Shin OK Number 34 - Justice
Kallen gruffed as she shuffled through queue at the local post office. The championship finale in Abu Dhabi was next week, and as it approached the inevitable confrontation with destiny that it represented loomed with an increasing presence in every cell of Kallen's mind, but for the time being it was at least possible to maintain a physical distance from Yas Island, hiding in the Monday morning humdrum of inner city Tokyo, collecting mail. She had arranged for any post to be sent here, rather than to the apartment, so as to ensure that her address couldn't be leaked, but that meant that someone needed to regularly make the trip down to the decidedly unassuming bureau, which was not likely used to being frequented by a nationally famous athlete.
As such, she made a point to visit at the crack of dawn, arriving just as they opened up. However, it seemed that no person could possibly wake up earlier than kindly octogenarians collecting their pensions and plotting their strategies for the weeks round of bingo, and no matter what she did, she was always at the back of a line, of which she was the youngest occupant by several decades.
Young people just didn't care for post offices it seemed.
Not that she minded; one of the benefits of the average age of the queue being 75 was that very few of them kept up with sports, and they wouldn't know Kallen Kōzuki if she ran them over. While they often dwelt on topics which were almost fascinating in their banality, it was nice to chat about topics removed from racing sometimes.
Anything to take her mind off Abu Dhabi, and the choice she would have to make.
However, time had this bad habit of moving forward, and so even as Kallen was comfortable enough to listen idly, the woman regaling Kallen about the conspiracy between her landlord and neighbouring renter to hide the growing damp in her walls had come here to get things done. When she was called up, she moved on, leaving Kallen at the head of the queue, waiting to be called up to stall two. She stretched her arms up behind her back as she strolled up to the gap in the wall, still not quite awake, as the postal worker sat behind the glass awaiting Kallen's request, glumly gazing down at her desk as though it contained a preview of her doom.
"Morning" Kallen mumbled, placing her paperwork down on the desk. Shuffling through her material, as if trying to remember through a blank mind why she had come other than to appreciate the majesty of the post office as an institution, it came back to her as, with a start, she blurted "Post office stay box sixteen, please."
However, if the quick and muddled statement rushed out in scabrous, barely thought-out Japanese was at all hard to understand, the impassive postal clerk didn't let on, and, without so much as looking up, nodded "I'll grab your stuff."
"Cheers" Kallen mumbled, as she pulled out an energy drink she had bought on the way and shot it down her gullet, trying to wake herself up. After a moment absentmindedly trying to scratch her hair with the arse end of the bottle, the clerk returned with the contents of the locker into which any incoming mail was put, except where it was too big, in which case it was kept in the general vault with a label insisting that it not be touched.
It was the thought that counted.
With an appreciative nod, Kallen lifted the papers and envelopes up with a cupping grip and carried it away from the stall and over to the table out near the back of the reception. Carefully filing through the stack, she mentally cycled through the dates. She recognised her payslips, and set them aside first, taking notes of all of the cheques received since she had last checked in May. Setting aside cheques addressed to Naoto, Kallen looked… sent thirtieth of October, sent thirtieth of September… and then nothing. The letters were gone.
She paused, looking down at the pile with a deep confusion, before checking again through all the ones she had discarded. All were indeed to Naoto. What? Where had… three months wages gone?
After she flipped through some of the smaller envelopes, hoping that one of them could explain the missing season. Where…?
Frowning, Kallen scooped up the papers and returned to the queue. Placing them in the little depression in the opening under the window separating Kallen from the clerk, she cleared her throat before explaining "Apologies, but some things appear to be missing, has anyone taken anything from this box?"
Naoto shared the box, and it wasn't unheard of for him to confuse his mail with hers, given that they shared a surname and field of employment, though it was rare enough to raise an eyebrow and merit at least a month's ribbing. Still, it could be worse…
The clerk looked down at her computer, scrolled through the history. Shaking her head, she muttered "No, there wasn't… obviously we have you coming normally we'd have it down whenever you or your brother came by, but the last time he came by was… March, you've been by since then. We did see your mum come up a few times though."
Kallen frowned, and demandingly responded "Pardon me?"
She shook with surprise. What? Her? How had… how had she found… and why? What? She was completely shocked. It was as if she had been snuck up on in a dark alley by the planet Jupiter brandishing a claymore, it was completely… inconceivable, the shape of it was so utterly beyond what she… Kasumi?
The clerk was caught off guard by Kallen's visible shock, and seemed to look back down at the table in shame, shuffling paper and mumbling "I'm sorry… she had all the identification, everything checked out, she asked to have a look through the lockbox."
Kallen was still trying to understand what had happened, but she was still aware enough of herself to "What?"
"She said you'd given her the go ahead to pick up some stuff." the clerk explained. "All the paperwork checked out."
Kallen frowned. Money… Kasumi had asked for money, a few times, she had asked for… but Kallen had always provided it, Kallen… she hadn't said that Kasumi had to go and get it, least of all from her daughters mail.
"Is there anything I can do?" the clerk asked, clearly feeling somewhat helpless to deal with the increasingly irritated woman stood at her stall.
"No…" Kallen replied, looking down in baffled frustration for a moment before shaking her head and mumbling "Thank you…"
Turning away, Kallen slipped the stack of sheets down her satchel, before swinging it on her back and stepping back out into the street, tugging a baseball cap down across her forehead and dipping her gaze down to avoid attention as she made her way through the gently frosted streets that were just realising winter had come. She huffed her way up north between blocks of flats, her breath visible in the crisp morning air, and as she rounded the last corner up the alley, her mind was still racing, even as she raced up the spiral staircase and up to the door, up on the third floor, and fumbled for the keys in her pocket which had a convenient habit of turning into the Tardis when Kallen was trying to find anything in it.
Bank notes… some odds and ends… keys! Kallen fished it out like a triumphant seafaring catch, and slotted the long end of the black key into the door. Eager to make her way in, she twisted the key and pushed the door open.
Immediately, a hideous smell. Kallen's nose immediately recoiled in revolt, awful. The thick toxic honey had the sort of wafting, nauseating smell that… it wasn't… Kallen couldn't… it wasn't like anything she had smelled before, it was almost syrupy.
No… she had smelt it before, but where? And where was Kasumi?
"Mum?" Kallen called into the apartment, as she tried to swat past the smell by waving her arm, though she quickly appreciated why this was not the standard means one was advised to use to get rid of bad smells. She ventured deeper into the flat, looking around for the source of the stench. Where… it wasn't the bin, despite her suspicions, and as she looked around, neither the smell or her mother could be found anywhere.
"Mum!?" Kallen asked, before suddenly she heard the sound of crashing porcelain. The bathroom, right across from her by the entryway. She ran up to the door, wrestling with the handle before she saw, just above the handle mount, the red sign reading locked. Kallen hammered on the door, screaming in "Mum!"
"Kallen?" came the reply, strained, and audibly confused. "Something's gone wrong, the plumbing!"
"Open the door Mum!" Kallen pleaded, having no ability to gauge what the situation was with the room blocked off, however Kasumi resisted, replying "There's water everywhere, it's flooding, don't open the door unless you've got a lot of towels ready to soak it up."
Kallen swore, before running to fetch the entire contents of the towel rack as she heard more bangs from the bathroom. She shouted back "Don't touch anything, you don't want to make it worse!", before she pressed handcloths and body towels and rags into the base of the door, before shouting "Okay, open the door!"
After a moment, the latch turned and sewage sloshed out, soaking into the fabric dam protecting the rest of the apartment. Kallen groaned, briefly huffing before kneeling down and trying to swab the water coming out of…
She looked up, and saw water slewing out of the base of the toilet, which had both clogged and smashed. How…
Kallen groaned again, before mumbling "We're going to have to get the landlord in to fix this, ach."
Alarmed, Kasumi seemed to retreat, and urge "No, no, that shouldn't… we can get this cleaned up, surely?"
"Cleaned up? Maybe." Kallen huffed, before sighing and sitting back. "But that toilet is going to keep spewing out water, and we don't know if it's going through the floor into the flat downstairs."
"Okay, okay." Kasumi nodded. "Is there anything I can do to help, I was a house maid back in the day, I know how to sort out this kind of stuff, just tell the landlord that he might have to buy some replacement stuff, it's the least I can do."
"Sure, whatever." Kallen muttered, too irritated to argue, rolling her eyes before asking "What even happened?"
"The toilet clogged up when I tried to flush, and the water rose up and over the brim. I was trying to unblock it with the brush, but I think I broke it."
Kallen shook her head, before getting up and grabbing more towels to try and soak up the streaming wastewater, making sure that there was as little material as possible that could seep down through the floor and cause as little indoor precipitation for the folks residing below them as possible. Kasumi, in fairness to her, did contribute a good bit to clearing up the mess, paying particular attention to getting the flowing function back in the toilet and stopping the leaking. After some time spent swabbing the decks and calling around the building to try and ensure the source of the leak could be understood by everyone who would suddenly be wondering why their roofs were pooling with moisture. The pilot wiped her brow, slammed the gear which had been used to stem the tide into the dryer, and collapsed into the sofa, as Kasumi sat on the swivelling desk seat across the room. She seemed to nod across to her daughter, and smirk "That was a close one!"
The twenty year old nodded, exhausted, before catching herself and replying "Actually, there was something I wanted to talk about."
"Sure, go on ahead." Kasumi nodded, herself exhausted.
"I was down at the post office this morning, I have a… PO box down there." Kallen explained, to which Kasumi interrupted "I know."
Biting her lip, Kallen continued "So I get my pay mailed to there, but the last few months are missing, the staff say the only people who've gone in there have been you, Naoto moved out earlier in the year so he hasn't touched it. Do you know what happened?"
"What are you implying?"
"I'm just asking if you know anything."
"I just find it funny that you immediately leap to suspect me." Kasumi scorned. "Who told you that it was me, some clerk, and you believed them?"
Kallen, who had just twenty minutes ago been marching home to give Kasumi a piece of her mind, was put back on the other foot, as her mother rounded and proved every bit as capable of asserting a self-righteous acidity as her daughter. Kallen flinched, letting open more room for Kasumi to dig in.
"Yeah, it was me, but that's not the point." Kasumi raged, standing over Kallen in a venomous show of power. "The fact that you just assumed that I was to blame, believed that I had to be the one, without ever questioning it… no matter what, the fact that you didn't even hesitate to round on me… shameful."
Blinking, Kallen whispered, in utter disbelief, "You-"
"Do you think it was easy for me?" Kasumi asked. "I had to let go of Naoto, I had to live alone, and now even you just assume the worst of me? What did I do to deserve this kind of treatment? Eh? What, am I the bad guy now? Me?"
Kallen, now in a corner as Kasumi covered off all angles to enforce herself, was forced to retreat into the back of her seat, her heart bracing fearfully even as she, on an intellectual level, surely had nothing physical to fear, as she was far stronger and far more capable of defending herself than her mother. Even in spite of this, Kasumi held such a forceful position that even the possibility of getting up, let alone trying to adopt any sort of defensive stance beyond a sort of wince, seemed out of the question.
"I am doing everything I can to support you, and you just leap to suspect me." Kasumi scorned, voice booming. "I'm doing my best, what more can I do to earn the slightest credence from you? Ungrateful daughter! If you hold me in such low regard then I suppose that you may as well be rid of me, deal with things on your own! Is that what you want? Do you want to be rid of me?"
Kallen's eyes were now wide open, beadily fixated on her mother, with her teeth dug into her lips with such force that it might draw blood. She said nothing; she didn't trust herself to, but if the daggers she was staring into her mother materialised, she might be convicted of matricide.
Kasumi, not drawing out a response, huffed, and tried to make a show of calming herself. Tutting, she asked "Why did you make me do that?"
Kallen knew better than to satisfy her with a response, and Askumi sighed, before, as she breathed, and the temperature of the room dropped a few clicks, she magnanimously admitted "I'm sorry but… yes, I was the one. You said I could borrow some money to settle some debts-"
"I gave you as much money as I was able." Kallen finally interrupted, snippily cutting her mother short. "It was not license to go and take more."
"I appreciate that, I just needed some emergency funds, I swear everything which was taken will be repaid." Kasumi explained. "Besides, we're family, it's not so much yours or mine as ours. And I'm sorry for blowing up just there, I've been incredibly… stressed, recently. Worried. Watching you go out, every time you get in the car, I'm worried you're never coming back, I saw what happened to Naoto back in 2017, and… to think that you've never more than a few corners from that… or worse… that you might die…"
Kallen was not impressed by her mothers show. She was still fixated on how she took her pay, even though… well she did say she could have some of her money, and… well, it wasn't unreasonable for her to be a little… jumpy, a little protective. She probably wasn't used to the level of security Kallen enjoyed, financial or otherwise. She couldn't blame her; until recently, nor was Kallen.
It was fair that she could get a freak injury. But to die? No way, there was no way she could die in one of these cars.
Underlining her point, she pointed out "Mum, no one's died in one of these in like… almost a decade, and even that was a freak accident that can't happen anymore, they changed the designs and the rules specifically to prevent it. The time when it happened before that was another two decades back before that. It won't happen."
"I know…" Kasumi nodded. "And I'm sorry for yelling, it just… you know it isn't who I am, you know I love you, and it hurts, when you act like this. I just want what's best for you. I'm not the bad guy, I'm your mother."
Kallen said nothing, as she contemplated what her mother had said. There is who Kasumi was, and there is what Kasumi does, and they actually have little to do with one another. But…
"No, I want a reliever in the bank in ten minutes. Okay. I'll see you in the lobby, I'm just about to arrive. I'm not waiting. You hang up, I can't hold my phone."
Lelouch huffed as he continued to persevere down the street, placing his crutches forward for one half of a stride and letting his feet swing forward for the other half as fast as he could, struggling to maintain the pace which most other people would describe as "modest".
Then again, he had never been exactly an athlete, even before his injury. And besides, he had made it.
Long Lional, which he had been rushing down, was simply horrid to try and traverse by way of crutches, with the cross-brick pavement catching his spokes and nearly tripping him up. However as he felt the warm air brace him as the automatic door slid open, he let up, slowly allowing his momentum to bleed off as he swung into the bank and hobbled to a stop. He took a breath, before more steadily making his way into the reception. He was prepared, had his paperwork in order, and was prepared to throw his life in with the dice once again, but as he stepped past the frosted glass dividing panel beckoning him into the bank proper, he saw the man he was not in a million years expecting to find in the lobby of a bank in the middle of Buckinghamshire; VV, who contrasted Lelouch's panting, ruffled shirt which wasn't tucked in and creased trousers with a suit jacket so sharp Lelouch felt like he had cut himself just by looking at it.
Lelouch awkwardly chuckled as Charles' brother approached, clearly not amused.
"Good Afternoon Lelouch." he said curtly.
"Afternoon VV!" Lelouch replied, with a spot of pep, hoping to catch VV in some sort of positive spirit. However, he could not be so lucky, as VV, not impressed, asked "What are you doing?"
"Getting my cardio exercise in." Lelouch explained, aware that he was lying unconvincingly but nonetheless enjoying the idea that this was just his normal aerobics routine to stop by a bank with a pile of secret documents. "Making up for twenty years of lost time."
"You know we have a disability section in our company gym that you can use whenever you want, bankrupting yourself by buying out another failing team is quite unnecessary for your fitness." VV replied, raising an eyebrow in appreciation of Lelouch's audacity. Appreciating his investors humour, Lelouch continued, replying "The wheelchair treadmill just doesn't get your heart racing in quite the same way as racing around to save your mate's bacon."
VV laughed, for the first time, however as his hearty chuckle faded, his face grew more severe. Pursing his lips in scepticism, the Briton remarked, with some scorn, "You're already overseeing one team, what's going on with buying a new one?"
Lelouch nodded. While he had a set of explanations prepared for if VV found out about his plan before the deal was transacted, at which point it would have been too late to do anything, Lelouch knew it was easier to ask for forgiveness than permission. Still, now that he didn't have a choice, the best defence was attack.
"Are you saying that my administration has been in some way inadequate?" he asked, questioning VV's line of reasoning for bringing up Lelouch's busy schedule. "Is there something in our administration suggesting my concentration is anything less than what it needs to be? We're number one in the WDC with one race to go-"
"With a driver who is dead." VV interrupted, not having Lelouch's soft-soaping.
"Granted…" Lelouch conceded, though he was eager to follow up by noting "In our second ever season, we've made it to the final race in both seasons with a chance-"
"Lelouch." VV interrupted, running out of patience. "The driver who's leading can't defend his lead, he's only there because no one has passed him yet, which they will do. What you call a chance is the hope that everyone crashes out of the final race and no one finishes, allowing Xingke to not be overtaken. What I see are two failures to win with cars that could have done it in both years."
Lelouch sighed. VV was probably right, but he had invested too much in the hope that Xingke's dream could still be fulfilled retrospectively to entertain the fact, let alone the idea, that it was open season on the dead pilots lead. Crestfallen, Lelouch couldn't help but look down at his feet.
Too fucking small.
Eventually, he mumbled "Well, the second one hasn't missed yet."
"In the same way that the sun has not fallen below the horizon to beckon the night yet." VV insisted, impatient with Lelouch's evasiveness. "It will do so."
There was an air of finality to VV's authoritative tone, as if he was speaking to a child. It was not unfair, Lelouch supposed, he was forty years the man's junior, but it did emphasise the scope of what he was doing, his size in the whole thing. Lelouch was a twenty year old bastard who crawled out from under a rock in southern France like a woodlouse with nothing that was neither stolen or haggled for and all the spite you could load into a person.
Goddamn Charles. Goddamn that man. This was his fault. Reuben, Lloyd, the yearly rule changes which forced teams to sink money into new models which would be useless before they had had the slightest chance to pay for themselves, forcing them into a cycle of cutting corners, budgeting, which meant less performance, which meant less money, which meant less performance… all of it traced back to the structure of the thing, and one man at the head of it. It had to be taken down, it had to be opposed, someone had to take a stand.
And if Lelouch were to take that stand, he needed a lot of leverage, and two teams was more than one. Leverage the teams he had under his control into some kind of opposition, something…
Lelouch gritted his teeth. He had to do it. And to do that, he had to cow VV.
"So why do you care if I bankrupt myself?" Lelouch, emboldened, demanded, having confirmed his convictions. "It's my choice, hell you could sweep up my shares, I'm surprised you're not cheering for my downfall."
"Well, first I like to have a sense that my TP hasn't lost his mind, that's always comforting." VV replied, with no shortage of sarcasm. "Second, if you go bankrupt, you'll have to sell your stake in this team leaving it in peril once again, which will defeat the entire purpose of your project with this team, and leave me out of a job."
"You're making the assumption that I'll go bankrupt." Lelouch coolly shot back.
Aghast, VV, who could hardly believe what Lelouch said, asked "Do you know what the word 'risk' means? Chance? Do you for a second consider what could go wrong?"
"No." Lelouch replied flatly. "No, VV, I don't."
VV looked shocked at Lelouch's snap call, and of course there was the risk that VV could try and work some administrative voodoo to stop him, but the Frenchman knew that if he could hold a stronger nerve than his partner, he might just be able to convince him that Lelouch had the capacity to follow this through, or at least that it was a bad idea to try and stop him.
It was a lie, of course; Lelouch was aware of what could go wrong to an ordinarily paralysing extent. Everything could go wrong. He could be ruined. Nothing of what VV said was wrong. It was just that this was more important, it was something Lelouch had for the longest time struggled to recognise, it was bigger than him. If he lost out, but the project was successful, he didn't care. This wasn't just about him anymore; Xingke had communicated the idea of a larger project which could benefit the community, and had communicated it to such an extent that while Lelouch saw the incredible danger, he was not discouraged by it.
He had to move forward.
VV, still not understanding Lelouch's new framework, asked "So what's going to happen, you're just going to keep making huge gambles, trying to play the big hero, until one day you're going to cop a hit you can't shake off? This is the attitude of someone who wants to die, not someone who wants to help anyone."
Lelouch looked down again. He didn't know what to say to that, what…
He shook his head, and moved on.
"Well it's a good job that you won't have to worry about it." the Frenchman proclaimed. "I've rescued this team, I know how to do it again for another one."
VV sighed, before putting up his hands. "So be it. What do you need?"
"Not much." Lelouch replied. "I'm taking all the liability, I'm comfortable with that, I'm okay with taking the blame if this arse about face. I know what I'm doing. But that means that I need to be in complete control. I need to be able to make decisions on the field of battle without having to stop and look over my shoulder to make sure a committee is properly consulted at every step when things are touch and go in the crucial moments."
"Your conviction I don't doubt, but there's no shortage of maniacs with conviction to spare." VV noted. "I need you to know what you're saying… if you're saying… if you take this bet and lose, you'll be worse than bankrupt, everything you've built will be lost, your family!"
Lelouch simply shook his head, and replied "You say this as if I don't know it."
VV leaned his head forward, and raised is eyebrow in a sort of amusement.
"And you're comfortable with it?" he asked.
"The only reason I haven't signed the papers yet is that I'm busy talking to you." Lelouch simply answered, no more bothered, at least to all appearances, than if he were ordering dinner off a menu.
VV nodded, and sighed. He couldn't stop it, and it seemed he had internalised this now. All he could do was bite his lip, but not before asking "Why are you doing this?"
"I have an ability to stop this, which means I have a responsibility to stop this." came the simple reply from a stoic Lelouch, who viewed this as sufficient. Standing more to attention, at least as much as his body allowed him to, he then asked "Will that be all?"
Shaking his head, VV sighed "Yes Mr Lamperouge that will be all."
Lelouch gave a satisfied nod, content, before he limped past VV with a certain pride. Moving back towards the meeting rooms, he caught a glimpse, and stepped into the future.
Have to get over 35/40 to pass my theory test, if I get my license I might just be able to persuade my neurosurgeon that I'm not a hazard on track. I'll keep ye posted. Currently averaging 37/38 on the mocks. As always, please be sure to review, it gives me so much delight and drive to keep this story going.
~G1ll3s