Life is a Game (TriniMad & Blue Hatter)

[Blue Hatter]

This is a role play between TriniMad and Blue Hatter. Please don't post here if you're not one of us. Thanks.

 

[Blue Hatter]

It was a bright, warm day in Chiba, Japan with the sun sitting in in the blue sky that had only a few fluffy white clouds, and the sun shone down on the city, bathing the earth in a brilliant golden yellow glow. Though perhaps "warm" was an understatement, honestly it was hot, blisteringly hot, and the fact that there was no breeze at all certainly didn't help matters.

Kenta Tatchibana was just one of the many people suffering in the sweltering heat. He was on his way home after another day at college, and though he had a car college wasn't too far from the Tachibana household so he usually just walked to his classes. Right now that was a decision he was very much regretting, if he had drove in he would have been home long ago and relaxing in the cool breeze of an air conditioner. Perhaps it was no surprise that he was hurrying home as quickly as he could, though this was only making him feel even hotter.

Yes, Kenta was still living at home with his mother, father and younger sister. It wasn't a bad arrangement, really, and it gave him time to save up money from his part-time job and get a place of his own later. His parents had often told him that so long as he went to college that he was welcome to say at the house, and it was an offer he had clearly taken them up on. But he did pay them some rent, he wasn't total freeloader.

He and his sister got along about as well as any other brother and sister did, he supposed. They were close, or so he thought, though there was a fair amount of teasing between the two of them-- though perhaps most of the teasing came from him-- and they did have their occasional arguments, but the latter was to be expected, all siblings fought every now and then. Despite how much he teased his younger sister he did care about her greatly and was always looking out for her and watching over her even if he wouldn't openly admit it. He always did his best to protect her. That was a brother's duty after all, right?

Kenta wore a simple black button-up shot-sleeved jacket with white stripes on the sleeves, a red T-shirt with the logo of a local band and bold kanji characters that spelled out "Wasabi Senpai", the name of the band; he also wore a pair of faded and worn black jeans and old black and white sneakers. The clothes he wore were a bit too hot for the weather but they were his usual style and old habits were hard to break even if they did lead to suffering.

The walk from the college to the family home took a good twenty minutes but finally he had arrived. Upon reaching the front door he fished the house key from his left hip pocket and slid it into the key slot on the door knob, turned it until he heard it click and unlock, and then he turned the knob, pushed the door open and slipped inside. He let the door close behind him and lock, and then, finally, he breathed a sigh of relief at the rush of cool air within the house. Much better! He wasn't sure if anyone else was home yet but he wasn't too keen on checking it out just yet, not until he got some water in his system, so he made his way to the kitchen and withdrew a glass from the nearby cupboard, a filtered water pitcher from the refrigerator, then filled the glass with some water, plopped in a few cubes of ice from the freezer, and greedily began to gulp down the cold liquid. He could almost feel his body temperature dropping.

 

[TriniMad]

Between her brother and herself, Alice was obviously the family favorite; was it just because she was a girl? She hoped so, as the way they sometimes treated her, a genius of outstanding proportions, was sometimes just overwhelming. To their parents, she was like Da Vinci or Van Gogh; an artistic prodigy, someone they hoped would propel the entire family into fame and perhaps even some wealth when she made her talent bloom even more. But for herself, Alice simply just enjoyed art; it was her reprieve, her hobby, the way she put soul into her life.

It was her escape.

Now that she was eighteen and currently in her first year of college, some people might comment that she didn't need an escape any more, not when what happened was nearly a year ago. However, in a twist of irony, that was how she found the escape within art and it manifested, drawing her pain and shame into what she drew and painted, put into life onto canvas and paper. As just another face in college, she did feel better though; it was mostly in thanks to her older brother that she managed to pull herself past that terrible time. Kenta was her hero, her mentor, everything she could ask from a brother. Yet... There was something deep inside Alice that wanted more than that, knowing that he was one of the only men she had ever encountered who wouldn't hurt her. One of the very few, and so, she understood why she loved him so, but it didn't make what she wanted from him any more right.

It was so wrong. Everything that she secretly craved from him was wrong.

For the last couple of weeks, Alice had been hiding away from Kenta as much as possible, mostly to bury her own guilt and shame. Normally, they were close as siblings could get with their usual inclusive jokes and teasing. But when he had came up behind her two weeks ago, the warm feeling of his body pressing up against her back, it was too much for her and she fled from him. Alice was a girl most could consider as shy; she was an introvert through and through, and when confronted with problems like this, she just wanted to be alone and not have to deal with them.

So when she heard her older brother make the door open (both of their parents worked late and usually weren't at home any time much), Alice was safely in her room, drawing as soon as she had been released from her classes early that day. It was easy to ignore him while she was in her sanctuary, her room, where she could just aimlessly draw without having to interact with anyone else. Her sketches wildly vary usually, yet it seemed the longer she hid from him, the more her sketches seemed to concentrate on him; the long lean silhouette of his body, the wrinkles in the corners of his eyes when he laughed, or how his jaw sloped in an angle. To anyone else's eyes, these sketches could be of any man, but to her, it was of Kenta and only him.

Even when Alice could hear him move above the house, doing what he usually did with the temperature outside just sweltering this afternoon, she remained silent as a mouse in her room. She doubted that he would try to enter, and because she was formerly alone, she had not bothered to overdress at all; just a pair of extremely short exercise shorts that hid under the thin black oversized shirt that draped over her thighs where she sat, giving the illusion that she was wearing absolutely nothing underneath.

 

[Blue Hatter]

As Kenta made his way around the house, doing this and that, he heard no other noise than those that he was making, so he could only assume that he was the only one home at the time. It was some time before he finally decided to head up to his room to change into something more comfortable and cooler, and lounge about for a while, perhaps play a video game, read some comics, watch television or otherwise do something that distracted him from the essay he should be working on. Perhaps he could be a bit of a procrastinator at times, unlike his prodigy of a sister who seemed to overshadow him in nearly every aspect.

He was well aware how skilled his sister was, how amazing she was, and how their parents seemed to favor her. Perhaps that was why they had opted to give her an English name rather than a Japanese one, maybe they had thought that a name that was more familiar to most of the world (no doubt thanks to Alice's Adventures in Wonderland, one of their mother's favorite stories) she would get farther in life. Maybe. Sure, Kenta knew that their parents loved him, too, but their love for him was different from the love they had for Alice. Or that's how it seemed to him, anyway. But maybe that was understandable in a way, she was the "baby" after all, the youngest child, and didn't most parents favor the youngest?

But he never really let it bother him. It bothered him more when he was younger, when no matter what he did their mother and father paid Alice more attention, and it had made him jealous, and maybe that was where some of the teasing had come from, but as he got older those feelings slowly faded away from him. It no longer concerned him so much, and he was proud of his sister, he was proud of her skills, and he loved her very, very much. And that was why it concerned him so when she began to hide herself away in his room.

He couldn't help but wonder if he had done something to scare her or offend her but he wasn't sure what that could be. Had he taking his teasing too far? Had he hurt her? It concerned him and he knew that he needed to try to break her from her current funk... But how?

Well, back to the main topic, he made his way up the stairs and toward his room, and when he passed the door leading into his sister's bedroom he noticed that it was closed, a sign that she was probably home and inside. Locked away again, he thought to himself.

Quietly and without a word he made his way to his bedroom and closed the door, and after slipping off his jacket and shirt, revealing his bare chest to the cool air, he all but tossed himself onto the bed. His body was sturdy, he was muscular but not extremely so, just enough to show some definition. He laid quietly on his bed for a few minutes and eyed the poster next to him on the wall. It was a poster depicting characters of an anime series he used to watch when he was kid, but the primary function of the poster was not for entertainment but instead to cover up a large hole in the thin wall that he had kicked in years ago during his sleep. For one reason or another no one had ever gotten around to patching up the hole and a poster had been put over it to "temporarily" cover it. So much for temporary.

On the other side of that wall was his sister's room, and the hole looked directly into it. As children they sometimes used to the hole for goofing around... Sending notes, tossing food, tossing things between each other's room, but that had all stopped a little while ago and he had all but forgotten about the hole. Well, sort of. After mulling it over for a moment or two he reached up to pull the tape off from the bottom left corner of the poster, revealing the three inch wide hole. He paused for another moment before finally speaking up.

"...Is the little mouse hungry?" he asked, knowing that she would be able to hear him through the thin wall alone but different through the hole. He fished a small candy bar out from the bedside table-- yes, he had a small stash of junk food-- and slipped one end through the hole, wiggling it to try to get her attention. He sometimes called her a "little mouse" because of how quiet she had become.