#11 Gardenia
It was somewhat disconcerting to Jounouchi to have his sisters and his friends all in one place. They'd been completely distinct parts of his life for pretty much ever—as a child, he'd been too embarrassed about what his friends would think if they knew he was close to his kid sister; when he was older, he was too ashamed of his life to want Shizuka to even know about it, much less be a part of it. So now he watched his separate worlds collide and it felt surreal, but it felt good, too, to have done things he could be proud of, to have friends he wasn't ashamed of and who accepted Shizuka into their midst as if she had always been one of them, and to not be embarrassed when his little sister hugged him and kissed him on the cheek right in front of them.
Okay, maybe a little embarrassed.
The weirdest thing, though, was how chummy she'd gotten with Mai, having somehow bonded during their ten-minute car ride to the pier. He was absurdly pleased; for some reason he couldn't fathom, it was really important to him for his sister to like Mai. But still, it was… weird. He couldn't think of two people who were more dissimilar. Shizuka was like a gardenia, garden-cultivated, carefully tended and pruned and shielded from weeds and pests. Mai was more like a wild orchid, exotic and lovely but hardy and resilient and needing only the sun and the rain nature provided to thrive.
It wasn't until Yugi's duel with Bakura and the reemergence of the Spirit of the Ring that it occurred to Jounouchi just exactly how much danger he'd put Shizuka in by bringing her into his world, and by then it was too late to send her away. And it wasn't until much later that he began to understand that wild orchids could be much more fragile than they appeared and gardenias could possess a surprising strength.