Work Text:
“You’re up late.”
The voice brought Kirumi out of her cleaning-induced haze. She looked up from the spot she was scrubbing, surrounded by vaguely pink bubbles. The deep red stain on the wood underneath had faded slightly, but not nearly enough for her to be satisfied. Granted, it was dark out, and the back deck behind the dining hall where she knelt was usually cast in shade even during the day. The late hour wasn’t doing her any favors.
Kirumi could still see the mess, though. She could always see the mess.
The evening announcement had played about half an hour ago. She hadn’t stopped cleaning for that. For Rantaro’s voice, though, she did, if only for a moment.
“Not that late,” she replied.
“Late enough.” Rantaro was standing at the bottom of the stairs leading up to the deck, leaning his weight into his left hip. He stretched his arms above his head as if to prove his point. “What’re you doing out here? I thought you cleaned the deck this morning.”
Kirumi turned back to her work, ignoring the soreness in her shoulders as she began scrubbing once more. “I swept the deck this morning,” she corrected. “I am scrubbing it now.”
Footsteps creaked up towards Kirumi as Rantaro approached. He stopped and stood in front of her, no doubt looking down at the spot she was scrubbing. “Did something happen?”
“Beet juice happened.”
“Eh?”
“Well, more accurately, borscht happened.”
Kirumi leaned back to sit on her heels and used her wrist to brush her bangs out of her face. She let out a long, slow sigh, then carefully poured a bottle of water to wash away the bubbles before sprinkling a handful of coarse salt over the stain.
“Momota-san asked me to make some because he had not had it since the last time he visited Moscow for astronaut training,” she continued, “and I was admittedly so excited to practice my Eastern European cuisine that I forgot to ask him to be careful with it…” She bit the inside of her cheek. “Beets make a spectacular wood dye, did you know that? I don’t think he noticed the spill, he would have told me if he had, but I should have come out to check earlier, as soon as he brought me his dishes…”
Indeed, she should have checked sooner, or better yet, asked Kaito to eat inside where the tiles would have been easy to clean… He’d even said he was going outside and Kirumi had been too focused on cleaning up the kitchen to think about the wooden deck, and hell , Kirumi thought, how could she have made such a huge oversight? Her tunnel vision had done it again. She was a terrible maid, certainly the worst, she knew it to be true, and this damn stain was evidence of—
“You okay, Mimi?”
The downward spiral stopped halfway to the bottom. Rantaro’s voice brought Kirumi forth from within.
She must have gone quiet without realizing. It certainly wouldn’t be the first time.
“...Yes,” she said. She turned to her supplies and picked up half a lemon, sliced cleanly through the middle. She pressed the flesh against the salt-covered stain and began scrubbing back and forth. “I am simply a bit…” She cleared her throat. “Frustrated, I suppose.”
The admission was an understatement—‘frustrated’ felt like too weak a word for the tingling disquiet reaching from her stomach to her fingertips. She wasn’t sure what else to describe it as, though. ‘Angry’ felt too strong, too violent, too self-centered; a maid ought not to get angry, especially at her own incompetence. She could settle on ‘frustrated’. It wasn’t the exact word, but she’d never know the exact word. As varied as her skills were, describing her feelings had never been one of them.
Rantaro seemed to understand, at least enough. He was good at that.
“Yeah,” he said. A moment passed, quiet, before he walked over to lean against one of the tables by her. “Mind if I keep you company? If this is gonna keep you up for a while, that is.”
Kirumi hummed. “...I do not wish to be an imposition.”
“I’m offering.”
“Mm… Very well.” The stain faded further with the lemon and salt, but not enough to satisfy Kirumi, not yet. “Forgive me if I am not the best conversationalist at the moment.”
“No forgiveness needed. You’re all good.” Rantaro sat in one of the nearby chairs and crossed an ankle over his knee as he leaned back. “I’m just happy to hang out with you.”
The words made Kirumi blush. She kept her eyes on the stain, which was surely the same color as her face, and poured more water over it, washing out the salt and acid and carrying some pinkness with it.
Time for more soap.
They carried on like that, in the quiet of the starlight, for several minutes. Kirumi washed the stain and kept her eyes raptly on it, for if she looked at Rantaro for too long it could very well dry out and be there forever. Occasionally she would spare a glance up at him, and they’d smile at each other before she went back to scrubbing and Rantaro went back to looking up at the stars, the constellations that he’d surely heard Kaito waxing poetic about before, just as Kirumi had.
The singing started when Kirumi began the second round of salt and lemon.
It was soft, gentle, much like all of Rantaro. The words were in a different language — was that English? — so she couldn’t understand, but Rantaro was singing softly to himself as he gazed up at the dark sky, the gap in the walls that surrounded them.
A second later, though, he stopped. “Oh… Sorry.”
Kirumi blinked. She hadn’t realized that she’d stopped scrubbing and begun to stare. Her face felt warm, and she looked down at the stain again, the faded splotch of red.
“Don’t be,” she murmured. “Your voice is pretty.”
“Ah?” Rantaro chuckled under his breath. “I wouldn’t say that much.”
“Hush. It is very pretty.” Kirumi shifted her weight, then went on scrubbing. “If you wish to continue, I do not mind.”
“I don’t wanna bother you.”
“It is no bother. In fact…” Kirumi hesitated. “It is nice to have some background noise.”
How she loathed to be alone with her mistakes. Music would, at least, lift the weight of the mess, if not its image.
Rantaro spent a moment in quiet, but soon, he opened his mouth again, and a soft melody sprang forth. Kirumi could almost hear a piano in the background, an accompaniment for his gentle tones, in the wind that brushed through the tall grass and the vines.
She caught a few English words — things like “no” and “blue” and “love”, basic things, words she’d learned in school in her youth. She had rudimentary knowledge of the language, as much as a maid should have, but all of her past employers spoke Japanese either natively or well enough to communicate, so she’d never had much of a use for it. She was better with French, Korean, and Mandarin. Not fluent, but almost. English was far-off, something she hoped to learn but hadn’t quite grasped yet.
Far-off, like a clean deck. Far-off, like closeness, like—
No. She shouldn’t think like that, not with Rantaro right here.
The song brought a bit of relaxation to her muscles, and Kirumi continued scrubbing, the soreness fading into the background as Rantaro sang. The stain, however, seemed to have reached a point where nothing more would help it. It was pale now, nothing like the bright splash it had been before, but Kirumi could still see it, and if she could see it, it was too much. Had she been alone, perhaps she would have tears in her eyes. But no, no, she couldn’t show that kind of weakness, not even to herself.
Rantaro’s voice ended off on a final note, and he sighed slowly, a soft noise that made Kirumi look up at him. His face might have been a bit red, but it was hard to tell in the dark. He looked down at her though, and he smiled. His face was framed by the light of the moon, almost like a halo, and Kirumi could have reached out and touched him had she been a braver, less pathetic girl.
“You’ve mostly gotten the stain out,” Rantaro said.
Kirumi shook her head. “Not enough.”
“Eh?”
“If I can see it, it’s not enough.” Kirumi looked back down at the spot on the deck. “If I cannot clean this, then I have failed as a maid. It is as simple as that.”
For a moment, there was quiet. Kirumi could hear the grass brushing against itself, the conspicuous absence of crickets.
“Well, I can barely see it,” Rantaro said. “I don’t think anybody’s going to notice it.”
“But I notice it,” Kirumi said. “And if I notice it, then well, well…”
She swallowed hard and looked away for a moment, then continued scrubbing furiously. The stain stayed intact. It was as faded as it was going to get, a pale splatter, like blood in a white shirt.
“Mimi…”
A hand came down to meet Kirumi’s shoulder. When she looked up, Rantaro was leaning forward, his gaze meeting hers.
“It doesn’t have to be perfect,” he said.
“It does,” Kirumi whispered. “Because it’s me.”
“You don’t have to be perfect, either.”
Had she an ounce less self-control, maybe Kirumi would have cried. But she just blinked hard, and the tears were gone, like they’d never existed in the first place.
“...My apologies,” she murmured. “I did not mean to lose myself before you.”
“You don’t have anything to apologize for.” Rantaro hummed, then knelt on the deck in front of her. “Here… I’ll help you clean up. Then, if you want, we can go on a walk before bed. Does that sound nice?”
Kirumi looked at Rantaro, then back down at the stain. His shadow cast over it rendered it invisible.
“...Okay,” she said softly. “Okay.”
“Only if you want to.”
“I do want to.”
Rantaro smiled and set about gathering up the cleaning supplies. Kirumi gave the stain one last rinse.
“I heard that song when I visited New York,” Rantaro said. “You’d like it there. There’s so much art and culture.”
“Is there, now?”
“Yeah. And a lot of great music.”
“Mm.” Kirumi picked up the soap bottle. “Tell me more.”
The pair put away all the cleaning supplies, then set about their walk. Rantaro told Kirumi about all the music he’d heard in all the places he’d been, and sometimes he hummed a few notes, notes that Kirumi captured with her ears and kept inside her heart for the future, in case there was ever another stain she couldn’t get out.