Extra Spicy?

(Akane's PoV)

-

'Okay... so... extra spicy...' I rubbed my chin. "Guess I'll search for my favorite ramen—'

The delivery app was still loading when I saw the notifications.

Two messages, sitting in the banner at the top of my screen, arrived hours ago, sometime during the long dead sleep of the afternoon, from a name that made my thumb stop moving.

Kurone.

I sat up on the couch. Upstairs, I could hear Shin moving boxes around, the muffled scrape of cardboard on floorboards, an occasional thud. I opened the thread.

The first message was long.

KURONE:'Akane, I'm sorry. I heard the rumors about what happened, and I know that sooner or later you would have come looking for me about it. I never wanted to tell Shin what happened between Kenji and me. I asked you not to, and then I did it myself. I know that's not fair to you. I'm asking you to forgive me. But I couldn't keep it inside anymore in that moment. I needed him to know. I'm sorry. I just exploded.'

I read it twice.

And I felt the anger I'd been half-saving for her — the you told him, you put him on that field, you nearly cost him everything — assemble itself, and then quietly fail to fire.

Because I'd seen her in that bathroom, I'd seen the fear inside her eyes. She'd held that thing alone, sealed, for longer than anyone should hold anything, and it had finally come out of her sideways, in front of the one person whose reaction she couldn't control.

That was a dam breaking, and I know dams. Way too well.

Then I read the second message, and everything else went out of my head.

KURONE: 'I don't feel well at all. I have nausea, tremors, fear. I'm terrified of the dark and of being alone. I think I have a fever too. I don't know what's happening to me, but I'm also having terrible mood swings. I don't think I'll be coming to school all week. Love you! You're still my best friend. I'm sorry.

P.S. If you know anything about Shin's parents, please let me know asap. My mother spoke with them just a few hours ago, and they said that they'd be willing to come back to Japan. They miss him.'

I sat very still on the couch.

Upstairs, something cardboard fell over, followed by Shin's muffled voice saying a very bad word.

'My mother spoke with them just a few hours ago. They miss him.'

Those sentences sat there at the bottom of the message, casual as a weather report, and detonated on a delay.

A few hours ago. At the same time, we were asleep on this couch. While Shin's yes was still less than a few hours old, everything was already in motion.

Kurone's mother, a phone line stretched across the world to Italy, two broken people on the other end of it hearing, for the first time in four years, that a road home existed.

It was really happening. Not someday. Now.

My chest did something complicated — fear and hope tangled so tight I couldn't tell whose they were, mine or his — and I forced it down, because there was something else in that message. Something that had snagged on the way past and was pulling at my sleeve.

I read the symptoms again.

Nausea.

Tremors. Fear. Mood swings.

Fever, maybe. Terrified of being alone.

And taken one way, it was exactly what it looked like: a girl coming apart in the aftermath of the worst thing that ever happened to her. The body keeping the score. I'd seen her flinch from hands that weren't there. Panic does all of this. Trauma does all of this. Every one of those symptoms had a perfectly obvious, perfectly terrible explanation, and that explanation's name was Kenji.

But I read the list a third time, and the cold thing in the basement of me laid the symptoms out in a different order.

Nausea. Fatigue. Mood swings. A body suddenly foreign to itself, doing things it can't explain. A girl eighteen years old, one year above us, writing I don't know what's happening to me — and planning to vanish from school for an entire week.

My eyes went wide.

The delivery app glowed forgotten in my other hand. Upstairs, Shin let out a small, triumphant "found you, dumbass!" to a stuffed hooded necromancer that had waited many years to hear it, and his footsteps started back across the floor toward the stairs, light and happy, belonging to a boy whose evening still contained nothing but noodles and horror movies.

And I sat frozen on his couch with my phone in my hand and the thought fully formed now, standing in the middle of my head where I couldn't walk around it:

'Kurone...

...you're not pregnant, are you?'

My thumbs were already moving before I'd finished deciding to write.

AKANE: 'Kuro. Don't worry about the other thing. Really. Please focus on getting better right now; that's the only job you have this week. And if you need anything, don't overthink it; call me. Any hour.'

I stared at the screen for a second, then kept going, because there was no gentle way to build up to it and pretending otherwise would only cost her time.

AKANE: 'But I have to be honest, I'm seriously worried. Have you taken a pregnancy test? Those symptoms are... very specific.'

Upstairs, a box scraped across the floor, and Shin's voice came down muffled through the ceiling.

"Oh! What the — what is this?"

Something clattered, and he sounded delighted. Whatever archaeological layer he'd hit up there, it had apparently produced treasure.

I looked back at my phone. The message sat there, delivered, unread.

AKANE: 'Kuro, answer as soon as you can. Please.'

Two minutes.

I sat on that couch and watched the screen for two full minutes without blinking properly, the delivery app still glowing forgotten behind the message thread, and I have rarely wanted a set of typing dots to appear so badly in my life.

Then they did.

KURONE: 'No... I haven't. But it seems impossible to me. I've always taken birth control. And even if it did happen... I would never carry that creature's child. It would be a scandal for both our families too.'

I let out a small breath.

Relief, of a kind. Thin and partial, but real. 'She's on birth control.' 

'Well... she can be smart when she wants. I hope she used the same as mine.' 

That changed everything: the nausea, the shaking, the fever, the mood swings... all of it slotted straight back into the explanation that had been sitting there the whole time, the obvious one, the one whose name was Kenji. A body coming apart in the aftermath. Panic doing what panic does.

But birth control isn't a wall. It's a very good fence. And a girl who has just described her own body as a stranger to her should not be guessing at anything.

AKANE: 'Kuro, take the test anyway. Please. Please talk to your mother, talk to a doctor, or talk to anyone else, but do it. Otherwise I'll bring you one myself.'

The reply came fast this time.

KURONE:'It would be better if you brought it... I don't want to talk to my mother about these things, because I already know what her words are gonna be.'

After her words, I closed my eyes and sighed at the ceiling.

Of course. Of course she didn't. Her mother is a woman who arranges international relocations over the phone and someone who forgot to teach her how to live.

Kurone would rather swallow the whole thing than carry it into that kitchen.

And I know exactly what that particular silence tastes like. I grew up on it.

AKANE: 'Fine. Tomorrow after school I'll come by your place.'

KURONE: 'You're too kind to me, Akane. Thank you. I think I'll rest for a bit now. I'll be waiting for you tomorrow. Good night! ♥'

AKANE: 'Good night. Feel free to call me if you're not feeling well.'

Three minutes passed, and no reply came.

'I would've never thought that someone like her could have a redemption arc... but hey, that's life...' I sighed.

After that, I threw the phone onto the cushion beside me, tipped my head back against the couch, and dragged both hands down my face.

Too kind. She always said that during these years. Like kindness is something I'm doing for her instead of the only thing left to do. And every time she said it, it landed somewhere between a thank-you and an accusation about the years I spent not being kind at all.

At that exact moment, footsteps came down the stairs.

"Hey," Shin said. "Everything okay, Akane?"

He came into the living room dusty at the knees, hair wrecked, holding a stuffed hooded necromancer in one hand like a man returning from war. I looked up at him and felt the two impulses arrive at once.

'Deflect. Or don't.'

No secrets. Both directions.

Fine. But not all secrets are mine to spend.

"I'm fine," I said. "But... Kurone isn't. She just messaged me. She says she feels awful and she won't be at school all week."

Shin's face changed immediately, the lightness draining out of it into worry.

"I figured," he said quietly. "Today she couldn't even stay upright in the corridor."

"So after school tomorrow I'm going to go see her." I sat up properly. "I'll cut out a little early, and I'll be waiting for you at the gates once you've finished the festival stuff. That way you don't have to hang around wondering where I am, and so I can be sure that the Gyaru Whore won't be near you spreading all her dirty bitchy pheromones all over your clothes."

"Okay." He nodded, and there was no hesitation anywhere in it, and no shadow either. "Just let me know how she's doing. And—"

My hand twitched involuntarily. 'Just let me know how she's doing.' 

Then, Shin held out the plush.

"This is your plush," he said. "The one I won cleanly and fairly, through skill, without leaning over any lines, and which I am now formally gifting to you."

"Now it's mine," I said, and snatched it out of his hands before the sentence was finished, hugging it against my chest. That plush was slightly flattened on one side, one horn of the hood bent permanently sideways, and it smelled faintly of cardboard and old house. Perfect. "Ahhh! Now I want the Larry the Skeleton Janitor plush too!"

"That doesn't exist. I guess." Shin sighed.

"It exists. It was a limited run. I want him as our anniversary gift."

"It was a rumor, Akane. Rare piece. Nobody's ever produced photographic evidence." He stretched his arms. "I promise that I'll buy it if I'll find it."

"So you just said that we'll stay together enough to have an anniversary, ghost boy?" I said, burying my face in Mordecai's flattened hood. "You just signed your death sentence, you know?" I teased.

"I signed this death sentence the second I stepped inside your sanctuary, Akane," He smiled.

Then Shin dropped onto the couch beside me, and for a second we just sat there—him dusty, tired, and gently amused, me with an edgy necromancer under my chin—and the ordinary evening tried valiantly to reassert itself over everything else in the room.

Then he glanced at the coffee table.

"Hey. Did you call the delivery? I'm pretty hungry." 

My eyes went wide.

"Ah." I looked at my phone, still lying face-down on the cushion where I'd flung it. "No. Kurone distracted me. Sorry. I'm doing it now, I'm doing it now—"