My Scumbag System-Chapter 412: Five Queens and a Sleeping King

The house was quiet in a way that felt almost suspicious.

Skylar noticed it the moment she came downstairs, mug in hand, hair still damp from the shower. No Jaime shouting affirmations at his own reflection. No Raphael breaking something. No Marco bellowing about team breakfast like a golden retriever who had learned to speak. Just the ambient sound of the atoll wind against the windows and, from somewhere deeper in the house, the faint clink of ceramic.

She checked the time. 8:47.

The dry-erase board by the front door had a list in Carmen’s handwriting, which meant the mission assignments had gone up sometime before six while Skylar had still been horizontal. She crossed to it.

TEAM BETA: Gate Clear, Sector 4. Isabelle, Raphael, Hikari, Marco, Malachi, Soomin. Depart 0600. ETA return 2200.

TEAM GAMMA: Recon and E-Rank sweep, outer district. Juan, Jaime, Noah, Monica, Jacob. Depart 0700. ETA return 1800.

BRAXTON: Don’t ask.

CARMEN: Also don’t ask.

So it was just them today. Skylar did the math without meaning to. Natalia was still here because Satori was still here. Celeste was here because the roster had her resting, Satori’s orders. Emi because she was the house healer and somebody had to be on standby.

And Akari because Akari was, as far as Skylar could tell, immune to being assigned anywhere she didn’t want to go.

The kitchen confirmed it. Emi stood at the stove in an oversized pastel hoodie that read HUNTER PROSPECT across the back in letters that had partially peeled off, her blue antennae bobbing as she stirred something that smelled aggressively wholesome. Natalia sat at the counter with a textbook open that she was absolutely not reading, purple eyes fixed on her phone. Cel occupied the small table by the window with a datapad and a posture that had been trained into her by people who charged tuition by the syllable.

Akari sat on the counter eating someone else’s yogurt, not at all concerned about this.

"There she is," Akari said. She pointed her spoon at Skylar. "Last one up."

"I don’t take feedback from people stealing my yogurt."

Akari looked at the yogurt container, then back at Skylar. Zero remorse. "It was at the front of the fridge."

"That’s where I put things I’m planning to eat."

"Planning and doing are different skills."

Skylar pulled a mug from the cabinet and poured coffee. She didn’t have the energy for Akari before caffeine. She barely had the energy for Akari after caffeine. The girl was like a social stress test that had been made sentient and given access to expensive lip gloss.

Emi set a bowl down in front of Skylar’s usual chair without being asked, oatmeal with actual fruit in it because Emi was constitutionally incapable of letting someone consume empty calories without staging a quiet intervention.

"I didn’t ask for this," Skylar said.

"I know." Emi smiled with her whole face. "But you would’ve just had the coffee."

"That was the plan."

"It’s a bad plan."

Skylar sat and ate the oatmeal. She wasn’t going to say it was good.

It was good.

Natalia turned a page in her textbook she hadn’t been reading and said, without looking up, "Where’s Satori."

"Asleep," Cel said from the window table. "He was up at three reading his status screen again."

The table went briefly interesting. Natalia’s pen stopped moving. Emi’s antennae twitched. Skylar wrapped both hands around her mug and looked at the middle distance.

Akari, immune to atmospheric tension in the way a cat is immune to embarrassment, pointed her spoon at Cel this time. "How do you know he was up at three."

"I wasn’t sleeping well either," Cel said. "I heard him in the hallway."

"You heard him in Natalia’s hallway."

"The walls are thin," Natalia said, and turned another page.

Akari put the spoon down. Something shifted in her expression, less teasing and more genuinely interested, which was somehow worse. "Okay but this is actually fascinating from a sociological perspective."

"No," Skylar said.

"I’m just saying, the five of us are all in this house today, and Satori is asleep upstairs, and nobody is talking about the elephant."

"There’s no elephant," Emi said, in the voice she used when she was trying to believe something hard enough to make it true.

Akari looked at Emi. Emi’s antennae dropped about half an inch. Akari looked at Natalia. Natalia’s page turned again, this time with slightly more force. Akari looked at Cel, who was doing the diplomatic thing of appearing deeply absorbed in her datapad. Then she looked at Skylar.

Skylar met her eyes and held them. "Don’t."

"I’m not doing anything," Akari said, entirely pleasantly, which was the most dangerous version of her. "I’m just thinking that this is the most interesting dormitory situation I’ve encountered at any educational institution and that it would be a waste not to do something about it."

"Like what," Emi asked, because Emi could never help herself.

Akari smiled. It was a very specific kind of smile, the one she wore when she had already decided something and was now walking everyone else toward the conclusion like a museum docent on a tour nobody had paid for.

"Truth or dare," she said. "Tonight. His room."

The kitchen did something then that kitchens rarely managed, which was produce five completely different silences from five different people simultaneously.

Emi made a small sound.

Natalia put her pen down.

Cel looked up from her datapad.

Skylar said, "Why."

"Because," Akari said, swinging her legs off the counter and setting the empty yogurt cup aside, "we are five women in a house with one man who has kissed at least three of us and done significantly more than that with at minimum two, and none of us are actually talking to each other about it. Which is going to cause a problem eventually. Better to have the conversation in a format with structure."

"Truth or dare is not a structured format," Cel said carefully.

"It has rules."

"Children have rules. Children still run into traffic."

Akari pointed at her. "You’re scared."

Cel straightened. Whatever diplomatic instinct had been running her expression switched over to something cooler and more direct. "I’m not scared. I think the proposal has obvious potential for harm."

"Or obvious potential for honesty." Akari turned to Emi. "You want to."

"I didn’t say anything," Emi said.

"You made a sound."

"It was a neutral sound."

"It was not neutral, it had a question mark in it." Akari turned to Natalia. "You’re not scared either. You’re considering logistics."

Natalia looked at her for a long moment. Something moved behind her eyes that Skylar couldn’t read. Then Natalia said, "If anyone cries, it ends. And no one tells him it was your idea."

Akari spread her hands, gracious in victory. "Obviously."

Skylar drank her coffee.

She was being asked to weigh in. She could feel it, all four of them rotating slightly toward her the way plants did toward light, which was deeply ironic given recent events. The thing was, Akari wasn’t wrong, which Skylar found profoundly irritating. The arrangement in this house operated on the unspoken understanding that nobody looked directly at it. It was like a structural beam everyone had agreed to navigate around without acknowledging the wall it was holding up.

At some point the wall was going to become relevant.

"Fine," Skylar said.

Emi made the sound again.

"But," Skylar continued, "we tell him. He doesn’t get ambushed in his own room."

"Obviously," Akari said again.

"And if someone says stop, it stops."

"Agreed."

"And you’re not doing this because you’re bored."

Akari paused. Skylar waited. This was the actual question, the one underneath the other ones, and Akari was smart enough to know it.

"I’m doing it," Akari said finally, "because Hikari asked me last week why everyone in the house seems sad sometimes and I didn’t have a good answer." She said it without her usual performance around it, just the words sitting there. "My sister notices things. She doesn’t always have the framework for them but she notices. And she’s going to be back tomorrow and I would like for the answer to be better than ’unresolved tension.’"

The kitchen was quiet again, differently this time.

Emi reached across and briefly touched Akari’s wrist. Akari looked at the hand with an expression that was almost surprised before covering it with her usual composure.

Cel said, "We should tell him over lunch."

"Agreed," Natalia said.

"I’ll make something," Emi said, already turning back toward the stove.

Skylar looked at her empty oatmeal bowl and thought, not for the first time, that Emi Aoyama was entirely too good for this situation. Not in the way that meant she didn’t belong. More in the way that meant she was going to teach the rest of them something whether they wanted to learn it or not.

She poured a second coffee.

===

Telling Satori went about as well as Skylar had predicted, which was to say he sat there with his mug and his irritatingly composed face for approximately four seconds and then said, "Akari."

"Present," Akari said from across the table.

"Why."

"Sociological investment."

Satori looked at Natalia. Natalia looked back with the expression of someone who had calculated her level of culpability and decided it was acceptable.

He looked at Emi. Emi had both hands around her own mug and was performing intense interest in the table grain.

He looked at Cel. Cel said, "I want it on record that I did raise concerns."

"Noted." He looked at Skylar last. Skylar shrugged once, and he seemed to accept this as the explanation it was.

"Fine," he said. "My room. After nine. Nobody breaks anything."

Akari said, "Spiritually or physically?"

He pointed at her. "Either."

She pressed her lips together, satisfied.

Skylar watched him stand, watched the way he rolled his shoulder where the burn scarring pulled tight even now, and thought about the cave and the purple fire and the weight of him sitting beside her in the quiet while his arms were ruined and he still hadn’t stopped moving.

She thought about how she’d found out he had feelings the same way she found out about most things that complicated her life, all at once, in a context that left no room for comfortable denial.

She drank her coffee.

Tonight would be what it was going to be.

She was, she decided, reasonably confident about this.

Somewhat.