June 18th, 2022
It was, perhaps, one of the more bizarre gatherings of the Hinamizawa Club.
For one thing, they were assembled not at the school or the shrine or out in the mountainside woods, but in front of somebody's house. For another thing, rather than clutching tools that were actually fun, everybody had some kind of cleaning implement in hand, or a bucket, or a bundle of rags. Satoko actually had a cart trailing behind her bike, probably courtesy of Mion's capricious family storage.
Despite the task looming before them, Keiichi took in a deep breath with pleasure. The thick pelt of snow that had all but completely buried Hinamizawa was finally melted away, leaving the still-crisp air filled with the rich, revitalizing scent of damp black earth and sprouting green buds.
"Right!" Mion slapped her hands together with a much-louder clap than normal, courtesy of her thick rubber gloves. A kerchief was bound tightly about her brow to keep her bangs out of her face, in another concession to the job ahead. "Shion, has Kasai-san called yet?"
"Coach is at this very moment sitting down in a maid café with Kasai guarding the exits." Shion announced proudly, twirling a feather-duster around her finger. Her hair was similarly bundled up under a large white bandanna.
"Thank goodness. Irie-sensei might be a bit frivolous, but I wouldn't trust him around this much cleaning stuff." Satoko replied, lifting a bundle of supplies out of her cart and carrying it towards the house as Satoshi held open the sliding door.
"His maid fetish is a bit troublesome and pathetic, mew." Rika said cheerily, standing beside her cousin with an angelic smile as Hanyuu flinched guiltily away from her.
"H-hau, let's just start with the cleaning, okay?" she asked plaintively, and Mion grinned, twirling and brandishing her mop like it was a bamboo cane.
"Okay!" she shouted, planting the wooden end into the dirt road to ground her makeshift staff. "Spring is officially here, guys, and you know what that means?"
"SPRING CLEANING!" everyone chimed as they punched a fist into the air, Keiichi moving a heartbeat behind the others.
"That's right!" Mion grinned. "Spring cleaning! Its time to scrub, mop, soak, spit, and polish this here Hojo house until it shines! We'll split up into pairs to clean each room on the list, as per our earlier division of labor, and whoever cleans the most, best, and fastest wins the game! I wanna be able to see my reflection, you got me?"
"Its wood though." Keiichi pointed out what he felt should be obvious. "You can't get it to shine."
There was a moment of silence.
Then everyone turned to level a disappointed look at him –even Satoshi.
"Change of plans." Mion sighed, putting one hand to her forehead, before she extended the other in a hard shove that sent Keiichi tumbling into Rena. "Rena, keep Kei-chan here from demolishing whatever you clean. Your team will win if you finish everything on time and satisfactorily."
"I'm not THAT bad!" Keiichi squawked in outrage as he disentangled himself from Rena.
"I beg to differ."
"Then beg." Rena said sweetly, her eyes gleaming as she adjusted her grip on the bucket of cleaning supplies she held, in a way that suddenly seemed like she might use it as a mace or some kind of melee weapon. "Keiichi-kun and I will clean everything we need to."
Satoko hummed happily as she pushed open a window, snapping out her dust rag to make the grime fly right off of it, cascading down into the brisk spring breeze. Since she lived with Rika and Hanyuu, and Satoshi was still recuperating at the clinic, the Hojo house was untenanted almost the whole year through, except for two occasions. Once in fall, when someone went through the house and closed up everything tightly, preparing for the winter snows, and once again now, in spring, when everything was given a real good, thorough cleaning.
For some time this had been Satoko's job and hers alone, but of course, the club wouldn't let her go through this alone, and Ni-Ni was finally here to clean his own room for her, a job she had jealously guarded for years. Thanks to how tightly she shut everything up in the months that nobody was here, not much more than dirt and dust and the leavings of small vermin had crept inside the house, but that was still quite a job in itself, as evidenced by Hanyuu's squeals of horror as she was confronted with the cobwebs that needed brushing out in the corners of the upstairs hallway.
"Ah…ah…"
Satoko ducked her head back inside, raising an eyebrow under the handkerchief bound tightly around her brow.
"Yes, Hanyuu?" she asked expectantly.
"Ah…AH…HWA-CHOO!"
A sneeze thundered through the house as Hanyuu flew back across the newly-dusted floorboards, arms akimbo and her hair fluttering everywhere as it settled over her face and arms.
"Hau…" she whimpered, giving a miserable sniffle. "S-so much dust…"
"That's the point." Satoko sighed, turning back to the window and snapping her rag out again. "Honestly, Hanyuu."
"Hck." Hanyuu sniffled one last time, snorting up a bit of dust-infused snot, and groggily climbed to her feet. Her feather-duster was thick with cobwebs and mouse droppings, and she climbed the small wooden stepladder Satoko had set up with the same grim determination as a climber sighting in on the peak of Mount Everest.
Of course, deep-cleaning an entire house on her own had once taken Satoko several days, but with the club's help –and Kasai-san's help in diverting a maid-crazed Doctor Irie from seeing them all with cleaning supplies and kerchiefs bound about their heads and then inevitably getting in everyone's way as he ranted about maids and tried to get them into uniform– they could probably get it all done in one day, if Keiichi-san didn't ruin the floors or the walls by using the wrong cleaning solution.
"Eh…" Satoko sweatdropped a little, before she shook her head and snapped her rag with more vigor, before turning back to the hallway with a devilish glint in her eye. Not a mote of dust would escape her wrath, and by the end of the day, Mion would have to concede that she and Hanyuu were the best cleaners.
Mion whistled a cheery tune as she flung the damp futon out through the air, draping the heavy cotton over the double-strung clothesline as the scent of soapy water and warming grass filled the air around her. She spread it out a little, not wanting it to get wrinkles, and took several clothespins from the bristling forest of wooden pegs clipped onto the sleeves of the white sweatshirt tied around her waist. She pinned one flap of the heavy futon to the first line, then stepped over to the other side to pin it to the other line, preventing the drying futon from blowing away or –more likely, in the case of the wool mattresses like this one– getting blown onto the muddy and grassy ground and ruining an hour's worth of washing.
Satoko's house didn't have a washing machine, and so Rika, seated on an upturned bucket, was forced to improvise with a rack and a large wooden basin as she merrily scrubbed at some of the quilted blankets that had previously been folded up in the linen closet. They were washing the heaviest bedding first, slowly working their way up to the lighter things like sheets and pillowcases, so that everything should be dry more or less at the same time. Mion might not look like it, but she had learned a lot about cleaning a house alongside her duties as the next Sonozaki head. Their ancestral home was just that –ancestral, drafty as hell in the winter and apt to constantly spring new leaks if you didn't keep a careful, constant eye on keeping up repairs.
The maid that came to clean daily just meant that Mion didn't have to clean daily. She still had to keep an eye on everything, and she'd done plenty of mending with her own two hands. They were saving that for after, though –sewing up all the little holes or the age-given tears that had happened with the bedding that had been folded into storage. Then they'd fold everything away again with cedar-and-clove sachets and lavender sprigs to deter pests until next year, or whenever Satoshi and possibly even Satoko moved back into the house –whichever came first.
Mion liked laundry. She liked the fresh, clean scent, she liked lifting and wringing out fabric and feeling water run over her fingers, she liked the satisfaction of seeing something become perfectly clean, and she especially liked the opportunity to twist some of the laundry into rattails and give the nearest unwary victim a sharp snap with them.
"Hehe." Mion cast a glance at Rika, who was, of course, safe: Mion could flick her, sure, but Rika also had access to one thing Mion didn't, and that was a large vat of water. Escalating a conflict under those circumstances was a bad idea, so Mion, once they got into the realm of pillowcases and loose sheets, would have to pick and choose her victims carefully. Perhaps once everyone else finished up with their cleaning and brought their handkerchiefs and dust rags out to be cleaned…?
Shion tried to control her blushes as she and Satoshi-kun entered his room, but it was rather difficult. After all, this was Satoshi-kun's room that she was inside. Satoshi-kun's room. That was i-intimate, even if it was just for cleaning.
Really, Shion, get ahold of yourself. She smacked her cheeks several times, making sure to do so a bit more gently than usual, given the latex gloves she was wearing. Focus!
"We'll need to dust first, starting from the top down, and then we can sweep out all the dust from the floor." she said, pointing. "After that, we can scrub down all the surfaces, then dry them, and then go over them with polish and varnish and all the rest of it if we need to."
"Muu…" Satoshi-kun eyed his room with morose expectation as he brandished his dust rag. "You sure know a lot about this, Shion-san."
Shion puffed out her chest a little, smirking proudly.
"Well, they taught us this sort of thing at St. Lucia's." she said. "They were trying to teach us how to be good brides and stuff, I think."
Shion then realized what she'd said –even if it was perfectly true, they had been doing their best to indoctrinate Shion and all her haughty stupid classmates into brainless housewives– and blushed a bright pink, hastily turning away to a patch of wall.
"A-anyway!" she said. "If you want to move your furniture around and stuff, you can do that after we finish dusting and sweeping out the dust, okay?"
"Sure thing." Satoshi-kun said complacently, raising his dust rag and heading for a different corner with a determined expression.
Most of the windows and doors, both within the house and leading out of it, had been thrown open, and so the spring breeze whisked through the house without hardly any restraint whatsoever when it came, bringing with it the twitter of birds and the scent of spring. The dust scattered away in that breeze when they swept it outside, and Shion ran the hose coiled up beside Rika-chama, who was scrubbing cheerfully at a tub full of cotton with a stack of stored bedding beside her on a mat. She filled a plastic bucket with soapy water, then dragged it laboriously back into the house and up the stairs, heading for Satoshi-kun's room.
They each took sponges from the supply bucket Shion had left outside and wrung them out, before starting to work with a will on the walls: the tatami mats on the floor had already been taken out and were airing on their sides in the hallway, away from the damp and dust.
Shion took deep breaths of the lovely fresh air as she returned to the bucket, plunging the sponge in and out of the soapy, grey-tinted water. The whole world seemed to sparkle on cool spring mornings like this, crisp and new and clean. Despite the chorelike nature of these tasks, she would have been hard-pressed to remember a time when she was happier.
Rena sighed as she set Keiichi to vacuuming the tatami mats braced against the wall, using a handheld vacuum plugged into the downstairs hallway outlet. He'd at least known to go along the grain, rather than against it, and Rena cast it from her mind as she returned her attention to her own task, spraying aerosolized vinegar on the mats he had finished vacuuming.
Much to her chagrin, she had indeed had to walk Keiichi through pretty much every aspect of cleaning, since he more or less completely relied on his mom for that as well as shopping and cooking. It was a good thing Keiichi was so smart in school subjects, because out here, he was pretty much functionally useless.
Rena mentally tabbed that idea. She should suggest hosting some more housework-based club games to Mion, if only because Keiichi would probably live on his own someday, and she wasn't at all convinced that he wouldn't starve to death in a messy apartment if the rest of the club didn't take a hand in his home improvement skills. Rika-chan and Satoko-chan had mentioned once, when they had that contest to make boxed lunches, that Keiichi had been absolutely abysmal at cooking even when club competition had lit a fire under him.
And maybe said competitions would give her a chance to show off her own skills…n-not that Rena had such ulterior motives at all. At all!
"Hauuuu…" Rena hummed under her breath, her cheeks reddening, as she started spritzing the tatami mats with slightly more vigor. That was a dangerous line of thought to take!
9.22 AM, USA Central Time
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