You Love Her, Don't You?
Why is Ryo stuck with the biggest asshole in the history of Totsuki?
It all started when Alice commanded him to find Jun Shiomi to investigate a certain spice that she had flown in from Madagascar specifically for a pop-up restaurant she was helping out with nearby. As usual, he abided by her request and slouched his way to Shiomi's lab, the vial of spice (golden-brown, but it glinted iridescently under a focused light) in his pocket. He just planned to ask the basic questions like, "Is it sweet? Spicy? What's it commonly used for?"
Of course, things never go as planned.
First of all, he had spent several minutes trying to find Shiomi, who turned out to be asleep outside in the garden, her glasses still balanced on her face and her ponytailed hair tangled within herbs and dirt. He didn't want to wake her, but luckily he didn't have to when Hayama appeared behind him, grumbling about how Jun left the oven on again and couldn't even bother to sleep in the right place. "This woman," he scoffed, scooping up Shiomi's small body into his arms. Without acknowledging Ryo, Hayama carefully tucked Shiomi under a readied blanket on the tea-stained couch. Finally, he turned to his visitor. "What do you want?" His voice was already bristling with annoyance and unwelcome.
Ryo, used to Hayama's prickly demeanor, had then wasted no words and told him of Alice's plans and peppered him with all the right questions. Copying all the answers down on a notepad, he had nodded and was about to leave politely if not a little hurriedly. Hayama always grated his nerves ever since he won their first shokugeki together.
And then the worst part came.
Shiomi had woken up soundlessly, as if roused by a ghost, and saw the two boys talking grimly, hardly holding back from bickering. Scattered brain, she had said, "Kurokiba, you're here! What a surprise! I was just about to ask Akira to pick those wild mushrooms in the field right outside the school. Why don't you join him?"
"Me? I'm…busy. I have to get to Miss Alice."
"Nonsense! I just keep thinking of how lonely poor little Akira will be, picking mushrooms in that big field all alone. He'll get tired so fast with those small muscles," she had said, ignoring Hayama's protests on how "those small muscles do ALL your chores because you forget to do them!". Instead, she went on. "Time will pass faster with the two of you working together. Won't you do that for me, Kurokiba?"
Initially, Ryo was planning on refusing, no matter what. He had no obligation to Hayama or Shiomi. But perhaps it was Shiomi's careless nature or need to be taken care of by Hayama that reminded him of Alice, who was probably experimenting with her vast collections of machines at the time. So he grudgingly said yes, he would help Hayama with the damn mushrooms. Who knew he could be such a considerate individual?
Unfortunately, he is already regretting his sudden kindness. Hayama had taken him to the field, blanketed with dandelions and overgrown ferns, and now they are on their knees searching for a flower-shaped mushroom. "Ridiculous," Ryo mumbles under his breath.
"What did you say?" Hayama demands. In some ways, his hotheadedness mirrors Alice's own behavior.
"I can't believe I'm stuck here with you when I could be doing something else."
"Like what? Running at Alice's beck and call?"
Ryo pauses for a moment. "Yeah," he says.
Hayama snorts. "So much better than picking mushrooms."
"Better company, at the very least."
"Oh, so you like the Ice Princess more than me?" It's clear that his epithet is more joking than demeaning, but Ryo can't help but bristle slightly at Hayama's rude nicknames for Alice.
"Yes. I thought I made that abundantly clear," he mutters and returns to digging up the roots of the mushrooms. Grains of soil dribble between his fingers, staining them with the feeling of wet mud fitting in between each crevice and line of his hand.
After a few more minutes of grubbing for these godforsaken fungi, Ryo thinks, he suddenly drops the basket onto the ground and sits down, legs crossed. He's had enough. Of course, Hayama flies into outrage, ready to bicker with him, hissing, "Jun needs this so we ought to hurry up and help her." When Ryo doesn't budge from his position, Hayama sighs. Then, he sits down next to Ryo.
"Finally ready for a break, huh?" Ryo snickers. Hayama's pale hair (like Alice's, he absentmindedly notes, except with a slightly blue hue) is slicked back into a ponytail, but the result of long hours under the sun has caused a few flyaways to stick out like strands of hay.
"I think we both need a break," Hayama replies, tucking his knees under his chin. Ryo doesn't have to think to find the parallels of their situation: both serving masters who get into far more trouble than the boys' deserve. Yet, both Ryo and Hayama remain stuck at the hips of these women in one way or another.
"Alice can last another hour without me," Ryo says dryly. They both rush into silence, eager for a period where none has to hear the other's voice; instead, they seek refuge by listening to the twilight cicadas and watching for the fireflies darting through the lowering curtain of evening. It's quiet, a rare moment for the both of them. They are used to the hustle and bustle of Alice's or Jun's busy lives of research, cooking, and demanding. Now, it's just the two of them watching the sun disappear beneath the skyline of trees; in a way, they are like the horizon inside of which the sun slips into. Without their mistresses, they are almost aimless, an arrowhead with no direction, no sense of beginning nor ending; they seem to belong to an unfurled sky but never really are part of it.
Perhaps Hayama realizes this, so he starts a conversation to prove that he is something more. "I always wanted to go back to my home country, you know. After I graduate. See how it is. See what I can do there."
"Are you gonna go?"
Hayama furrows his brows into a seamless line. "I don't know…Jun needs me here." And once more, he cannot seem to leave her behind, cannot seem to become something without her.
Ryo, already familiar with the taste of freedom as a result of those five months without Alice, responds, "Maybe just take a summer off and go back. Explore it. Who knows what you'll find?"
"Yeah, maybe. Reminds me, didn't you leave Totsuki for a while? Alice came back without you. She seemed really desolate for a bit."
"Did she," Ryo murmurs thoughtfully. "Yeah, I traveled around Europe for a bit. Nice to not have anyone tell you what to do."
"But now you're back. Doing the same thing," Hayama says, more a statement evoking a contradiction than an actual question.
"No, not the same thing. I mean, yeah, it might look like it from someone like you" — he can't help but attack Hayama once again — "but Alice and I know that it's something different. She…understands more, I guess, that I'm not just some human robot for her to use."
"Doesn't look like it," Hayama interjects (irritatingly, Ryo fumes).
"It's…We just have this mutual understanding. For Alice and me, we understand each other in and out. We're good apart, but even better together. Those five months away made me realize she's not just my mistress. She does things because…she cares. I care, too. I don't know what I'd do without her," Ryo finishes honestly. He wonders if he's said too much because what follows is silence. Heaviness in the air. Then, Hayama speaks.
"You love her, don't you?"
For once, Ryo can't say something sharp or laugh at Hayama or rebuke him for his assumptions. It is as if his voice has vanished like the sun. Instead, he sits and thinks. Finally, he clears his throat. "I…I don't know. Love almost seems like too weak a word to describe what Alice and I have. It's…just not enough. It's too simple." Fumbling over his words, Ryo quickly switches the subject and turns the questions on Hayama. "Well, do you like anyone?"
Hayama hesitates. "Well, I do like someone."
"Lucky — sorry, unlucky girl."
"Girl," Hayama snorts so lowly that Ryo almost misses it if not for the abrupt coil of sadness wound thickly in his voice. "Yeah, unlucky girl."
"It's not Shiomi, is it?"
"No, of course it's not Jun!" Hayama exclaims, aghast. "I think of her like a mother. She saved me, which is why I have to always help her now. I can't believe someone like her made me who I am today," he scoffs, shaking his head. "But this person is someone who inspires me. H-they lost to me in a shokugeki, but they showed me a lot of new things that I admire."
"You can admire someone?" Ryo jokes, but Hayama doesn't laugh. Instead, he raises his hand so that his palm faces the indigo sky, examining the moonlight leaking between his fingers.
"I admire their fire. Their passion. Their dedication. The way they're at odds with me, of all people. The way they challenge me," he says, more serious than Ryo wants the conversation to be.
"So are you gonna ask her out?"
"I can't."
"Why not?"
"They are in love with someone else," Hayama says, all of a sudden turning to look Ryo in the eyes. Shifting uncomfortably, Ryo blinks to shatter the moment. It was almost as if he were electrified by Hayama's silent turmoil, as if Hayama wanted to say something more but wouldn't. Couldn't. Hayama looks down and digs his hands underneath the soil, unsettling the dirt into fortified mounds of unrest. "I want this person to be happy, so I'm not going to say anything."
"At the cost of your own happiness?"
"Yes," Hayama says, a little bitterly. "So, Ryo, I would advise that if you do love Alice, you should tell her as soon as possible. Before she slips away."
Ryo treads to the Nakiri mansion, head down, the moonlight filtering through cracks between clouds twisted together. His hair, slightly overgrown, is obscured by a faded baseball cap, one that belonged to Alice's father. His eyes follow the pebbles that he kicks along the path, so focused, in fact, that he nearly misses Alice's silhouette by the doorway. From his vantage point, her figure merely looks like a dark shape with golden light surrounding it like a halo. As he approaches, her disapproving stance — arms crossed, slanted mouth — becomes clear.
"Hey," he says simply when he reaches the doorsteps. Alice glares down at him.
"'Hey'? Is that all you have to say? I've been waiting so long for you!" Alice whines. "Come up. I've been bored without you!" Reaching her hand out, she pulls him through the doorway. Immediately, once inside the mansion, Ryo drops her hand like it is on fire. He doesn't know why, but maybe it's because of what Hayama said earlier. Skin contact between the two used to be normal; expected, actually. Alice would drag him around, unfazed, by the arm or the wrist or the sleeve to places he never dreamed of going. He would hold her when she slept or pick her up and deliver her to her bed or gently touch her neck to remind her that he was there whenever she got anxious. I've got you, his touch would say. But now, his touch screams confusion and desperation. If she touched him, maybe she would realize it and draw away in horror. Now, his touch whispers, Who are you to me? Does it matter? It shouldn't matter, because he is just her aide, but it's like Hayama's words have ignited a new world to Ryo.
"You love her, don't you?"
"Ryo? What's wrong with you?" Alice breaks him out of his stupor. "You've just been standing there! Snap out of it, Ryo." Despite the harshness of her tone, she grabs him by the wrist — it's natural between us, he reminds himself — and clutches it like her life depends on it. Her life doesn't — she has Erina, her parents, all her friends — but, with no one important to him except for her, his might.
"You should tell her as soon as possible. Before she slips away."
"I think I…" he begins but his voice catches, knotting together into a lump deep in his throat.
"You what?"
"Never mind," he says, shaking her hand off. Ignoring her hurt expression, he stalks off to his room but takes care not to slam the door.
"You love her, don't you?"
How the hell is he supposed to know?
Hi guys! Sorry this took so much longer than I expected; I try to write one chapter ahead of what I publish, but the next chapter is taking a bit. Ryo is, again, confused, but don't worry! Things are definitely heating up – you'll see in the next chapter! To NinjaWolf101: you'll definitely see ;) I don't think anyone will anticipate what happens next! To teathree and whatermelown: thank you so much! I really do love hearing what you guys think!
As always, thanks for reading and reviews are appreciated! :)