Descent

Yu Kanda

The speech my PA had been hassling me about was due tomorrow and all I'd written for it was a few measly sentences on a company notepad.

Groaning, I rubbed my temples with the tips of my fingers. This was so damn annoying…

And then, as if by some cruel turn of fate, things got a whole lot worse; familiar voices drifted in through the open door to my office, causing a headache reared its ugly head.

They're back.

I stood, reluctantly -and slowly- making my way to the door, wanting to prolong this reunion for as long as I possibly could.

Tiedoll, as annoying as it was, was still the owner of this company, so there were certain things I couldn't sign. Or at least, that was his official reason for visiting me so often. The reality of it was that he just 'loved visiting his sons'.

I was lucky that he'd been away for the past month on one of Daisya's soccer trips, taking said soccer freak and that irritating Rabbit with him. The trip was now over, meaning I'd be seeing them all twice a week -at the very least-, which Tiedoll would use to then drag me off to one of our mandatory family dinners.

From the doorway, I spotted Lavi -who was in the middle of shaking a very confused-looking Moyashi's hand-, Tiedoll, Daisya, and Marie.

Marie I could handle.

He was calm and easy to be around, which was why most people got along with him so well.

Daisya was the joker, Tiedoll was compassionate and empathetic, and I… I was the 'unfeeling ingrate with an ego that would put Caesar to shame', in the words of one of my past PAs.

I couldn't remember which one she was. None of them really mattered to me anyway.

They were expendable.

I tuned into the conversation seconds before Lavi retracted his hand, listening and watching them all interact. They were all smiling, so everything seemed alright.

"You're really tiny, you know that, right?"

I felt myself smirk; my PA hated jabs at his -lack of- height.

"This is the average height for males my a-"

"Quit deluding yourself, Moyashi," I cut in, lips twitching when he turned to face me and the remnant of something vaguely menacing was crushed by a polite plastic smile.

"I have a name," he said, a muscle in his jaw doing a quick little spasm.

I leant smugly against the frame of the door, knowing with certainty that I'd won this encounter. The thick silence that settled over us reinforced my win.

Daisya coughed, drawing our attention by taking it upon himself to break the tension the Moyashi and I had generated. "So… how'd a runt like you get stuck with this crappy job?"

My PA looked back over at me, face blank. "I have terrible luck."

Now that was the truth. His luck had to be subpar to end up with me as his immediate superior.

There was another long silence, which was ultimately ended by Lavi loudly clapping his hands together, startling everyone but me. "I'd love to stay here and keep this awkward atmosphere up and running, but how about me go in there," he said in his usual calculatingly-cheery manner, motioning over to the doorway I blocked. "Yeah?"

I stepped back inside to allow access and returned to my chair. When I sat down and noticed that the only one who hadn't followed me in was the Moyashi, my eyes nearly rolled into the back of my head. "Moyashi… Get in here." I needed him to assist me with sorting what was for Tiedoll and what wasn't. Having him in here was also a good way to delay what I knew was coming. Tiedoll's 'talks' could sometimes go on for hours… "And bring a chair."

My PA was already at the doorway by the time he'd heard the last order. He stopped, turned on his heel, and disappeared. Barely a minute later, he returned with a chair from one of the meeting rooms on this floor, setting it down roughly two metres in front of my desk.

Finished with his task, he stood patently beside the chair with his hands behind his back.

"Thank you," Tiedoll said, crow's feet crinkling as he smiled, his hand seeking out my PA's shoulder for physical contact.

The Moyashi looked surprised, but in the end, he too smiled. "It's fine, really. Uhm… sorry… but I didn't catch your name…?"

Lavi let out a stupefied "Huh?"

Even I was surprised. I knew that my PA was airy and focussed on his work, but even he had to know of at least three of the people he'd just met.

"Is… something wrong?"

"Don't you watch TV?!" Lavi cried, voice laced through with shock and confusion and dejection and a whole lot more shit that I couldn't identify.

My PA's expression became a mix of nervousness and discomfort. "Not much of it," he admitted quietly, stepping back a bit, away from Tiedoll's outstretched hand, which hadn't moved since the beginning of this conversation.

Tiedoll lowered his hand.

Frowning at the way my PA was acting, I decided that it was best for me to continue watching for now. Sitting at my desk as I was, it was like I had front row seats to a show. A show that was like a soap opera, but with better acting.

It was Lavi who saw fit to enlighten the oblivious white-haired young idiot as to who exactly it was he was with.

"I'm going to go ahead and assume you don't know anyone, so… The big guy is Noise Marie, the one with the funny makeup is Daisya Barry." He paused to shoot Daisya -who was currently staring daggers at him- a lopsided grin. "And the guy with the fuzzy hair is Froi Teidoll, as in CEO-of-this-building Froi Tiedoll."

The colour drained from my PA's face, which then became mortified as he bent in low rigid bow. "I'm terribly sorry for n-not knowing who you were!"

I nearly choked on nothing, then had to clamp a hand over my mouth shut and breathe through my nose to keep myself from snickering.

Everyone else just stood there shocked, none of them used to his personality. Tiedoll then looked at me, so I dropped my hand and schooled my expression.

"I'll try to be more aware in the future! It's only my second official week, please forgive me!"

I clenched my jaw to keep myself from making a sound. I could not chuckle or snort or laugh, not with them watching. Later, I'd replay this scene in my mind and enjoy it to my heart's content, but for now, I had to control myself.

Lavi suddenly looked pretty guilty for having laid it on so thick. "Erm, it's not… your fault… I guess…"

Though hesitant, my PA straightened up out of his stiff bow, slowly raising his head.

It was then that Lavi hooked an arm around the brat's shoulder, and all I did was watch when my PA tensed up as he was dragged towards his office space. "You and I are gonna go talk," Lavi declared, grin back in place as he pulled the door shut behind the two of them.

This wasn't good. I had no real reason to call my PA back in, which mean I'd have to deal with Tiedoll…

VWV

Tiedoll was engaging in a completely one-sided conversation with me, chatting non-stop about recent events from the chair directly opposite my desk.

Eventually, our discussion morphed into one about why I wasn't allowed to fire Rouvelier, and then on into how my poor attitude was negatively effecting the people who worked under me. From that, it became a talk on my meeting -if you could even call it that- later on with Oceania branch.

And then it delved into our private lives.

I was Japanese, dammit! Private matters were supposed to stay private!

"Marie's already found someone," he said, gesturing to my eldest adopted sibling, who sat reclined on the leather futon to my right. "I doubt Daiysa will ever settle, but what about you?"

"Tch." I fucking hated these conversations. "My private life is none of your business."

"Yes it is, Yu. You're my son."

There he went using the 'you're my son' thing again. While it was technically the truth, having him say it so many times only served to irritate me further. "Whatever."

"I wouldn't mind at least one grandchild from you," Tiedoll continued. "Adopted is fine. All I want is for you to find someone and be happy."

I knew that, but I cringed anyway. "I don't like kids." Children were noisy and bratty, and there was no way I wanted to waste eighteen long years of my life dealing with one.

Tiedoll jumped up, and his hands reached cross the desk, seizing mine in an iron hold. "That's only now. You'll get used to the idea once you find someone."

Oh shit.

Since he'd been away for so long, I'd forgotten the cardinal rule when it came to dealing with Tiedoll: Always outright reject his ideas, whatever they may be.

The end result of not doing so was that he'd then continue to pursue the idea until he fucking died.

Right now, he was beaming, so over the moon with delight and whatever else he was feeling that it made me want to hurl. He was getting all emotional too, and wouldn't let my hands go. If this continued, he'd start crying. Again.

That's when Lavi came back in laughing, a big grin curving up his lips. "Yu-chan, what'd you do to that poor kid? He hates your guts."

Tiedoll turned his head, relief filling me as the Usagi's unintentional distraction effectively managed to steer us safely away from the topic of the spawning and/or acquiring of tiny devils.

I extracted my hands from Tiedoll's, and it was only then that I realised what had been said. The Moyashi hates me? "Good." If he didn't, that would make him a masochist or something. And I couldn't have him enjoying this.

"Seriously, how is it that you managed to force someone into being your PA?" Lavi asked, wandering lazily over to Marie and perching himself on the edge of the futon.

Tiedoll's attention shifted to Lavi, his aging face drawn with worry. "That boy was forced?"

"He originally worked in Komui's division," I said, before Lavi could answer. It was best if I explained -even if it meant wasting my spit-, since I didn't know what the Moyashi had told Lavi. "And he only agreed to be my PA for the week it would take for me to find someone else. I told Komui that I wanted the kid as my PA. When he came in for work the next day, I had Komui pressure him into accepting." By taking advantage of his obvious lack of ability to say no.

"Yu," Tiedoll chided disapprovingly, ever the right-minded parent. "You can't do that."

"I don't see the problem." And I didn't, so long as you didn't count the personality clash. "The pay is better than what he was getting before. He should be thanking me."

"You…" Marie murmured, speaking for the first time since I'd seen him today. "You're doing this because you're having fun."

He may be blind, but my eldest adopted brother was intuitive as heck and could read people like they had invisible tapecorders following them around and revealing shit that only he could hear.

That was one of the few things I hated about him.

"It's satisfying to mess with him," I conceded, not quite agreeing, but not disagreeing either.

Tiedoll turned back to me, brow creased even further with bewilderment and concern. "Why is he even here? Shouldn't he be in school?"

"He's twenty-one," I deadpanned, though I could understand the question. I too had been caught off guard by the knowledge of my PA's age. I didn't know if I could say that puberty had been kind to him, not if he looked like a baby-faced teen for the next ten or twenty years of his unfortunate life.

Marie was the only one not stunned into silence, though it was probably only because he hadn't seen the kid's face.

VWV

My PA gathered together the papers I'd already through, scanning and checking them over before handing Tiedoll those that were appropriate. He was professional as usual, focussed wholly on the task at hand. With my family -and the Usagi- here, we couldn't exactly banter like usual. Then again, we'd been too busy to do that lately.

The Moyashi had been brought in just as the Spring preparations had begun, so we hadn't the time to be messing about when there was a ton of work to be done. I knew that he sometimes ended up taking documents home with him to complete, and I wasn't able to complain since they were always handed in to me on time.

Speaking of time…

A glance at the clock told me that it was nearly time for me to begin preparing for our meeting -which was actually dinner at some classy restaurant Lavi had chosen-. My shoulders slumped a fraction, the weight known as duty pushing them down. Today I'd done nothing but read and scrawl my signature on hundreds of papers, right now I had this dinner, and then tomorrow was the Crow meeting. I was barely able to catch a break before my duties at Vice-Chairman caught up to me and thrust more work and responsibilities in my face.

I needed a way to relieve all the stress that was building up before I snapped and killed someone. Not a vacation… Those were boring. I could always mess with the Moyashi. That was entertaining.

Certainly more entertaining than these damn meetings…

My hands stilled.

"Fuck," I breathed, palm meeting my forehead. Tiedoll's arrival had distracted me from what I'd been doing earlier.

"Language!" Tiedoll snapped tersely. My PA looked like he wanted to join in the admonishment of my word choice.

I ignored them. "I'm supposed to have dinner with the heads of Oceania branch later, but tomorrow morning there's that meeting with the leading distributors of Crow enterprises… shit."

"Language!" Tiedoll repeated, sterner this time. He'd never been one for swearing. Or accepting it, for that matter.

"What's wrong with that?" Lavi asked from the futon, which he lay draped across like a discarded coat. Marie had moved his feet to allow the red-head to sit down, and Lavi had taken over half the futon as his own as a result.

"I haven't made the speech."

"Y-you haven't done it yet?" Allen spluttered, eyes wide behind his wire-framed glasses. "Didn't you say that you were nearly finished?"

I realised that yes, I had indeed said something along those lines to him. He really wasn't going to like this. "I lied so you'd shut up about it."

He made an disbelieving face while placing a hand on my desk, fingers gripping the edge. "Well aren't you a stupid one."

"I'm not stupid! Maybe if you hadn't bugging me about it, I might've done it!" And if Tiedoll hadn't appeared unscheduled again. And there hadn't been so much to do. And if I hadn't put this off for so long. And… and… and…

"Well you don't have time to write it now unless you pull an all-nighter. Unfortunately, the Oceania branch dinner will cut into your time." My PA calmly took the papers that sat in front of me, tucking them in his arms. "I'll sort these. You write what you can before the dinner."

This was too much to deal with in such a short amount of time. I wouldn't be able to go it without out a speech, but… there was no time. "You write the damn speech!" I snapped, dragging a hand through my ponytail to free it from knots that wouldn't be there. The last instance of me letting a PA write my speech involved him fucking it up splendidly. Still, making shit up as I went along would lead me into a swearing tangent.

Allen Walker's smile would have been a sweet one, had his eyes not told me just how much he wanted me dead. "Is that an order, sir?"

VWV

I was gonna write something about "invisible billboards above their heads that only he could see" to describe Marie's intuition but then I remembered that he was blind and that kind of imagery didn't work properly (Just in case you didn't understand the "tapecorders" thing).