Left alone at home, I cleaned my room before relaxing with my usual otaku stuff, which mainly involved watching VTuber videos and playing gacha games on my phone. It was my turn to make dinner, but Kokoro had told me she would be eating while she was out, and I had no idea when Kisaki would be back. So, instead of cooking, I ordered some gyudon for delivery.
At around eight, just as I was tucking into my cheap meal of beef and rice, I heard someone walk through the front door. It was too early for Kokoro to be back, so it could only be...
“Hey.”
“O-Oh, Kisaki...”
This was the first time my sister and I had been alone together since she’d come back to Japan. Thanks to Kokoro, we’d actually talked to each other more than we ever used to, but I still felt awkward around her. It was hard to believe that we used to play together so much as kids.
Should I go back to my room? Maybe it’s fine to stay though. I was here first, and she’ll probably go straight to her room so she doesn’t have to hang around me...
Kisaki silently walked to the fridge and poured herself a glass of Kokoro’s homemade barley tea. Glass in hand, she then headed into the living room and took a seat on the chair in front of the couch, where I was sitting.
Huh? I thought she’d avoid me and rush to her room...
She started sipping her tea while looking at her phone.
I-Is she going to just... stay here? Doesn’t it bother her to be alone with me? B-But this is so awkward! This is the first time in forever that we’ve sat so close to each other without someone else in the room!
I couldn’t stand the silence any longer, so I tried to think of a topic to start a conversation. Then at least she couldn’t accuse me of being rude.
This wouldn’t have happened if Nishina were here! Why am I even worrying about being polite to my sister anyway? How stupid is that?!
“So, K-Kisaki... You were an otaku all along, huh? I thought you’d stopped liking all that stuff when you started middle school.”
This was probably the best time to ask her about what had been on my mind for a while, but I was worried that bringing it up out of nowhere had come across as a bit weird.
“S-So what? What do you care?” she replied, making me immediately regret speaking to her.
“It’s just that, you know, you went with Mom and Dad to India without complaining or anything, even though it’s so hard to get hold of otaku stuff there.”
“I obviously didn’t want to leave my hobbies behind... but family is supposed to stay together,” she murmured.
That last part was so surprising coming from her that I didn’t know how to reply.
“But you...” she continued, her voice lowered to practically a whisper.
“Me...?”
“...No, it’s nothing.”
“Huh? Wh-What is it?”
How could I not be curious after she stopped mid-sentence like that?
“Anyway,” she said, changing the topic, “I still can’t believe that a girl that pretty is a friend of yours, and that she’s an otaku, to top it off.”
“Excuse me?!”
“You never made friends with girls before.”
“U-Uh...”
That was true, and I’d only become friends with Kokoro by coincidence. If we hadn’t run into each other at that party, I probably still wouldn’t have any female friends. Spending time with her was also what got me kind of used to girls, at least to the point where I’d managed to speak to Elena. I’d only met the other girls I knew right now—Mashiro, Yume, Iroha, and Mikoto—because Kokoro had convinced me to go to more events and take on a part-time job with her.
Now that Kisaki mentioned it, I realized that all of this would have been unthinkable for me just a few years ago, and it was probably all thanks to one person: Kokoro.
“You even used to get nervous when I had friends over. Grade school friends,” Kisaki pressed.
“What?! I-I wasn’t nervous around your friends!”
“The more I think about it,” she continued, ignoring me, “the weirder it gets. How the hell did you manage to become friends with Kokoro?”
“Ugh... W-Well, we’re both otaku, and her situation was similar to mine, so... I think being able to talk about our hobbies was a huge part of it.”
“Oh...”
“By the way, are you able to enjoy your hobbies over there in India?” I asked her.
“As if! How could I do that outside of Japan?! It must have been easy for you though, since you were so selfish and stayed here by yourself!” Her tone made it clear just how mad at me she was.
Hey, if she’d wanted to stay in Japan she could have just said so, but then again she was very close to our mom, and it must be hard living away from your parents when you’re still in middle school. On the other hand, the reason she didn’t stay could be that she didn’t want to live alone with me...
“Say,” I said, changing the subject to something else I had to ask her about. “About those doujinshi you’re going to sell. I just have to make sure—they aren’t adult doujinshi, right?”
“D-Don’t be stupid! Do you really think I could draw something like that?! That’s still way too embarrassing for now...”
“...For now?! So you’re going to do it eventually?!”
She’s already thinking of drawing raunchy manga at her age?! Is she some kind of closet pervert?!
“Anyway,” she said, “what’s the most popular game genre here in Japan at the minute?”
“Gacha games are the thing right now. FG0 and that...”
“I see... And what are girls playing?”
“No idea why you’d ask me that, but... I guess the HypMic game is pretty popular,” I said.
It then dawned on me that I was having a normal, natural conversation with my sister for the first time in years. It felt weird—as if we’d gone back in time to when she was still in grade school and we were so close to each other.
We kept chatting for a while, talking without any awkwardness and asking each other lots of questions: I asked her about India, our parents, and how she liked school over there, and she asked me about the latest otaku trends in Japan.
I used to think that she’d changed, but I soon realized that this wasn’t the case. She was still the same impertinent kid that I remembered. I was happy that she was at least talking with me once again, and I wished that we could have gotten back to this point when she had still lived in Japan... although it was obviously too late for that. However, our little conversation ended up making me even more curious about the reason she’d started avoiding me in the first place.
Surely I didn’t just imagine that... did I? I want to ask her, but I can’t. As the older brother, I just can’t...
“Hi! I’m back!”
“Kokoro! Hello!”
“Oh, you’re back. Hey.”
“Were you two... chatting?”
Kokoro, who’d just walked through the door, looked from me to Kisaki. She’d probably noticed how little interaction we usually had with each other, hence her surprise at seeing us together.
Later that night, I woke up and went downstairs to use the restroom. I tiptoed as silently as possible so as not to wake up Kisaki or Kokoro.
Just as I reached the last step, I noticed that the light was still on in the living room.
Is one of them still up?
“Thank you so much... I wouldn’t be able to bind all of these by myself.”
“Aw, don’t mention it! I’ve always wanted to make a doujinshi, you know? But I can’t draw or write or anything, so I’m happy I can help out in some way! And it’s even a HypMic doujinshi!”
Through the living room door, I could hear two voices, the sound of the printer, and something playing on the TV at low volume.
So Nishina is helping Kisaki bind her doujinshi...
“You’ve been a huge help! Really!”
“You already got your newest work bound, right?”
“Yeah. I’m going to sell it for around a hundred yen or so, as an extra. I got the idea for the story just recently, so I didn’t have the time to get it printed and bound properly, but I still wanted to have it ready for Comiket one way or another.”
“But that’s super cool! I love it when my favorite circles sell copybooks!”
Even though I had no experience publishing doujinshi myself, I had heard about copybooks. Instead of having their work turned into a properly published manga volume by a company, sometimes artists just photocopied their drawings and bound them by hand.
Kisaki’s so passionate about this that she even drew a last-minute doujinshi, wow. I have to respect her commitment, even if it’s just another BL story...
I would have offered to help out too, but she probably didn’t want me seeing her drawings, so I decided to continue to the bathroom and then head back to bed.
The second I grabbed the door handle, however, I heard Kokoro’s voice once again.
“So, like... I’ve seen you talking with Ichigaya quite a bit since you got back, but he told me the two of you didn’t get along at all. Was that true?”
Her words took me by surprise, so I froze in place, my hand still stuck to the door.
“No, you’re right. We definitely didn’t...” I heard Kisaki reply.
“I remember him saying it wasn’t always like that though...”
“Yeah, we used to get along fine when we were kids.”
“I was just curious about what happened to get you two talking again.”
Straight to the point! I’ll just stay a second longer. Maybe knowing her answer will do me more harm than good, but I have to hear it!
“Oh, but you don’t have to tell me if you don’t feel like it,” Kokoro said.
“No, it’s not a problem. It began years ago, when he started avoiding me all of a sudden.”
Huh...? Did she just say that I was the one avoiding her?
I was so surprised that I had to grab the door handle tighter to prevent myself from walking into the living room.
What’s she on about?! She was the one avoiding me!
“He... was avoiding you?”