"I happen to be running late for an important engagement," Yoshiro remarks in a smooth timbre, a voice like watered steel that echoes in the empty warehouse near the docks, cool and ominous as anything. Her countenance is illuminated briefly in the orange-amber glow of fire as she sparks a lighter, cups the flame to the end of her cigarette, and breathes in deeply before exhaling on a direct, "Which is making me impatient. I'm not certain that you understand the gravity of that."

[break]

In a smooth motion, she shrugs out of her formal haori, a jacket that has been in her family for generations and only recently been refitted for her. Careful not to muss the slate-grey silk, embroidered richly with motifs of brutish Arcanine and chased in red-gold flecks like smouldering embers, she drapes it over Chiyo's awaiting arm, and rolls her shoulders once, twice to loosen them before circling around the chair in which Amber Lenoir 's former head of security is bound.

[break]

It would be just her luck that the boys would apprehend him while she was on the way to the festival, a fact that has her more irritable than she has right to be.

[break]

"I don't know anything about the Voltorb, I already told them every-"

[break]

"Tell me," she directs abruptly, the ornamental sash wrapped tightly around her knuckles of a sudden drawn taut around his windpipe as she draws it back with a snap, one foot planted on the base of the chair to keep it there as he struggles and spasms for air.

[break]

It goes as such until she is on the verge of being unacceptably late.

[break]

"This ends one of two ways," Yoshiro informs him, her knuckles bruised where they cracked off his cheekbone. The man is sobbing, slack in his chair. She feels, ultimately, little remorse for him. He is leading the life he chose, as certainly as she is her own. Drawing another chair over, she turns it to sit facing him and lights another cigarette, "In one of them, hm -"

[break]

She takes another drag, sitting back in the chair before checking her phone, her brow furrowing as she scrolls through the messages, "In one of them, little Etsuko is still alive when your ex-wife collects upon your life insurance. In the other..." She shrugs noncommittally, "Tragic how fire pokemon take to nesting beneath buildings in the winter, isn't it?"

[break]

"Hayate, voice to text - I'll be there in twenty minutes, period. Important family business, period."

[break]

"Please, I'll do anyth-"

[break]

"That's enough," Yoshiro instructs patiently, the end of her katana coming to rest just beneath his chin to silence any further commentary. And then to her phone, "I promise I'll make it up to you, period. Send."

[break]

junya: i'll be there in twenty minutes. important family business. peace i love you edith that's enough. i promise i'll make it up to you.

[break]

"Now." Her dark eyes lift to the man once more. "Have you rethought your position?"

[break]

---

[break]

Shioda Yoshiro arrives, by the time on her watch, at precisely half-past the agreed-upon time, exiting the back of a black towncar with her hair freshly combed through and dark eyes accentuated with not only a smoky bit of liner, but also a hint of gold at the corners, both equally uncommon for her. Taking in the awaiting festivities with a certain nervous energy and anticipation alike, she takes the time to straighten the collar of her kimono for perhaps the fifth time, hoping that the scarce amount of expensive cologne at her pulse-points is enough to offset the faint scent of lingering smoke.

[break]

She is used to feeling in control, her one constant, and distinctly unused to the way her palms are slightly sweaty where they hold a parchment box - her bet at forgiveness for her late arrival - containing a handful of strawberry daifuku, the same sort that were their favorite as children. She is also distinctly unused to the way her heart races like a Bolthund on the track when she spots Amber, looking a vision near the Magikarp pond as she carefully reapplies lipstick in a small handmirror.

[break]

She wonders, briefly, what that precise shade might look like on her neck, and were she not quite suddenly preoccupied with the inappropriateness of that observation, might have the wherewithal to draw a connection from this one moment to her string of short-lived and utterly catastrophic relationships with...well. Predominantly with blonde women in the various underground art scenes in Johto.

[break]

An instant passes in which she's certain that Amber has looked up only to see her standing there like a post, and she snaps out of her introspection, offers what by now is an uncharacteristically apologetic smile, and crosses over toward the Magikarp pond to hold out the small box in offering.

[break]

"I'm sorry. It was never my intention to keep you waiting," Yoshiro confides smoothly, and means it. The Bolthund in her chest is still racing, and it's untoward for a Shioda oyabun, but she's doing an admirable job of not looking at crimson lipstick. Is. Was. Damn it. Her dark eyes flick up as she confesses, and means it more, "You look lovely."

[break]

[break][break]

+ ooc notes: Amber Lenoir FESTIVE FLIRTS

[attr="class","pokeclass"]

"I answered you," Yoshiro observes, a current of amusement bleeding into her smooth timbre as she teases lowly, "Eventually." And then with far more seriousness, voice all watered steel once more, "Chiyo and I were in the process of letting your Bastidion Protection hire go. He didn't take it well."

[break]

Her other, bruise-knuckled hand lifts as if to catch Amber's elbow as the other woman wobbles slightly, lest she does fall into the Magikarp pond on accident and ruin all her finery. It wouldn't be the first time one or another of them ended up in one, she muses to herself, a quirk to the corner of her lips at the thought.

[break]

"I should let you," she informs the other in a serious timbre, though a mischievous spark of delight in her dark eyes reveals otherwise as she insincerely lowers her empty hand a fraction. "Keep all the daifuku to myself while you splash about like a 'karp."

[break]

A smile breaks out on her countenance, however, when the box is taken, and, contrary to her words, she waits until she's drawn along in step before discreetly passing her own mochi off to Lucifer, fingertips stroking the Umbreon's ears lightly as she scans the surrounding crowd and listens to the array of festivities available to them.

[break]

"You have a bit of-" Yoshiro doesn't bother to finish elaborating, instead using one hand to catch Amber by the wrist, while the other rises to brush away a bit of powder from the corner of the other's mouth. If her touch lingers a second longer than it should, is that really such a- She blinks once as if realizing herself, and recovers smoothly with, "Why not all of them?"

[break]

Withdrawing, if only the one hand, the other finding Amber's own to lace their fingers together and tugging her forward, as she cuts through the crowd toward their first destination, having decided upon it already.

[break]

It's been years since they were able to do anything together, after all. Why not make up for lost time? "The mall first. Then the shrine, foodstall, and -" She looks amusedly over her companion sidelong for an instant, as if in on a secret, "We'll find a roof to climb up onto, to watch the fireworks in peace. The pagoda - if you're feeling brave."

[break]

Guiding them down toward the entrance of the mall, where the vendors have already toted out row upon row of festival fashions, she catches Amber's gaze at the comment on her appearance, head tilting subtly at what follows after.

[break]

She remains silent for a solid three seconds before a warm laugh escapes her, an altogether too self-assured smile following after as she confides an octave lower, never breaking eye contact, "Hilarious."

[break]

And she shouldn't say it. She really shouldn't, but the Bolthund in her chest has stopped racing of a sudden.

[break]

"We'd have to give them something to talk about," Yoshiro intones further, nonchalant as anything, and winks at Amber once. It starts again. Only then does her gaze shift toward the nearby wares, fingertips catching the sleeve of a kimono to draw it out a scarce measure for view - its pattern of magikarp and autumn leaves intricate. "Ah. This is lovely."

[break]


[break][break]

+ ooc notes: Amber Lenoir FESTIVE FLIRTS

[attr="class","pokeclass"]

And how to take that?

Yoshiro contemplated it a moment, head atilt and dark eyes introspective as she recalled her lessons with Oba Guiying. Electricity sparks from the pads on its limbs. Wherever Zeraora runs, lightning flashes and thunder echoes. Zeraora. No matter how she contemplated it, she couldn't misconstrue it as anything but flattery. Do you really believe thunder echoes where I walk? They were young again, watching torrents of rain like silver beneath the eaves, craning for glimpses of Rayquaza amidst the roiling clouds.

They weren't young now, her dark eyes locked with...no, Junya.

But Amber's palm felt warmly electric against her own, and-

She was about to do something fantastically stupid about it.

Would have, had it not been for the way the other's words caught up with her, indignant, about Hydreigon, and making her suddenly remember herself all at once. An unbidden smile, the corner of which curled upward in a fond manner, broke over her features as she asked with a low amusement, "My Amber? Taming dragons?

Yoshiro moved to almost arm's-length, though left their fingers laced as she gave the other woman a thoughtful once-over, as if truly taking the measure of all that claimed bravado. But the watered steel of her voice was warm as she drew Amber back in, its cutting edge turned, a blade set aside in the sunlight, "I remember having to hold your hand every time we went out on the second floor balcony."

She blinked at mention of the kimono, blinked again, more slowly, at the notion that the other may wish to actually purchase it for her. Sure, Yoshiro had received gifts before. A nice watch, once, from- was her name Chanterelle? Chantal? It probably hadn't been her real name, anyways. But she was much more often the gifter than the giftee, and it was hardly ever with any deep thought, just a card swiped for a pair of designer shoes or a place on the wait-list of that five star ramen restaurant downtown.

Junya hadn't received a gift since...Well. Not since that last summer, when a well-loved, well-worn Growlithe plush had made its way onto the windowsill for her to find. It had withstood everything. Time. Distance. The near-end of the Shioda line. She had it still, set carefully upon the bookstand in her estate in its own tidy, precise spot, over a decade old now and missing the black rim of fuzz around its ears.

When all the childlike wonder faded from Amber's features, replaced by a simmering embarrassment, Junya was the one who looked through the window at all their lost time. The missed birthdays, the missed festivals just like this one, stretching so far back it scarcely felt fair. It was her hand, beneath a Shioda Oyabun's well-earned stripes, that caught the door handle, pulling it ajar to the faint clink of festival chimes.

"Not without that Houndoom in the window," Yoshiro answered with confidence, beckoning Amber inward even as the shopkeeper inside started to reach beneath the counter and insist, "I don't have any money in the reg-" At the cool, level look offered in return, they abruptly fell silent, and Yoshiro countered as if nothing had transpired, "I'll pay with a card, then."

A conspiratory look shared between her and the nearby Umbreon, she flashed a grin at his keeper, "Lucifer wants it. I don't make the rules."

When they departed for the shrine thereafter, wading through a crowded street strung with softly-glowing paper lanterns, Yoshiro draped her arm around Amber's shoulders to keep them from losing one another as they went - or so she told herself. Held securely in her free hand, a parchment bag decorated in scarlet-gold and containing far more than they initially went in for spoke otherwise.

"What are you going to wish for?" she asked in a smooth, curious timbre as they drew closer to their destination, turning toward the blonde to be heard above the street music.

Amber Lenoir

☉

What about you?

And isn't that the question? And is it fair that so little a one should feel so damning, slide through all her armour of time and distance and Yoshiro to seek what remains of Junya, because that's what it is, isn't it? That Junya is still the dull ache behind her ribs. That Junya is the waning red and gold of a dwindling summer, a season whose glory dwindled far too early when the bitter winds of autumn came howling home. Shioda Yoshiro and Shioda Junya were never meant to coexist, the latter meant to rest easily between the interred ashes of Ai and Hinata, drowned beneath a blanket of yellow and white chrysanthemum.

Junya was the one who still remembered, who climbed in the courtyard tree with that little, golden-haired girl, picked sakura blossoms for her. Held her hand when the boughs whispered in the winds, and found a way to coax her higher, higher still, until they could count the fletchlings nested at the corner of the tile roof, see the cramorants dip low over distant houses in the evening. Who listened, told stories, laughed until her father got the ladder and bribed them lower, beckoned from their escape with promises of rice candy and rides on Hinote, whose stripes were only just starting to gray with age.

Yoshiro is the armour beneath which all those things were laid to rest, cannot exist in the same world as Amber Lenoir , but is here all the same, a Bolthund race to her heart that she's certain the other would feel if their palms still touched. Yoshiro remembers other things, the scent of smoke and copper upon the air, heavy as a shroud in the halls of a nine-tailed enemy. The little tufts of golden fur that littered the ground like flower petals, marked all the places Torao had found purchase, sunk his teeth in deep until an ancient pokemon ceased its struggle.

It is vindictive and relentless by nature. Those who cross it even once will be cursed for a thousand years, along with their descendants.

Her brother's voice as they sat beside the still waters, telling her, They cannot curse you from beyond the grave.

Yoshiro remembers the trembling in another's voice, pleading and rough with smoke, the trembling in her own then-unmarked hands as she lifted her father's blade down from the mantle upon which it had been just another empty possession - a trophy to laud a fleeting Húxiān victory. And then another of Oba Guiying's little lessons: how to send a message. When the Húxiān find their brother, he is bereft his head and his hands. Hours later, beneath the dull neon in downtown Johto, she received the first of what will become many stripes as Amber Berry smiled brightly on the flickering screen of an old television.

When the program had cut off for a news bulletin - report of a yakuza hit across the city, presumed retaliation for the Shioda massacre she had considered it to be symbolic.

Shioda Yoshiro and Shioda Junya were never meant to coexist: but they do.

They both came to Hoenn for her.

They both watch Amber Lenoir from behind dark lashes, their darker irises drinking in the way that she lights up in a sneaky little smile, how the corner of her mouth quirks up just so, how she holds the plush Houndoom in her arms with an aura of barely concealed delight. And when she rests her chin atop it, bites her lip, they are both completely done in. Perhaps that shouldn't be a revelation, that the one would climb the tallest tree for her, and the other burn the world, that they both, in their own way, could l-

No, she thinks.

Ours is a secret, too.

She realizes that she hasn't answered, not just yet, and should soon. That the silence between them cannot last forever, has already lasted too long, years and leagues, and a continent apart. She realizes, all at once and also a little too late, that she hasn't looked up from the scarlet of the other's lips in what has to have been a solid minute, and how that must look, and -

How many times have I looked for you in someone?

How many times have I stood in the crowd only to slip away just before you could see?

How many near misses to keep you safe, only to find out I could lose you even if we never met again?

The heat creeping over the back of her neck, tinging the shell of her ears with a dusky pink, is unfamiliar.

What about you?

That you would call me Junya again - and - I want to ruin our friendship - are wishes that exist simultaneously, occupy the same space and time. She doesn't speak either of them aloud, but acts, catches the Houndoom plush in the other's arms by one ear and uses it to pull the blonde in. Her other hand, all sharply inked knuckles and subtly calloused fingertips, comes to rest at Amber's jaw as she ducks in just so.

And in the instant that their lips meet, she thinks that Amber was wrong. The thunder never followed me at all, it was always yours. The kiss is warm, gentle, shockingly earnest. The sort of kiss that Junya may have shared with her one summer, had things been different.

It ends abruptly to the shutter of a camera, the bright bulb-flash as an enterprising paparazzo snaps what must be a lucky shot. The transition is stark, instant, a curl to the upper lip, a tightening at the corner of the eyes as she shifts back. He boldly snaps another picture.

"Get that fucking camera out of my face." Her voice is rougher than she expected.

When she moves, Shioda Yoshiro doesn't so much catch the camera as she catches the whole damned paparazzo.

Amber Lenoir

☉

Well, fuck.

It is in this intimate moment that Shioda Yoshiro becomes self aware. Self aware enough to realize exactly how fucked she is, as she's drawn in closer and her fingers wind in the other woman's kimono. So fucked that they might be breaking the proverbial fucked barometer, somewhere between the moment that Amber touches her cheek that tenderly and the one in which she finds out exactly what that scarlet lipstick tastes like on her teeth.

Amber is thunder and fervor. Amber is like touching a livewire with her bare hands, a sudden and devastatingly lovely sort of chaos, thrillingly electric. Amber is the last late-summer storm they watched roll in in Johto, when home still felt like home. She tastes of ozone and lipstick.

Yoshiro could laugh and mean it.

Zeroara wasn't wrong for this year - not at all.

In between the flash of the shutter and the instant she shifts back, there is a distant part of Yoshiro that should be very, very grateful for their fortune, in that if the paparazzi had happened upon them any later, the photos captured may have been more compromising with the way that...a sudden, subtle sting distracts her from that thought as she runs her tongue along the inside of her lower lip. She tastes copper. Did Amber bite her?

Her dark eyes glance askance.

This fucking girl.

And now, of course, it's all that she can think about, even well after the camera ricochets off the ground and the glass of the lens crunches beneath her shoes. Yoshiro's half-step forward, swift, allows her to catch them by the front of their shirt - this reedy journalist with their sharply pomaded hair and faded press badge, their hands raised placatingly before them, even as the knuckles of her right hand tense beneath their ink.

She shouldn't have to live like this, is what Yoshiro's countenance, all sudden, stony fury, says. With the burden of everyone's opinions, freely offered and not asked for. With the constant criticism. With her snipe of a mother constantly regaling the press. With all the this and that of how far the star of Amber Berry has fallen.

Junya has always known the truth. That Amber Berry was always fictitious, a construction of coloured paper, of paste and craft store glitter that was paraded out in front of the shining lights whenever Ms. Berry needed a quick buck, or in their circumstance, a yakuza debt settled. Amber Lenoir, by contrast, has always been real, lives and breathes behind the mirage of a sand castle childhood swept out by the tide. Deserves much better than she has ever been given.

But maybe I could give you better.

It is an odd thought to have for many reasons. For someone like her, with so little time outside her legitimate business and her very illegitimate one. For someone whose acquaintances would always, always, live with the shadow of retaliation over them. Her life was already in danger, a small, selfish part of Yoshiro whispers. But she has not come to the notice of the Húxiān yet, the more rational part rebukes.

But no one can protect you better than I can, interjects yet another, and she recognizes that to be pride. Pride and something else she cannot put to words yet. Because no one needs you like I do.

"It's okay," Amber's words snap her out of her loop of introspection. It isn't. But the arm that slides through hers is enough to make her pause, make her knuckles loosen in the front of the paparazzi's shirt until she releases them entirely.

Her dark eyes settle to Amber's lighter as she breathes in, breathes out smoothly, allows herself to be molded back into the semblance of what she should be. Not looking away, she addresses the photographer in any case, her voice as cool and smooth as watered steel, "If I see you again, you will regret it."

Yoshiro speaks it into being and means it, but let's the offense slide because she was asked to, nevermind that she would have bounced their skull off the pavement just as willingly if that's what had been asked of her instead. She knows Amber must know that, searches the other's gaze to see if she will change her mind as the photographer scrambles for their camera, a scrape of plastic and glass on gravel before a swift retreat is made.

"Did we, uh, have anything else we wanted to do? For the New Year."

"I..." Yoshiro trails off of a sudden as her dark eyes drink in the full picture before her, the smudged lipstick, the blossom-pink flush. And why does it feel like everything in her brain short-circuits all at once, white-hot and blank before she asks before she can reason with herself, "Would you like to come back to mine?"

Yoshiro is fairly certain with a dawning sort of horror, that her voice cracked in there somewhere, but doesn't want to overthink that any further. Is she a teenaged boy or a fucking oyabun? And has she ever asked anyone that and meant anything by it before? Blinking once, incredulous at the nerve of herself, she clears her throat before offering tentatively instead, "Or we could-"

The nod throws her. Throws her straight to the ground to pummel her within an inch of her life. And when she cuts off suddenly, the corner of her lips twitches upward in a surprised, if slightly sheepish smile before she asks eloquently, "Yeah?"

She's never found her phone so fast in her fucking life.

"Chiyo? Bring the car back around."

Amber Lenoir

☉