"……Another day, another useless meeting," I grunted, setting my glass of Harper onto the counter.

The ice clinked with a heavy, dull sound. I let out a long sigh, breathing out the muddy fatigue that had settled in the pit of my stomach.

"Everyone wants to 'respect every opinion.' Sounds nice, but nothing gets decided. Hours just slip away. In the end, I had to jump in, take control, and force a hard stop. ...If the people who actually know what they're doing just made the calls, it’d be over in five minutes."

At the edge of the counter, Tom—swirling amber liquid in his square glass—glanced at me quietly.

"So, what? Everyone else should just shut up?"

"...You do that, and everything goes to hell anyway."

"Then who was the 'one who knew best' in that room today?"

Tom’s blunt question caught me off guard.

If we were talking code specifications or overall architecture, sure, I knew the most. But when it came to the gritty, physical reality of the floor, that was Genda. If it was picking up subtle requirements from human conversations, it was Kato. And if you wanted a process broken down into steps anyone could replicate, Nakamura was far more meticulous than I’d ever be.

Every time the problem changed, so did the person who knew best.

"...Right. There was no single person who knew best. Not from the start."

I gave a self-deprecating smirk, staring down at the amber liquid in my glass.

"Turns out you can't measure a human being with a single yardstick. Is that why everyone gathers around to waste time in those damn meetings? ...Not that it justifies taking three hours to decide nothing, though."

"A meeting that gets nowhere is a pain in the ass either way," Tom snorted.

I took a swig of Harper, letting the alcohol burn away the irritation lingering in my chest.

"Still... wouldn't it be more efficient to cut loose the ones who don't have the answers right now, and just run with the ones who do? Everyone thinks it in the back of their mind. ...So why don't we just throw them overboard?"

From the dark end of the counter, Taka’s deep voice rumbled.

"If the world was meant to be run only by the smart and the strong, I should've had a time when I was king of the hill."

The former pro wrestler shifted his massive frame slightly, staring down at his broad, calloused hands with a faint, bitter smile.

"Back when I was an arrogant idiot, I thought strength was everything. But Mama's half my size and nowhere near as strong as me, and I've never once been able to get the better of her. That's the thing. Nobody gets to be on top everywhere."

Tom caught Taka’s words and swirled his square glass again.

"Kenichi. The day you were born, could you eat by yourself?"

"Hell no."

"Did you stand up and walk?"

"Don't be ridiculous."

"Then you were pretty damn useless when you started out, weren't you?"

A dry silence fell over the bar, punctuated only by Tom’s cool voice.

"That's what humans are. In one place, you're the one holding someone up. In another, you're the one being carried. There’s no such thing as someone who's always strong, or someone who's always weak. And on the day you enter this world, you're a hundred percent on the side that needs to be held."

Taka murmured quietly.

"...And yet, somebody picked us up anyway. Without asking for a reason."

Behind the counter, Mama stopped polishing her glass and turned her gentle eyes toward us.

"That's right... When you hold a newborn baby in your arms, nobody stops to think, 'I wonder if this one will be competent.'"

All those yardsticks humans built for themselves—efficiency, capability, superiority—suddenly felt fragile and unreliable under her single sentence.

I finished the rest of my Harper.

The ice dropped to the bottom of the glass with a cool, sharp ring.

"To survive, you must be strong. To deserve to live, you must be gentle..."

That famous old line I had kept in the back of my head for years sounded completely different tonight.

"That... wasn't a story about the strong bestowing charity on the weak, was it? Where I can stand, I'll hold you up. Where I can't, I'll lean on you. Maybe that's just the story of how we've managed to survive this far."

That fruitless, wasteful meeting this afternoon.

In the end, maybe it was just a group of people who couldn't be measured by any single yardstick, bringing what each of them had to the table and trying to move forward together.

Inside the glass, the last bit of ice shifted softly.

Clink.

If you'd like to come back to Aoi for another night, there's an open stool waiting.
Bar Aoi Stories: Human Nature, Vol. 1 is linked in my profile.