Chapter Text
I enter the living room of Aoi and I’s apartment to the usual chaos.
Team Athena’s biweekly games and movie marathon was last night and into the early morning of today.
Thankfully, they are all still sleeping. Or at least most of them. Stay Gold is staring out the window at the streets below as rain begins to fall. Dream Journey is reading one of the books from the home office and balancing Orfevre against her side on the couch so she doesn’t fall into an “undignified” position in her sleep.
Gold Ship and Nakayama Festa have ended up sharing a pillow, but are starfished out in opposite directions across the floor. They nearly cross the whole room. Happy Meek is still curled up on the reclining chair, but her ears are flicking meaning she is close to waking.
I hear the coffee maker going as I walk to the kitchen.
“Good morning, Boss!” Fenomeno says a bit too loudly before catching herself. “Ah, sorry.”
“G’morning to you, too, Meno.” I chuckle and take the cup of coffee she hands over. “Thank you.”
There is a faint blush across her cheeks, which is honestly very cute especially on someone of her stature, when I take a sip and mumble a small “perfect”.
“It’s too early for this.” The grumbly voice belonging to Athena’s newest member interrupts from the table, making Fenomeno shake her head with an even redder face and start setting up the ingredients for our food.
Narita Taishin has her head on her arm as she plays a game on her phone.
“If you’re gonna be all grumpy, Taishin, you’ll be joining us on breakfast duty.” I threaten lightly, not really seriously.
She raises her head, looking at us as Meno holds out an apron to me and one to Aoi, who has entered the kitchen now.
“Ok.” The smaller uma says and puts her phone in her pocket before getting up.
“O-oh.” I fumble a second, surprised by her agreeing.
We whip around the kitchen preparing piles and piles of pancakes and eggs and bacon, which were chosen for this time’s breakfast.
“Meno, dear, would you mind waking up the others?” Aoi asks and the woman in question freezes up for a second.
“Yes, Boss!” She shouts rigidly with a blush once more and we can hear a groan from the living room, probably Gold Ship. The tall uma then hurries out of the kitchen to fulfill her new duty. “TIME TO GET UP! FOOD!”
I chuckle. She knows exactly how to get through to the sleeping umas.
Meek is already waiting patiently at a set table as the others drag themselves into the room. She must have snuck in when we were cooking. Though how did she get the plates and everything without us knowing?
“She likes you.” The quietest of our band of misfits says. “Both of you.”
“Ah…” Aoi isn’t sure how to address what her trainee said, but she doesn’t have to as a certain Ship rushes her way into the room and to her seat, almost pushing Festa over in the process.
Gold Ship stole one of the chairs the first time she had visited the apartment. I honestly don’t know how the hell she managed to, but it later reappeared, decorated and bearing her name across the backrest.
“Once more, I am glad we thought to get the giant table.” I say to Aoi and kiss her cheek as I sit down next to her, Fenomeno is watching us almost longingly from her seat closer to the other end of the oval table. “Meek, thanks for setting the table.”
“Welcome.” I hear her say before she is drowned out by the regular noise of the group.
As everyone has eaten their fill, and nearly had a small war between Golshi and Stego over the last pancake, I stand up.
“Today is a rare rest day for all of us. The schedules have aligned this week. I will be taking whoever wants to go back to the dorms in about an hour. And whoever else wants to hang out here some more, you are welcome to. Just let us know whenever you are heading out, ok?”
The apartment is not far from Tracen, well within walking distance or a short jog for the umamusume, but I always offer to drive them.
They start clearing up the table and bringing things to Stego and Festa, who are on dish duty.
People are often very shocked when I tell them that the Team is actually a bit easy to control.
Maybe easy is an overstatement, but it is not as bad as they assume. It definitely was in the beginning, but now we have settled into a sort of rhythm.
I had originally moved here from Canada to be with my wife. We met when she had come to see some races over there with her family. Her cousin had a trainee participating. I happened to be there watching my brother’s trainee that day, so I was in the stands and not down by the track.
By some miracle Aoi and I ended up talking before the race about uma and training ideas at first, but then we got into a lot of other topics. Her father had quickly excused himself with a wink her way. He had seen it way before we did.
We hung out many times before her family went back to Japan and after we would talk over the phone and video whenever we could, given the time difference and our works.
On my last visit to Japan, 2 years later to begin the process of transferring to Tracen and finalizing the paperwork to be a Trainer in this country, Aoi had surprised me. She beat me to it. She proposed to me and I couldn’t hold back a laugh as tears filled my eyes and I pulled out the ring box from my pocket. She joined the laughter with her own tears.
Trainers don’t make a fortune or anything close, but her family is quite well off. They insisted we get the biggest apartment and that it be fully bought and not rented. We did try to protest, but her parents weren’t having it.
When I had started working at Tracen, Fenomeno and Nakayama Festa had caught my eye. I had worked with multiple uma before, so taking them both on as trainee was almost a no brainer. Especially since it seemed Meno wanted no one else and Festa didn’t really seem to care any which way until Meno dragged her to my office with her.
Gold Ship was the next to join us. I had never seen her so genuinely distraught as the day her old trainer had had enough and couldn’t handle her chaos anymore and quit. Its wasn’t the fake tears she pulls on McQueen, but an actual sadness and despair that dragged her down. Festa had told me she was hiding in an unused classroom near Tachyon’s lab because Golshi didn’t want anyone to see her like that. She almost seemed to believe I would eventually give up on her, too, when I offered to take her on as my own. It took some convincing, but soon she accepted and was back to her menace ways.
At that point it was decided we would need to make a Team considering we now had three members, four if we were including Aoi’s trainee, Meek. Thus Team Athena was born.
Orfevre had joined us after she decided her old trainer wasn’t good enough. I do feel bad for the guy, he isn’t a bad trainer by any means. Just not up to her standards it seems. I heard he took a vacation and is back with a new trainee and doing well this year. Orfevre was intrigued mostly by how well I was able to redirect Gold Ship’s extensive energy and by how well her training was going. She wanted to challenge her and my training style. Apparently, I passed her unspoken tests because she is still here.
Dream Journey followed Orfevre. She seemed to be doing very well with her own trainer, but she gave it up to follow the regal uma. I still do not understand her or why she made such a decision, but I have learned to not question it or her. For my own safety.
Taishin and Stego both joined around the same time, with Taishin last. Stego just appeared and announced she was joining Athena. Everyone was very confused. In all honesty a lot of people thought she had dropped out the year before with how she had just vanished with very few able to contact her at all. Taishin on the other hand was similar to Orfevre. She had seen how well Gold Ship was doing as a closer and demanded I take her on. The difference being she didn’t already have a trainer.
It was honestly very hard in the beginning, learning to balance so many different trainings and race plans and everything. I believed I was managing well enough, but I guess the struggle was beginning to be noticed as Tazuna had sneakily assigned two assistants to Athena in an attempt to combat my (and Aoi’s since she is officially a trainer for the Team, too) workload. She and Akikawa knew the girls would be very resistant to getting assigned different trainers and also knew very, very few would be willing to even work with some of them.
Am I still overloaded and overworked? Hell yes. Would I change any of it? Hell no.