[Fanfic, 100% OJ] Sufficiency

Genre: Slice of Life

Words: 1895

B/D: Just a quick, blow off steam kind of story.

Suguri, as a rule, did not have bad days, or at least didn’t remember having any. That was the thing about being old; individual episodes of misfortune were eventually subsumed within the amorphous soup of time, until it felt like luck was simply something that didn’t affect you. If you left the graph running long enough, it all became a straight line eventually. But now that Hime and Sora had entered her life, she was having good days with greater and greater frequency – which meant she was due some bad days to balance it out.

Today had the makings of a bad day. She wrinkled her nose, and quietly inspect what had been a rasher of bacon and was now a smear of pure carbon that had been atomically bonded to the base of her frying pan. How did Hime cook this so often, she wondered, and so well? Was her precious companion secretly some kind of pork wizard, a bacon elemental who could bend cured meat to her will?

Sadly, it was a question she would never receive an answer to. The entire reason she had thrown on her apron and sacrificed a slice of meat to the cooking gods was because she had woken up this morning to a note, penned in Hime’s elegant hand:

My dear Suguri,

Seeing Nath’s memorial the other day reminded me of something I really should check up on, so I shall be away for a few days. I shan’t be doing anything too dangerous, so don’t fret. Just consider this your own personal vacation from my constant teasing! Take good care of Sora while I’m away, or vice versa.

Thinking of you always,

Hime

Suguri did not, especially, desire a break from Hime’s teasing. She actually quite enjoyed it, although she was dimly aware that a time would come when their relationship would progress from cuddles and soft, slow kisses every morning to a more adult and physical relationship, which vaguely terrified her. 

Setting that matter well aside, she scraped a layer of black soot out of the frying pan and dunked it in the sink to soak. Bacon, she had decided, was treacherous. Arrogant, too. Anything that had the nerve to burst into fire right in front of her eyes was definitely up to something. It certainly wasn’t trustworthy breakfast material, at least not without Hime to tame it. There had to be an alternative.

Half an hour later, she and Sora were both staring into two bowls of suspiciously colourful wheat circles, drowned in approximately half an ocean of milk. Increasing the amount of milk decreased the ratio of potentially radioactive children’s cereal per bowl of breakfast, and that was an important ratio to consider. Slowly, the colours from the cereal were beginning to spread across the milk’s surface, like an oil spill slowly spreading out on the sea.

“Are you sure the bacon is broken?” Sora asked.

“The bacon,” Suguri said gravely, “is most definitely broken.”

There was a brief pause for more staring. Suguri wondered if breakfast cereal technically counted as a soup, and if it did, how primordial the soup was supposed to be. She was almost one hundred percent sure the cereal was not alive, but that little nagging ‘almost’ was enough to halt her spoon. Still, she was supposed to be the one who took the first bite. She had regenerative abilities in case anything went horribly wrong, and Sora didn’t.

“What about toast?”

“No bread.”

“Bread is gettable. We can get it.” Sora put her palms on the table and stood up. “Let’s go on a bread hunting mission.”

Suguri took one last look at her breakfast soup, and then nodded. Bread was easy enough. They could even get croissants. She did like a good croissant, although she had never managed to eat them gracefully. Hime had evolved a rare talent for eating croissants without a single flake of pastry either touching the floor or getting stuck to her mouth, and if Suguri was honest it was maybe the one thing in the world that made her mad. No one woman should have that much power, even if it was Hime and even if she fluttered her eyelashes every time she ate one.

“We have to hurry, though. I’m meeting Sham today. She’s doing a show in a city and it’s got an aquarium.” Sora’s large, green eyes were completely unreadable. “They don’t have dolphins, but they have lots of tortoises.”

Suguri looked at her, and knew that the chance she wouldn’t want to ride around on the back of a sufficiently large tortoise was zero percent. She would never actually do it, because no such tortoise existed and she would worry about hurting it, but in an ideal world, Sora would ride everywhere on a giant tortoise and become an unflinching ally of testudines the world over. There was no other possibility that existed.

But, now that she thought about it, a trip to an aquarium was definitely a date, wasn’t it? It certainly would be to Sham. She wondered if she should… well, she didn’t know. Dispense some kind of sagely romantic advice? She did technically have more life experience. What would Hime say in this situation?

“…Always use protection,” she mumbled.

“Hm? I always have my shield running,” Sora replied, tilting her head. “Anyway, I’m going to borrow Hime’s camera and take lots of pictures.”

“Of you and Sham?”

“Of fish. I want to show them to Roger.”

Suguri scratched her head. If Sham felt threatened by how affectionate Sora was with Nath, then she didn’t even want to imagine how jealous she might be of Nath’s cat. Actually, she wouldn’t be surprised if Nath herself was jealous of that cat. (She knew for sure that Sora and Hime were both jealous of the cat, because, well, he had the good fortune of being born a cat, and they didn’t.)

“Take some of you and Sham, too,” she said after a moment’s pause. “And some that Hime will like. You can show her when she gets back.”

“Mm. I think Hime would like penguins. If they had sharks I think Nath would like them, but I don’t think it’s that kind of aquarium.” She threw a glance at the window, noted the colour of the light. Frowned slightly. “Suguri, let’s hurry.”

A little while later, Suguri waved as Sora trotted away from the bakery, carrying a bag laden with croissants that she had promised would not, under any circumstances, find themselves in the eager beaks of the penguin enclosure. Even if they all stood in a line and quacked at her, which apparently was the sound Sora thought penguins made. The only question facing Suguri now was what to do with the rest of her day. Normally, that was a question Hime would answer in some way, shape or form.

But then, she thought, she did have several days’ worth of crossword puzzles to catch up on. She took a great amount of pleasure in fitting more words in than the puzzle was designed to accommodate, primarily by writing her letters very small. It was the anti-authoritarian streak she would never admit she had. With just the smallest smile, she went home to indulge it.

“…So she burst into my apartment and spent the next hour showing pictures of fish to my cat.”

Suguri cradled the phone with her shoulder, and wondered what she should say. Nath did not sound amused. Well, okay, she sounded like she was trying not to be amused and failing just a tiny bit, but still.

“Did he like them?” she tried.

“He’s a cat.” A few seconds of silence. “…I guess he did sit there and look at them all with her. And he purred a bit. But he’s a cat. Do cats even understand photographs?”

“It’s not impossible.”

“Then she gave me a postcard of a shark. There weren’t any sharks at the aquarium. She just got it for me because she thought I wanted to see one.”

“That was considerate of her.”

“Anyway, the cat went to sleep on her, so she went to sleep as well. I guess she’s staying over for the night.”

“I see. I hope it’s not too inconvenient.”

A moment of silence. “Well… I’m never not happy to see her, I suppose. She makes life interesting.”

It sounded like faint praise, and perhaps it was. But Nath was an ancient, just like Suguri. She would know, without a doubt, the truth of what she’d said. Anybody who made life interesting – who made the days worth counting, the world worth getting out of bed for – was precious beyond measure.

A ticking timebomb. That was what Sham had called them. She might have been right.

“Glad to hear it. Hime’s out of town at the moment, so if you could keep Sora company, I’d appreciate it.” Suguri let a few seconds elapse. Pretended to think. “You know, I think there’s a zoo near Port City.”

“I think there’s a moon near Jupiter as well.” Suguri had never known anybody that could audibly roll their eyes, but Nath was making a valiant attempt. “Well. Even if the delivery wasn’t great, the hint is good. She does seem to like animals.”

They exchanged a few more pleasantries before Nath said her goodbyes and put the phone down. Neither of them were phone people, so an extended conversation was out of the question. She regretted that, a little. When she thought about it, she realised that, even though they had a lot in common, she and Nath didn’t actually tend to talk that much if Sora or Hime weren’t there to act as catalysts. Perhaps she’d been relying on them too much. It was an uncomfortable thing to think about. She’d always considered herself a very self-sufficient person, but perhaps she ought to be working harder.

She set the phone down on its charger, and went to get ready for bed. She took a shower, even though her hair was a pain to wash, and came out smelling like Hime’s strawberry body scrub. When she slipped beneath the covers, she slept not in the middle of the bed, but the side which had become hers. She took one of the pillows from the wall long demolished, and snuggled it against her as she tried to get comfortable. For the first time in what felt like a long time, the house filled up with the same deathly silence it had before Hime had arrived. And – just a little, in the very bottom of her heart – she felt lonely.

But that was fine. It just reminded her to treasure what she had. Tomorrow, she wasn’t going to feel lonely. She was going to wake up, bright and early, go down to the kitchen table, and , one by one, call her friends. She was going to listen to Saki ramble about baking, and humour Nana when she complained. She was going to ask Sham about the aquarium, and try to strike up a genuine conversation with Nath. Most importantly, she was going to take the frying pan out of soak, dust off her ego, and finally learn the ways of bacon.

When Hime comes home, the first thing she’ll get is a hug. But the second is breakfast in bed.

A/N: Might introduce a character in the next Suguriverse story. It's probably an easy guess as to who. I had this ready for a couple days, but didn't post because I personally felt like trash. I still feel like trash, so I might take a break from fics for a little while.