Commentary: Part III! Gosh but this is fun.
Warning: Implications ahead!
I hope you enjoy it. =)
CYCLE
PART III: Jupiter
or
Muffins are quite deadly
Breeeee, insists the phone.
Makoto, who worked late the previous night at the local bakery, cracks open a jaundiced eye. She rolls it toward the phone—she lifts her head too. She fell asleep at the table on a stack of invoices, and now one sticks to her cheek and flutters there.
Breeeee, the phone pleads again. With a low moan, Makoto reaches out, catches the receiver, drops it, curses, and falls from her chair chasing it. She eventually, on her hands and knees in the middle of her kitchen floor, fits it to her ear. The invoice crinkles between the mouthpiece and her flesh.
"'Lo?" she growls.
"Mako-chan?" a soft voice inquires in turn. It demurs, "I'm sorry—did I wake you?"
"Ami-chan?" Mako asks sleepily. She denies, "You didn't wake me, n—" and must break away from the claim to yawn. Ami giggles, and Makoto turns her lips into the receiver and smiles. She is surprised, but pleased too, to hear Ami's voice so early.
She glances at the clock on the stove. The little green numbers inform her cheerily that it is 10:02 AM.
…okay, maybe it's not early, but the sentiment remains unchanged.
"—something to show you," Ami finishes. "It's taken me all morning to decide that I'm not completely insane, and I think you should see it first because you're the one out of the rest who's least likely to freak out, and—"
"Whoa, hold it," Makoto interrupts. "Back up." She's slowly coming awake. She opens her other eye, her lashes still smeared with sleep. She shifts the phone in her hand a little. Because she never made it to the shower the previous evening, she leaves sugar-white fingerprints across the shiny black receiver. "What?" she resumes. "You said you've got something to show me?"
Ami pauses, and Makoto listens to her breathe into the phone. The other woman's respiration is quick, excited—she licks her lips, a satin wet whisper. Makoto echoes the motion—and flushes. Why did I do that? she wonders.
Before she can devote much thought to the matter, Ami's voice rises once more.
She asks, "May I come over?"
"Uhm." Makoto, thoughtless, twines her fingers in the phone's crinkled cord. She winds the plastic ribbon around and around her thumb, her face hot, her smile an idiot's smile. "Sure—yeah. That's, yeah, that's fine—hey," she realizes. "Have you eaten yet? Today?"
"Now that you mention it," Ami disagrees, "I haven't—"
"Good." Makoto nods, even though Ami can't see her. "Me either. I'll make us breakfast."
The protest from the other soldier is immediate and contrite: "Mako-chan, you don't have to do that!"
"I know." Makoto opens the cabinet nearest her, selects a skillet, and shoves it atop the stove. It scrapes merrily across the burners. "I want to, though, and you'd better be here in"—she checks the clock for the second time—"thirty minutes, Ami-chan, or I'll have eaten all the muffins."
Ami pauses again. This time Makoto licks her lips. Her flush spreads over her cheeks, sweeps down her neck, and paints her collarbones red.
"…muffins?" Ami ventures. She tries not to sound too hopeful. She fails. Miserably.
"Blueberry muffins. Nuts on top." Makoto, using the chair she fell out of as a support, climbs to her feet. She opens the fridge and peers within. She tacks on, "And bacon."
"Oooo," Ami opines. "Bacon."
Makoto makes chomping noises into the phone. Ami giggles again, eager, and when the sound has tapered, the lightning soldier insists, "Thirty minutes! Chop chop!" and hangs up.
A mixing bowl, two cups of flour, and a cracked egg later, Makoto realizes that the invoice is still attached to her face.
After nearly an exact half hour, she takes the muffin tin from the simmering oven in time to a knock on the door. "Come in!" she calls. She carefully ladles the tin onto a cooling rack.
A shuffling sound in the hall: a round face next, peering around the kitchen's jamb. Ami, countenance scarlet and hair windswept, demands breathlessly, "Am I too late? Are there any—"
Makoto cuts her off, stepping aside to gesture to the tin with a flourish.
Ami grins—a wide, shy kind of grin—and claps her hands together gleefully. Her eyes light like night lanterns. "They smell wonderful, Mako-chan."
Taking a bow, the chef waves Ami to her invoice-strewn table. "Good! I hope they taste as much. Sit, sit—I'll serve. I'm up anyway. How much bacon do you want?"
Ami's eyes glint, predatory, and Makoto laughs. She thus ensures the plate she settles before her petite friend moments later sports plenty of protein.
"Thank you, Mako-chan. This is…" Ami, clearing away the stack of invoices to make room for two glasses of orange juice and Makoto's own plate, provides the taller girl an expression that is all admiring adoration.
Makoto puts down her plate a little too hard: two semi-squashed blueberries make a break for it, rolling away from their mother muffin around the rim of the saucer. "Aw," she dismisses, "c'mon, it's nothing." And because Ami looks like she's going to argue, she queries hastily, "So! What's this thing you need me to see, huh?"
She plunks herself down next to the smaller soldier, whose face has gone still, somber, serious. Concerned, Makoto nudges her and lifts her eyebrows.
Ami's stonewall expression wavers, softens, and she leans forward suddenly. "You've got a little flour on your nose," she says. "Here"—and she licks her thumb—"let me get it."
The small star of her hand closes the distance between them, furls over Makoto's cheek. The taller soldier inhales. The wet pad of Ami's thumb brushes her.
TZZT.
Makoto blinks and Ami's hair is standing aloft on her skull, a feathery blue Einstein corona. Sparks dance in it. Eyes enormous, Ami exhales a faint, "Oh!" in a puff of white smoke.
She jitters and falls, face first, into her waiting muffin.