Title: Sweets to the Sweet

Rating: PG

Warning(s): None

Summary: Miyako has a secret, at 12:35 every month or so.

Word Count: 405

Author's Note: I went over, I admit it. But the brevity of last time's episode made me want to… beef it up a little. By the way, this one's inspired by the dream-illusion that Miyako has in the last episodes, her deepest desire, which never made sense to me.


People think that she's a horrible cook, certainly Daisuke taunts her mercilessly at every opportunity, especially when she brings less than perfect egg salad sandwiches and misshapen octopus sausages. She shrieks at any insult to her cooking, matching Mimi-san in decibels easily.

However, there is only one person who knows her secret.

It's not Hikari; it's not even Iori.

Every so often, once in a blue moon, she sends a special email out and receives a terse (but always very polite) response. It's usually those rare afternoons that her parents are both running the store and her siblings have their own business to attend to, so she has the apartment to herself.

She bundles up her long hair (really, she was going to have to get a trim one of these days) and pulls out the aprons from the wash, shaking out the crisp cotton. Each tool waits for her on the kitchen counter, like the array of a surgeon's scalpels. He comes punctually, at 12:35 precisely, as he has been for the last six months.

Usually, he has a plastic bag full of groceries in one hand and always a small wrapped container in the other.

"What is it today, Miyako-san?" he always asks and his face softens in a sweet, slight smile.

Sometimes it's crepes. Sometimes it's mochi. She mercilessly orders him about her kitchen while floating about from bowl to oven to refrigerator, the queen of her own little kingdom. And he always acquiesces to whatever she orders and something in his gaze perceptibly relaxes.

He's not a bad cook himself, having a deftness that shows even when whipping egg whites or kneading dough. Maybe it's his hands, soft and pale and strong, astonishingly delicate for a boy.

After they make and share whatever recipe she's taught him, he opens that little bundle. Inside he always has four pieces of sakura flavored sweets for her. She always insists on sharing. One is for her. One is for Poromon, who usually hovers around the kitchen in anticipation for a taste. One is given to Minomon, who always thanks her with mixture of grave, formal politeness and innocent joy. And she always gives the last one back.

"Because sweets are always sweeter when they're shared," she says with a little smile, and Ichijouji Ken never fails to blush, his deep blue eyes never leaving hers as he takes the last sweet from the box.