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Ryuji has been given many profound and invaluable gifts over the years. One of them is his mother coming back to life after the long shadow of his father faded away. Another has to be his friends, bundled up together in a neat, if chaotic, package. But he has to acknowledge– haltingly, begrudgingly– that his cane is one of them as well.
It’s not just because it carries gifts from the Thieves: specifically, the countless stickers along its body and a little hand-sculpted charm dangling upon the wristband. They’d have put even more stickers on it if he hadn’t protested against covering up the old ones, although he has allowed them to replace the water-damaged ones and the ones that got scraped down to white smudges. The only parts of it that are still black– the only bits of uncovered black rubber and aluminum– are the handle and the tip.
Therefore, when he goes looking for his cane midway through preparing dinner for his mom, he doesn’t have to look that hard to find it. It waits for him against the couch, and he feels more secure the moment he gets the wristband around his wrist. Ryuji is just grateful he managed to get most of the two-handed prep done before his leg started acting up.
He doesn’t have to lean on it too much as he gets the meat and onions into the pan, poking and swishing them around as he learned from the greats. Between his mom, Akira, Haru, and good ol’ Boss, Ryuji counts himself among the pupils of culinary masters, their lack of Michelin stars be damned. He’s still nowhere near mastery himself, but he figures it’ll rub off on him eventually.
With thirty years and change behind him, Ryuji’s just now passed the threshold of living with his busted leg for longer than he’s lived without it. If he tries, he can remember the before-times in a collection of sensations: wind and driving rain and the pleasant burn of exertion. Everything afterwards is more vivid, somehow, and it’s not just the Metaverse-borne exhilaration– he remembers the small moments just as easily as the big ones. An evening out with Akira and Yusuke, trying a little something from every food truck they could find. A begrudging accompaniment of Ann and Shiho on a clothes shopping trip. An afternoon spent on the phone with Haru. An extra treat snuck to Morgana.
Ryuji’s got enough intuition by now to be pretty sure that this collection of small moments will end up being one of those memories, especially if he ends up burning himself trying to boil the noodles. With a watchful eye on the pan, he rips open the package of udon noodles and slides them into the pot, setting a timer on his phone. The whole process involves just enough juggling that it feels like hard work, but not enough to totally overwhelm him.
The timer on Ryuji’s phone goes off a few moments before he hears the screen door squeak open. Ryuji manages to get the noodles into the colander to drain them right as Emi comes trundling in, tote bags looped over her arms. He gives her a lopsided, slightly awkward little smile. “Hey, mom.”
The lines etched into Emi’s face converge into something like half-delight, half-shock. “You little– I told you I was going to cook for you while you’re here!”
“Ma, it’s fine,” Ryuji says, trying to focus on adjusting the temperature of the broth and arguing at the same time. “I’m a guest, and I’ve got nothin’ to do all day. Don’t worry about it–”
“You’re not a guest, you’re my son!” Emi has already set her bags aside, rolled up her sleeves, and started washing her hands. Ryuji is grateful that he timed this such that everything would practically be done by the time she got home. “I’ll be damn– darned if I let you slave over a hot stove all day!”
Ryuji gives her a half-hug in between getting the various components into place. He’s setting the table by the time Emi wipes her hands dry and looks about the kitchen for something to do. She lets out a disappointed little huff when she can’t find anything. “Well, I guess there’s not much to help with, is there?”
“Yup. And I’m doin’ the dishes afterwards.”
Emi playfully swats him on the arm as he gets bowls down from the cabinet single-handedly. “Making your mother watch you do all the hard work, huh?”
“Yup,” he repeats. “If I gotta chain you to the couch to help you out, Ma, I’ll do it.”
“I’d like to see you try,” she jabs, but there’s no real venom in it. Emi sits down at the little two-person table, apparently content to watch Ryuji finish preparing two mostly-perfect udon beef bowls.
When Ryuji sits down, he does it the same way he’s done for years: lowering himself down gently, lopsidedly, swaying a bit to make sure he’s comfortable. “I can’t say this is gonna be top-notch or anything,” he says, gesturing to Emi’s bowl, “but hopefully it’s, y’know, at least okay.”
Emi takes in the fine bowl sitting in front of her with unabashed joy. “Okay? Ryuji, this looks absolutely delicious! And it’ll taste all the better because I didn’t have to lift a finger making it.”
Ryuji has to laugh at the absurdity of it– of how much she can flip-flop from one little joke to another, minute to minute. Sometimes he sees himself in her, and every time he can’t help but feel perfectly proud: of her, of himself, of what they’ve become despite it all.
They say their thanks, and for a while Ryuji has nothing to do but eat and look around the room. He got to poke around the house plenty after Emi left for work, but he wasn’t full-on snooping, thank you very much. His earlier assessment was correct; he really didn’t have anything to do after he made himself breakfast, so he went looking for all the markers of Emi’s life that she’s set down here.
He found them in trinkets, of course, because he and his mother are always more alike than he realizes. With her new job as an RN, she’s managed to travel a couple of times in the past few years, and there are plenty of touristy little tchotchkes up on the fridge and the tops of dressers. From where Ryuji’s sitting right now, he can also see a lumpy ceramic pot painted in cheery orange, saying hello to him from the kitchen windowsill. He’s fairly sure he made that in art class, in either year 2 or year 3. The before-times, for certain.
Emi’s eaten through the lion’s share of her bowl when she pipes up next. “How are your friends doing?”
“Good,” Ryuji opens, and he launches into a story about Akira trying to bake quaint little pastries for Leblanc: he’d made a handful of croissants, a batch of scones, and several cat-shaped cookies. Unfortunately, it was only the kitty cookies that got burnt, much to Morgana’s chagrin. “Little dude complained so much. Says he’s ‘Leblanc’s mascot’ or whatever, with ‘an image to maintain’.”
Emi chuckles as she finishes slurping up a noodle. “Aw, I bet he was just whining ‘cause he couldn’t have any. My auntie had a cat like that once– she was hard of hearing, remember, so her little tomcat would meow up a storm around dinnertime to catch her attention. You could hear him two towns over, I swear.”
Ryuji is more familiar with the story than its characters; he only faintly remembers the actual cat and aunt. Both of them are long gone. “Sometimes I wonder if it’d be any more convenient for Akira to have a cat like that,” he deflects. “I mean, having one that can talk with words is probably nice, but he’s a pain in the ass sometimes with all his requests.”
Ryuji picks his head up to see Emi giving him a blank look. “Ma, I told you the cat can talk. Metaverse thing.”
“The cat talks?”
“The cat talks.”
Emi, mildly disgruntled, chews through the last piece of beef in her bowl. “I guess I remembered it differently– I don’t know, I thought you meant he had those little buttons he can press to say words or things he could point at. Tapping his little paw on the ground like one of those horses that can count, you know?”
Ryuji considers it: they probably could teach Morgana math or Morse code if they tried. “I did say he talks with words, I’m pretty sure.”
Over the years, Ryuji has managed to tell his mother bits and pieces of his Metaverse exploits. He’s never delved too far into the particulars– he still barely feels like he understands it himself, sometimes– but she knows enough that last time he brought her to see his friends, she told Haru “and you must be Noir” with a conspiratorial wink. Seeing Haru so enthused was worth the multi-hour explanation he’d had to trudge through.
The details he avoids are all the gory and/or dangerous and/or incomprehensible bits: near-death experiences, vast fascist conspiracies, time-tripping psychotherapists, and the like. He does, however, remember telling her about Akira’s magical talking cat a few months ago, since he had to have some explanation for why he told Akira to “put the cat on the phone” and appeared to have a full conversation with the little bastard.
“Well,” Emi says, appearing to internalize this fact with a normal amount of skepticism. “The next time I can make it down there, you can translate for me.”
Ryuji bristles a bit at the idea of being a translator for a cat. The concept gains some traction in his head when he realizes he can say whatever the hell he wants and Morgana can’t do anything about it except bat at him and meow louder. “Sure, Ma,” he concedes, rising to get the dishes. Emi almost manages to head him off before he gets to the sink, but he blocks her gently, like the world’s most tenderhearted rugby player. “I got dessert,” he says, and that mollifies her enough for him to get the dishes firmly out of her grasp and into the sink. He’ll quietly wash them later, after she goes to sleep. “I walked around the corner– got some freezy treats for us.”
“Oh, did you now!” Emi almost immediately goes to poke through the freezer, and Ryuji half-suppresses a giggle. Her taste for sweets is a league beyond Ryuji’s, and approaching the league of a certain someone else he knows. “Which one is yours?”
Ryuji flips his answer around. “The mint-choco one’s for you. Unless you want the strawberry one,” he says, reaching across the kitchen thoroughfare to snag his cane. As he wraps the strap around his wrist, his cane’s charm finds its way into his palm. It’s a tiny glazed ceramic thing, a sunshine-orange canine barely a couple of centimeters long, crafted by Yusuke during the brief few weeks where he was able to finagle access to a kiln. Its tail pokes Ryuji slightly, but not enough to be uncomfortable.
“Yusuke says hi,” he adds, as Emi slips a strawberry-flavored ice cream bar into his hands. The wrapper crinkles as they both shuffle their way out to the porch. “He says he’s gotta come out here sometime and paint the riverside.”
Emi makes a noise somewhere between a huff and a scoff. “It’s not anything special, really. Can’t imagine it’s all that pretty to paint.”
“I think that’s why he wanted to paint it.” Ryuji lowers himself down to the edge of the porch in a slow, rickety motion: a wooden-jointed puppet clattering down to rest. Emi, sitting beside him, waits until he’s settled to tear the wrapper off of her own bar. “Said it was ‘endearing in its plain nature’ or something along those lines.”
Here Emi does scoff. “Well, now he’s making me want to stand up for the poor thing! It’s not that plain, and it’s not that special either.” She grins with a kind of mischief that’s come naturally to her ever since her ex-husband walked out. “A whole lot like me, don’t ya think?”
Ryuji ruffles her hair in protest, and all at once he’s struck by a somatic memory of her doing nearly the same thing, back when he was shorter than her. “Come on, mom, you’re plenty special– the most special of any of us!”
He doesn’t tell her the other reason Yusuke wants to come and paint in Shizuoka: to complete the commissioned portrait he started of Emi, for which he would much prefer a live subject. ‘To properly capture the fire brimming within her,’ he’d said, ‘and all the ways it aligns and diverges from yours.’ Yusuke had completed a portrait of Ryuji himself in months past as a birthday present, and it was Ryuji’s idea to throw some cash at him and make a matching piece of his mother. He’s already started scripting how he’s going to present it to her, figuring out just how to phrase something sappy about parts of them getting to remain together when the land divides them.
For now, though, they don’t have acrylic paint fumes and sitting still to worry about. The only worry occupying Ryuji’s mind is the drops of strawberry ice cream sneaking down his fingers. He chases them inelegantly, slurping them up before they can stain his shirt– or, worse, his cane. The aluminum beastie is resting placidly against his leg, and if Ryuji gets the handle sticky he knows it’s going to feel odd in his hand for days. Emi giggles watching him struggle against an unending tide of confectionary meltwater. Her expression isn’t all amusement and schadenfreude, though, and when Ryuji notices the subtle tears at the creases of her eyes he pauses his efforts to turn all of his attention onto her.
The golden-hour sunlight illuminates her in turns through the trees. Emi’s laughter rings out again. “Forgive me, Ryu,” she says, and suddenly Ryuji feels himself getting teary. The last time she used that nickname for him, he couldn’t have been more than nine years old. “I was just thinking– here you are, so tall and strong, and it feels like I sat with you just like this only yesterday.”
Ryuji buries his smile in an indelicate chomp of strawberries and cream. Emi continues her story, but only after she takes some time to partake in her own ice cream. “I’d be surprised if you remembered it. You couldn’t have been more than five, and I’d gotten out of work earlier than usual, so I picked you up from school and walked you home.”
Ryuji only faintly remembers those afternoons: there weren’t many of them to start with and they petered away fast, as Emi’s work hours picked up and then crescendoed when she had to fight for as many hours as she could get. She counterbalanced the household’s sudden lack of a father as best she could, in those days.
Emi seems to have picked up on Ryuji’s sudden bout of melancholy, if the way she slows the pace of her story is any indication. “You asked me for a treat as we passed by the store, and there was something so earnest about you in that moment, looking up at me. It wasn’t the usual sort of begging and pleading that kids do. Odd, sure, but you were quieter then, and I didn’t want to shut you down by pressing you about it. I stopped off and got us each something to enjoy, and we sat, and we chatted, and that afternoon was the guiding star of my life for months afterwards. It made everything easier to bear,” she murmurs, looking faraway and pensive.
All at once a similar memory rushes back to Ryuji, couched in mint chocolate. During a Mementos trip, Futaba had brought out a few mochi-wrapped ice-creamy bonbons, which she had apparently squirreled away in an insulated lunchbox. If Ryuji concentrates, he can still remember how it felt to nurse his bruises while his treat dissolved on his tongue. He remembered that moment keenly in the following weeks, and he was even eventually able to repay Futaba with a Featherman keychain he managed to snag on clearance. She, of course, repaid him in turn a week later, and so the wheel kept turning. It made everything easier to bear.
“I think I remember that,” Ryuji says, and Emi snaps out of her reminiscing to turn her full focus onto him. “I mean, I don’t really remember it, but I remember what I was thinking when I asked you. I just… y’know, the kid-logic in my brain kicked in, and I figured if we had to sit down and eat I’d get more time to spend with you.”
“Oh, Ryu,” Emi says, ruffling his hair. “We’ve got all the time in the world.”
They don’t, not really: Ryuji has to be back in Tokyo for work in three days, and one of those days will be spent entirely on the train, and Emi has to sleep and–
It doesn’t matter, not really.
When they go back inside, Ryuji will jostle a mug and it will shatter, and he’ll say something about sweeping it up but Emi will beat him to it. “Silly Skull,” she’ll say, admonishing him for putting so much weight on his bad leg trying to bend down, and in return he’ll tell her a story about what Captain Kidd was like– what he was to him. For now, though, there are only the gifts to consider: the pink one melting in his hand, the black one resting gently at his side, and the sunshine-bright one that he hopes he can equal, someday.
