✅ My Cousin's Keeper [NaNoWriMo 2021]

17. My Suspicious Nature

Tess was as good as her word. When the timer on her food started beeping, she went to get it herself. Ffrances called through telling her to put the remains of a jug of cheese sauce in the microwave for thirty seconds before pouring it over, and suggested that she could add some bacon or chop veggies if she wanted. She'd set the timer on the oven to allow a few minutes for preparing fillings, and there were plenty of options for the little girl to choose from.

She decided against a glass of wine in the end, although I think she poured herself a little taster before making that decision. When she came back, we had almost finished ours. But I ate slowly, taking plenty of time for conversation so that she wouldn't be left sitting alone at the table. She told us a little about her day, although there was little enough that I could understand. It seemed that it had just been girls chatting about typical girl stuff, whatever that meant for this particular group of friends. The story was pretty vague once the details of what and who they talked about had been redacted, but I could feel safer knowing that Tess had a good time. After that we moved on to sharing a little backstory about how I'd met Ffrances, although the version we told between us included a few funny details that I was sure I didn't remember happening. It was fun to return to old memories, and amusing to see which parts my love wanted to subject to a little artistic license.

"The real question," she said, as I returned from the kitchen after filling up our glasses, "is who's the weird retro dude with purple hair?"

"You haven't heard of Captain Kairo?" I raised an eyebrow. "Perhaps we need to educate you. What do you think, Tess?"

"I don't know either," she answered with a shrug. "I know you were obsessed with him, but I never got into it myself. I think I was too young to understand it back then, and after we left the country..."

"Okay, then you both need to be shown. Just put your critical brain on hold for a while. It can be cheesy, but he bears it with pride." Nobody got the joke, which just made me more determined to show them the jewel in the crown of turn-of-the-century, intentionally cliché nostalgia fuel.

We had a dozen streaming services set up on the TV, so it took quite some time to determine that none of them had Captain Kairo. When that failed, I searched on my phone to find out how best to watch it now. It turned up a niche service that would allow us to watch a hundred different 'vintage' Asian shows, none of which I had heard of. Still, I thought that revisiting one of my childhood addictions was worth the price of a free trial, and quickly signed us up.

"So what's the deal here?" Ffrances asked. "It's just a TV show? Or is there like a movie and a game franchise to go with it? And what language is that?"

"I'm not sure. The language, I mean. It's a comedy drama cartoon thing, it just seemed to perfectly capture how I was feeling at the time. Half parody, and then that just makes it hit harder when they do a serious one. Maybe it's not as good as I remember, I just... it's kind of special to me. I hope that if you watch it, you might be able to see why it hooked me so much. I got into it because I got a gift from a friend, but when I started watching it it just... felt like the writers really understood me, in a way."

They asked more questions, of course. I realised as I was answering that a lot of what made Captain Kairo significant to me was more about my worldview than the show itself, and the place I'd been at mentally. But I was desperate to see now if it would still have all the feels that I remembered. Finally, managing to navigate the confusing menus and find an option for English subtitles, I pressed play.

We all laughed. That was the most important thing. And there was never a time that something didn't make sense after being a decade separated from the show, not remembering most of the details. From slapstick violence to the emotional sucker punch of Valkyrie's dog dying, everything was just as crisp as I remembered. The animation wasn't good, and the subtitles weren't perfect, but it was easy to give it a pass on those due to its age, and the fact that the characters would casually refer to the problems as if it was an inside joke they were sharing with us.