#askfic.

“I’m picking up some music sheet that I left a few months ago,” Kunizuka explained. “Shi—Karanomori told me that they would be reinstating the room tomorrow.”

For as long as Akane had visited, the lights here had been kept at a faded orange. A warm ambience, she remembered. Perfect to set the mood. And she remembered he wagged his eyebrows when he said that, cackling when Akane threw a pillow at him.

The two women both looked at the space now, as if tracing the source of that echo in the furniture and its trappings, now left adrift as detritus wading in lukewarm light.

“Yes, I heard,” she offered uselessly when the silence dragged. “That’s why I was here.”

“To raid the fridge?”

“No, actually. I just wanted to take a look around before they cleared it. Then I got distracted by the food that was still in the cupboards and I found this notebook. And I was curious because this page was bookmarked like he’d been planning on making it because the ingredients needed are all in one group in the pantry.”

She knew she was babbling and it sounded silly even in her own ears but Kunizuka’s unwavering gaze made it seem like she understood. Stupidly, Akane felt her throat clench.

She jerked the notebook forward.

“Could you actually help me with something?”

“What is it?”

“Do you know if that says tablespoon or teaspoon?” Kunizuka blinked at the tiny, barely-legible notation Akane pointed as if she’d been presented with squiggles before recognition dawned and she narrowed her eyes in amusement.

“Did a six-year old write this?“

Akane’s laughter bubbled, surprising and light. “It’s pretty old so I wouldn’t be surprised. I think he also has a shorthand for certain things. But I‘m not familiar with any of it so all of this might as well be gibberish.”

Kunizuka looked at it thoughtfully.

“He has terrible handwriting. And I don’t read much of English so I’m afraid I can’t help.”

Akane sighed, taking the notebook back.

“I suppose it doesn’t matter. It can’t make that much of a difference in taste, right?”

Kunizuka inspected the counters where the dry ingredients sat, waiting to be mixed. “Hm. I don’t know about that.“

“What do you mean?”

Kunizuka paused before she spoke, careful and slow. “He once told me that cooking was a lot like jazz. The way Louis Armstrong could play the cornet like he didn’t need a music sheet. Sometimes you could be flexible in how much of this or that you put in. But baking, on the other hand, was like Bach. It needed steps. You couldn’t compromise on a note. I’m guessing that for him in this case, a teaspoon and a tablespoon would be two very different things.”

This was probably the most Kunizuka had ever said to her at once. Akane felt a little out of step.

She had flipped through the pages aimlessly when she found it, directing her attention through the creased pages, not really looking but seeing the glimpses of what had been left.

The smudges of the old-fashioned pencil he wrote with had obscured some characters. On the corners, she had spotted doodles of the food he had recorded from his own experiments. There were variations of languages. English, Japanese, Korean and some Akane didn’t recognize. Hurried and annotated with his own commentary as if he had painstakingly copied from recipe books that he could get hold of or transcribed from memories of informal explanations given to him by latent criminals who taught him how to hold a knife, to grease a pan, to smuggle food, to ensure that his stomach could never be empty no matter how much this world wanted otherwise.

It was all hurried scrawls, like he was rushing. His memory didn’t have a long shelf life, it seemed.

Akane heard the open wound in her voice when she spoke. “I looked throughout the kitchen and it only has enough ingredients for one batch.”

Kunizuka turned towards her, her eyes uncharacteristically soft, and Akane felt relieved that she didn’t have to explain.

“Do you need some help?” she asked, already taking out a whisk from one of the drawers with surprising familiarity.

That was the other thing about Kunizuka. You had no choice but to feel her rejection. Just as you had no choice but to feel her kindness either.

“I’d like that.”

*

The kitchen was a mess.

Baking, Akane learned in the past hour, had the magical ability of covering flour in at least one spot of every counter by the end no matter how carefully you sifted.

The payoff however lay on the baking sheet they had left over the stove.

“It’s actually not that bad.”

Akane had never tasted anything as wonderful as the treat in her mouth. “I think it’s amazing.”

“I’m not that fond of sweets,” Kunizuka said, grabbing another from the tray.

They stood next to each other, chewing in silence for a moment.

“So I’m guessing it must have been teaspoon then, huh?” Akane piped up after they’d cleared the cookies. They tossed around the idea of sharing them with the others but it was a half-hearted conversation at best.

“I used a tablespoon actually.”

She frowned. “No, I’m pretty sure I gave you a teaspoon.”

They both looked at each other, then at the assorted utensils scattered on the kitchen and in the sink, their answer clumped amid the chaos.

“If only we knew,” Kunizuka said, her voice different. 

Akane looked at the woman next to her, at her strong and steady profile. Kunizuka had glimmered with satisfaction when they’d set the tray out. It was the same look in her face when she talked about music or when she plucked some practice notes on her guitar in order to tune it. She would never say anything else in her body. Her eyes were the giveaways.

They looked at her now, open and endless and Akane understood.

For a brief moment, she imagined what Kunizuka would say if she told her. About Sibyl. About everything that kept her up at night.

“I think you should take the recipe book,” Kunizuka said.

Akane blinked. “What about you?”

“I don’t cook much. And he would’ve wanted you to have it.”

Kunizuka held the notebook towards her.

“I don’t know.”

“He knew I would have no patience to sit through figuring out what he was trying to say. But you do.”

Her voice was matter-of-fact but there was a tatter in its ends. Akane looked at the room again and the orange light seemed cooler already.

“He didn’t run, you know,” she said softly. “You know he would never run and abandon us willingly.”

Kunizuka stared at her, a mirrored grief she allowed to come out. “I know.”

After that, there was silence again, familiarizing itself in the folds of the couch, in the hidden corners of all the possessions he had left in this life. 

There would be no body to bury, no grave to stand over, no headstone to inscribe their loss. But Kunizuka’s hand was the first to reach out, and Akane didn’t hesitate to anchor herself in the other woman’s strong grip.

When the collapse starts, they rile up angry, unsatisfied, choked like a fuse that still hasn’t been lit. They call you to their crusade because they know who you are and who you were. You feign a wolf but you are still a hound at heart, aren’t you? Your loyalties have always belonged to her first even if your gun points otherwise.

Little by little, the country starts to sway. Some sheep will always remain sheep and you spare them even while you make them watch as their safe, little normalcy falls to their knees. Either you flick the match to the fire or you snuff it in your fist. When the flames start licking the walls and the smell of souls burning covers you thick with ash, you tell yourself a lie.

This is what she would have wanted. This is for peace even if you don’t believe in forgiveness. She is nothing but a specter in your sleep and the cause for it is still not. You know Sibyl has no business being alive at this point.

Then again neither do you, yet here you both are in between the thing that will kill you both.

There is always a choice, the voice to your right says, face frozen like a cadaver in perpetual blitheness. You haven’t seen him in awhile. He does not seem that much different from the last time you did. But even he seems more human than you now, amber eyes glittering with a humor found in death. When he talks, there is none of his usual smugness.

There is always a choice, even one that takes others’ away. He looks at the detonator with an unreadable expression and you fire a warning shot to his temple for old times’ sake. When your ears stop ringing, he simply raises an eyebrow as if you’ve both shared something amusing.

Let’s not lose our heads here just yet, shall we?

Now that’s funny.

There are only so many times you can lose something before it decides it no longer wants to be found.

But he’s right of course. There’s always a choice, isn’t there? Even if it is an unfair one.

Peace called for something bigger and you rose to the occasion. Rarely does the world exist in black or white but the revolution tasked you with this sacrifice because you were the only one who could be an exception.

But you’re not completely there yet. Your grayness, your heart, your conscience, your only vestige of humanity stares at you now with a ghost of brown eyes and a soft voice. It holds onto you even when your hand is at the switch. Even when it’s pleading for you to stop.