Twenty-Six -
Xenosaga Ep. II, Shion and Jin
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By the time he'd hiked up his yukata and bolted out there--not even stopping to put on his shoes, so his socks were soaked and muddy--Shion had already knocked over another of the carefully-tended plants, kneeling on the lower level of the display shelves and digging both of her chubby toddler's paws into the dirt of the largest plant, flinging the once-pristine moss everywhere.

"Shion!" Dropping his yukata Jin grabbed his three-year-old sister and hauled her bodily down off the shelves. "What are you doing? You shouldn't touch those!"

"Lemme go!" Shion squealed, kicking both legs frantically and knocking a third plant off the shelves to shatter. "I'm making 'em better, lemme go!"

"You don't need to make them better. They're fine just as they are." Jin struggled to carry the screaming kicking flailing Shion to the house, sparing her bare and filthy feet having to walk over the shards of broken pottery. He set her down on the long low wooden porch that wrapped around the house and left her there to throw herself to the ground and have her tantrum, picking his way back through the mess to see what he could do about salvaging the plants.

The littlest one was beyond saving. The second plant to fall had fallen directly on top of it and the tiny tree was in four twisted wooden pieces, and all Jin could do was pick up the pieces and carry them to the recycler. The other two were salvageable, though, and in his hurry to repot them Jin didn't actually see what Shion had been doing until he carried the two new pots to the display shelves.

A bunch of empty plastic boxes from the recycler jutted from the dirt of the largest bonsai, with wobbly windows drawn on them in red marker. One of them was carefully labeled 'VECTER'; that Shion could actually write at this age was nothing short of amazing, but her spelling still left a bit to be desired.

The tiny tree itself had turned into a battleground; God knew where Shion had found the bits and scraps of wire and steel, but she'd painstakingly twisted them into tiny robots and festooned the tree with them. Tiny ESes hung from the smaller branches and stood on the larger ones, twists of wire that passed for guns pointed at each other.

Jin spent a few seconds trying to figure out who was winning before he shook his head and started plucking the tiny robots from the outraged bonsai.