribbons and glasses, and she always seems to have a book on her."

"Sounds familiar," Suguha acknowledged, remembering a girl by that description who sat by the window in her classroom. "So what are you going to do about it?"

She couldn't quite understand what made her think so, but the younger sister felt that the answer she got would be especially significant somehow. As for exactly how or why she thought that, she couldn't even fathom either one.

"Well, this is the first time I've ever been confessed to by a girl, and she seemed super serious about it, too. I was understandably caught off guard. I had no idea what to say," the person heralded as perfect to outsiders revealed a rather crippling weakness. "So I hit the emergency exit button. I said I needed time to think and then logged out, then immediately logged into Sword Art Online, another VRMMO, to go get help figuring out to do from my best online friend, the info broker who has whiskers on her avatar. Only, well…"

"What went wrong?" Sugu asked, trying to cut right past the resistances she saw coming back up. "It's obvious it didn't go over well, but how so?"

"When I talked to her about it, she mistook my panic over the unknown for dislike of the concept." The fifteen-year-old freed one hand to put it over her forehead. "And it only got worse from there. I tried to explain my case, but it seemed like everything I said made her more upset. In the end, she shouted 'How would you react if I was the one who confessed to you, huh?!' and stormed off."

"So she's in love with you, too? That's what it seems like to me."

"… Probably. So until this is resolved, I'm locked out of all three of my VRMMOs."

Suguha remembered the story of why her sister wouldn't touch the third at the moment. The confessions blocked out two of them, but apparently, in the last one ALfheim Online, she recently got into a big fight with her best male friend, one of the only men who had never shown any romantic interest in her. Since they had yet to resolve that, Kimiko had people to avoid in every VR game she played.

The younger sibling realized pretty quickly that this was like a godsend chance. The older teen didn't want to play any of her VR games. She had to take advantage of this rare opportunity while it lasted. There was only one thing to do.

"If you're out of games to play," she began, catching her big sis's attention right away with the wording. "I thought of something you could do for a while until at least one of them gets resolved."

"I'm listening."

Sugu took a deep breath. Now or never. She might not get another chance like this for over a year at least. She had to make full use of it. "Come watch me at kendo practice."

"… What?"


Author's Note

I was talking with one of my reviewers about this story a few days back, and they were all like "Kendo is something that would be mentioned offhandedly." I almost immediately laughed upon reading this because I, of course, had already planned for kendo to have a major role in the story for at least the beginning of it.

In case some of you couldn't tell, this story isn't half as planned out as some of my other works tend to be pretty much from the start. As with most of my inexplicably popular fanfics (seriously, what is with going from zero to thirty followers with one opening chapter in two days?!), I'm totally winging it this time, only planning a few major things and otherwise just using a very vague outline as a base. I guess the 'write as you think of new things to include' strategy is really effective, because that's how a lot of my easily popular stuff has gone down – this story, Weapons with Hearts, SAO: Re:Designed, GGO SW, and Shoot to Thrill (and its sequel), just to name a few that started like this.

So, I think this chapter was better than the last one in some areas, but worse in others. It did less obvious info dumping, but it also had a lot less setting description and a lot higher of a 'dialogue to narration' ratio. Which I suppose is sort of my usual style, but I still don't really like it that much. What do you guys think? Good read or not?

Well, it's about time for me to sign off for now. I have to get to bed a little earlier so I can wake up by the hotel's checkout time tomorrow. I visited with family this weekend, but their house couldn't fit us, so we had to get a hotel room. Now I have to somehow get up at two in the afternoon (already they're giving us extra time and it's still not late enough dammit!) so that my mother, the driver, can make it to some office mate's wedding by four. I guess I'll sleep some more in the car…

See you next chapter!