Chapter Text
The Naming of Cats is a difficult matter,
It isn't just one of your holiday games;
They had put her right in his arms. Bid a swift farewell and wished him as much good luck as he could carry, along with the cat, and seemed to disappear in an instant. He wasn’t ready for this.
He didn’t have food, he didn’t have medicine, he didn’t have a litter box or a bed or even a tiny toy-mouse for her to play with. All he had was the kitten in his arms, an uncomfortably heavy backpack on his shoulders, and by far not enough money in his wallet or in his bank account.
It wasn’t really clear to him what had made him act this way. Still, one ought to look on a bright side. Assuming an air of reassurance and calmness, he unstuck the cat’s claws from his sweater and raised her to eye-level, in the middle of the street.
“It’s going to be okay,” Kaworu told her, looking into the big blue specs she had for eyes.
Naturally, he had to stop at a pet shop on his way home. The kitten, small thing that she was, clung desperately to his chest, seemingly more terrified of life than he’d ever been. At some point, on the bus, she’d started meowing, although it sounded more like wailing now.
The shopkeeper gave him a bizarre look while he gathered pouches of kitten food with one hand and held the trembling kitten with the other. Granted, she hadn’t stopped wailing, and it was possible that he had started rocking her in his arms as one would have done with an infant.
Two pouches. It was impossible for him to carry more than that up to his apartment even if he’d had the money for it. For now, it would have to do.
Before a Cat will condescend
To treat you as a trusted friend,
Some little token of esteem
Is needed, like a dish of cream; 1
At least his apartment was quiet. Not in one of its best days, but it was home, and it was warm, and it had a lot of soft surfaces where the cat could be deposited while he re-evaluated his life. Actually, there was no time for that; there were kittens to be fed.
The sudden change of environment had managed to surprise her into silence, at least. Kaworu placed her carefully in the middle of his bed, and she instantly started nuzzling around his sheets. It only took a moment for him to go, take a plate out of a cupboard and pour half the contents of a cat food pouch into it, but when he turned back to her, she suddenly seemed even smaller than before. Now he remembered.
She was way too little to be left there, he thought, approaching the bed with the plate in his hands. Even if they would have taken her to a nice shelter, and even though there would have been people to look after her there, she was still too small.
“Hello,” he said, slowly seating himself on the edge of the bed.
She was inspecting one of the purple suns on his sheets and seemed unwilling to give him any attention. Kaworu watched her for a while, and then gave her side a tentative poke. Since no disastrous effects followed, he did it again, and again, until poking turned to petting and he kept at it until she started pushing her head into his palm.
“Aren’t you hungry?” he asked and almost shifted the plate from his knees to his bed before stopping himself. Well, neither of these was an especially good idea; he hadn’t yet changed and he’d only just done laundry the other day. “Okay,” he said to himself or to them both, and carefully picked the cat in one hand, carrying her and the plate to an empty place on the floor, by the balcony door.
He put her down before she had the chance to get scared again. Then, he placed the food in front of her, nudged her again, in the right direction, and observed. The plate was bigger than her, diametrically. Still, two, three timid sniffs was all it took for her to attack it with all her kitty force.
Kaworu widened his eyes once she started growling around the food, but then blinked and left her at it while he finally took the chance to change his clothes. While wondering at the static his sweater produced once it was taken off, he glanced at the clock. Four hours ago he’d been arguing with his teacher over Mozart’s 20th piano concerto, vaguely worrying about some unfinished music theory notes and pondering what to do in order to save enough money to last him another week.
Now all of these had been temporarily forgotten, and he had a cat.
He pulled a T-shirt out of his bathroom cupboard and glanced back at the aggressively munching thing on his floor. He wondered whether he had a china cup small enough to serve as a decent water container.
“We’ll have to find you a name,” Kaworu pondered, holding his knees to his chest and watching the cat march around his apartment one day later. “Do you have any preferences?” She found a discarded piece of wool from one of his oldest mufflers and started rolling around the floor with it. “Okay,” Kaworu said, quietly, and held his knees closer.
Earlier this day, he’d managed to come back home with a litter box, some sand, more diverse food, and a small bag of what were presumably next week’s groceries. Upon checking all his drawers for scraps of pretty much anything, he’d also found two unopened bags of rice. There was cause for rejoicing.
He kind of wished he’d got her some toy, but he’d forgotten. Still, she seemed happy enough to laze around in his sweaters, if needed. She was so small, and grey, and fuzzy. Her fur seemed to stick up in all possible places, like an earthly blowfish. When he’d tried to pet her earlier, she’d turned on her back and started biting his fingers without too much fervour.
A thought illuminated his face. He grinned.
He called her Tabris, because that was what his dad had used to call him when he was younger, and he kind of missed his dad lately. A week had passed and he didn’t feel quite so gloomy anymore. Plus, Tabris seemed happy, sleeping and playing and eating all day long; and it was such a nice thing not to stay in an empty room anymore. It was only his preference, there, Kaworu decided. It had been hard to live alone after spending all his childhood surrounded by siblings.
“Hello, what are you doing?” he asked when, moments after he’d locked the front door, he started to be escaladed by use of tiny, sharp claws. “When did you get so good at that?” he looked down at the cat currently hanging from his hip, and helped her up to his shoulder. “Now, be careful.”
She had an iron grip that had left its mark on his skin dozens of times already, so it was relatively easy to go around with her perched up there. First things first, he deposited his backpack on a chair and went to the kitchen to retrieve her food. At some point, she’d got the idea to climb down his arm as soon as the pouch was in his hands.
“You’ll grow up to be a professional funambulist,” he said, before taking her in one hand and placing her on the floor, beside her small and butterfly-patterned eating bowl.
She still purred when she was given food. It was wonderfully adorable. Actually, it reminded him of when he was maybe 8 years old and his father and his grandmother – or was it a neighbour? – prepared glazed doughnut holes for him and his siblings. They always almost seemed to buzz on their chairs as they waited.
Well, that had been some time ago.
It occurred to him only too late – that he didn’t, in fact, have anyone to share his double popsicle with. So Kaworu sat on the bench, looking from time to time at the children roller-skating on the park alley, from time to time at the ice-cream he held with both hands, for now. Lately it was so hard for him not to space out on a regular basis.
He glanced at the slightly bigger kitten who lay beside him on the bench. After a moment, Tabris raised her eyes too, an almost inquisitive look on her face. Kaworu turned back to his ice-cream and finally split it in two.
“Might as well,” he said, and made a few tricky manoeuvres in order to break off a bit of ice-cream with his fingers and then place it on its wrapper, in front of his cat.
It was vanilla, it couldn’t be too bad for her. She’d found and eaten worse things in his apartment.
“Do enjoy,” he said, and started his own popsicle. It was just a teensy bit too sweet.
This was his second summer in the city. The first had been kind of interesting, he’d just finished his 1st year of college, and things had seemed to work out, more or less. It had been new, to be alone in the city and not have anything mandatory to do. It had been liberating, at the time.
Now he was mostly bored.
Back when winter came, he’d made some plans, assembled ideas of what he was going to do when he actually had some free time on his hands. They didn’t seem quite so interesting now. It had been a few weeks, and he had done mostly nothing during them, apart from dealing with the college withdrawal papers and spending too much time sitting still.
It felt strangely familiar – the sitting still, that is.
“Are you having a good time?” he asked Tabris, after she’d nearly licked clean the wrapper. She gave him a doleful stare and, comforted, Kaworu offered her the rest of her ice-cream.
He was halfway through his, and watching in mute encouragement a small child being taught to ride a bike, when it hit him. Not the bike, although that might have been less painful. Biting into the wooden stick surrounded by frozen vanilla cream, Kaworu grimaced, and not only from hurting his teeth.
It was no wonder he had been feeling so complacent in his state of continuous lethargy and boredom – there was a time when he’d been used to it, after all. For a year or so, until his dad caught on to it, at least. Annoyance was as good a motivation as any other; Kaworu finished his ice-cream with what could be read as determination.
“Hurry up with that,” he poked Tabris gently on the head, and got up. After a stretch, he made himself grin. “We’re going to the Planetarium,” he told her. And then to the Botanical Gardens, and the Flower Market, and we’re going to have our bicycle fixed, and go and get new shelves.
If anything, he wasn’t going to let himself fall down again; even if he’d have to physically force himself to move. Maybe he’d get a job. Oughtn’t be too hard after smuggling Tabris into an art museum.
Whenever push came to shove, Kaworu determined that it was time for a reality check. When he was little, he’d pressed several easily-impressed relatives into letting him arrange an iced tea stand at a make-believe yard sale. It had as much success as one would have expected of something like that, but it was then that Kaworu had learned an important life lesson: customer service was hard.
Now, many years later, he could say a few additional things: first, that camomile tea helped with nerves quite fine, after one had downed three mugs in a row, and second, that he was really glad he’d been in that Peter Pan play when he was 11. It had taught him to smile in a way that didn’t seem to get on people’s nerves, and it had taught him to do it habitually. It worked to the extent that it actually made him feel better.
This had probably helped a lot. Especially when his co-workers had started giving him weird looks at the sight of the row of empty tea mugs on the counter. Thankfully, that had only lasted for a few weeks, back when he had first started working. Apparently, camomile was also well-known for making one sleepy. Somebody should have told him that earlier.
Against his good manners, he’d initially thought that the coffee shop would be more boring. The first week had been a chaos of learning how to use the coffee makers. During the second one he’d been at a loss regarding what to do in between customers. The third had been an end-of-vacation nightmare, with long queues during his every shift.
It was good he’d started this during the summer, however. It had kept him busy, indeed – enough so as not to dwell too long on his undetermined leave of absence from college – and it made sure that, by the time his distance classes started, he’d have entered a more or less steady rhythm here. Yes, that was what he told himself.
He might have got a little emotional after his first pay check, realising that he could get something other than parboiled rice and weird-tasting noodles from the grocery store for once – the first time in two months. He could even get Tabris gourmet food, if he pushed it. (He might have been unprepared for the sudden and sharp decrease in his budget that followed enrolling into another college.) It was all good now. With a steady schedule, he’d be able to get back on his feet relatively quickly – and, most importantly, without any need to call home for help, money, or leftovers.
Reality check. Customer service was hard, demanding, and tiring even when Kaworu didn’t bring his issues with him to work. He ought to get a grip, restrict his intake of tea to only one cup a day, and breathe deeply. He’d been doing this just fine for two months, after all.
Kaworu had several people.
There was the old lady who came every other day at 4 o’clock and ordered hot cider, to whom he smiled with the lightness of knowing that his smile would always be returned. There was the tall man who’d first surprised him by asking for four shots of espresso and then proceeded to add five spoons of sugar and cinnamon to them. There was the businesswoman who came by once a week or every fortnight to get very strong, very hot green tea. There were several customers who’d been there when he’d first learnt how to make coffee and they had retained their sympathy ever since. And there was – well, the one he had kind of scared off.
“Um, excuse me. It was... three Americanos, two mochas and one double espresso, right?” Kaworu asked while checking his scraggly writing in the order-notebook. Usually, his writing was quite tidy, so this could only be attributed to the morning rush. “Wasn’t it?” he looked up.
Across the counter, Shinji was giving him a look of utter horror, of the likes of which Kaworu had only seen in deep psychological movies before. It made him want to give him a break, want to give himself a break, give him something warm to drink, a blanket, and a soft pillow, and ask him what his favourite cartoons were. Sadly, he could do none, and nor did he think that he was the right person to do this, or that Shinji would have liked him to. They didn’t quite talk.
“Three Americanos, two espressos, and a latte...,” Shinji corrected, without quite breaking his look of approaching doom.
A pause ensued like a sudden stop of background noise at night. “Ah,” Kaworu said, ducking to check his notebook again. “Oh, I’m sorry, I think I skipped a line halfway through. Sorry,” he said again, biting his lip, but Shinji wasn’t looking at him anymore, choosing instead to stare forlornly at the candy racks.
It had been two weeks of interacting, and Kaworu had done his best to atone for the bad first impression he’d made. So far, his most notable breakthrough had been a small, impromptu breakfast muffin, for which he’d been paid back anyway. Still, they met three times a week, and Shinji seemed to be required to go on quite a lot of coffee errands, so it probably wasn’t all that unusual for Kaworu to want to be friendly.
He grabbed three out of the six coffees he had placed in the carrier, thankful that there wasn’t a queue. “I’ll make them again. It won’t take a minute.”
“No, that’s really not –” Shinji moved his hands about for a moment, but apparently recognised the hopelessness of it once Kaworu started working on the coffee makers again. On Kaworu’s part, he was movingrather more quickly with that effect in mind. “I was thinking that maybe they wouldn’t notice...”
It was not what he had expected to hear, and the wry look on Shinji’s face was quite novel, so Kaworu paused for a moment to take it in and suppress a laugh. “Don’t worry, it’s not that inconvenient,” he said once he’d gone back to adding copious amounts of scalding milk to the lattes.
“If you say so,” he thought he heard Shinji mutter, but it was hard to be sure over the rumble of the machine.
True to his word, Kaworu was done relatively quickly, and without burning his hands or other necessary parts of his body. For his second month working there, he was doing quite well. Once all the cups were put in the coffee carrier, a relieved sigh got out of Shinji too.
“Er, extra,” he then said before Kaworu had the chance to try his luck at giving him another muffin or a cup of hot chocolate as an apology for the emotional damage. It took a moment for him to see Shinji handling his wallet.
“No, no,” he accordingly waved his hands. “Don’t worry, it was my mistake,” which statement Shinji seemed to take as a personal affront, the creases in between his eyebrows making Kaworu’s grin rather frantic.
It wasn’t a lie, either. He could probably pull off having wasted three cups of coffee, in the very unlucky situation that somebody wouldn’t come and order one of them in the next five minutes. No worries need to be made. He schooled his features in a more casual smile.
Shinji’s frown decreased a fraction as he lowered his hands, but the suspicious look was still there. Still, he eventually pocketed his wallet and took a hold of the coffee carrier without further arguing. Which was a blessing, because Kaworu wasn’t particularly good at that.
“Have a nice day,” he called out with the cheerfulness of one winning a demi-argument without too much effort apart from a well-placed smile.
From the door, Shinji gave him another furtive, accusatory look, and stepped outside. Once the door closed, Kaworu found himself grinning again. Then, he turned on his heels, catching sight of the thankfully-still-steaming coffee cups and crossed his fingers for customers.
“You really don’t believe in ghosts?” Kaworu asked, because it was important, after their third impromptu piano meeting.
Shinji, tugging at his scarf in an attempt to make it cover as much of his face as decently possible, was inattentively following his lead round and round the college grounds. It was frosty, and it wasn’t too crowded, and Kaworu wasn’t sure whether asking him out further for a warm drink was acceptable or not.
The scarf was very big, very soft-looking, very blue, and always in Shinji’s possession, as of late. It looked pretty sturdy too, taking into account current ministrations. Kaworu probably wouldn’t have paid more attention to it than necessary, had it not been for the palette gradient it formed with the darker colour of Shinji’s eyes.
“Ghosts,” Shinji carefully worded now, letting said scarf hang around his mouth, and giving Kaworu a look that indicated that he wasn’t quite sure he wasn’t being made fun of.
Kaworu nodded. “Ghosts. Do you not believe in them?”
After gracing him for a few moments more with that inquisitive look, Shinji eventually looked ahead and let out a particularly thoughtful breath, an overachieving cloud in the early November air. Waiting for the mysterious answer, Kaworu tried to warm his hands in his pockets, among two marbles and a pack of gum.
“Is this still about the Halloween cappuccino I refused?” Shinji asked, rearranging his scarf and following him between two willow trees. Theoretically, still college grounds.
For a moment, Kaworu grinned to himself, then made a detour to a pebbled side-alley. Unbeknownst to some, it would actually take them back to the entrance hall. “No,” Kaworu drew out only a bit, “I managed to recover from that,” he allowed himself to joke, assessed the damage, let out an interior sigh of relief. “It just occurred to me that you don’t look like a particularly ghost-y type of person.”
The entrance was in sight now; he’d actually have to retrieve his bike this time around. Shinji looked at him with something akin to something preceding a smile. It was new, it was exciting, and Kaworu felt his own delight get the better of him.
“That’s...,” Shinji puffed another thin cloud of breath, “...new,” he decided. As good as anything, Kaworu supplied for himself. “I guess I’m not. I never paid them too much thought.” Although, a few moments afterwards, another unspoken idea seemed to pass his mind, bringing a wry expression with it.
Kaworu didn’t pry; he’d got kind of used to this. Instead, he directed himself towards his bike, waiting for him in a cold, frosty and kind of despondent manner. “Well, we had too many white sheets in the house back when I was little.”
“Just like you had too much cabbage and bought three tortoises that other time,” Shinji said, behind him now.
Hands hovering in close proximity to his bike, Kaworu stopped. Granted, he did remember telling Shinji that story in passing at some point, but that had been weeks before. It often caught him unawares, realising that Shinji actually listened and remembered what he told him. Maybe it came from growing up in a big family, but Kaworu wasn’t quite that used to undivided attention.
“Yes, quite like that.”
Shinji hummed in a polite manner as he waited for him to unhook his bike; that, too, was really nice of him, Kaworu thought, feeling the tips of his fingers freeze on the pale green metal. Beads and trinkets tinkled as he pushed his patient vehicle out of its parking lot.
“Don’t you get cold?” Shinji asked after Kaworu had finished stuffing his bag in the front basket. “On, on that,” he gestured vaguely.
His fingers were cold, Kaworu pondered, blinking. “Not really. It’s cold anyway.”
In complete agreement, Shinji pulled his scarf over his mouth again, muttering, “True.”
They went side by side until they reached the street. It has been nice, Kaworu found himself thinking, in a rather more hurried way than his thoughts usually came. For an interrupted moment, he felt a dull, but deep longing for something.
From the way his boots were fidgeting, Shinji must have wanted to go home.
“Er,” Kaworu let his bike lean on his side. “See you again soon?”
Kaworu really liked his eyes. This had no leverage over the fact that he felt restless whenever Shinji actually looked at him for more than a second at a time. He gazed back, nevertheless.
It lasted until Shinji looked away, apparently constrained to do so by the need to reply. “Okay.” Kaworu went back to breathing again. “Um. Goodbye.”
“Have a nice day,” Kaworu grinned, successfully getting one last glance before they parted ways. Okay. Now only to be careful while going into traffic in this state of mind.
Truth be told, Kaworu had been feeling out of sorts for a while now – but he didn’t think it was noticeable. He was out of sorts most of the time, anyway, and he’d noted that people hardly ever picked up on it.
Which wasn’t their fault, anyway. It was hard to recognise something when you’d been subjected to it from the very beginning, Kaworu considered. Either that or maybe Kaworu was a better actor than he’d been given credit for by his 7th grade teacher – the one who’d made the unfortunate decision to cast him in the role of the antagonist.
Well, either way, Kaworu was out of sorts now. A little bit, just enough for his fingertips to grow somewhat numb.
Shinji still had his blue muffler with him these days – sometimes, Kaworu still forgot his, and came back home hoarse and sniffling – and the colour grew more vivid on the black of his coat and the dark of his hair. For a moment, then he dragged his knitted hat over his ears and Kaworu smiled absently at a hanging reindeer he’d been busying himself with in order not to stare at Shinji as he got dressed.
He pressed on the plush belly of the reindeer without feeling much of it and hoped the snow was not too bad. Then, since Shinji appeared to be ready to go, he made another two steps to the doorway.
The hat was making his fringe appear longer, Kaworu saw, and then smiled. “Thank you for coming,” he said and meant it completely. It had been a while since he’d had over someone he felt so nice with.
Shinji’s eyes wandered for a moment, then his figure settled with a shrug. He was such a comforting person to have around, always the farthest point away from a disdainful thought. “It was nice to be here,” he said, and Kaworu thought of future visits and felt happy.
He felt his hands tremble a little and looked back inside, familiarity calming him a bit. “Tabris had a good time,” he watched her on the couch for a moment. “I think I’ll have to watch her sulk for days now.” Most likely – she seemed to do all the sulking he didn’t do on the outside, and to take pride in it.
The quietest sound announced Kaworu that Shinji laughed, and he felt his heart kick up a notch or two even as he turned his eyes back to him. “I’ll be back then,” Shinji said, smiling and looking into his eyes.
Lately it was kinda hard to tell when they had actually got here.
“Take care,” was the little Kaworu could say. There must have been some half-formed idea which pushed him forwards then – some incipient yearning to stand closer – but he didn’t realise it until they were inches apart.
Is this alright? Kaworu asked wordlessly, aimlessly, looking at him from that distance. On the brightside, they were, all things considered, closer. I hope it’s alright. And he only had one instant to think he’s going to kiss me before it actually happened.
For a moment, it only felt pleasant, warm lips on his, more familiar than he would have expected of his first kiss. Then the world caught up with him and there were fingers on his jaw and he felt them trembling and remembered that this was Shinji, and there was a lightness in his chest that just about hurt.
It was wonderful, being able to feel this and realise that he was part of it too. If he was overwhelmed, it was okay. That much was normal.It was hard to tell, but he thought Shinji’s hands were trembling; trembling and warm and pressing ever so slightly on his cheek. Then Shinji ran his fingers through his hair and that was new, that was something that hadn’t happened in a very long time, and Kaworu wanted to laugh because it was as if a bubble of affection that had just broken inside him.
He hadn’t felt so much like a human being in a long while. He’d been doing alright, but he was happy now. Almost perfectly, and he was also afraid, a fear he only became aware of as their kisses dimmed.
“Take care.”
Shinji gave him another small smile and turned in the direction of the stairs, which left Kaworu with closing and locking his door for the night. All well-ingrained movements even with his trembling and slightly numb hands. Then he turned back to his now comparatively empty apartment, considered turning on the overhead light, but eventually voted against it.
Tabris was still on the couch, lying untroubled in the middle of it. Shinji had petted her nearly to sleep, Kaworu remembered. She’d been there ever since. Kaworu bit his lip at the thought, looked around the room, only lit by the moon and fairy lights now, and went over the events of his day. As he started with the morning, he found himself overtaken by an anticipatory hurry to reach the latest ones.
He let go of his lip only to grin at nothing, and to take in a shuddering breath just as he realised his knees felt a little too unreliable for him to be standing up. His facial expressions were kind of out of his control at the moment too. Suddenly, he made up his mind and went to sit beside Tabris. Immediately, he proceeded to poke her downy fur.
“Hey. Wake up, wake up,” he grinned even as he continued to torment her. “Please,” he tried with no effect and eventually settled for simply ruffling her tummy. “Honestly, you’ll sleep through anything,” he said once she squinted bluely at him.
It was a familiar occurrence for him to speak to her whenever they were home alone, but now he witnessed himself go wordless even as he was prepared to say something more. A sudden spasm of emotion and remembrance affected him and he could almost feel Shinji’s face touching his again. How long ago had it been? Two minutes? Six? Ten? Kaworu simply pushed his face into Tabris’s fur.
Ducks…2, Kaworu thought, and immediately grabbed Shinji’s hand to bring them nearer the lake. Shinji’s hands were always so warm; well, not always, but most of the time.
“If you move that fast you’ll scare them away,” Shinji said, a step behind him, and he stopped right on the point where concrete met grass. “They’re too small to be fed, anyway...”
He had regained that step now, standing beside him, but their hands still held together. His hands were also very soft, Kaworu thought. But not really; smooth, rather than soft – with calloused fingertips and palms.
Kaworu was counting. “Eleven,” he said, grinning at the ducklings just now falling back into the water. “Such a big family. I wonder if they’ll leave them all here.”
Shinji’s face was doing that thing it did when he seemingly thought a statement ridiculous but was having trouble figuring out what exactly was making it so. It was one expression he’d grown rather fond of.
“They must separate them at some point,” was Shinji’s reasonably hesitant answer.
“I suppose so,” Kaworu followed one slower duckling with his eyes. “Otherwise we’d be full of ducks.”
Out of the corner of his eye he saw Shinji’s eyebrows rise and lower in the interval of a second. It probably translated to a dramatic intonation of: Tragic.... Kaworu had a hard time not laughing. At hand-level, he pulled his fingers away a fraction and started tracing the lines of his palm.
“So...,” Shinji started, looking at the lake, and Kaworu took the hint to start walking again. “I think I also saw some swans, at some point.”
No swans in sight, for the time being. Only the random pigeon-loving elderly. These cinematic effects of life were something Kaworu particularly enjoyed – on certain days.
“We’ll see. Cotton candy?”
There was a vendor, just at the corner of the alley. From what Kaworu could see with his contacts, it looked green. Shinji always slackened his grip around small children, with the exception of when they’d been to the Aquarium and held hands for the first time.
“I haven’t had breakfast yet,” he said, and Kaworu’s course of action was first to worry, because it was past midday, and then to put his thoughts on a sunnier path.
Accordingly, “I saw a small place from the bus a few days ago. What do you think about lentil soup?” Then, just to be completely informative, “It’s not far.”
For some reason, Shinji’s eyebrows were furrowed as he stared at the pavement. Then, “What are your views on wrapping paper?” he mutteringly parodied himself, and Kaworu laughed. “I don’t mind it,” followed the actual answer, and a momentary tighter clasp made Kaworu swallow back his snickers.
Granted, the cotton candy machine and the small children were past. He tentatively ran his fingers over Shinji’s knuckles. “Can we made a compromise and get the cotton candy first?” he tried.
Shinji gave him a sideway glance, one that bore the most fascinating trace of amusement in it. “In a very mature manner,” he articulated slowly, ultimately choosing not to top it with a question mark.
“As befits us as adults,” Kaworu nodded, smilingly serious.
It made Shinji smile too – a wonderful thing. “Then, I guess, by all means,” Shinji made a gesture towards the vendor with his free hand as his other loosely intertwined their fingers.
Kaworu rejoiced, in a grown-up manner. He could have fallen in love with him hands-first.
Theoretically, he had nothing to fear – he’d looked it up online. Practically, he’d probably seen more flames at a campfire. It was probably all safe. Still.
Kaworu stepped back from the cooker and contemplated it for a while. He wondered. Ultimately, he put the brand-new barbecue lighter on the table and turned instead to the counter where he held berries and peaches in three different bowls. These were okay. After checking the time once again, he occupied himself with cutting the peaches into neat, medium slices. Then, he proceeded to wash the berries once more. Afterwards, he prodded the butter again, weighed the box of sugar in his hands, and gave his also-brand-new bottle of rum a few cautionary shakes. On a second thought, maybe this wasn’t so wise. He couldn’t be sure, though.
There was still around thirty minutes to go, but it wasn’t a particularly good point of reference, since Shinji usually arrived early. Kaworu studied the thick pan he’d positioned over the cooker once again.
The problem at hand was an opposition of ideas. On the one hand, he considered that doing this before Shinji arrived might be better, in case the result was poorly (and also in case Shinji would put his mature side into light and explain the possible dangers of it and thus make Kaworu abandon his dinner plans, but he wasn’t quite willing to think that out loud). On the other, this was all about the show – he’d heard – so he probably needed a witness that didn’t fear getting their whiskers burnt off in the process. Furthermore, it would look impressive and, no matter what he said, Shinji was hard to impress.
Kaworu debated with himself. Then, he turned on the heat under the pan and went to measure out the sugar and butter. Shinji arrived just as he was adding peaches to the melted aftermath. Thankfully, he let himself in.
“What are you making?” he asked after peeping at Kaworu carefully adding slice after slice in simmering butter.
“A snack,” Kaworu said, adding the last of them.
Looking over while wiping his hands on a colourful kitchen towel, he saw Shinji crouched on the floor, bathing Tabris in unexpected love. Incredibly enough, he was wearing the paper-airplane T-shirt Kaworu had inflicted upon him a few months before. Kaworu mixed the berries with cinnamon with far more happiness than they provided.
“How was today’s rehearsal?” he asked because he liked to hear Shinji make that small sound of anguished discontentment whenever he mentioned this.
Said sound ensued; Kaworu smiled while carefully stirring the peaches. “It was fine,” Shinji sighed, and got up from the floor, leaving Tabris, from what Kaworu could glimpse, under a pretty dizzy spell. He could relate to that.
“What was it today?” He wondered just how soft the peaches had to get before adding the berries.
Instead of answering, Shinji first leant his forehead on Kaworu’s shoulder. “Mmm—” he started, shaking his head once for every added consonant, “—ozart.”3
Not completely unrelated to Kaworu’s most persuasive expressions and words, Shinji had more or less got involved in music-something with the Conservatory orchestra this spring. It involved symphonies and produced a lot of agonized sounds from him, something Kaworu had first found out through deduction and afterwards through tired midnight calls. He felt kind of bad for the persuasion part. Just a little bit.
Freeing his hand from where it held the pan in place, Kaworu patted his head a little. “Really, and here I sat thinking you were powering through Stravinsky again.”
“Ugh,” Shinji said, and Kaworu bit back a smile.
But then Shinji’s head left his shoulder and the freedom of movement reminded him to add the berries before they turned to mush in their bowl. He suddenly remembered that a well-underlined piece of advice regarding this had been that he warmed the alcohol a little before adding it. He poured a bit of rum in a plastic cup.
“What are you making?” was Shinji’s more emphatic question, while Kaworu tested the drink with the tip of his tongue. A moment later, he pulled a face at it.
“Do you know how I could warm this up?” he eventually turned to Shinji again.
Shinji, who didn’t seem any more trusting for his lack of an answer. He warily eyed the small cup in Kaworu’s hands, then the pan on the stove, and finally Kaworu himself, and then took the cup from him.
“It’s already at room temperature as it is,” he said, after a moment of cradling it.
“Yeah, well,” Kaworu took a wooden spoon and started stirring the ingredients in the pan again. They didn’t look too bad – that was a plus.
He glanced at Shinji out the corner of his eye, and wondered if this could still turn out impressive. Either that, or it will explode, Kaworu reasoned. That would have been a little impressive in itself.
After a few minutes, he turned the heat off again, and for safe measure also pushed the pan to the other side of the cooker. “Okay,” he said, and looked at it.
Shinji was still cradling the little cup of rum; he looked at that too. He wondered whether he should have taken the ice-cream out before now. Well, his freezer wasn’t the best there was, so it should have been alright.
Shinji was looking at him too. “So... now?”
“Well,” Kaworu started, getting back to the moment, and took the cup from him. Carefully, he poured it all over the fruity not-yet-mush. He took hold his barbeque lighter. He glanced at Shinji. “Um, step back.”
Shinji did, expression torn between relief and wariness. Trying to stand as far away as anatomically possible from the pan and still be able to light it up, Kaworu prodded the lighter awake. Nothing exploded, and neither did it make any excruciating sounds. If anything, the flames looked quite undisturbed.
He and Shinji looked at it for a while, with the occasional glance towards the curtains and other fabrics in their proximity. Then, the flames started to die down. A few more moments and they were gone, fruity blend intact, but more imposing for its past hardships.
Kaworu looked at Shinji, smile more or less tentative. Shinji looked too, and smiled back. “That was – interesting.”
Kaworu’s smile finally settled down, but not without a little resignation. Not that impressive, in the end. Still, at least it had been fun. “Nothing burnt,” he grinned.
Which made Shinji grin too, and that was compensation enough for hypothetically burning up his curtains. “It looked very professional, though,” Shinji went on, which was nice, given that he’d seen Kaworu scowl at a drop of alcohol not ten minutes before. “What do we do with it now?”
Kaworu really liked that comfortable, blithe look in his eyes. A lot. “I also have ice-cream,” he said, and immediately turned to retrieve it.
He’d settled for vanilla, which was what he liked to have at home anyway. He’d also prepared two painted glass bowls for the occasion, one with green dragonflies and one made to look like a small aquarium from the outside.
Halfway through scooping it into the first bowl, his eyes rested on the still relatively full bottle of rum he’d acquired at high expense – literally. “I’m not sure what to do with this,” he mused, and when he turned to Shinji he found him scooping a blueberry out of the pan with his fingers.
He looked a little bit guilty at being caught, but raised it to his lips anyway.
“Cat fingers,” Kaworu warned, as if his apartment wasn’t full of cat hair anyway. Shinji, knowing this, shrugged.
“I don’t know either,” he said and only then proceeded to wash his hands at the kitchen sink.
Well, some opportunity will arise in the end, Kaworu decided. Gently, he started adding spoonfuls of flambé fruit over ice-cream. In between bowls, he stopped to hand-pick a blueberry too, because he was too sentimental not to.
Shinji was in the process of finding an acceptable spoon in Kaworu’s drawer collection, but a smile still played on his lips at that. Adding a few more raspberries in the second bowl, Kaworu realised that they hadn’t kissed for the past week, and willed himself to remember to do something about that today.
For what it was worth, he sprinkled some coconut over the two bowls as a conclusion.