Title: Boss Room Relationships: Silica/Sinon Fandom: Sword Art Online Word Count: 1289 Summary: It's the first time Keiko is seeing her family since she's started dating Shino. She struggles to tell her family about it. Author Notes: Written for SAO Pride Week 2022 Day 3: Coming Out.
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Keiko's long, frilly dress comes close to dragging against the stone floor with each of her steps towards the door to her parents' house. She doesn't have to, but she bunches some of the fabric between her fingers to avoid getting it dirty, just to be safe.
This dress is one of the many ill-fitting articles of clothing bought for her when she was a few years younger, the purchase done with the expectation she'd grow into it; an assumption that mocks her to this day, littering her wardrobe with dresses a size too big for her 4' 10" of height. As she looks at Shino by her side, clad in a flannel shirt and a jean skirt, Keiko can't help but think that her parents' assumptions about her tend to cause her nothing but trouble.
She sighs.
Seeing as Keiko hesitates to knock on the door, Shino, who's been mostly silent since they left the bullet train, pipes up.
"Whatever happens, it's not like I'll stop being your girlfriend, you know?"
Keiko doesn't look at her, but her hand reaches for Shino's arm. I know, the gesture wordlessly says.
Keiko has liked girls as far as she could remember, even if she didn't always know . She's gotten a fair lot of attention from boys in her time in SAO, and mostly didn’t dislike it, but something clicked back then when the rare girl would call her cute. It sends a shiver down her spine to have a place place as unpleasant as the death game be the source of her sapphic awakening, but little about SAO was purely pleasant or unpleasant. Allowing her to find herself amidst the strife was perhaps Aincrad's saving grace.
Now that she knows of her inclinations and has a girlfriend, the idea of opening this door to a family meeting and letting them know feels like a greater challenge than entering a boss room. Silly as it is to compare both, she wonders if that's how the frontliners back in the death game felt before clearing a floor, forced to open a door to what felt like certain doom if they wanted to make any progress.
"I'm not worried about us as much as, just… I told you about my family. They are…" she punctuates her sentence with a vague hand gesture. "I don't live with them because the survivor school is all the way in Tokyo, and they found a way to resent me for that somehow. If they can find a way to get mad at me for having been in a coma , they'll find a way to get mad at… Us. Me." Keiko's teeth clench in a way that makes her jaw squarer. "Me and my dad only just got to speaking terms again, when I finally visited on New Year's. I guess I'm afraid of losing that."
When she stops and thinks, this is how it's always been with her parents; they never understand. Her father calls her insane for daring to use VR again. Her mother would chide her for refusing to go to her aunt’s house, where her cousins would incessantly ask her intrusive questions about her time in the floating castle. Both of them told her that changing her study focus from being a chemist to being a psychologist was a foolish choice, especially with how heartbroken it made her grandpa, who was excited to see her following in his footsteps.
"I don't know," Keiko says, biting her lip. "I guess I'm being a bit of a coward, haha…”
Truly, she's always been a coward, and she knows it. She couldn't face the front lines in Aincrad, couldn't face her dad head-on until holiday last year, couldn't—
"Hey now," Shino interrupts her train of thought. Her hand reaches for Keiko's. "You’re being too hard on yourself. It’s not weird to be scared when dealing with stuff like that. It’s not like I have much experience with it myself, but…”
Shino’s words feel bittersweet as they leave her own mouth. Shino understands that with her absent parents, distant relatives, and few longtime friends, worries about coming out creating a rift between her and her close ones probably never were on her mind quite as often as they were Keiko’s. She doesn’t know if her mother would even be able to process it if she were to broach the subject, and she isn’t close enough to her aunt to care if she had a negative reaction. She feels a tinge of jealousy at how, despite Keiko’s predicament, at least Keiko gets to have a father to be stuck in said predicament with.
“... But I think that if we managed to survive literal death games, we can take on your relatives.”
“... Probably,” Keiko responds.
Shino is right. How is she still scared of anything after the two years she spent in the floating castle, literally fighting for her life?
Shino had told Keiko before that her original reason for logging in Gun Gale was that she was looking to become a stronger version of herself, to shed away her weakness as Shino, the fragile schoolgirl, by immersing herself in Sinon, the cold sniper of the wastes. And, against all odds, she did in some way.
As Keiko looks at herself trembling in fear at the idea of uttering the words, “This is my girlfriend,” in front of her parents, she can’t help but wonder if Aincrad made her any stronger. Perhaps unlike her girlfriend, who had toughened herself through steel and grit, her time in Aincrad had her hollowed out like a gourd, and nothing but the plastic image of the cutesy girl with the feathery dragon remained; cute, convenient, and perhaps attractive to some, but lacking in strength to handle things by herself.
At times, it feels like everybody around her matured from the experiences they faced, but all she got for her trouble were these shaky hands.
“I wish I could be more like you,” Keiko says, after a moment lost in thought.
“Like me?”
“Yeah! You’re strong. You’re cool. You don’t get cold feet when it matters.”
That draws a chuckle out of Shino.
“I’m not so sure about that. Come on, you know me. Lots of things still make me nervous. I wish I was more like you , really.”
“Like me?”
“Yeah, like you. You have a big heart, to the point where you care more about others than you do yourself. I wish I was more like that sometimes, but… I don’t think my brain is there yet, or something.”
A part of Shino doubts herself even as she admits as much. In fact, looking at Keiko, she believes she can think of at least a person she might have a soft spot for.
“Knowing you,” Shino continues, “You’re probably thinking of this as something you’re doing by yourself. That dealing with your parents is your battle, and you shouldn’t burden others with it. But that’s what I’m here for… that’s kind of the point.”
Shino interlaces her fingers with Keiko’s. As she does so, Keiko remembers Shino’s use of we earlier.
It’s nice to remember that she is not going in there alone.
“You’re right,” Keiko says. “I just wish this was easier. But if you’re with me, then…”
She squeezes Shino’s hand tighter.
“I don’t have to worry about anything.”
She takes a deep breath. She can still feel her heart beating so loudly in her chest that she can hear it blaring in her ears, but that’s fine.
As she taps her knuckles on the door to her family house, a sense of serenity washes over her as she looks to her side.
I am not entering this boss room alone .
