24Author's Note
Huh. This happened. This is, to me, just like if my devout Christian mother were to suddenly take an intense interest in drawing male on male gay pornography without changing her faith. It would be so wrong to her on so many levels, and under normal circumstances, she would never do it, no matter how much she wanted to.
That's exactly how much I utterly detest this ship. The only reason I'm even writing it is because I came the perfect idea from thinking about a fanfic about a Nanoha crack pairing with a large age gap (Hayate/Vivio) and remembering a certain scene that I felt like recreating as a one-shot for The Yuri Drabble Zone. Well, the scene isn't in the current outline of this story anymore, the fic itself has taken on a life of its own and become a multi-chapter work, and I feel like I've officially lost my sanity for lengthening it any more than absolutely necessary.
Yes, I am actually writing a female Kirito x Yui fanfic. This was the one non-yaoi ship in SAO that I could never justify reading about, no matter how good the work actually was. And yet here I am, writing not only a story about it, but an effing multi-chapter one at that! What the hell am I even doing…? It's just… why would I even consider…?
Just read it for yourselves if you think you can handle it. Despite being arguably the most controversial thing I've ever written on this account, it's also among my best work as I am right this moment. I'm actually rather impressed with myself about this… even if I also want to kill myself for it at the same time.
Like Mother Like Daughter
Prologue: Broken Vows and Mouthy Knights
"What'll it be, Kimiko? Since it's been a while, first round is on the house," a rich baritone called out to me from a meter or two to my right, behind the counter of the bar I had just sat down at.
Normally, I would have been grateful for the kind gesture. It was my first time coming to the bar and grill in about a year, despite having frequented the place almost daily in the past. And though I had brought more than enough money to pay for both drinks and a meal, it would be nice to walk away with more of what I brought in. Unfortunately, the call had some unintended side effects that she, quite frankly, did not want to deal with right then.
"Kimiko-sama is here?!"
"Our goddess has returned to us!"
"She lasted thirteen months. Impressive, considering her history with this place."
"Couldn't resist in the end, huh~? Well, whatever. Least we'll get a show tonight."
Those were just a few of the lines I could make out from the regulars of the place. The latter two reminded me that I had sworn off alcohol the last time I was here. Well, so much for that. Not like remembering it beforehand would have stopped me. I really needed to get shit-faced drunk, and some year-old vow wouldn't get in the way of that for a second.
My own determination to drink aside, those idiots weren't entirely wrong. I most likely would end up giving them quite the show as the night went on. When I got really drunk off my ass, I tended to get really hot, and since it also loosened up my normally careful, reserved and methodical personality, that often led to me taking my clothes off, showing my… highly desirable figure, until I decided to go home. After which, I'd somehow manage to get all my clothes back on, whether through someone I trusted helping me or through my own uncoordinated attempts, before going back to the train station and going home.
In the distant past, I used to just crash in the upstairs bedroom that the owner and bartender, a tall, dark-skinned man born in America named Andrew, would allow me to sleep in. I always offered to pay him for it, but he declined every single time. From his standpoint, it never got any use otherwise, and the business contributions my drunken behavior made covered for the cost.
But starting about eight years ago, I always made the trip home, usually with the aid of a friend. The reason why was simple – at that point, my responsibilities changed significantly. I had to go home, because I knew that not being there until the next day would set a terrible example.
Fuck. Don't go there. Not yet. You're not drunk enough to think about her yet.
"Russian vodka, then," I gave my response, watching as Andrew, whose outfit tonight seemed to be a snow-white button-up shirt and black slacks, went and grabbed a bottle off the shelf. "And my first round will be a regular glass, not a shot glass."
I did my best to ignore the chorus of cheers that rang out in total disharmony at my words. Those dickheads were just ecstatic that I was planning to get smashed as fast as possible. They didn't even consider the possible reasons I might need to bring out the big guns and speed up the inebriation. They weren't concerned with the problems in my life that might have caused my arrival at all. And I only ever drank when I had a problem I didn't want to think about sober, so those bastards knew that there was something wrong just by the fact that I was there.
"You skip for a year and then return, only to immediately order the strongest stuff you can tolerate," a calm, sober-sounding, familiar voice rang out from behind my seat. "Well, there goes this salaryman's night of drinking and unwinding. Can't get drunk myself if I'm gonna have to help your sorry ass get back home. What's wrong today, Kimiko?"
I swung my seat around and looked up at the man standing before me. A tall guy who looked to be in his thirties with short, dark red hair and stubble all over the bottom half of his face. He was wearing similar clothes to the bartender, except his pants were a dark brown, and his shirt's sleeves weren't buttoned up.
"Oh, it's my knight in rusty armor," I quipped, giving him a nod and patting the empty, circular, cushioned seat on my left, which would be my right when I turned back around. "Good thing you're here, Klein. Now I can get wrecked without having to worry about going home alone safely."
His name wasn't actually Klein, believe it or not. That was just his decade-old gaming handle, but since I met him through an MMO we both played when I was a teen, I always called him that. His real name was Tsuboi Ryoutarou, or as most of his IRL friends called him, Ryo. But in the fifteen or so years that I'd known him, I'd never once called him by anything but his old gaming name.
While I was certainly grateful that he was here, I wouldn't exactly sum it up to luck. It was Friday night, and he had Saturdays and Sundays off, so it made sense for him to be here to relieve the stress of the work week. If anything, I had been betting on him being here.
One could argue that he could have gone to any number of bars to do this. But for the two of us, this place held a special significance. This was the first place we ever met up IRL, and as I knew from Andrew, he had been coming here long before he invited me. He had been a regular customer there for years, apparently ever since he'd been legally allowed to drink.
At our first meeting, I was only seventeen, so I couldn't drink myself. In fact, the only reason we met up at all was because my aunt, who acted as my guardian, walked in on a voice chat we were doing, freaked out at the sound of "some guy his twenties," and demanded to see him in real life so she could report him if he tried anything. So we met at this bar and grill, a rather odd choice, and after about half an hour of talking, we managed to convince my aunt that he wasn't so shady after all.
We started meeting up more often after that, with my aunt's seal of approval. For some reason I couldn't understand, she actually really liked him, probably a lot more than a parent of sorts should like the twenty-something-year-old friend of their teenage daughter.
As soon as my hand left the seat next to me as I turned back around, he walked up to it and sat down, leaning on the table with his elbow and resting his hairy chin in his hand. He turned to face Andrew, who had just set a glass of my requested booze in front of me.
He called out in a calm voice befitting someone whose intended target was less than a meter away. "Yo, can I get some water and some bread? I only had about a fourth of my beer at the table I was at before, but I want to be totally sober by the time we need to leave."
"All right, but you're paying for the bread," the bartender confirmed with a nod.
I decided that this would be the opportune time to start drinking, so I grabbed my new glass of Russian vodka and brought it to my lips. "Down the hatch you go."
I tilted the glass, bit by bit, and the clear liquid in it began to slide down my tongue, giving me a pleasant burning sensation. Most people wouldn't be able to tolerate this strength of alcohol staying in their mouth for longer than a few seconds, but to me, the sensation was something I'd missed like a long lost twin sister. I savored the feeling, drinking as slowly as possible in order to get the most out of it.
By the time I lowered the glass back down to the table, a little over half its contents had been drained. The crystal container was fairly wide and tall, so this was no easy feat, especially with the contents being a strong alcoholic beverage like Russian vodka. Any normal person would have become unintelligibly drunk after so much of it, but for me, this was only the beginning.
I wasn't exactly an alcoholic. I didn't drink very often, nor did I even keep booze at home. But for reasons unknown to me, I'd had an incredibly high alcohol tolerance for as long as I could remember. It took me an insane amount of liquor to get totally drunk, unless I went with really strong stuff like what I'd chosen today. But even with Russian vodka, it'd take me an entire bottle of straight drinking, uninhibited by fatty foods or lemon juice, to really get wrecked.
But I didn't plan to do that all at once. The main reason I came here tonight was to get something painful off my chest, and that only required me to be loosened up a bit. Which is why I stopped drinking after half the glass had been emptied – it would be just enough for me to be able to freely speak my mind. Getting totally wasted could wait until after I'd done that.
"So, what happened to make you come back here, huh?" Klein asked me a few seconds after I let go of my glass. "Knowing you, it must have been something really upsetting if it made you go back on your own vow."
I turned to him and gave him a smile. "Glad you asked. Actually, believe it or not, it's kind of a continuation of the event that made me swear off liquor in the first place."
"So then this is Yui-related?" my redheaded friend correctly guessed, receiving a nod from me in return.
"It's been over a year since then, so let me make sure I still have the story straight," the rich baritone of Andrew inserted itself into our conversation. I turned to him, gave him an affirmatory nod, and he began recounting the event as he remembered it. "Yui, the kid you've been taking care of since she was ten, admitted to you that she was in love with someone, but wouldn't tell you who. So in order to get her to tell you, you decided to try to make yourself seem more trustworthy, starting with not drinking anymore."
Klein, apparently not satisfied with a purely factual recollection of the event, decided to add in his own personal flavor. "In other words, a high school romance drama between mother and daughter. The love of my life has fallen for someone else, whatever shall I— Aaah, my fucking foot!"
My own foot slowly moved away from its momentary spot atop that of the man howling next to me. "Nobody asked for your interpretation, Klein. Even if I didn't give birth to her, she's still my kid. She may be my number one priority, as one's kid should be, but I'm not in love with her."
"You can say that, but coming from a lesbian who's been single ever since she got her kid, it's not very convincing— you're gonna break my foot, asshole!"
"No more comments from the peanut gallery until I've brought you up to speed. It's my turn to talk now." After retracting my foot once again, I sighed, grabbed my glass of vodka, then promptly took another sip, this one much smaller. Once the crystal returned to the table, I began my story. "First off, she still hasn't told me who she's in love with, and after getting into a fight with it about a month after I stopped coming here, I just kind of dropped it, and neither of us brought up the subject after that. Now then, for the event that brought me back here… as you guys know, this month is October. I just turned thirty, and next week, Yui will turn eighteen."
I grabbed my glass and took yet another drink, because damn, did I need it. This was proving to be harder to talk about than I anticipated, but I couldn't back out halfway through the story, either. So I drained the entire rest of the glass, set it down on the table with a loud clink, and then resumed my tale.
"So this morning, as we were eating breakfast, she told me something totally out of left field," I said, recalling just how shocked I had been to hear it. "I mean, she'd never willingly brought the subject up before, and since I'd stopped asking, I thought I'd never hear about it again. But she told me, face heating up a bit, that she plans to confess to her love on her eighteenth birthday."
Next chapter will be from Yui's perspective, and will begin around the time Kimiko gets home from Andrew/Agil's bar. It would have been the second scene of this installment, but I haven't figured out how to start it yet, so I figured releasing what I already have done to check for interest would be a better course of action.
Just so you know, the only reason I've been able to justify writing this story is because they're not related by blood. I can't effing stand the idea of actual mother/child incest (partly because I grew up living with just my mom in the house with me and the idea of doing that stuff with her is kind of… really bad for a multitude of reasons), so don't expect this to become a regular thing for me. You'll probably never see me write for this ship again outside of this one story where they're not even related, so if you like it, enjoy it while it lasts.
Reviews please? Normally I'm pretty picky, but since I'm posting something so controversial, I'll take whatever I can get as long as it's not just people bashing me for writing Kirito/Yui.
See you next time!
