[Fanfic, 100% OJ] Calling a Spade

Genre: Slice of Life/Humour

Length: 1802 words

B/D: Just something to try and chase away writer's block. By the way, the 100% Orange Juice plushie kickstarter is on until the end of February -- if you haven't already, go get you some plushie action.

Suguri, it had to be said, was not in the habit of giving gifts. It wasn’t because she was stingy. It was more because it took her weeks upon weeks of deep meditation to decide what the perfect gift would be, and then because her her perception of time had been warped just a smidge by her advanced age, anywhere up to a year to actually go out and get it. Where she was fast she was fast, and where she was slow she was slow. That was just the truth of it.

Nevertheless, Sora woke up that morning to a bleary eyed Suguri holding a three foot long, badly wrapped package with her name on it.

“Ooh,” she murmured, appreciatively. It seemed like the appropriate thing to do. Truth be told, she was about as good at receiving gifts as Suguri was at giving them. Her eyes flicked from the package to Hime, who was watching with a quiet smile from her cosy armchair. That meant that there would be no bacon in the immediate future. Maybe the gift was just three feet of bacon, and they were waiting for her to unwrap it so they could have the world’s biggest breakfast. She had never seen three feet of bacon before, and felt vaguely excited at the prospect.

“Take it,” Suguri said, and thrust the package at her a little impatiently. She hadn’t had her morning hugs yet. Sora could tell from the way she was standing. She probably hadn’t had them because her arms were full of bacon, and Hime didn’t want to hug her while she had bacon in her arms. That would make them a bacon sandwich where Suguri and Hime were the bread, which Sora thought would be the exact worst configuration in Hime’s view. She would prefer a bacon and Suguri sandwich in which she was the filling, because that would mean she and Suguri were close to each other no matter where the bacon was. Or one where Suguri was the filling and there were two slices of bacon for the bread, and then Hime was the one doing the eating. It was a matter that deserved some serious consideration at a future time.

“Thank you,” she said, and took her package, which, now that she had a chance to hold it, was far too rigid to be bacon. Maybe it was a three foot box with bacon on the inside, which was even better than three feet of bacon because you got the box for free. She shook it experimentally, and was surprised to hear something metallic bumping against the cardboard. It wasn’t the kind of noise she expected her breakfast to make, even before it had been cooked. But maybe whatever was in the box was even better than bacon, although probably not as tasty.

Quietly, she settled down to unwrap it – an adventure in and of itself, since Suguri had used sticky tape and brown wrapping paper in a nearly 1:1 ratio, and then tied that up with string, and then applied another layer of her paper and sticky tape alloy. Eventually, though she broke through – and was delighted with what she found.

“It’s an entrenching tool!” she gasped, running her hand along the illustrated design on the box. “So nostalgic…”

“…‘Entrenching tool?’” Hime mouthed, sidling up to Suguri. “I thought you got her a shovel.”

Suguri took a moment to comb her memory. “I think…they’re like shovels, but collapsible and specially designed so they can be used as hand-to-hand weapons? That one really is just a shovel, though.”

“Shovel?” Sora asked, looking down at the box. She said the word as if she was trying it out for the first time. Tasting it. “Ah… Sorry. I don’t know ‘shovel’. In my time, we had entrenching tools. That was all. Are shovels new?”

Hime and Suguri glanced at each other, although only one of them was silently begging to be extricated from the social situation in which Sora had accidentally put them. The other one was Hime, who was looking at Suguri because she was nice to look at. With a sigh, she set about the rescue.

“You really did grow up in a time of war, I suppose. Putting that aside for now, do you like it?” she asked, effortlessly sweeping away any strangeness in a way that neither of her companions could have.

“I love it,” Sora said, opening the box at one end. But there was a hitch in her voice, an empty pause that said a but was coming, and coming soon. “But… it’s too long. It should be half this length. It doesn’t look like it folds, either. The head is the wrong shape, too. It’s like a square, but it should be a triangle. You can’t sharpen the edges like this.”

“Yes, well, if we feel like we need a trench or for you to chop somebody’s head off, we’ll get you one of those. But I believe Suguri had something rather different in mind, correct?”

The silver-haired girl nodded. “Let’s go out to the garden.”

This, to Sora, seemed like a very strange idea. For one, she hadn’t really thought they had a garden. You could walk out of the back door and there was certainly a lot of grass and twigs and green stuff, but usually a garden had a fence or a boundary or something. Maybe Suguri just thought that the entire world was one big garden that belonged to her; maybe she separated the world into two compartments, which were ‘inside’ and ‘garden’. But even then, why would they want to go outside, where the cold was and the breakfast wasn’t? There might be breakfast outside, admittedly, but they would have to catch it first, and it probably wouldn’t be as sustainably farmed as theirs. (Suguri took a rather dim view of anybody skimping on the welfare of their animals to make greater profits, and as she was extremely dangerous, functionally immortal, and had helped humanity rebuild after Sora narrowly stopped them from becoming extinct, she had a touch more sway in the matter than might first be appreciated.)

Nevertheless, Sora picked up her new entrenching tool that wasn’t an entrenching tool, and marched out in the wake of her two friends. They seemed to have a plan for this new ‘shovel’, which was reassuring. She’d been excited at first because it gave her a kick of nostalgia, but that had waned since she discovered that it wasn’t really a holdover from her own world. Now she didn’t know quite what she would use such a ‘shovel’ for.

“This,” Suguri said, spreading her arms out wide, “all the way up to that hill, used to be my garden.”

It was a long, rolling stretch of land; their home was already at the top of the hill, and at the bottom there was a large flat leading up to the next. Now that Sora noticed, the levelness of the ground did indicate that it was manmade – or, at least, had been tended to.

“Originally, my mission was to restore the planet after the damage done in Sora’s time. So I’m proud of my cultivation techniques,” she went on. “I used to do a lot of gardening to pass the time, but I lost motivation at some point, and the land took it all back.”

“Oh. Is it because you spent too much time canoodling with Hime?”

Suguri grinned. “Firstly, it happened five hundred years before Hime even arrived on this planet.”

“And secondly, there’s no such thing as too much canoodling with Hime. I am a goddess, you know, and my canoodles are simply divine,” Hime added.

“That too,” Suguri said, and it was difficult to tell if she was joking or not. “But I thought… well. Maybe it would be nice if we all did some gardening together. I could teach you. It’d be… um. A family thing.”

Sora leaned on her shovel as she had once leaned on her sword, and looked out over the landscape. She didn’t really know anything about gardening. She didn’t really know much of anything, outside of what she’d learned in military bases. It was why Nath and Suguri, who seemed to know at least a little bit about everything they came across, seemed so impressive to her. She wanted to learn. Even if she didn’t like it, she wanted to try. It would be fun, and they could grow things for the kitchen. She nodded, gravely.

“I’d like that,” she said.

Suguri gave her a rare, warm smile. “Okay. We have a lot of space, so… We can all have our own plots. So you should both think about what you want to start growing. We’ll dig out the plots and prepare them in the next couple of days, so we can plant things in spring.”

“I think,” Sora said, after a moment of deep thought, “I want to plant grapes.”

“Grapes?”

“Mm. So we can make wine. Not much. But Nath likes it, and I think she would really enjoy it if we gave her a bottle we made ourselves,” Sora explained. “Can we do that?”

“There’s no reason why not. It might not be the best wine, and you’ll be waiting for a while. If you want to make wine this year, you could try planting strawberries. You could also plant roses and make rose hip wine. Cherries as well.”

“I see. Can we do all of them?”

“Of course. But for now, let’s start digging. Sora, take your shovel and–”

Sora shook her head. “Wait. Breakfast first, then gardening. Come inside. I’ll show you something we used to do in the army,” she said, picking up her shovel and departing. Suguri made to follow, but Hime caught her sleeve.

“Good work,” she said, low enough not to carry. “She seems excited. To be honest, I thought she could do with a hobby.”

“I’m excited, too. It’s been a while since I did any gardening,” Suguri replied. “What about you? We’re making you a plot. Do you have anything you’d like to plant?”

Hime smiled, as if remembering a private joke. “Oh, all sorts. I could always use some more carrots, of course, but there are so many flowers I should like to see in bloom. I think… lilies, first.”

“Lilies?”

Her hand found Suguri’s, and squeezed. “For purity, elegance… and love between women, of course.”

“I should have known.”

“You really should have,” she teased.

They walked back to the kitchen together to find that Sora had taken her brand new gardening tool and was using it as very unwieldy, ad hoc frying pan. Soon, they were feasting on a breakfast of eggs, toast, and (of course) bacon – by the shovelful.

A/N: This is like the perfect storm of Vulp tropes -- weird obsession with breakfast, an excuse to spend more time researching gardening, and future techno lesbians.