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Celes considered Valentine’s Day a necessary evil. In the days running up to it, she spent approximately sixteen thousand yen on chocolates, an amount that she waved a hand at, claiming the money was pocket change out of her gothic purse even if it was all the only pocket change that she had. The reason she spent so much was because she was investing in a date precisely a month later called White Day, when the men who received chocolates would have to give back a gift that cost three times more. She expected jewellery.
Also, she had a reputation to maintain, and to not give chocolates would be unsightly.
When Celes arrived at the shoe locker room, only a few people were there, pottering around, and she only managed a few paces before Sayaka popped up in front of her.
“Happy Valentine’s Day,” greeted Sayaka, holding out a small bag tied with a yellow bow of friendship that Celes gave a tight smile at.
“Ah, Maizono-san, has it slipped your mind?” asked Celes.
“Nope, I remembered. You’re on a diet,” said Sayaka. She gave the bag a small shake, like how one might grab a cat’s attention with a bag of cat food, but Celes’s cat hated dry food. “But these candies are sugar-free, so it should be okay, right?”
Sayaka maneuvered her lips into a pout. Celes sighed and slumped her shoulders.
“Maizono-san, your face could rot teeth. I concede. You’ve trapped me,” said Celes, despite how their exchange of words hadn’t drawn attention, and she accepted the bag.
The two of them headed over to their adjacent shoe lockers. Sayaka walked with a skip in her step, full of smiles.
“Are you giving anyone any honmei choco?” asked Sayaka.
“No. There hasn’t been a single man who has caught my attention,” said Celes matter-of-factly.
Ever.
Just their bank accounts.
Sayaka stood in front of her locker and raised her eyebrows. “Not a single one?”
“I said, no.” Celes bent down and removed her shoes. “But that is fine. In Germany, where I was raised, the holiday is far less celebrated, and it is more for adults. However, the idea of giving out chocolates to classmates as a social obligation is interesting.”
“Ah, I see,” said Sayaka. She opened her locker and swapped her shoes.
Celes straightened and pulled her locker’s handle, shoes in one hand, but instead of reaching inside, she froze, eyes wide.
“Hm?” Sayaka took a moment to notice. “Celes-san? Are you okay?”
She followed Celes’s gaze and gasped.
“You got chocolate!” said Sayaka, pointing out the obvious as she pointed a finger at Celes’s locker, other hand over her mouth.
Not just any chocolate, though. The room hushed as Celes dragged out the heart-shaped box, her nostrils flaring, and dangled it between her fingers. This went beyond ‘friendship’ or ‘obligation’ chocolate.
“Is that a note?” asked Sayaka, and Celes steadied her grip on the box to investigate.
Indeed, secured by a ribbon was a clean sheet of paper, which Celes picked out and read aloud.
“‘Here is the key to my heart’,” Celes said with a furrowed brow. She shifted her thumb off some words. “Below that are an assortment of letter strings.”
At the bottom of the list of seemingly random letters were two capital letter ‘I’s with two lines coming out of their middles, forming a diamond between the letters that looped at the top. Celes deduced that they were the author’s signature, like the bloody writing that serial killer, Genocider Syo, left behind.
Sayaka touched her finger lightly against the sheet of paper. “They’re like words, but not in any language that I know.”
“I suspect it’s a code of some kind and their meaning will become clear once they’re deciphered,” said Celes, sending an excited shiver up Sayaka.
“Wow! Expensive chocolate and a puzzle?” said Sayaka, beaming. She hopped delicately from one foot to the other. “This has to be honmei chocolate!”
Celes studied the note some more. Everything apart from the signature had been typed in Arial font and printed, while the symbol and been drawn in black ink. Sayaka fished out her phone from her blouse pocket and flicked the screen on.
“Oh, no, we have class soon,” said Sayaka with a slight lip press after. “Maybe you can work out what it means between lessons? You’re smart, so it shouldn’t be hard for you.”
They closed their lockers and headed to class together. Their teacher hadn’t arrived yet. Sayaka approached Makoto’s desk, offering him and nearby Chihiro a wave, but Celes didn’t follow her. Celes stationed herself at the front of the classroom and counted. On this occasion, the whole class was present, most likely due to what day of the year it was. Even those who didn’t care for the holiday were there, as they were the sort of people who wanted to have a good attendance.
She cleared her throat.
“Excuse me,” she said.
Everyone continued bumbling around and talking in their overlapping bubbles. Her smile drained away, darkening her features, and she spotted a glass bottle on their teacher’s desk.
Celes scraped her metal finger claw against it. The grating noise strained the class into silence.
“That took longer than I would have liked,” she said, now with everyone’s attention on her, half of them wincing, half of them glaring. She lifted the box of chocolates. “Please, tell me, who left this in my shoe locker?”
“I-Is that...?” Hifumi adjusted his glasses and squinted. After a beat, he lurched back in his chair, nearly overbalancing and tipping over. His arms flailed briefly before he jumped up. “... H-Honmei chocolate?”
“It looks like some to me,” said Chihiro with a finger against their chin.
Mondo quirked his brow. “Don’t girls usually get guys chocolate?”
“Not always,” replied Sakura. “However, it is uncommon...”
Celes inclined her head to the side. She placed the chocolate box onto the desk and formed a ‘V’ shape under her chin with her hands.
“Well, whoever they were, they didn’t leave a name, so can they please speak up now?” asked Celes.
Silence. No one raised a hand. She gritted her teeth to sustain her smile.
“Am I speaking in a foreign tongue?” asked Celes. “Quite plainly, I said, can they speak up?”
More silence. One of her eyes twitched.
Eventually, Yasuhiro ended the stand-off, but not in the way that Celes wanted.
“Whoever it is, they probably don’t want to say it in front of everyone,” he told her.
“It must be honmei chocolate.” Aoi lightly punched her palm. “From a secret admirer...”
She scratched at her chin.
“.... but isn’t not putting your name on the one day when you’re meant to confess kind of silly?” Aoi added.
“They might be from a different class,” said Byakuya, the first to lose interest, with his gaze on the book in his hands.
“Or they could be a teacher,” Touko piped up, wringing her hands together at the desk behind him.
Byakuya glanced up. “Or Celes could have given it to herself as a cry for attention.”
Celes laughed loudly into her hand.
“Your attempts at a burn succeed as much as a wet dishcloth,” Celes informed him.
He didn’t acknowledge her, back to reading his book, and she elevated her chin, but their homeroom teacher walked in before she could prod him again or interrogate them any further. Reluctantly, she sat at her desk, and she laid out the note in front of her, staring at its nonsense words.
It seemed she would have to play their game.
The letter wasn’t hard to figure out. In fact, she worked out its hidden message during their first lesson. What Sayaka thought was an unknown language was an anagram of an instruction to go to a certain place in the school.
During lunch break, Celes left the classroom and within minutes, showed up at the entrance hall. Several students were loitering there, but none of them paid her more than a glance.
Time passed like the stuttering hand on an analog clock. Heat crept up her neck as she waited for someone to come forward and claim responsibility for the chocolate. To make it look like she hadn’t been stood up, she walked over to the map near the door leading to outside and pretended to study it for a while. When she had drawn that out for long enough, she checked the noticeboard, and that was when she spotted a slip of lined paper pinned to it, bearing the same strange symbol that the note on her chocolates had.
This note didn’t have anagrams, but coordinates.
“What...?” she mumbled, soon remembering the map. Her shoulders slumped but she would be damned if she let whoever wrote the notes think for even a second that they had outsmarted her. No, she would find them, and she would reject their chocolates to their face.
Celes soon found herself outside of the headmaster’s office and she readied her fist, but before she knocked, she caught sight of a note almost completely tucked underneath the door. She bent down and pulled it out. Even if it was unrelated, the note could still provide some interesting information about another student.
‘I left my book in the girls’ changing room by the swimming pool. Return it to where I got it off the shelf in the library. You’ll know it’s mine by the bookmark.’
Signed off with the strange symbol.
Male students weren’t allowed in that changing room. Therefore, Celes could get them into trouble if she chose to reveal their actions to one of the teachers. She smirked to herself.
First, she tracked down the book, left under a bench in the corner of the changing room. In it was a bookmark with the author’s symbol on it. Then she went to the library and found its shelf, where she discovered a sheet of paper where it should have been. It was a crossword that when solved, revealed a word that led her to the kitchens.
“Ah, Celes-san, have you come to sample my selection of meats, finally?” asked Teruteru, a student in another class who spent his time cooking when he should have spent his time in the ground.
“I would like some royal milk tea,” she said. She deserved a break and she was here, so she might as well have something to drink.
“For you, I will let you have some of my special milk,” he said, and she watched closely as he retrieved a milk pan from one of the cupboards. He frowned and turned it over in his hands.
A word search was stuck to the bottom of the milk pan.
While she drank her tea in the cafeteria, Celes worked on the word search. The only word that didn’t appear in it despite being in the list below was another location, and so after she finished her drink, she stomped over to the recreation room. There, she noticed that the mahjong set had been put back in the wrong place, and she inspected it. As she predicted, she found a note, this one containing riddles where the first letter of each answer spelled out a word.
Another location in the school.
Celes gritted her teeth and at the sauna, nearly ripped its door off. She searched the small room for a note, for anything out of the ordinary. The longer she spent in there, the more her outfit constricted her body. Her vision blurred and her head spun, and unable to take the temperature anymore, she stumbled out, sweating.
They would pay dearly for this. Celes almost ran to the bathhouse lockers, only she didn’t because that wouldn’t have been dignifying, and as she sat down on a bench, she realised that the chocolates had melted.
Something glinted in one of the pieces. Her skin crawled as she picked it out. It was a small key, only the length of one finger joint, its head a skull. From past experience, she knew the key was for a pair of handcuffs. Knowing that, however, gave her no hint on what to do with the key. The sauna had provided no inspiration, only melting the chocolates, and whoever gave her the chocolates must have known she wouldn’t eat them, or else she would have swallowed the key.
She threw the lid and when it landed, she noticed some text on its underside.
‘Where the day begins and ends.’
That made her realise how much time she spent on this. Wasted on this. This, that had gone on long enough. Too long. Celes thundered out of the bathhouse, tossing the box of chocolates into the first bin she passed, and no one dared approach her through the storm that whipped around her all the way to her dorm room.
Her first step inside placed her foot onto a note that had been slid underneath her door. She picked it up, almost tearing it in her tight grip.
‘Sort out the first letter of each place of your journey, and you will reach the end.’
Over the course of the afternoon and well into the evening, Celes had visited several locations, so she seized a piece of paper from a notebook on her desk and wrote down the various places that she had been to that day due to the chocolate.
Entrance hall
Office
Changing room
Library
Kitchen
Recreation room
Sauna
In that order, they didn’t spell a word in any language, but in English, when rearranged, they did. Lockers. There were several in the school, and several kinds. By the swimming pool. In the bathhouse. For their shoes. As she searched each one, her heart pounded. Not only did she know roughly where to go, but she thought she knew who gave her the chocolates. Someone who could work with the headmaster so he wouldn’t take the note by his door. Someone who knew him well. Very well. Someone who could go into the girls’ changing room because they weren’t a male student. Someone whose symbol wasn’t two ‘I’s that connected, but two letter ‘K’s reflecting the other.
She swung open the door to a room of unused lockers in the old school building, once belonging to staff before they relocated to another area of the school. The only light snuck in from outside.
“Kizakura-sensei,” Celes would have snarled, if snarling was dignified. “When everyone finds out that...”
Celes faltered.
Only one other person was in there, but they were not Koichi Kizakura.
“Kirigiri-san?” she said, blinking. Her lashes patted out the fire in her.
Kyouko, leaning back against a locker, arms over her chest, stared at Celes calmly.
“This... is your doing?” asked Celes, mouth hanging open.
“What are you talking about?” said Kyouko with a faint smirk that the darkness almost swallowed whole, like she would have any other reason to be in an abandoned section of the school.
Celes was about to snap at her, but she caught herself at the last moment. She giggled into a fist.
“When you act stupid, the only person who seems stupid is you, Kirigiri-san,” said Celes. Her hand lowered and her smile dug into her cheeks, her eyes just as empty. “You sent me on quite the wild goose chase today. I really hope you have a good reason.”
Kyouko delayed her answer by first taking her weight off the locker, then by stroking her hair and finally by positioning herself so she stood facing Celes fully.
“It’s Valentine’s Day, isn’t it?” she asked Celes, no longer grinning, not even slightly.
“I... Yes.” Celes nearly forgot. As realisation set in, she raised a hand to her lips. “You got me honmei chocolate?”
“Indeed.” A faint blush dusted Kyouko’s features and she looked away, a hand hovering by one of her ears. “Is it really so surprising that I may feel something for you? You are alluring, in a way that many would perceive as beguiling... and maybe it is...”
Celes felt like she had wandered into the sauna again. She tried to defog the sensation with laughter that rang clear like bells.
“That is flattering, Kirigiri-san, but I don’t think I will be so charming in a minute. You used my valuable time on this little game,” she said, not bothering to feign smiles anymore. “Not only that, but your plan was far from perfect. You assumed I would have the patience to follow your plan through to the end. I could have swallowed the key. Someone could have moved one of the clues.”
Kyouko fell back on silence, but the room couldn’t answer for her, so Kyouko had no choice but to respond.
“Well, first of all, I wanted to have some fun with you, but I also wanted to see if you were able to solve my puzzles. If you couldn’t, or didn’t, then I would only be wasting my time.” She gave Celes a steady gaze. “But you’re right, there was room for something to go wrong. Many things, in fact, but it’s a gamble that I was willing to take. You know what a gamble is, don’t you?”
A rose whip cracked lightning in Celes’s core. Her face scrunched up and her perception distorted Kyouko’s stare into a leer, and unable to stand it, Celes burst forward and grabbed Kyouko’s shoulders. Their eyes locked, and Celes could only hear her breath, loud, ragged, and she could only see Kyouko’s wide eyes, and then only her pale pink lips.
Lightning struck again in her as their lips crashed together.
Within seconds, they parted. Celes couldn’t taste any lip gloss or clichés. Only the saliva that built up in her mouth, which crackled as she swallowed. Seeing how red Kyouko had gone made Celes dread to know if her colour matched hers. The fleeting touch had them panting, and the only way to hide her emotions, how exposed she had become, was to bury herself in Kyouko, so she leaned in again. At the same time, Kyouko did as well. Their noses bumped but they greeted each other slowly enough that they could adjust their angles rather than bounce back. Celes cupped one of Kyouko’s cheeks, while Kyouko placed a hand onto Celes’s waist.
When they finally pulled apart, Celes said, “But wait... What about the handcuff key?”
Kyouko slipped a finger under Celes’s chin, closing her mouth.
“That’s for tonight,” she told her. “I thought we could do some undercover work in my room.”