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Story Title: Time For A Drink
Chapter Title: Alternate Plans
Story Word Count: 4,435
Chapter Word Count: 1,071
Characters: Manjoume Chosaku, Manjoume Shoji
Genres: Family
LJ Challenge: 5drunkfics: Claim: Manjoume Chosaku, Manjoume Shoji: prompt #3, forget
Rated: PG-13
Notes: Please note that this story presents the older Manjoume brothers as NOT being abusive evil bastards who rape and beat their younger brother twice a day and three times on Sundays. If Chosaku and Shoji being presented as human beings and not vehicles for their younger brother's angst and woe displeases you, click your nearest back button NOW. This takes place not long after Chosaku vs. Jun in season one. While I normally refer to Manjoume Jun as 'Manjoume', because this point of view is his brother's, I will refer to him as 'Jun'. Because that's what they call him.
Summary: Sometimes, you just really, really need to have a good stiff drink. Five times Chosaku and Shoji needed one.
Coming back from Duel Academia after seeing Jun and heading right for the liquor cabinet was a familiar feeling. Chosaku was not certain if he was more humiliated or more angry or more just wanting to scream or anything. Shoji had been right; Jun had grown up, but did that mean he should be grateful that he had been beaten by a deck that had zero attack monsters?
No. It didn't.
One drink. Two drinks. He didn't even taste the liquor at all. There was still far too much fury taking over his taste buds. He could see Shoji drinking as well. They'd drunk together often over the last few years.
He replayed what had happened over and over again. Damn it, Jun had played him! He'd known all along what was going to happen! Jun had read him like a book, and played accordingly.
Chosaku wasn't sure if he wanted to admire his little brother for having pulled that off or if he wanted to fly back to Duel Academia and strangle him for it.
Perhaps he could do both. There were plenty of politicians whose sly ways he admired and yet if they were drowning, he would cheerfully throw water on them.
"What do we do now?" Shoji asked, staring into the depths of his drink as if it might possibly hold the answers that he was looking for. Chosaku wondered if it did. His certainly didn't.
As for the question itself, he knew that he didn't know either. "What can we do?" he grumbled half to himself and half to Shoji. "We can't buy the school now. Kaiba made that plain."
The CEO of KaibaCorp had called them while they were on the way home, and explicitly spelled out that no further offers from the Manjoume Group for the purchase of Duel Academia were to be even considered. He had hinted if they even thought about trying to make another one, he would ruin them in ways that they couldn't imagine.
"What would we have done with it if we'd had it, anyway?" Shoji pointed out. He explicitly ignored the fact they'd already made plans to that effect before they'd even considered buying the place. "Those students would never have listened to us. You saw how they reacted to Jun. They care about him."
Chosaku grumped a little more, tossing back a drink. Was it his fourth? Fifth? He'd lost track. No matter.
Shoji was right about that, too. If they couldn't have run it properly, then closing it down would have caused far, far too many repercussions for them to have wanted to bother with. There were several rich, powerful, and influential people connected to that place. Far too many for them to want to annoy.
Fine. So taking over the school to run it according to their desires was now out of the question. The best idea was to just forget they'd even tried that.
"Maybe we should try to start our own school." Shoji suggested. "If we can't buy Kaiba's, perhaps we can lure students away from him?"
Chosaku looked at him, trying to think through that familiar pleasant fog of alcohol. That wasn't a bad idea. Or at least he didn't think it was at the moment. "Maybe." They could start small, which would eliminate many of the problems that they would have with buying right into the larger market.
That made sound sense, the more he considered it. It was always better to start small and work one's way up. They could hand-pick their students, offering special prizes and treats for good performances. It might take them years to get into the same position that Duel Academia was today, but it could be done.
If they wanted to do it. That was the real question. That was the real problem. "Do we have that kind of time?" He was busy with his work, and so was Shoji most of the time.
Now that he thought about it, buying Duel Academia really would have been too much of a drain on their time and resources. He didn't wait for Shoji to answer this time, but just shook his head. "Neither of us has the time to devote to any of that." He drank again. Getting drunk would neither solve the problem of Jun nor make it go away. But it would make him forget it for a brief time, which was quite pleasant to contemplate.
Shoji poured himself another glass and once more stared into its depths. "We made mistakes with Jun," he said after a few moments of doing so. "His deck was better than we thought."
To say the least. Chosaku didn't feel quite as upset about that, though if it was because of the passage of a short amount of time or the drink, he wasn't sure.
"We'll have to leave him alone." The words tasted bad coming out of Chosaku's mouth, but they were true. This wasn't what was supposed to be. They were a family. Two of them against one wasn't what was supposed to happen. That was why they were supposed to succeed!
Where had they really gone wrong? Something had twisted into a knot somewhere along the line, and Chosaku wanted to go back, find out when and what it was, and stop it from happening.
Mistakes cannot be undone. Only repaired. His father's words, from long ago, when he'd failed on a test. He had worked harder and on the makeup, he had scored almost perfectly.
So, they couldn't change the past. What about the future? "We'll wait until he graduates," Chosaku could see only one way to settle things. "Once he's ready to enter the Pro Leagues, we'll be waiting. No one else is going to want to sponsor him if he's still using those Ojamas, but we will." Though, with any luck, Jun would find another deck style that wasn't so ridiculous.
And preferably pick up a new uniform that wasn't as badly worn out as that black jacket was. Didn't he have any respect for himself at all?
"Right." Shoji offered him another drink and Chosaku took it, finding that his had somehow drained itself. He tilted his glass towards his brother briefly before he took a long drink. This wasn't the end. It was just a setback. A few minor errors in judgment. It would all come out all right. One day.
To Be Continued