Entrust
[The Players: serenityw and joey_wheeler directly; seto_kaiba_ as the root impetus and power behind the whole log, and tristan_taylor_ in the background.
The Scene: On their 26th birthday, Joey and Serenity spend the evening in each other's quiet company and follow Seto's specific request by jointly opening his present to them.
Current-Dated to January 25th, 2009.]
"Nfkffph, phs--" That would've been 'Napkin, please' if Serenity hadn't been busy with the last half of a rather large cheeseburger. She sat crosslegged on the floor of her brothers' apartment, greasy paper bag in her lap and a spill of fries sliding their way across the slick wrapper onto her jeans. "Phl--" She swallowed. "Please?"
"Mm-hmm." Joey, midway through a cluster of thick-cut, supremely greasy french fries, nodded and reached for the stack of brown paper napkins at his knee, lifting the top three or four to pass over to his sister. He sat in mirror image of his twin, down to the unbrushed ponytail, and the last bites of a large, messy-looking double-thick cheeseburger sat, partially re-wrapped, in his lap. Two wads of silver foil and greasy paper lay on the floor in front of him, attesting to the burgers he'd already put away - with a much-salted, heavily ketchup-drenched styrofoam container of french fries, half-empty, right beside them. Big disposable cups of soda - Dr. Pepper for both of them - stood on the carpet between the twins, and a low-volume stream of the Grateful Dead piped out of Tristan's living-room stereo system.
For their birthday evening, Serenity and Joey decided on a very low-key affair: quite time together, with the comfort of Tristan's presence in the other room, and dinner. Because this was the Wheeler twins, who, hyperbolically speaking, keep the beef industry alive and well, 'dinner' necessitated burgers - big, thick, just-barely-past-bloody hamburgers and cheeseburgers decked out with enough condiments to make 'everyhing' sound like an understatement. They preferred preferred to patronize a tiny hole-in-the-wall (or, depending on who you asked, hole-in-the-floor) joint about eight blocks over from Tristan and Joey's apartment which exclusively sold burgers and didn't, to the best of the Wheeler twins' knowledge, actually have a name. They knew it as "that joint down the way that has the killer burgers," or often, "the burger place that's got that big-ass neon apple marquee in the apartment above it?" and sometimes simply, "the burger joint."
The first burger (on Serenity's part) and two burgers (on Joey's part) disappeared at an almost distressing rate. Once they'd made headway into their fries and gone to the refrigerator once for refills on their soda, conversation started up naturally and easily between them, covering unimportant but amusing topics. Their focus rotated, however, and eventually came to rest on the item placed in the direct center of their fast food detritus, lain equidistant from each twin and a safe space away from the greasy napkins and wrappers. It was a thickish manila envelope, unmarked, which had been delivered to Joey's office on Friday afternoon.
The gentle double knock on his office doorframe told Joey who it was before he lifted his head from his work.
"Yeah, Rita?"
"Just needed your attention for a minute." The petite, sharp brunette smiled briefly, an expression that advertised she had a secret. Joey raised one brow at her, tucking his pencil into the waves of hair behind his ear, and sat up in his chair, clearly giving her his focus. "Whatcha need?"
The rap of a second, heavier pair of knuckles against the doorframe, and the crisp sound of a very expensive sole on the floor tile, preceded the appearance of a keen pair of blue eyes, and the rest of a canny businessman to match, in Joey's doorway. Seto carried a manila envelope in his hands, and looked - as always - like he'd been born confident and classy. With a grin that spiked into being like lightning, Joey jumped up and hopped around the corner of his desk to greet his friend.
"So." Joey nodded down at the envelope. "You wanna open it, or me?"
His sister stared at the envelope; it stared (or did the manila equivalent) back quizzically. Swallowing a bite of fries (the good ones, too, not the pasty McDonalds variety), Serenity wiped her hands on a last crumpled wad of paper and fished in her pocket, pulling out a quarter. "Call it." She flipped the coin up; it spun, caught the light, then flickered down to land on her palm before being flipped flat onto the back of her hand. "Heads or tails?"
"Heads."
Up came the hand. "You got it," she announced, and nudged the envelope over with a sock-clad toe.
"Uh-uh," Joey countered, shaking his head and nudging the envelope back with one knuckle, fingertip folded under to keep greasy fingerprints off of it. "I won the flip so I pick. You're gonna open it."
His sister blinked. "Ooh. Kay." Salt scattered across the carpet as she leaned forward to pick it up; a few bits caught in the edges as she slit the top with a fingernail, and the official-looking documents that Serenity pulled slowly out were dusted with the last few grains. Shaking them off absentmindedly, she laid the papers carefully across her knee--
--and read--
--and stopped breathing momentarily. Her jaw didn't so much drop as simply give up on speech for the moment. "NNGH."
Joey only got a glimpse of the header of the documents, which boasted their origin in stately block lettering: Price Waterhouse Cooper. That was...they did stuff with money, didn't they? Investment or banking or - something. Joey waited patiently for his sister to read the papers, but when her face did something like that -
"What is it, Red? Lemme--" Joey tugged the documents out of his twin's mostly unresisting grasp and turned them around, scanning quickly. Several phrases jumped out at him: "the formation of the Wheeler Scholarship Fund" ... "renewable through investment of principal and interest" ... "as designated by Joseph Wheeler and/or Serenity Wheeler" ... "disbursement serially in amounts to be determined" ... "$550,000.00." His attention snagged on that last figure, and he reread the bulk of the "layman's" statement just to be sure he'd understood it right.
The papers Seto had given them were legal documents recording and sealing the establishment of a $550,000 'Wheeler Scholarship' fund, administered by Price Waterhouse Cooper. Joey and Serenity were designated as the distributors. More complicated terminology, which Joey stumbled over and eventually just had to guess at, stated that the fund could be made to be self-sustaining or renewable if the twins wanted, through investments. The money of the fund would be distributed in smaller increments, at the behest of either of the siblings, and - as far as Joey could find on the multi-page document - there were no stipulations or guidelines as to what type of scholarships, or target beneficiaries, the fund should be made to benefit.
$550,000.00 in scholarship money. For the kids. His kids - their kids, Joey amended himself, looking across to his shell-shocked sister.
Joey scanned the letter again, but he wasn't really seeing the words. He remembered the baseball tickets of the year previous, the skate park of the year before that, the Knicks tickets that started the whole chain of extraordinarily heartfelt (and expansively expensive) presents from Seto. And now Serenity was included too; the ordeal of the past year had apparently endeared his twin closely enough to his friend - or at least impressed her upon his mind well enough - that she merited honor as well. Joey acknowledged to himself that Serenity might be benefitting partially because she shared his birthday, as well as being his sibling, but -
He shook his head. In that case, the fund could have been the Joseph C. Wheeler fund. But it wasn't - because Seto had remembered that Serenity had kids of her own. And it had mattered to him, on some level.
Joey looked up from the papers to his sister's face, which was just a little blanched from shock but still as pretty as ever, and grinned fiercely. "He does this," he quipped. Some part of his brain was decent enough to be horrified at how blase he was being - this was over half a million dollars that Seto had just entrusted to them - but -
"He does this." Joey's grin softened into a fond, openly emotional smile, and handed the papers back to Serenity. "Heh. See what I meant 'bout he's got a knack for presents?"
"Oh my god," said his sister faintly in something that was almost horror. "He can't-- Joey, he can't-- Oh my god he CAN do that, can't he?" She took the papers, scanning the text with wide eyes.
"He did."
"Holy shit. Holy..."
Joey smiled wryly. "Yeah."
Something occurred to her then, and the deer-in-the-headlights look abruptly crinkled up into laughter, almost soundless at first and then emerging as wheezes and chortles; Serenity sagged against the couch leg behind her. "He, he said, when I was staying with him-- Joey, I asked him what he'd do if he was me, and he told me he'd, he'd..." She covered her eyes; the papers sagged onto the floor. "He said-- lots of things, but he s-said he was good at finding the money in things..."
Peering out from behind her fingers and still laughing, Serenity waved the documents at her twin. "This is an investment. He's investing in people."
This... could, no it would... change lives. Take them, make potentials possible, give them a chance to grow, open doors that would've otherwise stayed stuck shut; and Seto Kaiba had just given it to them, easy as that-- as a birthday present.
Joey's sister took a gulp of breath. "Does he do this a lot?" she asked weakly, flicking a couple of salt-grains off the top document.
"First birthday I had that I knew him, he gave me season tickets to the Knicks, in those fancy box seats near the court," Joey said. He emptied his lap of food wrappers, dusted his hands off, and rose to his knees, then shuffled over to his sister and braced his back against the couch she'd fetched up against. "The next year, that was when he made me that skate park downtown, Wheeler Skate Park." Tugging his twin partway into his lap, Joey laughed quietly. "Year after that, last year, it was season tickets to the Yankees, on the first base line - one'v the best places in the house. One year for Tris's birthday, can't remember which year it was - got him a race car." Joey stroked Serenity's hair back from her temple, tucking a wayward strand behind her ear absentmindedly, and patted her shoulder comfortingly. "Yeah, y'could say he does this a lot."
She sighed; the papers crackled as she tucked them carefully back into their envelope, leaning it against her brother's knee. "How do you thank somebody for something like this? It's a, a--" It was a little too large to comprehend other than in the abstract: not so much for what it was, but for what it could do... and that was the point, really.
But Hallmark didn't exactly cover situations like this, did they?
Joey curved his palm around his twin's skull, holding her head close against his shoulder, and marveling again, with the persistently distracted back reaches of his brain, how small and delicate she felt to his touch. Meanwhile, he sighed gently - not an expression of labor, or frustration, but simple release - and laced his free hand into one of his sister's.
"You jus' say thank you," Joey told her quietly, stroking his thumb across the silver braided ring on her pinky finger. "That's the thing - try too hard an' he's gonna know you're fakin', or at least he'll be sure you're fakin' anyway even when you aren't." He paused for a moment, and the non-silence of the apartment, including the happy scuffling yips of the neighbor's dog, filled the space. "He gets a lot of that, s'my impression. Lotsa people actin' like they don't actually mean. So...." Joey smiled, propped Serenity up with one hand on each shoulder, and gave her a steady gaze and determined grin underneath it.
"We jus' say thank you. Sincere as we can. We let 'im in on how we're thinkin' bout divvying the money - show him we're treatin' it serious, an' careful. Ask his advice if we want. But mainly - we say thank-you. An' that's gonna be enough - it's gotta be enough."
Beat. Blink. Smirk. "Course, buyin' him burgers wouldn' go awry either."
She thought about this, then slowly gave him his own grin right back. "Burgers and thank-yous it is, yeah." She let out a breath, tension and shock fading into a long, anticipatory burn of happiness and contentment. "Soon's-- when we-- "
"Chill, Red," Joey laughed gently, patting her shoulder. "I got it." Then, shouted jubilantly toward the hallway: "TRISTAN! Seto did it again!" With a happy leap, Joey jumped to his feet, tugged his sister up after him, and led the way to Tristan's bedroom door to give their friend the good news. Behind them, the cats began licking the grease off the hamburger wrappers, and the explosion of happy emotion inspired by Seto's gift filled the apartment like helium, buoying all its inhabitants upward.
The Scene: On their 26th birthday, Joey and Serenity spend the evening in each other's quiet company and follow Seto's specific request by jointly opening his present to them.
Current-Dated to January 25th, 2009.]
"Nfkffph, phs--" That would've been 'Napkin, please' if Serenity hadn't been busy with the last half of a rather large cheeseburger. She sat crosslegged on the floor of her brothers' apartment, greasy paper bag in her lap and a spill of fries sliding their way across the slick wrapper onto her jeans. "Phl--" She swallowed. "Please?"
"Mm-hmm." Joey, midway through a cluster of thick-cut, supremely greasy french fries, nodded and reached for the stack of brown paper napkins at his knee, lifting the top three or four to pass over to his sister. He sat in mirror image of his twin, down to the unbrushed ponytail, and the last bites of a large, messy-looking double-thick cheeseburger sat, partially re-wrapped, in his lap. Two wads of silver foil and greasy paper lay on the floor in front of him, attesting to the burgers he'd already put away - with a much-salted, heavily ketchup-drenched styrofoam container of french fries, half-empty, right beside them. Big disposable cups of soda - Dr. Pepper for both of them - stood on the carpet between the twins, and a low-volume stream of the Grateful Dead piped out of Tristan's living-room stereo system.
For their birthday evening, Serenity and Joey decided on a very low-key affair: quite time together, with the comfort of Tristan's presence in the other room, and dinner. Because this was the Wheeler twins, who, hyperbolically speaking, keep the beef industry alive and well, 'dinner' necessitated burgers - big, thick, just-barely-past-bloody hamburgers and cheeseburgers decked out with enough condiments to make 'everyhing' sound like an understatement. They preferred preferred to patronize a tiny hole-in-the-wall (or, depending on who you asked, hole-in-the-floor) joint about eight blocks over from Tristan and Joey's apartment which exclusively sold burgers and didn't, to the best of the Wheeler twins' knowledge, actually have a name. They knew it as "that joint down the way that has the killer burgers," or often, "the burger place that's got that big-ass neon apple marquee in the apartment above it?" and sometimes simply, "the burger joint."
The first burger (on Serenity's part) and two burgers (on Joey's part) disappeared at an almost distressing rate. Once they'd made headway into their fries and gone to the refrigerator once for refills on their soda, conversation started up naturally and easily between them, covering unimportant but amusing topics. Their focus rotated, however, and eventually came to rest on the item placed in the direct center of their fast food detritus, lain equidistant from each twin and a safe space away from the greasy napkins and wrappers. It was a thickish manila envelope, unmarked, which had been delivered to Joey's office on Friday afternoon.
The gentle double knock on his office doorframe told Joey who it was before he lifted his head from his work.
"Yeah, Rita?"
"Just needed your attention for a minute." The petite, sharp brunette smiled briefly, an expression that advertised she had a secret. Joey raised one brow at her, tucking his pencil into the waves of hair behind his ear, and sat up in his chair, clearly giving her his focus. "Whatcha need?"
The rap of a second, heavier pair of knuckles against the doorframe, and the crisp sound of a very expensive sole on the floor tile, preceded the appearance of a keen pair of blue eyes, and the rest of a canny businessman to match, in Joey's doorway. Seto carried a manila envelope in his hands, and looked - as always - like he'd been born confident and classy. With a grin that spiked into being like lightning, Joey jumped up and hopped around the corner of his desk to greet his friend.
"So." Joey nodded down at the envelope. "You wanna open it, or me?"
His sister stared at the envelope; it stared (or did the manila equivalent) back quizzically. Swallowing a bite of fries (the good ones, too, not the pasty McDonalds variety), Serenity wiped her hands on a last crumpled wad of paper and fished in her pocket, pulling out a quarter. "Call it." She flipped the coin up; it spun, caught the light, then flickered down to land on her palm before being flipped flat onto the back of her hand. "Heads or tails?"
"Heads."
Up came the hand. "You got it," she announced, and nudged the envelope over with a sock-clad toe.
"Uh-uh," Joey countered, shaking his head and nudging the envelope back with one knuckle, fingertip folded under to keep greasy fingerprints off of it. "I won the flip so I pick. You're gonna open it."
His sister blinked. "Ooh. Kay." Salt scattered across the carpet as she leaned forward to pick it up; a few bits caught in the edges as she slit the top with a fingernail, and the official-looking documents that Serenity pulled slowly out were dusted with the last few grains. Shaking them off absentmindedly, she laid the papers carefully across her knee--
--and read--
--and stopped breathing momentarily. Her jaw didn't so much drop as simply give up on speech for the moment. "NNGH."
Joey only got a glimpse of the header of the documents, which boasted their origin in stately block lettering: Price Waterhouse Cooper. That was...they did stuff with money, didn't they? Investment or banking or - something. Joey waited patiently for his sister to read the papers, but when her face did something like that -
"What is it, Red? Lemme--" Joey tugged the documents out of his twin's mostly unresisting grasp and turned them around, scanning quickly. Several phrases jumped out at him: "the formation of the Wheeler Scholarship Fund" ... "renewable through investment of principal and interest" ... "as designated by Joseph Wheeler and/or Serenity Wheeler" ... "disbursement serially in amounts to be determined" ... "$550,000.00." His attention snagged on that last figure, and he reread the bulk of the "layman's" statement just to be sure he'd understood it right.
The papers Seto had given them were legal documents recording and sealing the establishment of a $550,000 'Wheeler Scholarship' fund, administered by Price Waterhouse Cooper. Joey and Serenity were designated as the distributors. More complicated terminology, which Joey stumbled over and eventually just had to guess at, stated that the fund could be made to be self-sustaining or renewable if the twins wanted, through investments. The money of the fund would be distributed in smaller increments, at the behest of either of the siblings, and - as far as Joey could find on the multi-page document - there were no stipulations or guidelines as to what type of scholarships, or target beneficiaries, the fund should be made to benefit.
$550,000.00 in scholarship money. For the kids. His kids - their kids, Joey amended himself, looking across to his shell-shocked sister.
Joey scanned the letter again, but he wasn't really seeing the words. He remembered the baseball tickets of the year previous, the skate park of the year before that, the Knicks tickets that started the whole chain of extraordinarily heartfelt (and expansively expensive) presents from Seto. And now Serenity was included too; the ordeal of the past year had apparently endeared his twin closely enough to his friend - or at least impressed her upon his mind well enough - that she merited honor as well. Joey acknowledged to himself that Serenity might be benefitting partially because she shared his birthday, as well as being his sibling, but -
He shook his head. In that case, the fund could have been the Joseph C. Wheeler fund. But it wasn't - because Seto had remembered that Serenity had kids of her own. And it had mattered to him, on some level.
Joey looked up from the papers to his sister's face, which was just a little blanched from shock but still as pretty as ever, and grinned fiercely. "He does this," he quipped. Some part of his brain was decent enough to be horrified at how blase he was being - this was over half a million dollars that Seto had just entrusted to them - but -
"He does this." Joey's grin softened into a fond, openly emotional smile, and handed the papers back to Serenity. "Heh. See what I meant 'bout he's got a knack for presents?"
"Oh my god," said his sister faintly in something that was almost horror. "He can't-- Joey, he can't-- Oh my god he CAN do that, can't he?" She took the papers, scanning the text with wide eyes.
"He did."
"Holy shit. Holy..."
Joey smiled wryly. "Yeah."
Something occurred to her then, and the deer-in-the-headlights look abruptly crinkled up into laughter, almost soundless at first and then emerging as wheezes and chortles; Serenity sagged against the couch leg behind her. "He, he said, when I was staying with him-- Joey, I asked him what he'd do if he was me, and he told me he'd, he'd..." She covered her eyes; the papers sagged onto the floor. "He said-- lots of things, but he s-said he was good at finding the money in things..."
Peering out from behind her fingers and still laughing, Serenity waved the documents at her twin. "This is an investment. He's investing in people."
This... could, no it would... change lives. Take them, make potentials possible, give them a chance to grow, open doors that would've otherwise stayed stuck shut; and Seto Kaiba had just given it to them, easy as that-- as a birthday present.
Joey's sister took a gulp of breath. "Does he do this a lot?" she asked weakly, flicking a couple of salt-grains off the top document.
"First birthday I had that I knew him, he gave me season tickets to the Knicks, in those fancy box seats near the court," Joey said. He emptied his lap of food wrappers, dusted his hands off, and rose to his knees, then shuffled over to his sister and braced his back against the couch she'd fetched up against. "The next year, that was when he made me that skate park downtown, Wheeler Skate Park." Tugging his twin partway into his lap, Joey laughed quietly. "Year after that, last year, it was season tickets to the Yankees, on the first base line - one'v the best places in the house. One year for Tris's birthday, can't remember which year it was - got him a race car." Joey stroked Serenity's hair back from her temple, tucking a wayward strand behind her ear absentmindedly, and patted her shoulder comfortingly. "Yeah, y'could say he does this a lot."
She sighed; the papers crackled as she tucked them carefully back into their envelope, leaning it against her brother's knee. "How do you thank somebody for something like this? It's a, a--" It was a little too large to comprehend other than in the abstract: not so much for what it was, but for what it could do... and that was the point, really.
But Hallmark didn't exactly cover situations like this, did they?
Joey curved his palm around his twin's skull, holding her head close against his shoulder, and marveling again, with the persistently distracted back reaches of his brain, how small and delicate she felt to his touch. Meanwhile, he sighed gently - not an expression of labor, or frustration, but simple release - and laced his free hand into one of his sister's.
"You jus' say thank you," Joey told her quietly, stroking his thumb across the silver braided ring on her pinky finger. "That's the thing - try too hard an' he's gonna know you're fakin', or at least he'll be sure you're fakin' anyway even when you aren't." He paused for a moment, and the non-silence of the apartment, including the happy scuffling yips of the neighbor's dog, filled the space. "He gets a lot of that, s'my impression. Lotsa people actin' like they don't actually mean. So...." Joey smiled, propped Serenity up with one hand on each shoulder, and gave her a steady gaze and determined grin underneath it.
"We jus' say thank you. Sincere as we can. We let 'im in on how we're thinkin' bout divvying the money - show him we're treatin' it serious, an' careful. Ask his advice if we want. But mainly - we say thank-you. An' that's gonna be enough - it's gotta be enough."
Beat. Blink. Smirk. "Course, buyin' him burgers wouldn' go awry either."
She thought about this, then slowly gave him his own grin right back. "Burgers and thank-yous it is, yeah." She let out a breath, tension and shock fading into a long, anticipatory burn of happiness and contentment. "Soon's-- when we-- "
"Chill, Red," Joey laughed gently, patting her shoulder. "I got it." Then, shouted jubilantly toward the hallway: "TRISTAN! Seto did it again!" With a happy leap, Joey jumped to his feet, tugged his sister up after him, and led the way to Tristan's bedroom door to give their friend the good news. Behind them, the cats began licking the grease off the hamburger wrappers, and the explosion of happy emotion inspired by Seto's gift filled the apartment like helium, buoying all its inhabitants upward.