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Another RGU piece, this time from Saionji's POV, set post-canon as he moves in with Wakaba for financial reasons and they try to settle in to routines that won't end up with Saionji getting a sword pulled from his chest. (I'm sorry I keep forgetting I have Dreamwidth--)
Summary:
The thing is, Kyouichi has finally and permanently uprooted himself from Ohtori’s poisonous ground, but even as he feels himself growing into something new he’s desperate for familiar soil. The thing is, Wakaba needs a roommate to help pay rent and ease the loneliness, someone who will believe her when she lets something slip about the insanity of her previous school. The thing is, on paper, this new arrangement is perfect for them both.
The thing is, in practice it might not be so perfect.
Relationship Tags: Saionji Kyouichi/Shinohara Wakaba, Saionji Kyouichi & Shinohara Wakaba
Character Tags: Saionji Kyouichi, Shinohara Wakaba, Mentioned Kurono Hari, Mentioned Setsuno Touya
Additional Tags: Moving In, Financial Issues, Post-Canon, Developing Relationship, Pre-Relationship, that one metaphor from Fahrenheit 451 about how flowers can't grown on other flowers, that flowers and fireworks both need good soil and a solid foundation to grow, although i guess i didn't develop that metaphor as well as i'd have liked
Word Count: 2,709
So, fun fact, this was going to be a BnHA Chronohaul piece (not that anyone in the RGU fandom knows what Chronohaul is besides me and maybe two other people), but at the last minute I changed it to this instead. The Chronohaul piece was going to be another experimental one—a massive extended metaphor that was also an extended RGU reference (seriously, its title is gonna be The Car Is A Metaphor For Sex)—but this one grabbed my brain better, cooperated with me more. You know? It’s also a bit of a return to my roots, a much more introspective piece, although I’m not sure I’ve done an extended-time series of scenes like this before in my MSP series. Also I did slip in a BnHA reference near the end just for kicks, lmao (although it's not important that you know what i'm referencing).
“Are we sure this is a good idea?” Kyouichi says almost to himself, carrying his sparse luggage inside—just two suitcases and a small kitchen set. “Last time ended…badly.”
“Yeah, but last time I was still attending Ohtori,” Wakaba replies as she grabs the kitchen set and goes to put it in the apartment kitchen. “Also, didn’t you use to only have one suitcase?”
Kyouichi shrugs. “I’ve accumulated a few knickknacks since then. Is that the slow cooker I gave you?” he blurts out upon seeing a dark green metal thing on the counter.
“Yeah. You know, usually when guys send girls ‘something expensive’, it’s something like a dress or jewelry or alcohol. Although it’s been useful,” she admits.
“Good, that’s good,” he says. “Um. Yeah, dresses and jewelry are more Touga’s thing. I don’t…I don’t really like doing that.”
“Mhm.” She busies herself with popping open Kyouichi’s kitchen set and rifling through her cabinets to make space, figuring out the best way to organize their stuff. He doesn’t have a lot to pack away, which is perfect for the little apartment Wakaba lives in, but he doesn’t think his camping stove is going to see much use in the near future. While she’s busy with that, Kyouichi slips away from the awkwardness to take care of his two suitcases—mostly full of clothes, but with a toothbrush, deodorant, and enough whittling projects to make sure he needed two suitcases instead of just one. Maybe he should just grab some duffel bags—they’d be easier to cart around, surely, although he doesn’t exactly have a lot of money, not after his parents decided to cut him off when he left Ohtori. Let’s see: clothes, toiletries, old laptop computer, whittling knife, finished projects, unfinished projects, extra wood for future projects—
Ah, there’s one more thing to ask before that. “Hey Wakaba?”
“Yeah?”
“Where am I sleeping?”
She pokes her head in. “The other bedroom, second door on the left. It’s been empty since my last roommate moved out a couple weeks ago—I guess she thought I was too weird. Funny how that happens…” she murmured.
Kyouichi knows exactly what she’s talking about. He’s been desperate to talk to people, to make friends, but any time he mentions something related to Ohtori in conversation whoever he’s talking to starts looking at him funny and he doesn’t know how to explain that Ohtori was kinda just...like that. He’s had people accuse him of lying before, and the ones that don’t generally don’t believe him even if they pretend they do. (And Kyouichi can tell when they’re pretending.)
He moves his two suitcases to the empty room and starts to set up. It’s quite small, naturally, just a twin-sized bed, a dresser, some cheap shelving bolted to the wall, and a desk shoved into a scant few square meters. Wakaba’s already fitted out the bed with plain white sheets and a plain white pillow. Kyouichi unpacks pretty quickly—clothes, deodorant, laptop, whittling stuff—lining up his finished projects on the shelving in clear groups. His earliest projects, done from DIY kits, go on the far right, including a second attempt at the leaf hairclip that he never got to give to her. (To this day, he still doesn’t know what Mikage wanted with it. He should have asked.) His later projects, the ones he did without a pattern, stretch out to the left, starting with the rough stylized-flower shape that was his first foray into self-directed whittling and ending with the most recent project, a much smoother trio of chibi monkeys with their hands in the classic hear-no-evil see-no-evil speak-no-evil positions. Each monkey has significantly bigger and rounder ears than any normal monkey would. Like that little pet Anthy—Himemiya—the Rose Bride—Himemiya had had.
He’s never whittled a rose. He’s tried his hand at a lily, but never a rose.
“Come help me with dinner, would you?” Wakaba says as she pokes her head in. Good timing—Kyouchi’s just finished laying out his projects. He mhms an affirmative and heads out, wondering what dinner’s going to be.
The next day, when all his stuff is settled in and Wakaba’s out to her retail job, Kyouichi opens up his computer and gets to work. First priority is getting a job. Wakaba’s letting him stay here to help pay rent, after all, and even if Wakaba eats about the same as him (not something he would have expected, but apparently her job is exhausting) that still makes for twice the necessary food. And he can’t afford to be picky, either—he never finished high school (and anyways, Ohtori education is worthless, go figure) and neither his parents nor the Kiryuus are going to give him money now that he’s dropped out. What’s available around? What can he get to with the local bus routes? There are a few hard labor jobs down at some warehouses, and he’s pretty strong—shouldn’t need a lot of qualification, either. And they pay better than the minimum-wage customer service jobs he’s also seeing, even if they’re not as close.
(Plus, he wants to buy some lacquer and paint for his whittling projects.)
He sends in his application for four different jobs before Wakaba comes back. A productive day, he thinks, and says so to Wakaba when she asks.
“That’s good,” she says. “Always nice to have something to do.”
The day afterwards he looks for more job offers, and decides that he wants to sit outside this time. Staying inside all day yesterday made him more restless than it ever did at Ohtori (because Ohtori had been one big greenhouse, always summer, always trapped). He needs sun and air. The sun’s glare off of his laptop screen is a bit difficult to deal with, but the early fall weather is nice enough for him to deal with it.
He does it again for a few more days, one time even taking off his shirt to more properly sunbathe when the day’s warm enough, and Wakaba notices. “You’re like a plant,” she teases him over dinner.
“Well yeah,” he jokes. “My hair’s full of chlorophyll, haven’t you noticed?”
They both giggle at that. Kyouichi hadn’t been totally sure if his hair would remain green if he left Ohtori, because he’d heard once that green wasn’t a natural hair color, but it had stayed just as vibrant and wavy and dramatic outside as inside, although it did tend to get in his face more often. “Maybe we’re both plants,” he suggests half-jokingly.
“Yeah, hm,” Wakaba says, stirring her rice around with her spoon. (He doesn’t blame her. The baked salmon turned out perfect, but something’s off with the rice’s seasoning. It feels a little bit too sweet, almost.) “I’d obviously be an onion, but what kind of plant are you?”
“You’re not an onion,” Kyouichi protests.
W akaba blinks at him. “I’m not?”
“No.” Kyouichi struggles to find words, to figure out what he’s trying to say here, how to construct the metaphor around reality (and hopefully not the other way round, they’d both had enough of that at Ohtori). “You’re—well first off, you’re definitely not second rate. But also—” Hm. What was Wakaba? Definitely not something showy, like a rose, and in the same vein not something used for spices, like cinnamon or (appropriately) an onion. A main-dish kind of plant. “You’re…” It finally clicks. “You’re a potato.”
“A potato.”
“Yeah, a potato,” he says. “You can cook them all sorts of different ways, and they go with a whole lot of other ingredients and spices. They’re really versatile. And they can be a dish by themselves, not like onions—onions taste too strong, which is why they’re always used as seasoning and never by themselves. And even more than that—they’re filling and hearty and have lots of nutrients. You can feed people with just potatoes, even if meals end up boring after a while, and you can’t do that with onions, right? You know.” He frowns. “That…that metaphor didn’t turn out great.”
“No kidding. Aren’t poets supposed to compare girls to pretty things?”
“Pretty things like roses?”
They both shudder at that.
After a moment of silence, Wakaba muses aloud: “Maybe pretty’s overrated…”, but it’s clearly to herself, so Kyouichi doesn’t answer. “But anyways, if I’m a potato, then what are you?”
Now that is a tricky question. “Definitely not a potato—I get along with too few people. Some sort of super-spicy green pepper. An unripe habanero.”
“’Cause almost no one can handle you, but the ones who can get famous?”
“Famous?”
Wakaba kinda laughs. “Yeah, uh... I don’t know exactly why, but my grades started going up and people started noticing me when I was housing you the first time. Like I was turning special.” She rubs at the back of her neck. “I mean, I talked to Miki and Juri and even Nanami—you know, before she disappeared—and they didn’t make it seem like being special was all that great, but not being special isn’t super fun either. And I liked being noticed. You know.”
He doesn’t know, actually…but also he kind of does. It’s the sort of Catch-22 dichotomy that Ohtori specializes in.
“That’s a good way to put it,” she says. “Pick your poison kinda deal.”
T he conversation falls flat on that happy note. Kyouichi resolves to test some spice combinations for the rice tomorrow, see if he can get a more savory taste with a more balanced profile. A blend of opposites.
“How’s the job search going?” Wakaba asks finally.
“Pretty well. I’ve got offers for three interviews so far, starting next week.” Today’s Thursday, too, so not all that far off at all. “I should get my first paycheck in time to help pay rent next month.”
“Good, that’s good. I’d like to scale back my hours so I can focus on online schooling but money’s been too tight for a while now.”
“You too? Ohtori end up useless?”
“Exactly. I swear, what did they even teach us in there? It was so embarrassing to transfer out and realize you’re two grades behind in math. I’m not sure the teachers were even teaching us right, cuz even the few months I attended at a normal school before I had to switch to online were way different.” She shrugs. “At least I’m a lot better at math now, since my grade depends on how well I study and understand the material rather than whatever nebulous ‘specialness’ Ohtori operates off of.” She snorts and Kyouichi nods sympathetically—he’d had the same experience with history. He’s pretty sure that Ohtori’s history classes are even worse than its math classes.
“And what about online classes?” he prompts.
“Pretty good,” she says. “The videos and articles explain the concepts pretty well, and if I need to I can always meet with a teacher in-person to go over stuff. Mr. Saito—my math teacher—seemed really scary at first, but he’s actually really levelheaded and patient.”
Hm. That does sound nice. He hasn’t been to school, in person or online, since he dropped out of (ran away from) Ohtori, too busy trying to earn enough money to feed and house himself with the massive list of disciplinary infractions that had materialized on his record overnight after he’d left. He blames Mr. Ends of the World. (God, what a pretentious name.) “ You think I could enroll in online classes?”
“Maybe,” she says. “You should see how your job works out first, though.”
“Good point,” he says. What is having a manual labor job going to be like anyways?
Exhausting, but not all that bad, it turns out.
He finally lands a job with a really sketchy operation, hired by a guy who he’s eighty percent sure has yakuza tattoos under his white hoodie and sick mask, silver hair shimmery in the darkness of the warehouse. The guy introduces himself as Kurono Hari, and he’s got hard steel-gray eyes that seem to notice everything, and he walks with a confident, nothing-can-touch-me swagger that makes the slumbering beast of jealousy inside Kyouichi’s chest stir. (Handsome, he thinks. And then he immediately shuts that thought down because no way in hell is he getting into another Touga situation. Nope. Nuh-uh. No way in hell.) Normally he wouldn’t take such a job, but he’s been through four interviews already and that damn disciplinary record is making things difficult. (The really fun thing is that half of those entries really were real and his fault, which just makes it worse.) Kurono claps him on the back when Kyouichi shakes his hand and sends him into the deeper darkness of the warehouse, with a promise of fair pay, to go move heavy boxes of god-knows-what. Hopefully not drugs. Probably drugs.
Most of his coworkers know about as much as he does, which is to say, very little. They’re all struggling financially, just like him, and a lot of them aren’t even as lucky as to be able to afford an apartment, roommate or no. Some of them are immigrants or children of immigrants , some of them are Ainu, some of them dropped out of school like he did, some of them told stories of being unhireable because they didn’t fit a strict definition of ‘man’ or ‘woman’. The last group made something in Kyouichi’s chest tighten with longing whenever he looked over at them laughing, showing off top surgery scars or breast growth, but he doesn’t dwell on it, especially since all of his coworkers seem to be pretty friendly, even when he says something Wrong or lets slip something strange slip about Ohtori. One day one of the higher-ups visits, introduces himself as Setsuno Touya, and when Kyouichi accidentally mentions the car ride Ends of the World took him on Setsuno just nods sagely.
“Shitty relationships do that to ya,” he says. “My ex-girlfriend would do all sorts of crazy shit to get what she wanted and no one would ever believe me when I told them she was doing things like letting the bathtub overflow on purpose or shining lights in my face when I tried to sleep. Not to mention that she’d accuse me of cheating all the time, and then she ended up cheating on me.” He mutters something about some ‘overhaul’ being much more reasonable (what overhaul? What’s getting overhauled?) but Kyouichi doesn’t pry, mostly because he doesn’t want to know. Mostly it’s just nice for someone who didn’t attend Ohtori to finally get it.
He comes back home physically exhausted every day, but often mentally buzzing, and discussions with Wakaba about all sorts of random stuff—the kind of customers she got, some book she’s reading for class, the ethics of Confucianism—become a regular occurrence. The slow cooker sees a lot of use. They get more physical, too—he’d been scared to touch her, almost, fearing the feeling of her tensing up and looking away—but as he works with the others in the warehouse he learns ways of touching other than grabbing: shoulder bumps, slaps on the back, arms slung on shoulders. And when he starts to bump, pat, and nudge Wakaba she immediately responds by doing the same—little headbutts too, sometimes, and wrapping his arm in hers like a mini-hug. Not quite the jump-and-tackle she’d use on Tenjou, but it’s clearly affection, given freely and with no shame. It feels nice. One day he comes home early and falls asleep on the couch, waking up to Wakaba sprawled on top of him like her own bed.
Kyouichi’s current job is temporary, and he’ll probably have to keep getting sketchy, under-the-table jobs like this one until he finds the time to finish high school himself. Maybe Wakaba will finish first and they’ll have to end up moving when she finds a better paying job, or if she wants to go to college. But like this—he can see in his mind’s eye the tree statuette he’s working on, almost fully painted and lacquered, complete with green leaves and brown trunk—he thinks they’ll be okay.
if you're wondering what's up with setsuno mentioning his ex, it's mostly headcanon--the cheating part is canon, but the rest is very much not. i think of her (setsuno's ex) as kind of like shiori if she was targeting miki or some random 'softboi' on campus who wasn't special instead of juri
anyways!!! wakaba and saionji have Parallels and an Interesting Ship Dynamic!!! i'm a little nervous to post this after that "you guys it's misandry to say that ruka or saionji ever did anything bad!!!1! they're secretly pure angels i swear!!1!!!" rant from a blog that called herself a Ruka and Saionji apologist when i went to block her, cuz she mentioned wakaba/saionji in the rant and i do Not want to be associated with her NO THANK YOU
but anyways back to the Interesting Parallels, like their physicality--Wakaba jumps on Utena frequently as a show of affection, and Saionji tends to grabby grab people a lot--and their Jealously and Wanting To Be Special--Saionji obvs is jealous of Touga because Touga can access and perform Acceptable Masculinity and Saionji doesn't know how to be that kind of prince (so he gets shoved into either the brute or the princess role, another instance of dichotomy, hm?) and Wakaba wants to be Special very very badly and doesn't know how Utena is special, so she ends up treating Saionji, who she's in love with, like a 'shining thing' to hold and keep so that she's Special, much like how Saionji treats Touga, who he's arguably in love with, like a 'shining thing', a standard and set of expectations he can never reach. also, green and brown are the two most common--and arguably the healthiest, if you're thinking forest--colors in nature, and they make for a very calming, natural, and lively color palette, unlike green and red which clash unless you're using red as an accent to green like on Christmas (in other words, green and brown work all year round, whereas green and red only work once a year). (which makes it kinda telling as how saionji and wakaba's relationship teetered closer to the edge wakaba's hair got redder, right? or were my eyes playing tricks on me) (this isn't to say i don't ship tousai, i do, but in a more cracky off-again on-again toxic relationship where everyone else has to deal with the fallout. saionji and wakaba make each other better, saionji and touga make each other worse. both are fun)
