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“Alright then, thanks for coming! Have a nice day!”
As soon as the entry bell rang for the last time, Aya turned the key to lock the door, heaving an exhausted sigh.
“Tough day, huh…” she exhaled, slumping against the wall.
“Yeah… At least it’s over now though,” said Kanon, her fellow WcRonalds employee, treasured girlfriend and saviour of the hour. They were swamped enough between their small team, but if Kanon wasn’t here… She dreaded the thought.
“I can’t believe Himari-chan ditched us!” moaned Aya. “She knows the local school had a half day today!”
“I’m just glad there weren’t many customers apart from them… My hands still feel fried, though.”
“Speaking of fried things… We still have to sort out the cleanup for today.”
Scrubbing off grease from the counters and painstakingly gathering crumbs in a pan - Aya could hardly think of anything worse. The shop was closed! Even if it was still their shift, and even if she knew that was part of their assigned responsibilities… surely they should hire someone else to be on cleanup duty. How was she supposed to clean when she’d worked her fingers to the bone? She couldn’t scrub without fingers!
“Well… Maybe we can get it done quickly? That way, we can go home sooner…” Kanon proposed, though from the look on her face, cleaning anytime in the near future sounded like torture to her too.
Well, work was nothing if not torturous. And work needed to be done. Aya didn’t think either of them could stand staying here for a minute longer than necessary anyway.
“Let’s goooo…” droned Aya, unable to muster up even an ounce of enthusiasm.
Walking (or trudging in Aya’s case) into the kitchen area with cleaning sprays and washing rags in gloved hand, something in the atmosphere gave way the second they crossed the threshold of the room. It was as if a thick mist of doom enveloped the room as the two stared into the wasteland before them.
“It’s…”
“... awful.”
Dishes piled up to the ceiling in precarious and costly Jenga towers. Crumbs and other blackened specks that Aya really hoped were crumbs were crammed tightly into the crevices between racks like a lice infestation. Hardened grease coated the countertops around the fryers like gelatinous sludge.
Aya felt the little Chisato in her head drop dead at the squalor.
“How did it get this bad?” Kanon whispered beside Aya, the tone of her voice wavering, almost with tears.
“We were just trying to get through the end of school rush…”
Hearing a fragile sniffle next to her, Aya reached out to put an arm around Kanon before she began to cry, because if Kanon cried, Aya would absolutely cry, and she wasn’t sure tears would do anything but demolish their spirit completely. Maybe some of the grease would be washed off, at least.
“I just…” Kanon said, her voice breaking around the lump in her throat, “I just wish I took a part-time job at Hazawa Coffee…”
“Tsukushi-chan has such a fun time there…”
“And Tsugumi-chan would never let things get this bad…”
“We could really do with Eve-chan’s Bushido spirit right now…”
In conjunction, the two heaved a groan, one heavier than weight of the responsibility crushing their shoulders.
“... Where do we even start?” asked Aya helplessly.
Squeezing Aya into an emotional hug, Kanon let her head rest on Aya’s shoulder - it was the first bit of rest she’d had all day. Aya buried her face in Kanon’s hair, not bearing to look at the fast food dumping ground in front of her. For ten tragic seconds, their world could be nothing but the warmth of another person’s body against their own: two lovers shielding one another in a tight embrace, trapped in a scene of devastation.
But sooner rather than later, the seconds slipped through their fingers and vanished, and all that remained was carnage.
“... Get me a mop, please.”
Seconds stretched into minutes, minutes stretched into hours, and it really felt like hours stretched into days but eventually, Aya and Kanon broke through all those layers of grime and discovered that there was a kitchen beneath it.
Their minds had been too heavily scarred for that realisation to come with relief, though.
“I think,” Aya paused, suppressing a gag as she nearly keeled over. “I think I can never eat again. I’ll just go on a permanent diet starting today. My managers will be happy.”
Clothes ragged with stains and creases and the light gone from her eyes, Kanon slouched against the wall like a corpse, her expression frozen in a state of woe. “I feel… so dirty. Like, within myself. It feels like I’m more food waste than human.”
“It feels like I’m not human.”
“I don’t think I can ever hope to be again after this.”
Aya raised a hand to her face, her gaze so distant it was like she was hardly seeing. “There are crumbs… that live on me now.”
“Here.” Rummaging through her pocket, Kanon passed Aya a nail file, not sparing her a glance; her eyes remained fixed in a doll-like state on a point neither of them could see. “This’ll help.”
“Thanks.” Aya hesitated for a bit, thinking about the harm digging deep under her nail would cause to her nail bed, but that thought was little other than an echo of her former self: the innocent, hopeful, unblemished self she had lost to direct combat, never to be known again. She jabbed the tip of the nail file right under her nail and didn’t flinch as pain shot through her nerves. If anything, it was relieving to know her nerves still worked after all the damage.
“Aya-chan…”
“Yeah?”
Kanon patted the space next to her on the ground wordlessly; Aya slunk down to meet her, laying her head on Kanon’s poor shoulder.
“Do you ever think about dying?” asked Kanon.
Aya thought for a moment, before realising she knew the answer already. “I did a lot today.”
“I love you, Aya-chan. I wish I could have spared you.”
“I love you too. I’m glad I was here to help. I would hate for you to have gone through this alone.”
Without a sound, Kanon reached out to entwine her fingers with Aya’s own, not caring about the freshly made calluses that covered them.
“... I think I’ll quit after this.”
“Yeah,” Aya agreed. “Yeah, me too.”
“How am I going to face Hello Happy World after today?” Kanon thought aloud. “They’re all so innocent. They won’t understand. I don’t know how I’m supposed to spread smiles when I…”
Envisioning the sweet, cherubic faces of her bandmates, something fundamental in Kanon broke. She burst into tears, curling in on herself and away from Aya.
“I… I…!” she wailed. “I miss five hours ago!”
Aya hiccuped: it was the first drop of rain before the storm. Suddenly, she began to sob in rhythm with Kanon. “I miss five hours ago too!”
If someone were to walk in right then, they would have seen dishes polished to perfection, racks shining with cleanliness and countertops sparkling with the magic of Fairy Power Spray, as well as two teenage girls slumped against one another devoid of the dreams they had once chased. But no-one was ever going to walk in right then. No, no-one was ever going to walk in because Aya had left the door locked.
So for the rest of the evening, the two girls held each other tightly as only lovers in a tragedy could, not caring as their bodies wracked with sobs and their tears washed the last of the grease from the floor.