Work Text:
“What do you want, Isshiki?”
Kinokuni Nene has a singular talent for only ever betraying a calculated reaction in the face of just about anything. She’s nothing if not pragmatic, and utterly intolerant of any kind of sloppiness, and has only grown more and more so over time, so that now her default response to a wide array of stimuli is more likely than not to be a frosty, inscrutable disinterest.
But Kinokuni Nene is also more transparent than she appears, if you know her well, and while neither of them would ever call the other a friend Satoshi allows himself, privately, to indulge in the awareness that he must know her better than most. And so he recognizes all the signs when he appears by her booth in the empty lounge cabin—some slow blinking, a subtle tension in her shoulders and the column of her spine as she sits up straighter. When she turns her head to regard him sidelong Satoshi makes himself nonthreatening in turn, as he has learned to do; relaxing his posture, keeping a decorous distance.
They’re on the penultimate leg of the trip home, speeding back the way they came to catch a plane at Sapporo. The cabin lights are dim, reflective of the early hour, and the pale yellow glow of the bulbs overhead does little, really, to warm up her expression, falling aslant against the narrow planes of her face, casting the half of it he can’t quite see into shadow.
Satoshi remembers her being an early riser, but he’ll admit he’s a little surprised she’s not only kept the habit, but taken it to such an extreme.
“I was just going to ask,” Satoshi says, with a patience usually reserved for the most ornery of his tomato plants, “if the seat across from you was taken.”
“Oh.” Her voice is just a little curt, a little clipped. If the question has surprised or otherwise unbalanced her at all it only shows in the pause she has to take before she answers, “I’m alone.”
Hardly a congenial invitation to sit, but it’s not an outright rejection either. This is likely to be the best he’ll get from Nene, who like as not would simply slam a door in his face if she didn’t want him there, and often has.
“No Eizan-kun, then?” Satoshi should know better than to push the envelope, but he can never resist teasing a little when it’s her, or someone else who’s similarly tense in his presence. It’s the one card he’ll always have in his hand, and he can play it shamelessly when he truly sets his mind to it.
Right on cue, Nene pulls a face so caustic he can almost feel his skin burn. “Is that your idea of a joke?”
“Maybe. Or maybe I’m just jealous that you seem to hate him more than me,” he says—lightly, lightly, like he hasn’t joked with Rindou about this so many times it’s become something of a thing between them. Come back, Isshiki. Nene’s going to hang Eizan up by his toes if you don’t. You know, Isshiki, they sat together on the plane and I swear to you she wanted to stuff him into the overhead bin. She’d have done it, too, if there weren’t so many people around. “You must get to spend so much more time together with me and Kuga-kun gone.”
“You hate him too. Don’t pretend you weren’t happy to be free of him.”
(She doesn’t say “and of me, too,” but there’s something the way the sentence ends a little abruptly, the way she presses her lips into a line to stop herself from saying more, that makes Satoshi wonder if she might have been thinking it.)
“I’ve never threatened to stab him in the hand with my pen.” He smiles to soften the violence. “Well, may I?”
Nene shrugs. Her unconcern looks almost genuine. “Do as you like.”
So Satoshi does, sliding in across from her—a little diagonally rather than right in front, because there’s no need to be confrontational, because this is no chess game they’re playing, so early in the morning. He leans back, stretches his legs out under the table as far as they will go. Nene sits ramrod straight, ankles crossed primly, fingers interlocked in her lap and knuckles white as they get when she’s not sure how much she’s allowed to be troubled about something.
The silence hangs between them, grows thick as Satoshi looks diffidently away from Nene and out the window instead, searching for shapes in the darkness. A telephone wire. The crest of a hill.
“Was there something you wanted to talk about?”
He’s surprised when she’s the one who breaks it, and more than a little proud even if he will not tell her so. There is something; maybe that something is many things he’s been wanting to speak with her about since the Regiment de Cuisine. Except it had been easy to delay in favor of other, more urgent concerns, like victory. Like saving people, dramatic as that might sound, like something out of a storybook.
Or perhaps that was just urgency of a different sort—the kind that was always easier to justify, because it was concerned with big things, futures and freedom and the rest. This nebulous something that he now needs to talk about with Nene is between herself and him, a me-and-you sort of question and nothing more; no wonder it’s so easy, really, to set it aside. To insist it doesn’t matter much in the grand scheme of things, as he’s been doing for years, if he chooses to be honest, if only with himself.
“What do you think will happen when we come back?” Even as he says it he’s aware it’s the most arbitrary question he’s ever heard.
“Who knows. At the very least, the council will have to reform.”
“Would you accept a seat, when it does?”
“It’s not up to me. It’s Nakiri’s call as headmistress.”
“It is, isn’t it.” He doesn’t bother to point out to her that that’s not what he was asking. “But would you accept, if she recommended you?”
“Why would she do that?”
“You ask that like it’s out of the question.” Satoshi’s own hands are open, the palms upturned, placating. “You were the person we all went to when we wanted a thing done. You know the workings of the council, and you’re familiar to her in that capacity. She’ll have her friends around her, of course, but they can’t start from nothing, or learn how to do everything on their own.”
To anyone but her, Satoshi is certain, it would sound like a perfectly reasonable argument.
“I wasn’t on her side, Isshiki,” she points out. She doesn’t say your side, but it probably means the same thing. “If we hadn’t lost I’d have helped get you all expelled.” After a pause, she adds, so bitterly it hurts a little to hear it, “If I hadn’t lost.”
He shrugs. “That was that. This is this. And we all know more now than we did before, wouldn’t you say?”
In another place, and maybe if he were a different sort of person, Satoshi imagines it would be easier to remind her of all the things she knows now—to let things between them be simple, to say in case you were wondering, I meant what I said. And when she asked which part he would say all of it.
Instead, because they are here—which is to say between places, which is to say nowhere in particular—and because he is himself, he asks again: “So, would you?”
When she counters “Would you?” without so much as a pause, it might be the one thing he had not expected.
“What difference does it make? I was hardly expecting you to want to take a page from my book when it comes to decision-making.”
“I’m not looking to you,” she says, sighing as though he should know better. “It makes all the difference, but that’s not why.”
She doesn’t elaborate, and he doesn’t ask. Even the train has nothing more to say—none of the metallic clattering Satoshi’s ears have come to look for, no rattling, no hunger. Only state-of-the-art technology carrying them to a city that as yet is only a promise whispered into the predawn dark, forward, forward.
When they pull into the station at Sapporo an hour later the sky’s just started to turn a paler blue, muted rose and yellow low on the horizon, only the faintest suggestion of a sun. Satoshi knows it will come, but there’s pleasure in staying a little longer to wait for it, so he leans back in his seat and lets Nene go ahead of him, as the courteous, toneless voice of the conductor announces to all passengers that they have safely arrived.
The next time, she’s the one who comes to sit with him. He imagines he’d be happier about this if the first words out of her mouth weren’t “I’m going to kill you.”
Hardly an ideal morning greeting for the year’s last day of class, when every normal person within a ten-kilometer radius must be telling their friends how much they’ll miss them over the winter holidays. Instead, he has Kinokuni Nene sliding into the empty space on the bench beside him with her shoulders squared high, almost in fighting stance, producing a pen like a drawn sword from the front pocket of her bag.
“You would murder very prettily, I imagine,” he tells her evenly, ignoring the concerned glance from the classmate on his other side, the curious angle at which the girl in front of him turns her head, clearly eavesdropping. “You might want to get me somewhere less crowded, though.”
“Don’t be cute,” she hisses, scowling.
“I can’t not be what I am. At least tell me what I’ve done, before you put that pen somewhere painful.” He keeps one eye on the hand with the aforementioned pen, just in case.
“You sent Yukihira to me.”
So that’s what this is about. He had somehow found the time, even with the semester ending and their school’s administration turning somersaults and all the attendant chaos. Trust Souma to make things move even without knowing why, or how, or what needs to move in the first place.
“I didn’t send him,” Satoshi insists, and this part is absolutely true. “Have you seen anyone make Souma-kun do anything? As well try to stop an avalanche.”
“Then what did you tell him that gave him the impression that he could come to me for advice?”
The real story is that Souma had come home after a full day of shokugeki challenges and found Satoshi making dinner in the kitchen, and still had enough spit in him to ask “Hey, so how’s things with you and Kinokuni-senpai?”
Satoshi had not asked what brought it on, had only said, “Oh, the same as always.” Nene doesn’t need to know the whole story, anyway.
“Nothing he didn’t already know. He’s been wanting to experiment more with soba since your match, and he was impressed by your kneading technique.” All true. Satoshi is many things that she will not suffer, but let it not be said that he’s ever lied to her outright. “He knows there’s a lot he can learn from you.”
“He beat me,” she reminds him. Her frown deepens all the more when he waves it away, fluttering one hand.
“A minor detail.”
“Hardly minor.” There’s a faint flicker of hurt in her eyes he doesn’t know how to address. It’s just as well that he never gets to; she blinks, or maybe he does, and it’s gone as though it had never been there in the first place. “I wouldn’t know how to teach him.”
“Well, maybe you could teach me. Then I could teach him, and he’d never have to bother you again.”
“Maybe you could stop making bad jokes. You know all about how we do it.”
Perhaps, but it’s been so long since he made his own soba. Longer still since he last had the chance to watch her in the kitchen, close-up, without the distraction of a class humming around them, or an exam they had to perform for.
He imagines that Nene would teach better than she thinks; she has all the diligence for it, if not always the patience to put things into words. He thinks of the underclassmen, working at new recipes together in the kitchen, teaching each other, and thinks he would want something like that for her. A little less distance, a little more warmth—for that esteem others have for her to take root in something more intimate than the sight of her name high on a list of the top-ranked students in their year, or in the school. But none of that matters, of course, if she doesn’t want it for herself.
“Maybe I want you to remind me how you do it.” Still mostly true, though Satoshi recognizes the danger in letting her know how much. So he tilts his head at her instead, smiles the smile that makes Tadokoro glower when he turns it on her across the ping-pong table, the one she insists is always a foul, for the way it confounds everything. “Maybe I’d like you to come visit me at the dorm when all my kouhai go home for winter break.”
Nene flushes scarlet then, all the way down to her collar. “Don’t be stupid, Isshiki.”
“Too late. You know that better than anyone.” He chuckles. He may or may not mean it; it’s not as if he isn’t used to keeping an empty house twice a year, summer and winter. Better than a house full of strangers, where it doesn’t matter where you go, or when you return.
“And you?” Her expression shifts again, flattens out until he can no longer imagine what she might be thinking.
“What about me?”
“Are you not going home?”
“Polar Star is my home, Kinokuni,” he says, turning conveniently away from her when the bell rings, bringing his eyes to the front of a classroom with an attentiveness that she would be the first to say was completely unlike him. “I’m a freeloader, remember?”
He can still see her watching him, out of the corner of her eye. Once or twice she looks as if she’s about to say something more, but class is starting, and they’ve run out of chances to talk.
The mochi is on the table when Satoshi comes down to make breakfast on New Year’s Eve, navy blue wrapping cloth falling away to reveal the box, an unsigned card taped to the lid. He traces an idle fingertip over the brushstrokes curving dark and graceful around the syllables of his name, and decides he doesn’t need to call down the hall for Fumio, to ask who it is from.
There’s a number he’s never had a reason to call at the back of his mind, that still comes back easy when he faces the phone in the entrance hall. There’s no time to second-guess the call, either, when it goes through in two rings.
“Yes, this is Kinokuni Nene speaking.”
Satoshi can’t help smiling at her tone—so measured, so professional—and he has to press the back of his hand to his mouth to keep it quiet. This is the house phone, it must be, but he’s absolutely certain that were he to call the restaurant in the middle of a business day he would hear much the same.
“Good morning, Kinokuni Nene,” he says, and counts the seconds while she makes sense of the sound of his voice, fully prepared for the possibility that at the end of it she could choose to simply hang up.
In Satoshi’s imagination the house hasn’t changed since his last visit. All the old wood, the dusty light in the windows. The phone on a kitchen counter Nene had once been too small to even see over, to one side of a stack of cookbooks.
“Isshiki.”
“This won’t be long,” Satoshi assures her. “I just wanted to thank you for the mochi.”
Satoshi remembers they had not been allowed to help Nene’s father and uncles make it the old way when they were small, in the big mortar behind the house, pounding the rice with wooden mallets that were each too heavy for a child to lift alone. Her mother had taught them how to make it stovetop instead, with hot water in a pot and the sweet rice already ground to flour, and the two of them taking turns stirring a little at a time.
Maybe this is not a good time to be so nostalgic. But tomorrow he will take his sharpest knife and slice the mochi up into bite-sized pieces to toast on Souma’s charcoal grill, and it will taste like a quiet morning in his childhood, like the sort of time when things are simple.
“My family wishes you well.” She doesn’t clarify if that’s meant to include her or not.
“Thank you. I’ll give you a card for them when I see you next.” Likewise, he doesn’t ask her if she would like one for herself. “I should have posted it earlier this month, but...”
He doesn’t know what should come after that but. He is not like Nene, who measures out her speech the way she does everything else and never says anything without a reason, every word considered and careful and precise. Sometimes Satoshi speaks simply because it feels natural to say something, for no purpose but the pleasure of the engagement, and if a certain thought meanders in all directions as he puts it into words, only to end nowhere in particular, well, so be it.
“They won’t mind,” she says. “Don’t worry.”
“Thank you,” says Satoshi, again. He is grateful, suddenly, that she can’t see the way he curls the telephone cord around his finger, the slow tentative sweep of his eyes down to the floorboards, back up to the wall. “Well, I’d best not keep you. You probably have a busy day.”
“Mm.” It’s a sound that can mean anything. Right now the most logical thing to assume would be that it means their conversation is over, except Nene speaks up again. “Isshiki.”
Nothing follows. Satoshi watches a few dust motes dance in the sunbeam spilling through the window.
“... Yes?”
“Yes, what?”
It happened to you, too, he thinks, and wants to laugh. It’s a small mercy, that she seems in this moment to know as little as he does about what they’re supposed to be saying to each other. But he will file it away in his memory, carefully, remind himself not to take it for granted.
“You said ‘Isshiki.’ Was there something after?”
“No, I don’t think so.” She’s started clipping her words again, the way she does when she’s unsettled. “I’m sorry. Take care.”
You guys are so weird, Souma would say, probably, if he were here to listen.
“Goodbye, then,” he says, and waits for her to hang up.
“There’s a girl here to see you,” Fumio had said into the pipe leading up to his room, less than ten minutes ago.
Satoshi isn’t sure, now, what he had expected. He can only say for certain that the most befuddling thing about seeing Kinokuni Nene waiting in the entrance hall of his dorm is the sack of buckwheat flour at her feet.
“Well, this is a surprise,” he remarks. Carrying that sack up the steps and into the house alone looks like it’d have been no mean feat, but she’s not winded at all, even a little—just dour, as if her visit here is a chore she’s still convincing herself is necessary.
“My mother remembered how much she liked feeding you. I told her you probably hadn’t even finished the mochi.”
The calendar on the wall above her head reads January third. What a blessing that Nene’s mother still remembers him so fondly after all these years; fondly enough, at least, to forgive the New Year’s card he hasn’t yet sent. To say nothing of all the cards he’s been remiss in sending over the last five years.
“Let me show you to the freezer. Should I—” He cuts himself off as she bends to lift the sack in her arms, his question already answered, for all intents and purposes. “You don’t need my help, do you.”
“No, I don’t,” she agrees, and nods at him to lead the way.
Without preamble she carries the flour into the kitchen and puts it where he shows her, in one of the empty chest freezers. It’s strange to see her here, in his home, like past and present aligning. It’ll be even stranger to scoop out a cup of that flour later and be taken back instantly to the kitchen at her house, ten years ago—a fragrance oddly similar to black sesame wafting up from the mixing bowl, the buckwheat ground so fine it felt like cream when Satoshi passed his hands through it.
“I don’t suppose you want to cook with me anytime soon.”
“Not today,” Nene tells him. “Today I want to talk to you.”
That makes him incline his head, attentive and intrigued. “About something other than the flour?”
She shrugs. “The flour only made coming here more convenient.”
So, that’s how it is. Kinokuni Nene doesn’t lie. She’s too severe for that, or maybe too honest.
“Let’s go outside,” says Satoshi. “I want to show you my garden.”
There’s nothing there now, so deep into winter, but that might even be the point. To her credit, Nene doesn’t stop him with questions, and hesitates only a beat before she follows him back out of the kitchen.
“We’re headed out, Fumio-san,” he calls as they walk past her room, smiling benignly when she pokes her head out through the gap in the doorway.
“Isshiki.” There’s a note of warning in her voice that makes Nene’s brows furrow, but he only grins all the wider.
“For a walk only. Cross my heart.”
“Rascal.” Fumio shakes her head, makes a sound that comes out like something between a laugh and a scoff. But her eyes when she turns them on Nene are kind. “Don’t forget to bundle up, girl.”
“She likes you,” Satoshi supplies helpfully as he holds the door open, casts a last wry glance at the house before he sets off down the path. “I can tell. Come on.”
Nene keeps pace with him as they walk, around one side of the house and down toward the field that is Satoshi’s life—his heart and home and the reason he gets up in the morning, quite literally. His garden grows year-round in normal circumstances; six months ago he’d been looking forward to daikon this winter, and leeks and Swiss chard. But then, as he’d told Fumio with a twinkle in his eye, there’d been a war to fight, and he could hardly let her tend the crops alone.
So this year there is nothing but plain earth under their feet, last season’s furrows for him and Nene to stand in, under a sky the color of smoke. It’s a little sad to see them so empty, he won’t deny, but maybe there is promise too, for all that, as the soil sleeps overwinter.
It’s certainly a romantic notion—that there’s a season for everything, that nothing is ever wasted.
“I’ll plant spinach in around a month, and cucumbers. Tomatoes in the summer. Do you like tomatoes, Kinokuni?
Nene shrugs. “What kind?”
“Any kind. You can’t go wrong with them, in my book.” He beams, scuffing the soil fondly with the toe of one shoe. “They’re fussy as all hell, prone to wilt and blight and every kind of pest there is. They’ll get sick from too much sun, too much shade, too much water or too little, but when they bear fruit, it’s worth all the effort in the world. Like your soba, yes?”
She doesn’t answer, only inclines her head. Waiting for him to finish, no doubt, waiting for something to make sense. Satoshi can’t blame her in the least.
“The first crop I turned back in middle school, I couldn’t help thinking I got it, finally, what you were always working so hard for. ‘That Kinokuni,’ I thought. ‘She’d appreciate a good tomato.’” It's silly, really. He still remembers wanting to run and tell her as soon as he saw the first fruit on the vine, even if by then they hadn’t had a proper conversation in a year.
Those are still the things he wants to tell her now. Something about what gardening in the mild months is like, how good the soil smells when the water from the hose hits it and turns it suddenly dark and full of life. Something about all the things you can do with just your hands and your full attention.
Nene frowns, arms folded close against her body—to protect herself, or simply to keep herself warm. She always did catch a chill easily. “Why didn’t you say anything to me?”
“I didn’t know how. We were so little when I lived in your house. And after that, well.” After that, he does not say, he returned to Kyoto in her family’s car and could never quite bring himself to ask to speak to her, no matter how many times his mother called her mother on the phone. Not so much for lack of things to say as a quiet, persistent fear that she wouldn’t hear him anymore, no matter what. “You had ideas of your own, by then.”
“So it’s my fault,” she retorts bluntly.
Out here in the cold with nowhere to hide Satoshi feels its edge, knows he has to mind how he goes, this time. “No, never. I never thought so.” But I assumed then that I had as good as lost you, so what did it matter.
Five years it’s been easier to assume things, that’s all. Easier to assume things and let the opportunities to speak to her face to face pass him by, and not imagine a possible world where they might have been something like friends if he hadn’t been so silly and afraid.
That’s always how it pans out in stories, isn’t it—the hero never says the things he wants to say, until he’s about to die? And it’s only ever because he’s afraid.
The truth is that he had never meant to tell her, that he had imagined she was past needing to know. I meant what I said. Which part? All of it.
The part about how much I respect you, and how I wish you would speak more kindly of yourself. How I’ve never forgotten what I saw that day, or how it felt, even now. Even now.
And yet here they are now, accounting for a possibility that neither of them could ever have imagined: Nene standing beside him in his wintering garden, tired and cold and frowning down at the bare earth underfoot like she doubts its capacity to ever yield anything alive. But listening, still listening.
And that is the end of the story, or maybe the beginning.
“It’s so hard to talk to you,” she says.
“I know,” he answers. The truth is that at times like these he wouldn’t wish himself upon anyone, least of all her. “But you’re good at difficult things.”
When Nene answers the door, Satoshi’s first thought is But you hate contact lenses. The second is that there are waves in her hair.
“You look lovely,” he says, by way of greeting, though it comes out sounding more sympathetic than he might have originally intended. “Did your mother put you up to it?”
“She’s always like this when we have guests over.” Nene sighs, chances a quick look over her shoulder as if she’s worried someone might be listening. “You’re early.”
Satoshi pushes his hands deeper into his coat pockets to keep from fiddling with the buttons at his collar. He’d considered a tie earlier this evening, holding it up to his throat in front of the standing mirror, hanging it up because it was too much, taking it down again. Somewhere around the third time Souma had glimpsed him through the door on his way back to his own room and asked where he was going, decked out so nice.
Maybe I’ve got a date tonight. Jealous, Souma-kun?
Never mind that a date wouldn’t have taken nearly so much fussing. He’s been fussing so much it’s almost embarrassing to acknowledge it for what it is, even if no one else can tell—fussing since Nene called two days ago at her parents’ behest and asked if he was free to come to dinner on Sunday.
Nobody needs to know, least of all her, how many times he’s checked the date since waking up this morning. Sunday, January seventh. Sunday, January seventh. Or how many times he’s considered and reconsidered a tie.
Now Satoshi puts all his faith in the hope that her impeccable manners, at the very least, will prevent her from retracting that very offer at the door. “I was happy to receive your invitation.”
“You can thank my family,” she answers crisply, even as she stands aside to let him in.
He bows his head a little, obliging. “This is for your family, then.”
The sake bottle that he places in her hands is from Ryouko’s personal stores. The second-best bottle, she’d said, a smile flickering like a candle flame about her mouth as she took it down from the shelf. No need to make too much of an impression, senpai.
“They’ll be very grateful, I’m sure.” He watches Nene inspect the handwritten label with her usual solemn attention before she nods and gestures for him to go before her into the house.
Her house is so much like he remembers it’s as if he could build it again from memory—the grassy smell of new tatami, the gentle shadows cast by this alcove, that sliding door. Nene’s parents too, so familiar in their eagerness to welcome him and to tut about how tall he’s gotten and what they’ve heard about his business ventures. The table is spread with soba and sukiyaki and roasted sweet potato, and the place set for him is next to her, as it always used to be.
“It’s so good to see you again Satoshi-kun. Nene works so hard, I can’t remember the last time she had a friend over.”
A friend, huh, Satoshi thinks.
“The pleasure’s all mine, Auntie. Thank you for having me.” Out of the corner of one eye he sees Nene move, and his attention shifts toward her, one hand already open. “May I pour you some tea, Nene-chan?”
She looks startled to be so addressed, but offers her cup anyway. “Thank you.”
Later, Satoshi thinks, maybe he will wonder why he stayed away so long. For now it’s enough to fall back into old patterns, to sit quietly and listen to the adults talking, respond and interject when necessary or prompted. It’s the same, and yet not the same, somehow, for all the things that have quieted down inside of him and settled. How easy it is all of a sudden to turn to Nene with his own empty cup and ask her if she’ll be so kind as to fill it for him, how little he has to think before he laughs at a story her mother has started to tell, or a question her father has asked. Once he even sees her laughing too, softly, barely anything but a hand to her mouth and a gentle shaking of her shoulders, and he has to insist to himself that he is not imagining it.
He takes his leave after the meal, even if Nene’s parents ask him to stay and sample his lovely gift; he smiles and pleads curfew, not wanting to overstay his welcome, school again in the morning. Nene fetches his coat from the hall closet and then walks him to the gate, where they linger awhile without speaking, out in the cold.
“Thank you for inviting me,” he says, when he’s had his fill of contemplating the streetlamp on the corner and how it doesn’t so much as flicker, not even once, to give him something peculiar to look at. Instead it seems content to remain perfectly ordinary—glowing steadily, doing what it’s meant to do. “I missed it here.”
Nene’s hands are in the sleeves of her oversized cardigan. She’d be too dignified to blow on her fingers to keep them warm, of course. “My family would like it if you came again.”
“Would they? That’s kind of them.” The wind lifts, blows past them like the winter night making a joke, making Nene shiver and Satoshi slip his own hands into his coat pockets. There’s an omamori in the right one that he’s been meaning to give her all evening. “This is for you, by the way. Just for you this time.”
He had made sure to buy one at the shrine before he came, for happiness. He figures this is the least of many things he can wish for her—it’s only the day after her birthday, after all, and you don’t need a reason to wish someone well.
She doesn’t smile, but she has a way of handling the blue brocade, skimming the embroidery carefully with her fingertips, that’s almost gentle to see. “You remembered.”
“January sixth.” The words don’t crack on their way out of him. Small mercies. “I’m only sorry it’s late.”
“Don’t be.” She lifts her head and regards him with a puzzled expression, searching his face as though they’re meeting on the street by chance after a long time and she is only just remembering who he is. “Remember, whenever you want to come. Just tell me so I can put out a plate for you.”
Satoshi almost wants to ask her if she found what she was looking for. But he imagines she’d get snippy at him, for speaking in riddles again.
“I’ll come again. See you at school tomorrow, Kinokuni.”
“Take care on your way,” she tells him, and closes the gate.
It could be that she doesn’t go back into the house, but lingers long enough to watch him walk to the corner through the slats. Satoshi’s not sure if she does, but he looks back when he reaches the lamp all the same, turning a little over his shoulder, lifting an arm to wave.
As a child Satoshi had been fascinated by buckwheat—how the white flour turned grey when he poured water in the bowl, the texture like wet sand under his fingers, the rhythms of whisking and gathering and kneading. How aware he always became, suddenly, of his hands.
It’s a feeling he can well remember, that awareness, though his memory of the process is less than perfect. To fill the gaps, anyway, there is Nene, up to her elbows in the lacquered mixing bowl she’s always said is as precious as her life. Satoshi watches her from where he faces his own bowl, mimicking her motions, the better to repeat them later with the flour she gave him.
“Smells like black sesame.”
“Right?” Nene doesn’t look up, leaning instead down toward her flour like she’s bringing her whole body to attention. “Well-treated dough has a real glow to it.”
She’s working more slowly than usual today, though Satoshi knows it has nothing to do with making things easy for him to follow and everything to do with not having to perform. In the silence of the empty classroom he can only imagine what a relief it must be just to focus on the doing of it, how safe it must feel simply to let herself do what she knows.
Then she catches herself, raising her head a little like she’s just remembered she’s not alone, and it’s almost a shame.
“You can bring it together now,” she instructs him. “Make a ball. Do it how I show you.”
“I’ll follow your lead.”
Honestly, there’s something beautiful about it, all the shapes you have to make to achieve the perfect noodle. First the ball, then the disk, then the pleats you make across the top, pinching and folding. That’s the chrysanthemum.
The thought’s always made him smile; even more so now, because it makes him think of his garden, and how it won’t be long now until planting, when the last of the chills pass. That is something like this, too. Something you do with your body, honest, tangible, steady work.
He could try his hand at flowers. The girls would like it, surely, and Souma would find a way to cook with them, whatever kind he chose to grow.
“Like a flower, Isshiki. Like a flower. Not like a face that’s been punched.”
How very like Nene to catch him in a daydream. “That must be the first joke I’ve ever heard you make.”
“It’s not a joke.” Her tone is so reproachful he wouldn’t put it past her to reach into the bowl and slap the back of his hand. “Roll it over and start again.”
The dough is more forgiving than he thinks it is at first, folding readily in on itself so he can shape it anew. With Nene only half-watching him he can focus on finding a rhythm of his own, feeling it stretch and give, rolling it out onto the floured counter, ready for cutting.
“Start here.” She leaves her own dough briefly to arrange him just so—aligns the wooden cutting guide, puts the knife in his hand and positions his fingers correctly around the handle. “Go on.”
Satoshi obeys and begins to cut. “How do they look?”
“Very beautiful,” she says, taking a glance before she takes up her own knife. There’s no reluctance to the assessment, he thinks, only the frank awareness that comes of knowing what she’s looking at and seeing it for what it is. “They’ll probably turn out better than mine.”
“Hey, hey.” He frowns. “I don’t think that’s fair. Look how even yours are. No waste, no scraggly edges.”
“Yours are just as even. And you have a good hand with the rolling pin. It’s challenging to get a smooth surface, even after a few tries.”
“Well, look at you, so quick with the cutting guide. You just went and eyeballed it! Give your years of study a little more credit, Nene-chan.”
The old argument, too, is so familiar they fall into it without even realizing.
“We haven’t even cooked them yet,” Nene murmurs, shaking her head.
Satoshi laughs. “No, I guess we haven’t.”
They have a running joke—or at least, for him it’s a joke, though she could very well be serious about it—that one of them will challenge the other for real before the end of the year, to see where they stand, once and for all. They’ve even gone so far as to set the terms, hypothetically. If she wins, he will come to class on time every day of their final year. If he does, she will let him invite her over for a meal.
It’s tempting to imagine what it might be like to show her Polar Star as he knows it, introduce her to his patchwork family, see what she’d make of all the laughter and chaos and good noisiness in the dining hall at mealtime. There is the wall calendar he counts all his days by. There is the big table where all the strays gather round, and all you need to do to earn a seat is come as you are.
My turn to share my home with you. Sometime soon, I hope.
But not too soon, he amends to himself when he sees her take only one pot out of the cupboard overhead.
“It’s not a contest today, then.” It’s not a question either, but he touches her shoulder as she passes all the same, lightly, as if to make sure of something. He knows he is not imagining it when he feels her lean against his hand, just for a second, before crossing over to the sink.
In a second, Satoshi thinks, Nene will turn the knob, and the water from the tap will drum down into the bottom of the pot, and all he will hear after that is peace.
Strange, he thinks, how they know each other this way.
“Not today,” she agrees, and lets the water run.