¡Kiva Las Vegas!
"Come on, it's not that bad!"
She was closer now to 30 than he had been when she had first seen him don his armour, when she had first understood what that toy bat in his workshop had been about. Since then, the world had ended more than once, and she had graduated from university, had found herself at 27-years-old, still single, in a job she hated, and feeling that the best years of her life had been in middle school—and so, she had done what any rational woman in her mid-20s would have done; strong-armed her old childhood crush, now both married and a father, into flying halfway across the world with her at the drop of a hat and visit the Entertainment Capital of the World.
"Ah, you're not paying attention to me, Wataru!" she protested, aware that she was sounding like a schoolgirl. "We came all this way and you're totally not getting into the spirit of things."
Again, she pulled at his arm, and shyly he nodded his head.
"I'm trying, I promise."
"It's fine," she said, pulling his arm again, "it's just like the pachinko parlours in Shinjuku. Well, kind of."
Being a father hadn't changed him, she reflected, and despite the prescient vision of the future he had received all those years ago, he was still the same Wataru, still anxious, still full of doubt. But not when it mattered, she told herself, which was true, he had always been able to overcome such anxieties when it mattered. A year after the confrontation with the Checkmate Four, something had hardened that resolve when confronting impossible odds, some fated encounter that Shizuka could never conceive of, but had obviously given him a different perspective on the world.
Ah, but what was the point in dwelling on such things, she thought, standing with him at her side in the carpeted hallway, row after row after row of slot machines before them, a myriad of hotel guests and gamblers perched on stools hoping to beat the odds, to break it even; this, she thought, was the life, the battle of human tenacity against pure chance.
Lightly, she patted him on the arm.
"We're going to have fun, right?"
Kurenai Wataru looked at her with hesitation, his hair shorter than it had been back then, the colour no longer lightened by dye, the fringe no longer in his eyes.
"I guess so."
She frowned, releasing his arm.
"We didn't fly all the way out here just for you to be all like I guess so. We're going to have fun, even it kills us." She smiled, rolling out an old joke. "Trust me, I'm your mother, after all."
He squirmed awkwardly as she guided him towards the bar.
"Don't say that," he mumbled.
In return, she offered him a look of incredulity.
"You don't like me pretending to be your mother?" she asked.
He squirmed still, and, with a frown, she turned away.
"You never complained before."
"It was different before," he muttered shyly.
Shizuka slammed her handbag down on the bar, embossed leather and chequered squares.
"Sex on the beach," she proclaimed loudly, then gestured towards her blushing companion.
"Water, please," he murmured.
Shizuka placed her hands on her hips and scowled.
"A glass of house red," Wataru relented.
The bartender grunted, moving with a snarl from where he stood polishing the poorly washed glasses, his body language conveying his utter resentment at being forced to do his job.
"You need to calm down," Shizuka said, smiling as she thought of that Taylor Swift song.
"I'm calm," Wataru said, as if trying to convince himself. He looked away shyly. "I'm just not sure this was a good idea."
Shizuka sighed.
"It was. We're going to party like it's, well, like it's 2008."
The bartender returned, placing their drinks down on the mat before them, and she smiled, opening her handbag, taking out her purse and pulling free the bright coral orange of her debit card. A moment later, and he had shrunk back to his poorly washed glasses and indifference.
She reached down, lifting the tall, cool glass up, placing the straw between her lips, the taste of cranberry, vodka, and peach soon upon her tongue.
"You didn't think of me like that back then?" she asked, glancing sideways at him.
Ahead of them, the bartender continued to run a rag around the barely cleaned glasses, the raised voices of other hotel guests around them, each lost in their own stories, their own reasons for travelling so far out to the city amidst the desert winds, the silent dunes.
"You were a child," Wataru said quietly.
"I was 15!" Shizuka protested.
He nodded, lifting the glass in his right hand.
"A child."
In her ears, she could snippets of conversation, grandiose boasts, heartfelt accusations, uncertain confessions.
"I'm not anymore," she said, a tremble in her voice.
Wataru stared at the glass in his hand, the rich, red wine, the curved glass.
She took a deep breath and let it out.
"Well, no time for that now! We've got riches to win!"
She slapped him on the shoulder, the wine sloshing in the glass and splashing against the bar mat, exciting a look of displeasure from the bartender.
"Right, Wataru?"
He nodded.
"Right."
She plucked the straw out of her glass, lifted it and downed the cocktail in one, slamming it down on the mat, turning and throwing her arm around Wataru's shoulder.
"Let's goooo, as the kids say," she called out loudly.
Linking her arm in his, the glass of wine abandoned now on the bar, she led him once more into the crowds, and towards the sound of chiming machines and rattling change.