a jintaish short

Taisho has been restless as of late. Moreso than usual—Jin isn’t entirely sure what counts as “usual”, considering her partnership with Taisho thus far has been about one month—and it bothers her. She knows that she has the words to coax whatever ailment he’s dealing with out of him, but she doesn’t like wasting them on needless ventures. Unfortunately, she hasn’t gotten enough out of her deal with him to ignore this and have it be fine, so.

“What is it,” she asks flatly, tired after a hard day’s work. A nice stack of yen is in her back pocket, but it hurts to sit on.

He looks startled, jolting forward as if struck, and chances a glance at Jin, who watches him with curiosity. He doesn’t speak, but she can hear him. “You’re nervous about something. Or bothered.”

He flushes for a moment, something Jin’s only started seeing very recently, and opens and closes his mouth a thousand times like a fish suddenly thrown onto a deck. By the time he actually speaks, she feels worn out from this nowhere conversation already.

“I just… I just wanted to know where you, uh, what happened to your eyes?”

She raises her eyebrows and hums shortly, not expecting such a direct question. “I see. I’m surprised it’s taken you this long to ask.”

He looks vaguely bashful. Jin’s getting better at deciphering his weird, veiled emotions. “I mean, I’ve seen worse,” he sort of mumbles. “I didn’t want to be rude, but I didn’t want to just assume anything either, so…”

“It’s fine,” Jin says, waving a hand at him dismissively. “It’s not a big deal. They stand out. I’m used to it.” He looks doubtful, but stays silent. Good. Jin’s not fully used to how he talks yet.

“So, uh… to begin with, I should probably remember when it happened, yeah? Jeez, I don’t remember, I was barely a few months out on the street. So how old was I, 5? 6? Freshly green, still with the opportunity to return home and have it be a miracle if I wanted. Hah. Anyway, I was still learning the basics. Had just had my first run-in with some nasty winter weather at night, out in the cold without a roof above my head. I’m sure you can guess where that leads.” She isn’t. She isn’t sure about anything when it comes to Taisho. But she’s not going to chance her confidence now by glancing over, so she assumes and hopes for the best. That’s 75% of her career, really.

“After that night I realized pretty quickly that I needed to improve immediately or die. Something about my tactics of sympathy needed an upgrade. And I thought about it for a long time, y’know, what it was that I could do better. And then I realized.” She draws her eyes to the night sky, letting them widen enough for the starlight to reach back down at them. “The eyes.”

She lets them fall closed. “That’s what everyone goes for first. The windows to the soul, or whatever. What mattered was that they matter, a lot, when trying to drum sympathy. And if you can’t get someone to look you there, you’ve basically already failed.”

She opens her eyes and feels her mouth crack a slight smile. She can’t help it, even after all these years. The idea she had back then still excites her to this day.

“So I made it so everyone would look at them.”

Here she does look at Taisho, just out of curiosity, and holds back a frown at the results. He doesn’t look shocked, or understanding, or even a little grossed out. He’s wearing the same impassive expression as always. She sighs. It’s something they’ll have to work on later.

“That’s it, really. No big adventure or anything. I was able to convince a nearby parlor to do it for me, and here I am. I mean, it’s a miracle that I didn’t go blind or anything from it, and you can drum up a surprising amount of sympathy using the half-truth anyway. The ones who aren’t turned off by a shocking appearance are easier to earn trust from.”

Taisho tilts his head, suddenly. Jin is just grateful for any reaction at this point. “Were you paid substantially for your pain?”

Maybe not a reaction as odd as that.

“I… no, were you listenin’? I got it done for me. No money involved, in either direction. You should know I can get out of paying for anything by now.”

“Ah. I see. I apologize, then, for both my insensitivity and your experience.”

The muscles in Jin’s face twitch, once. She has no idea why she decided to start this partnership. “Don’t worry about it,” she says instead. “It’s got nothin’ to do with you.”

There’s silence over the two of them for the next few minutes, and Jin can’t exactly taste its flavor. Awkward? Comfortable? It’s eluding her, and she’s getting frustrated. She looks at Taisho once again, to attempt to gauge his feelings once again, but he’s a brick wall, staring straight forward with nothing but sheer sheet rock on his face. Jin groans and looks forward again, irritation sullying her instincts to relax herself.

This isn’t going to work.

❧♥☙

“Haul?” Taisho asks, seeing Jin return with her hands hidden. She just grins at him, and he nods after less than a second, understanding instantly. Four years of being around just one person makes communication easy like that.

“You know how it goes on that end,” she says, sitting down next to him and exhaling softly upon landing, “but I told you about my side project, yeah? It’s picking up speed now.” Taisho nods along, and Jin smiles as she speaks, a little bit of excitement bubbling up in her every time she relays information about this expedition to Taisho.

“So I’ve got a few investors now, I think these guys are really serious, and word’s startin’ to spread, I think. The net’s expanding. I’m reeling in something huge by the end of this, I can tell.”

Taisho keeps his gaze on Jin as she prattles on, eyes tracing the erratic movements she makes with her hands in her excitement. His face betrays very little, but Jin knows his language better than anyone, and can tell that he’s proud of her, in a way. The way he verbally says so when she’s finished helps, and she doesn’t say so, but she hopes he can read her enough to see that she feels the same about him expressing himself like that.

“How much longer do you plan on being active in this?” he asks, face flat but tone genuinely curious. She shrugs.

“Until it starts profiting off of itself. As of right now, if I leave it to its own devices it’ll die out. Soon, though—soon it’ll be a self-running machine, and I’ll be able to just sit back and watch the yen roll in. From there it’s a matter of keeping as low a profile as possible, even lower than before, and waiting until it gets too dangerous to be involved with at all anymore, and hopefully tire out the police so much they give up on searching for the culprit. I’m set from here on out, basically.”

“Uh-huh.” Taisho takes his gaze off of her and looks towards nothing in particular. “What to do with your spare time and wealth, then?”

She closes her eyes and tilts her head. “Dunno. Can’t risk a hotel room or anything, but maybe we’ll get ourselves something nice somehow. If I hide my face well enough and pay in cash we should be fine, yeah?”

A beat passes.

“We?”

Taisho’s face is hidden by shadow, and also his fringe. Jin’s features assemble themselves into something like confusion.

“Yeah, ‘we’. Why, were you planning on..?”

“No, not at all, I just… I thought that you were.”

A streetlamp that had been struggling to stay on nearby suddenly finds its spark and flares to life, and Jin can see part of Taisho’s face. She squints a bit, trying to make sense of what she’s seeing, and sits back upon getting a good look.

It’s difficult to place, because it’s something that’s she only seen maybe once or twice in their four years of companionship, but he looks a little pained.

“No, Taish, no,” she says, shifting a little closer, allowing them to touch. Taisho puts his weight on her almost immediately. “It’s… it’s been so long with you, Taish, I can’t imagine doin’ this on my own anymore. Do you even realize how much you do for me? How… how much it means to me?”

He doesn’t say anything, just nods, but Jin feels the slight movement against her shoulder and sighs, relaxing herself at his understanding. Feelings are difficult to articulate in words sometimes. This is okay.

They stay there for a while after, and Jin feels Taisho’s heartbeat slow when he falls asleep. She’s still awake, mind trying to process everything; that went far too quickly for her to fully comprehend the meaning of anything behind it. She slowly wriggles so that Taisho isn’t disturbed when she’s no longer supporting him, and gently lays him down on the ground to continue his sleep. There’s a sort of fondness that squeezes her heart as she watches him, but she doesn’t have all day.

She turns around and walks a short distance away, hands retrieving from her pocket a letter stashed there for the past day.

To Jin Yuro, unspecified residence
From the Hope’s Peak Academy Talent Scouting Department

She shouldn’t be feeling so sad reading this, should she? She’s not sure what to be feeling, not when there’s so much conflict going on inside that clouds her thought process.

There are so many benefits to becoming an officially recognized Super High School Level. Hope’s Peak has got its very own form of diplomatic immunity, in a sense. She’d be able to expand her reach so much farther than she could ever do from a street corner. The opportunity. The resources. The profit.

‘We?’ Taisho had said, with that pained look on his face but no weight behind the word.

Jin grimaces and stuffs the letter back into her pocket. She remembers back when choices were made for her, and all that she gave up to get away from that, but thinks that right now, she wouldn’t mind being told what to do.

Well, no. The correct answer is obvious. Jin just needs to get over herself. Sentimentality gets you nowhere.

Taisho sleeps softly, breath light and almost controlled, and Jin doesn’t move but realizes that she’s about to do something to her companion worse than any physical action she could take against him while he’s this vulnerable.

If only she weren’t so preoccupied with visions of grandeur, she’d find it in herself to let the part of her that feels bad take precedence.