Work Text:
Each muffin-cake had been baked in a pentagonal pan, with a star shape pressed into its middle. The stars, surrounded by chocolate frosting, were themselves then painted with an edible color for each squadmate. Finally, a large, separately-baked star nestled snugly among these pentagons on the shield-shaped plate, perfectly replicating the Arashiyama squad emblem.
By these cakes sat mochi in the shape of stars. Mochi hand-pounded: nothing was Too Good.
The four's excuse to assemble these and other crucial details had also been crafted with care: they would part for solo Rank wars, secretly retreating to the Strategy Room without Tokieda, and use the half-hour or so this gave them to deck at least the main room with festivity. All the presents had long been wrapped; all the decorations and favors had long been bought.
Even their civilian clothes under their Triggers were decoration, in a way. Everyone had at least a touch of yellow, type and shade and amount at their discretion, as a common color in their outfits. Kitora, for instance, had a cream-yellow, graceful knee-length party dress.
All these touches came from her: she had notebooks where she'd carefully plotted out everything they needed – proportions of ingredients in the cake, the timing to make the mochi, the design of the party favors – well in advance of Tokieda's birthday, some weeks ago. She took on the task one day when Arashiyama gathered the incomplete squad to decide on what they should do special for Tokieda, and she'd offered to take charge and do all the planning.
“All right! I'm sure you'll do a great job.” That vote of confidence from her captain had carried her on a cloud for weeks.
It also, more dangerously, made her want to live up to that vote.
And of course she would.
Planning such a small slice of a birthday party couldn't be simpler.
With the same caliber of teamwork that kept them at A-Rank number 5, they went to work, pulling out and placing all types of party supplies. Kitora glanced at the plates before this began and found them to be suitably feline, pleased on Tokieda's behalf. That pleasure lasted up until five places had been set out, like-item by like-item, and then they all quickly discovered what Satori had happened to forget: no cups.
No kitty cat cups to go with the kitty cat everything-else.
Out came Lady Hyde.
“How could you just forget?!” In seconds she'd backed Satori up to the wall with just her venomous stride. "How do you get everything else and forget the cups?!"
“I just did!”
“Why on Earth didn't you double check the bag before you brought it to HQ?”
Ayatsuji put gentle hands on Kitora's arm, trying both to soothe and restrain her. “It's all right, Ai. We can get cups from the cafeteria--”
“No! What would be the point of getting matching themed plates and napkins and hats,” – she stepped away from Ayatsuji to gesture at all the strategy room's temporary trappings, earthbound and airborne – “banners and noisemakers? Themed balloons, even! All to end up using the exact same cafeteria cups we see every day at Border??”
She dove into her bag set aside in the Operator's room, and returned with a pen and a careful flipping through a notepad for the first largest empty space. Every page that passed was visibly and surprisingly less-than-neat compared to those in the party planners, wrung ruthlessly for as much unwritten area as could hold intelligible pen or pencil marks. “Satori, where did you get these favors?” The page that could fit the store's name didn't appear until halfway through.
Normally, of course, Kitora tried not to show obvious imperfection to her squadmates. And that included such sloppily-written-but-pragmatically-taken, crinkle-paged notes. They didn't know if it would embarrass her later to think they'd noticed such woolly characters coming from her pen, but she certainly cared not in the moment.
Having the name safely written down and knowing where to find the place, she announced at the door: “I'll go, since I'm the fastest. Keep putting everything up while I'm gone, please!”
Time was ticking closer and closer to the agreed meeting point; Tokieda could appear at any minute she spent outside HQ. It was faster at one point to go over buildings, so she went over buildings, discreetly as possible, until she landed on the roof of the big party store and jumped into an alley out of sight. And, though it probably didn't really matter, she took off her Trigger as if jumping out of a car to run for the storefront on foot. Inwardly she'd been determined that outside the choice of venue, nothing of Border Official Business should touch this surprise party without unavoidable need; that included merely walking around a closed, casual civilian space with an arsenal literally ready at her fingertips.
Kitora showed a picture of a kitty plate to the first worker she found (and the only in the store at the moment), expecting a speedy purchase of its matching cups. Instead, the worker turned out to be new and unaccustomed to the store's offerings and also very distracted by the fact Kitora of Arashiyama Squad had shown up unexpectedly in the same store where he worked. As a member of the face of Border, Kitora could not even slightly hint to the young man what a useless hindrance he was being, intimidated by the size of his own place of employment.
I'll find it myself faster at this rate.
So she began stalking the aisles carefully scanning and, if necessary, checking everything shaped like a bag of party cups, just in case someone moved the last kitty set in stock to some other place, until finally she had reached the opposite end and the worker was already there, having just called out “Kitora-san” and started to walk to find her.
It was all so disgustingly terrible that she actually called Arashiyama and asked him if the guest of honor had already arrived at the party.
But a second wind quickly came: he still hadn't.
She let the worker quickly snap her picture as she lifted the cups, thanked him politely as the cups were scanned and paid for, and hurtled out of the party store at top speed.
Arashiyama didn't ring her at any point back to the strategy room, meaning she was lucky to get there before Tokieda. Even as she swept through the door and took off her “running legs”, she was tearing open one end of the bag. Each of them took a cup for their places, and Kitora placed Tokieda's in his; she'd thought it might be a nice small touch if each of them had a hand in setting his personal area on the table.
Once her turn was done at last, everything else apparently in perfect order, a grand sense of relief came over her.
And, also, a flash of accomplishment.
By this point, Tokieda had been “about to arrive any minute” for more than fifteen of them. Possible he'd been waylaid, since he had no reason to expect a surprise party by definition. But the longer spent waiting with no obvious deadline was the longer for Kitora to scrutinize every piece of the landscape she'd assembled one more time.
At last, she thumped her fist into her palm. “Cat.”
“Cat??” the others asked, sitting in place on the sofa a safe distance away.
“It would be better if we had the HQ cat. He'd be tickled by that.”
So Satori called up Toma, and Kitora spent another few minutes nervous, nervous since it was one more point of failure, since Tokieda may see Toma in the hallway and find out about this last touch and from there the not-such-a-surprise party, but now that she'd thought of the cat she was very determined to have this additional guest present. As, it could only make everything more perfect.
Toma arrived in a timely fashion, his calm, casual nature contrasting very heavily with the emanating stress strung high under Kitora's facade. He lifted the staring gray cat off his pompadour to set it on the tile at his feet.
“Pretty nice party you've got set up here,” he said as he bent down like a hairpin. The thank yous he got were relieved, except Kitora's, which was tempered by tiredness. “Like this cake, too,” he added, reaching under the tablecloth, aimed between two cushions, and tugging out an extra spoon. “Does it taste as great as it looks?”
Kitora swatted his hand in an instant, almost knocking the spoon from his grip, before he even got close to sampling.
“Don't touch! There's only enough for the five of us.”
Looking at the sizable cake, Toma answered “I'm sure Toki won't mind a little dimple in it for my contribution.”
“I mind! Anyway, get out! Out now!” She all but shoved the tall and half-surprised Sniper out the strategy room door, closing it behind. Before even two seconds had passed, she'd opened it again to lean out.
“Thank you for bringing the cat!”
The cat started to leave, trotting past her legs.
“Oh, no you don't!”
With Toma's help she wrangled the cat back into the room in moments and had it securely shut in with the other prisoners. Poker-faced as it was, the cat seemed troubled by Kitora's rigid stress and hung around the door. Ayatsuji picked it up to give reassuring scritches, leading Kitora to move a cushion chair to the side for her, the better to keep kitty fur away from the food.
“Is that everything?” Kitora asked the air, finger and thumb gnawing on her chin as she searched the tile of the room for a response.
“Kitora, please calm down,” Arashiyama said carefully. “Everything's fine.”
“I'm sorry, Captain, but it's really not! We've had all this time to set up. There's no reason everything shouldn't be perfect!”
“You could make sure the place settings are lined up better!” Satori suggested with a friendly air of desperation.
“No, right now they have a natural quality that shouldn't be---”
“He's on his way, Ai!”
Finally, at long last: the moment of truth; the end of torment. Now that it came walking their way on Ayatsuji's pocket radar, a cool relief draped over Kitora's neck and shoulders like a shawl. She took her spot as a bookend of Arashiyama and waited for the sound of Tokieda opening the strategy room door.
When that sound came, no doubt Tokieda was already surprised. He strode in, eyes raised to the suspended banners and serene balloons. Promptly he realized he wasn't alone, and at the moment he turned his head:
“Surprise!!” Ayatsuji held the cat as if it were waving over its head to Tokieda with both paws, another idea of Kitora's.
Tokieda never gushed about anything even if he was happy. But he did thank them warmly, and take the time to look around the strategy room and compliment the decorated scenery and the labor that went into it, which was all equally as good. Most important: the deadline had come with no obvious flaws leaping out by his reactions. Kitora thus became the picture of assured calm, settled into place in her landscape as though none of the fluster and frenzy to Spackle everything smooth had taken place.
First thing after that, he gravitated toward the cake and mochi, settling by his set place. “This cake is made up of pieces, huh? How do we divide it?”
“Everyone gets their own pentagon, and we'll all divide the star,” Arashiyama explained.
“Sounds good. Which one's mine?”
“The one with your favorite color, of course,” Kitora said, carefully pushing the cake cutter under his personal pentagon.
“But my favorite color is turquoise, not yellow.”
“Turquoise?” she echoed in a fractured, nonplussed register. He picked up immediately that she'd been, at the very least, in charge of these colors.
“But it doesn't come up often, so it's an honest mistake... not that big a deal?”
Ayatsuji and Arashiyama both ventured a gentle call of her name. Satori had already leaned strategically away, despite being behind his captain in relation to the wyftiger among them.
But when the full weight struck her – of forgetting to verify such a simple but crucial detail, of having taken her memory on the subject for granted – Kitora simply passed out, as if by anvil.
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