Work Text:
Kei wiped the cabinets down carefully, methodically. Pressing cloth into every niche, every nook, every raise and recession in the paneling, swiping away dust with precision and efficiency. Following the grain of the wood and working circles around the knobs and handles traced an almost hypnotic pattern under her fingers, though the act was not so much mindless as it was automatic, the sharp scent of lemon cleaning solution cloying her nose and tethering her to her body.
She had made good time today: the floors vacuumed and mopped, trinkets on shelves momentarily upturned and dusted, windows polished to glassy perfection. The house was largely quiet and at the rate she was going she would have worked through all the main rooms before its denizens returned from school or work or wherever it was they spent their day. It brought her an odd sort of pride that sat just a bit heavy and wrong behind her ribs.
It was a little funny- this time a few months ago if anyone had told her that she would be taking her duties as housekeeper with any modicum of care or sincerity, she would have kicked them to the curb and laughed in their face.
Now though, now it was something she sort of mildly floated through rather than actively despised. It had taken a while, but once she had gotten the hang of things it allowed her mind to drift, focused instead on everything and everyone around her. That was how it was supposed to be, this housekeeper facade was merely that. She could tuck herself behind it like a shelter, retreating before anyone could get a glimpse of her true nature. It was a tool, a secret weapon for her to wield in this ongoing uphill battle wherein she was the only soldier who seemed to know a war was being waged at all.
It was almost comforting, in a strange way. Even if she wasn’t sure if she liked the feel of it over her, around her, in her hand.
Well, it wasn’t as though she had much of a choice anymore, she was in too deep and didn’t know what else she could do. For now she bided her time, chipped away at it all, tried to hold herself together long enough for it all to be worth it.
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No one had noticed her half-assing her tasks when she first started. The head of the house had barely glanced through her fake resume when he hired her and the others were always too busy tormenting and obsessing over each other to pay her any mind. In retrospect, she couldn’t believe how fortunate their obliviousness was. Subtlety had never come particularly naturally to her.
She had quickly found that their treatment of her would range from occasional mild politeness- her inclusion in family photos having more to do with avoiding the embarrassment of asking her to move out of frame than anything else- to flippant dismissal, and perhaps under normal circumstances it would be cold but Kei preferred it. Even if they rolled out the red carpet for her every time she came in to work she would still silently despise them more and more with each passing day. They were simply making her job easier, letting her disappear into their periphery and settle snugly away from their conscious minds while she chased her true objective.
She had also figured out early on that everyone in the house had Stands. This fact probably should have scared her and at first, it had. At first, the wasp nest she had expected to infiltrate suddenly felt more like a tightrope strung taught over a vat of ravenous piranhas, ready to swarm and rip and tear the moment something disturbed the water. Still dangerous, but infinitely more precarious and with a frighteningly lower chance of being able to escape unscathed. But the more time she spent milling about, flitting from task to banal task, observing their every move, peering past the thin and fragile secrecy they seemed adamant about -but ultimately incompetent at- maintaining, the more she felt assured that they weren’t truly capable of hurting her if they tried. Born This Way rumbled under her skin and sent a chill down her spine at the thought. They could never hurt her and get away with it, she wouldn’t let them.
She had the advantage. She could kill everyone in the house if she wanted to, if it came to that. They wouldn’t even know what hit them.
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The very first thing Kei had done out of line of her housekeeping duties, once she had gained the confidence, was erase her name from the family registry. It was maybe a too-large risk for a likely unnecessary precaution, but it was one less shoe waiting to drop once it was gone.
Locating the registry itself had been easier than she had expected, almost startlingly so. The Higashikatas kept extensive records that reeked of generations of old pride, but they sat largely undisturbed in the head of house’s study. The books collected dust that became her duty to whisk away on a regular basis, it was simple enough to find the right time to take the next step.
Her name was only mentioned once, in tiny font in a footnote far off the main branch of the family tree. As both a woman and second born of her mother, with the way they kept their records she supposed she should have been surprised with having anything to erase at all.
She had considered erasing Yoshikage’s name, maybe even their mother’s too, but she stopped herself. There was little sense in the risk of leaving more of a trace than she had to, even if it would’ve been satisfying. Plus, leaving their names there with only her to think about them almost made it feel like they were there with her, like she wasn’t entirely alone in this place.
In any case, she was henceforth free to play her role with her trail fully covered. She could give her all to the performance, let it consume her until it could convince everyone but herself that it was true.
If she didn’t think about it too hard, it almost felt like power, as though she were in control.
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When the earthquake had struck, Kei’s first thought had been of her mother. She had been on her way to visit her, picking up some of her mom’s favorite snacks from a convenience store with the hope of smuggling them past the doctors and security, when the alert came through on her phone. She hunkered down with the other customers and store staff in the lobby of a nearby hotel and waited it out, constantly checking the local news for any sort of update, dread thick and palpable in the air. The tremors were strong and steady and they all watched carefully, fearfully, for water, cracks, collapse.
It was the longest three hours of Kei’s life, waiting for the all clear signal. When it came she almost couldn’t believe it. Snacks forgotten, she made her way to the hospital as quickly as she could. There was destruction, plants and debris making a mess of the streets, trees uprooted and tipped over into buildings, large pools of water standing where it usually wouldn’t without torrential downpour. It was bad. But it wasn’t nearly as bad as what Kei had seen coming through the news from other towns. A blessing, she supposed, if one in a terrible disguise.
The hospital, while thankfully physically intact, was also in disarray, doctors and nurses scrambling to assure those like Kei who had rushed over that everything was fine while also scrambling behind the scenes to make sure that things actually were fine. It was worth the wait they put her through, to actually see her mother’s face and know that she was okay. The nurse assigned to her informed her that she had slept through the whole ordeal. They both laughed, a bit too strained and stressed to be genuine, but Kei had appreciated the attempt at levity nonetheless.
It wasn’t until she sat down and took a deep breath that she opened her phone to call her brother. He hadn’t responded to the wall of texts she had sent him updating on her own wellbeing and asking after his. The call went straight to voicemail. She tried to not spiral into worry, instead snapping a picture of their sleeping mother and sending it to him. Not two minutes later he responded.
Glad you are both okay.
Kei tried to not feel frustrated- it was a miracle they had cell service at all right now. Her phone buzzed, receiving a distant photo of the outside of the naval base where Yoshikage worked, flooded by nearly a meter of water, half of it destroyed, the building lifted up on and precariously embedded into a protrusion of rock that had Kei racking her brain through every science class she had ever taken and came up blank; it was unlike anything she had ever seen before.
What is that?? Glad you’re okay too, she responded.
We don’t know. Some people are hurt, I will come by later today if I can.
Curse him and his noble heart, Kei couldn’t help but think. She knew it was unfair of her to wish for him to drop everything, all his responsibilities and all the lives he could save with his work, to be here with her and their mother right now. But she wished anyway.
He was keeping his distance, had been for the past couple years. Kei suspected that he was taking their mother’s declining health harder than he wanted to admit. She knew that he was trying his best to help, his income and savvy navigating the medical sphere responsible for most of her care. He visited when he could, but sometimes he was away for a long time and Kei felt that something had changed. In his absence she felt as though she should be doing something drastic, something to help, something to bring him back to them and assure him that they would figure something out- literally anything- but she was at a loss as to what.
But she knew he was trying, he said he would visit later if he could. She supposed that would have to be enough for now.
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The art of eavesdropping was a skill that had come to Kei like breathing. Relatedly, she found it a little funny how desperation will drive you mad enough to change you, warp and twist you into a brand new, cumulatively worse person.
It was desperation, she thought, that kept the guilt at bay when she started to hear the murmurs and gather enough pieces of the puzzle to really understand the shape of the impending doom on the horizon. Something about a curse, something about legacy. Desperation was the poison that was starting to put the people in this family at each other’s throats. The difference between her and them was that she no longer cared about her own self preservation, and hadn't for a long, long while. She had nothing left to lose, and while that nothingness carved a hollow void in her chest and left her hurting it freed her to see everything else more clearly than she ever could before.
Something was very wrong with this family, something rooted deep and rotten. Kei could almost see its silhouette, their downfall drawing nearer at a steady, imposing pace, and yet they paraded through their daily routines as though everything were fine, as though they couldn’t feel the tension in the air tightening like a noose. But she had come to know them the way that a backdrop got to know the side of the actors facing away from the audience. The moment they began to falter and slip they wouldn’t be able to hide, not from her.
She knew that the desperation had made her worse because she was certain that nothing would delight her more than to see it all fall and crumble to dust.
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It might hurt to look at him. Kei wasn’t sure. She would probably have been able to decide if she gave it a fair shot but just this once she preferred to linger in blissful ignorance for a little while longer.
The thing is, everyone said he looked like Yoshikage.
Kei never got the full story, she rarely did, having to put things together in pieces. She didn’t understand- they looked nothing alike and the more she thought about it, the more glimpses she caught of the man who had her brother’s face- hands- something- the angrier she became. At least, she was almost sure it was anger. Grief too, was making a home in her chest but she wasn’t ready to give it the time of day, not yet–
Whatever. At the end of the day, she had decided to pass along the corner of the puzzle she had managed to fit together over to Yo- Josuke , even though it hadn’t been what he wanted to hear. She had shown him mercy in that moment because she thought that he might have been like her: an outsider, an infiltrator into the Higashikata family, trying to drag the truth up from the cold soil. Maybe he too could see the poison seeping in, rotting it all from the roots and dooming the entire tree slow and steady. And for a moment, that singular moment between when he had realized the truth and she had, as she looked into his eyes- half familiar- Kei had foolishly hoped that it would bring her brother back, that he would wake up and they could save their mother together instead of him quietly shouldering it all on his own.
Then Josuke had fallen to his knees, tears streaming down his face, and the delusion disappeared like so much smoke.
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There had been a time, just once, when the eldest son cornered her. It had been a week after her employment began and they had never met. He had been on some sort of business trip for the past month-although the way the others talked about it made it just sound like a vacation, excited for him to return with tales of exotic adventures and high-end hotels, and he approached her as she had been on her knees, tending to some of the weeds in the outdoor planters.
“What are you doing here?” He had asked, and Kei had felt her heart leap into her throat. She recovered, disguising her fear as she adjusted the brim of her hat to better block against the sun and the weight of his stare with dirt-stained gloves.
She had told him she had been hired by his father to tend to the house, just basic tasks and maintenance, and if there were any additional duties he would request of her she would do them.
He had squinted at her, evaluating, before he nodded. He stated that she needn’t attend to any duties in his office. She replied that she had already been instructed to leave that room be. Apparently satisfied, he left her to her work and to her sweating palms.
It was a simple interaction, short and awkward and more than a little terrifying, but that was the moment the first pieces began to fall into place.
As she watched him retreat, she knew with a certainty that Jobin would be the harbinger of his family’s downfall, the catalyst of their destruction. He was protective, defensive, and she could see in his eyes that he had ambition that was too big for this house. He displayed the anxiety of a man who already had something in motion, wary of a new element on the playing field, already piling his plate so high he was struggling to see the top. Something was going to give eventually and whatever disaster may strike he would stand at its epicenter, it was only a matter of time.
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Josuke was the only one in the house that didn't let her disappear, not any more. Not since she told him what she had learned. It wasn’t because he was any friendlier than the others, no. On the contrary, he was almost pricklier in that odd way of his, aloof yet always viscerally aware of when she entered the room, fidgeting and determinedly looking anywhere else but at her with such intensity that it was truly a miracle that none of the blunter members of the family seemed to have caught on enough to comment.
Kei thought that it should probably hurt her feelings, but it didn't. It mostly just made her feel numb. She would simply turn away to dust the next shelf, carefully and methodically, and pretend that everything was normal.
It’s fine. She didn’t want to talk to him either.
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They didn’t even seem to know that they should be panicking, was the thing. They didn’t seem to realize what any outside observer sneaking a glimpse behind the curtain would be able to glean in an instant: that they were a Greek tragedy in its opening act.
No amount of scrubbing and scraping could do away with the hubris that hung invisible in the air like a shroud. Kei could practically smell it from the very moment she had stepped past the threshold of their estate. They all had secrets and none of them trusted each other. The moment something slipped through the cracks it would all come crashing down.
She almost wanted to tell them, just to see how vehemently they would deny it. They all seemed so sure that they would stand forever, invincible and immortalized in stone. Instead, she carefully donned a mask of neutral pleasantness, the perfect model of the agreeable, servient worker bee, droning along and tending to her tasks, fading into the backdrop to observe this particular play. She hung on to the promise she made to herself: that one day just enough would slip so that all of her suspicions would be proven true, that it would all be worth it and she could rip the mask off right in the living room before the whole family with vindictive glee to tell them that she was right all along.
She tried not to linger on the fear that when the fateful moment came to pass she would find the mask and her face to be one and the same.
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It was the dog that led her to the Higashikatas, in the end.
Her life had become whirlwind in all the worst ways, and she could hardly be sure which way was up anymore. It felt like just the other day she had finally gotten herself in the same room as Yoshikage and he had interrupted the beginnings of her frustrated tirade to inform her that he had been looking into their extended family.
“In case we need support after.” He had said. He had a look in his eye like he was lying but Kei couldn’t fathom what else he could possibly mean or why he would be hiding from her and the implications of what after meant threatened to tip her into tears. So she hadn’t asked.
Who knew that the humble little Kira family was distantly related to the stewards of the mighty fruit empire? Kei hadn’t know what to do with that information but Yoshikage insisted he would figure something out, that he would take care of it, he just needed a little more time. She trusted him, trusted him with her whole life and their mother’s both.
Months later, when news of a boat explosion and another earthquake rattling the coast was plastered on every TV screen across town, Kei knew in her bones that something had shifted. He wasn’t answering his phone, hadn’t been for days. She rarely ever wanted to intrude in his space, but when she forced the door to his apartment open and there was evidence of him having gained a roommate she suddenly felt like a fool for not having done so a lot earlier.
No one knew where he was and no one returned to his apartment. The police officers she talked to tried to be helpful, but they already had their hands full with the aftermath of the earthquake, with helping others who had things lost or stolen in the wreck, with finding others who had gone missing first. They had told her they would do their best, and she felt like they meant it, but it wasn’t enough.
So she rolled up her sleeves and searched for herself. His place of work hadn’t heard hide nor hair of him either since the initial quake, but confirmed that the boat that had exploded had been his- and if that hadn’t sent a wave of panic horror grief hopelessness worry through her, seeing the charred remains that had been recovered and dragged to shore nearly brought her to her knees.
There had been another woman lingering near the scene, getting as close to the wreckage as the police tape would allow, but she had long since fled before Kei even thought to talk to her.
Kei resumed her search, asking around if anyone had seen her brother, combing neighborhoods and parks and even checking the hospital to see if he had somehow been admitted without her being notified. Instead of lingering she pressed forward, searched longer and harder, because surely he couldn’t have disappeared without a single trace. He had always been far too stubborn and complicated to ever let anything be simple, and she had already had an inkling that something more was going on just beneath the surface, she only had to find it-
She didn’t know where she was or how long it had been when she finally collapsed. Somewhere by the coast, up high near a rocky cliff overlooking the seaside. Out here the landscape was mangled from the earthquake, difficult to traverse especially in the fading light of the evening. A ways off, a tall lonesome pine tree adorned the top of one of the cresting protrusions like it was reaching for something far up in the sky.
Kei felt like the earth was crumbling around her, tears finally overthrowing the desperate stranglehold she had locked them in for so long. Down her cheeks, across her nose and chin, she wept for the first time in ages, still having half a mind to choke the wails that tried to escape into gasps and hiccups- she didn’t know where she was but chances were she was trespassing and the last thing she needed was to explain anything to anyone.
This restraint was the only reason she heard the soft rustling of sticks and leaves being disturbed behind her. She whipped her head over her shoulder, ready to run or scream or sic Born This Way on some poor person who probably had no idea what they were getting into, but instead she froze.
One of the pins from her shirt had fallen off sometime during her aimless stumbling, sitting in the dust and patchy grass about a meter away. Emerging from the sparse bushes was an animal, a dog of some sort, Kei supposed, extending its head and sniffing curiously at the object. It was an odd looking thing, fur thin and dusty brown save for the darker ruff spiking up from its neck and running partways down its back. It hadn’t seemed bothered by her presence at all so she slowly turned, reaching a hand out although she wasn’t sure what she would do. Pet it? Shoo it away? Grab her pin back?
She startled when it suddenly barked, short and sharp, snatched her pin from the ground in its teeth, and took off, running through the thin brush.
“Hey!” she yelled, scrambling to follow, to pursue, her Stand rumbling and itching to help even though it couldn’t. She didn’t want to hurt it anyway, she wasn’t so cruel, but she needed to get that pin back- she couldn’t lose something else, not now . She scrambled over the rocky ridges a bit further inland, the dog’s dark mane a blot against the sparse flora even in the low light. It kept a brisk pace rather than a dead sprint so Kei was able to keep up with little issue, only struggling to not trip over the uneven ground while her vision was still a bit blurry with tears.
It led her through the wilder terrain to a place that looked more actively tended to, adult trees planted in neat rows. If she hadn’t been trespassing before she most definitely was now and she felt her pulse quicken in her throat, but the dog just kept going.
It finally, finally stopped a decent distance from the treeline, pacing right along one of those odd ridges that had been pushed up by the earthquake. Kei came to a halt, momentarily stunned by the strange dark divots in the stone, nearly feeling as though it was somehow immensely bigger than it actually was, or perhaps she was incredibly small, or maybe that it was watching her.
Snuffling noises snapped her from her thoughts, bringing her attention back to the dog, who nosed at the ground for a moment before beginning to dig vigorously. She ran the rest of the distance towards it as it buried her pin, and she hesitated once she was standing right next to it. What was she meant to do? She didn’t have much experience with animals, but she doubted it would be the best idea to try to stick a hand out near it when it might get possessive and bite.
As she deliberated, the dog finished its task, turning and kicking dirt over the hole. It looked at her then, turned and looked at her with an unnerving intelligence in its eyes. It stepped forward to sniff at her shoe, and at its continued docile behavior she crouched to pet it. Its fur was oddly rough, almost sandy rather than mangy like she had feared, but it leaned into the ministrations and its tail began to wag.
A sob pooled in Kei’s throat once again. There was something precious in the simplicity of the moment, something immensely gratifying about doing something with an immediate positive effect. The dog tilted its head so she could scratch under its ear and her lip trembled. It had been such a long time since anything had been simple and good.
After a while the dog backed away, wandering and sniffing around in the dirt again. It began to dig a few paces away from where it had buried her pin so she used the opportunity to retrieve what was her’s.
When her fingers brushed the object through the dirt however, she recoiled. It was an odd texture, smooth where there should be a fine edge. Returning to brush away the soil, she lifted the pin up to the last scraps of light offered by the setting sun.
It was unmistakably her pin, metal shiny and golden, but parts of it were dulled and disrupted by something else entirely, a different color and texture. Some sort of plant? Kei wondered as she ran her thumb across one of the odd patches. It felt almost like the skin of a lemon or orange, smooth and cool but with the give of something unmistakably organic. Nearby, the dog had dug something else up and seemed to try to eat it before yelping, dropping it from its mouth and full-body shaking like it was wicking away water.
Kei shuffled over on her knees, reaching to see what the dog had dropped. It looked like a fruit, although some sections had twisted unnaturally into metal, warped into angles that she recognized as part of the design of her pin.
Her mind went entirely blank as she sat back on her heels, looking at the two items side-by-side. She didn’t know what this was, how to begin processing this.
The dog stepped over to sniff at the pin-fruit-things, backing off when Kei waved it away in case it tried to eat it once more. It looked at her again with those too-intelligent eyes, barking once before turning and taking off.
Kei made to stand up and follow it- why, she had no clue- but froze when it veered off towards a house she hadn’t even noticed. Did this house belong to the dog’s owners? Did it escape? Surely responsible owners wouldn’t allow for their dog to be running around freely outside, especially so close to nighttime-
Her brain stalled once again for a moment as she watched the dog run up towards the house and through the wall without missing a step.
Now she felt well and truly lost, somehow, impossibly, more unmoored than she already had been. All she could do was gather the pin-fruit-things, stand, and shake herself. Once she began really looking, she could see a road on the other side of the house, the lights of the rest of the city of Morioh in the distance beyond it. She didn’t know what was going on, but something in her gut told her this all was not a coincidence. There was a lead here, something to chase and explore should she choose to pursue.
It took her a moment, but she realized where she was, whose house this must be.
Interesting.
The next day, the housekeeper listing put out by the eldest Higashikata received an application by one Kei Nijimura .
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Some days she let herself put on a play of her own in which everything was fine. Some days it was easier to slip into the monotony of a daily routine, scrubbing and vacuuming and pruning the shrubbery outside- never the fruit trees, she wasn’t allowed to touch those, they had specialists brought in to do that work- without trying to uncover secrets or clues much at all. Ah, Hato requested an extra run to the dry cleaners? Mitsuba said that she was due for another check up at the hospital, hadn’t she just gone last week? Was it just her or was young Tsurugi growing increasingly morose when no one else seemed to be watching? Maybe on another day Kei would regard these as potential pieces of the puzzle and chase them relentlessly until they fit somewhere in the wider scheme of things because they had to .
Maybe on another day.
Some days she assured herself what she was doing was purposeful and crucial to her plan. She was just more fully establishing her cover, she was laying low, she couldn’t let anyone become suspicious of her. But she knew the truth, even if she didn’t want to dwell on it.
No, some days she let it all slip by so that she may best play her role and nothing else. A one-woman show with a one-woman audience who always found herself in tears over the ending in the privacy of her apartment.
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Kei would be the first to admit that she hadn’t particularly excelled in school. It had less to do with her actual smarts- she got through her classes just fine when she chose to apply herself- but what she always lacked was motivation. She would internalize just enough information from her classes and weak attempts at studying to get through her next exam and little more, much preferring to skip in favor of the cinema or the park to smoke an occasional cigarette or literally anywhere and anything else. Against Yoshikage, ever the perfectionist, her barely-passing marks were laughable, not that her brother nor mother ever found it particularly funny.
When their mother fell ill enough for it to become necessary for one of them to be nearby and available at all times, Kei volunteered and tried to not feel relieved. She abandoned whatever paltry attempts she had been making to apply to university with a quickness that probably should have made her feel ashamed but she couldn’t help but latch on to the thought of finally, I can do something useful.
So she dedicated herself to the pursuit of making their mother comfortable and happy, reporting to Yoshikage and reeling him back in, making sure that he was visiting. It was a noble undertaking, everyone she mentioned it to assured her, she was a blessing to her family to be doing this, putting her life on hold to properly care for her family. She would just smile and nod and say she was grateful to be able to do so, keeping the sardonic remarks of it’s not like I had much going for me anyway locked firmly behind her teeth.
She hadn’t particularly excelled in school, but one concept from her science classes managed to stick in her mind. The freeze-thaw cycle: the natural process of water making its way into cracks and crevasses, freezing and expanding and melting before freezing again. Persistent, cyclical, destructive. Something as common and innocuous as water could rip something as strong as concrete to pieces with enough time.
When she first learned about it she had thought it was kind of cool. She had pictured a shatteringly cold breeze blowing at her back and felt something of an aspirational kinship with the idea of something small and unremarkable and aimless becoming an inevitable force of nature when given time and the proper circumstances.
She had thought about the cycle as she cowered, waiting for the tremors to stop. She had thought about it as she held her mother’s hand, as she watched her brother drift farther and farther away. She had thought about it the night she had sat in her meager apartment, hands trembling as she drafted a resume and felt as though she were signing her life away.
She had started thinking of it more often, as day after day she tended to the Higashikata household. She never could dedicate herself to something as grand and abstract as legacy. No, she felt she was much better suited for this: for biding her time, for chipping away, a glacial crawl towards a nebulous goal with a stark and solid endpoint.
She didn’t know what she was looking for, but she felt she would know once the search was over. Either she would succeed and uncover the truth of it all or she would watch this family slowly but surely come undone around her.
If she failed… well, she didn’t let herself consider what would happen if she failed.
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At the house, Kei wiped the cabinets down carefully, methodically. Pressing cloth into every niche, every nook, every raise and recession in the paneling, whisking away dust with precision and efficiency, simultaneously ignoring and keenly aware of the man sitting across the room who was nearly trembling with the effort of doing the same to her. He lacked the practice that she had, he didn’t yet know how to allow himself to fade into the background, to be subtle and simply passively observe until the time was just right.
Kei finished her kitchen routine, tucking the rags away and promptly turning on her heel to make her way out towards the hall. From the corner of her eye Josuke sat a little stiller, a little straighter. Kei slowed her pace, just a touch. A moment passed, an opportunity, an olive branch. But he said nothing.
The show must go on, she supposed, routine uninterrupted. A hairline crack in her chest rent open, deep and aching but she let it fade to join the thousands of others in her collection. It too was to be flooded and frozen over, and one day, she told herself, it would all be worth it.