Two Princes

Midorino Mizu

Author’s Note: The title doesn’t have a great deal to do with the story, but I liked it, so it can stay.

They were doing the dishes.

Lissa and Jonathan had had lasagna that night, the kind they sold in the grocery store's freezer section, in big aluminum pans you just stuck in the oven.

Their grandmother would have been scandalized. She'd taught Lissa how to make lasagna from scratch, layering tomato and meat and thin pieces of pasta on top of one another, and baking it in a hot oven.

Lasagna had been Sundays in their family; lasagna, Mass, and her grandmother's fairy stories.

Lissa had begged her grandmother to teach her how to make it, and had vowed to have it for Sunday dinners, just like her grandmother had. She had wanted to have a passel of kids, and have Sundays just like her family's.

She didn't have time for that sort of thing now, so Sundays she and Jonathan had the commercial version and pretended it was homemade.

"You look tired," murmured Jonathan from her right.

Lissa cast a sidelong glance at her brother as she handed him a clean plate to dry. "I am, a bit," she admitted.

Jonathan dried dishes in silence for a while, and Lissa had shrugged off his random comment as just that, random.

Her younger brother wasn't very much like her. At 12, he was tall and gangly, and his straight black hair tended to hang in his face.

He wore glasses, and Lissa had given up on making him keep them clean.

He'd always been quiet, even before their world had gone to hell.

His older sister, on the other hand, had always been bright and vivacious, a petite Italian whirlwind who was, despite appearances, perfectly capable of accomplishing whatever she set out to do.

As she had proved, rather forcefully, over the past year.

She'd started out the year as a freshman student at the University of Maryland.

Their family had lived in Baltimore since they'd gotten off the boat from Italy, practically. Both her grandfather and her father had worked in the shipyards, and she had been the first Ciceraro to go to college.

Then their parents had died in a car accident, and everything had changed.

Lissa had left school, of course, and it hadn't been a difficult decision, despite what her school friends had thought.

Because when it came down to it, it was either lose college or lose Jonathan. And that was no choice at all.

"Hey, Lissa!" Jonathan's voice was loud next to her ear, and Lissa jumped before glaring up at him.

It was pretty sad, she thought, that at twelve her brother was taller than she was at nineteen.

"What?" she asked irritably.

He shook his head at her. "I've been trying to get your attention for the last five minutes, Lissa. What were you thinking about?"

"Nothing," she said quickly. "Why were you trying to get my attention?" she asked.

"Er," started her brother. He rubbed his head and blushed a little. "I wanted to ask you something."

"Well, shoot."

He gave her a look. The sort that said she wasn't helping. Lissa barely stifled an exasperated sigh, and wondered if she had been this difficult when she had been twelve.

Probably, she thought. Maybe worse; she remembered her mother complaining about her overdeveloped sense of drama.

Finally, Jonathan heaved a sigh and spoke. "One of my friends is getting picked on at school a lot, and I don't know what to do."

Lissa raised her eyebrows. "Teachers are no help?" she asked.

Jonathan shook his head. "They can't see all the time, and it's a pretty big group of kids."

Lissa nodded. One of the few benefits of being a teenaged mother figure was that she remembered what junior high and high school was really like.

"Well," she said. "You'll have to rescue him, then."

Jonathan snorted. "Rescue him? Lissa, this isn't one of Grandma's fairy tales."

"Their lessons still apply," she insisted, pointing a soapy wooden spoon at his nose. "Sometimes the Gallant Prince has neither a sword nor a steed, and sometimes the Princess is another Prince.

"That doesn't mean that he doesn't need someone to ride to his aid."

"Cute," muttered Jonathan. "You read too many medieval romances growing up," he claimed.

Lissa flicked soap onto her younger brother. "Never," she said ominously, "mock a woman armed with dishwater."

Jonathan eyed her. "I have a towel," he said.

Before the night was over, they had laughed themselves sick, and they had to clean the kitchen all over again.

But they went to bed happy, and tomorrow was another day.

***

Lissa didn’t get home until late the next night; she was an administrative assistant at one of the many law firms in Baltimore, and it was an unwritten rule that the support staff didn’t leave until the lawyer they worked for either gave permission, or left themselves.

Alex O’Ryan never left on time, and he usually forgot that Lissa was there.

She had taken to making loud, crashing sounds in the main office when she had had enough. Then, Alex would call through the door, telling her she should go home.

It was a system that worked for both of them.

In any case, Lissa finally left the office that night after she “accidentally” knocked a paperweight on the floor, and headed home on the bus.

She grabbed a large pizza at Francisco’s, since it was getting late, and she didn’t feel like cooking.

Which was a good thing, she mused not ten minutes later, as the steak she’d been planning on having was being used for other purposes.

“Can’t I just put ice on it again?” complained Jonathan. He was sitting at the kitchen table with a sirloin over his left eye. His glasses were next to him, bent slightly out of shape.

He had gotten in a fight after school.

“The steak works better,” his older sister claimed. She pressed it harder against his eye, until he batted her hands away.

“I think I can manage it on my own, Melissa Anna Ciceraro.”

The surest sign that a sibling was getting annoyed, Lissa thought wryly, was the use of the full name.

“Fine,” she said out loud. “Since you’re so capable, you can hold it there yourself while you tell me what happened.”

Jonathan eyed her, and then finally sighed. “Well,” he said. “I really could have used a sword.”

“A sword?” Lissa was puzzled, until she worked out what her brother was talking about. “Oh, I see. So you got in a fight with the guys who were tormenting your friend. How many of them were there?”

“Eight,” said Jonathan flatly.

Lissa winced. “Ouch.”

“Yeah,” said Jonathan. “But maybe it’ll work.”

Lissa raised her eyebrows. “Violence doesn’t solve anything, Jonathan. Are you going to get in a fight every time someone threatens your friends?”

“You’re the one who told me to rescue Max,” he pointed out.

“I had something a bit more verbal in mind,” she returned. “I wasn’t expecting that you would start punching people.”

Jonathan gave her a baleful look out of his one visible eye. “High school wasn’t that long ago, was it Lissa? You should remember that there are always people who don’t understand anything but physical violence.”

Lissa opened her mouth as if to protest, but Jonathan forestalled her.

“Anyway, I’m hungry. Can we eat now? The pizza’ll get cold.”

Lissa huffed out a breath. “Fine,” she said. “Put the steak back in the refrigerator, and get out some napkins and drinks.”

“What do you want?” asked Jonathan as he plunked a pile of napkins on the table.

“I’ll have a Coke,” she said.

Jonathan got out Cokes for both of them, and for a while they ate the cheesy, saucy pie in silence, before Lissa pointed a finger at Jonathan’s glasses.

“We’ll have to go to the Mall tonight, and see about getting those fixed,” she said. “Or you won’t be able to see anything at school tomorrow.

“Yeah, yeah,” Jonathan said between bites. “Not like I’ll really miss anything.”

Lissa whacked him on the back of the head, and he nearly spit Coke all over the table. “School is important,” she said.

“Ow.” He glared at her. “Was that necessary?” He swiped a hand across his hair, and his fingers came away red. “And you got tomato sauce in my hair!”

Lissa gave him a bland stare. “I’m sure you’ll survive,” she said.

Jonathan narrowed his eyes at his sister. “Vengeance will be mine,” he said, in what he hoped were ominous tones.

“Sure, hon,” said his sister as she licked sauce off her fingers. “You just keep telling yourself that.”

Jonathan’s eyebrow twitched slightly. Living alone with his sister could be such a pain, because he could never really retaliate; his course of action was extremely limited because, well, she was a girl. So he did the only thing he could do.

He stuck out his tongue.

Lissa made appropriate noises, and they ate the rest of the pizza in amused silence.

The next time someone asked if it was really hard to live alone with his nineteen-year-old sister, he knew what to tell him or her.

Yeah, it was hard, and they both had to work ceaselessly to stay together.

But living alone with Lissa was better than living totally without her.

So, it was worth it.

~fin

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