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The pot of boiling vegetables and noodles in front of Haruka was … a challenge. In a way.
She heard An coughing from her room again; even the tea with honey she had earlier didn’t seem to help. What started as a suspected sore throat from all of the work Vivid Bad Squad was putting in turned pretty quickly into what was clearly a full-blown cold that hit An pretty hard. It’d been years since Haruka had seen anything knock An out like that.
Hence, the soup. And hence, the challenge.
“Let it boil…” Haruka consulted the recipe loaded onto her phone for the fiftieth time, just to ensure that she was doing everything properly. She’d never made soup not from a can or a batch that had been frozen by her parents before. It was hard to mess up, probably, but she also ran the risk of somehow messing up Ken and Yuka’s kitchen.
She poked at one of the carrot pieces with a fork. It seemed soft enough. The noodles, too. Everything was cut down into small, bite-sized pieces.
It was soup. She couldn’t have messed it up.
Haruka turned the heat down almost all the way, spooning out a helping into a bowl for An. It looked like soup was supposed to.
“I’m back,” she said, pulling up her mask before entering An’s room. At one point in time, they were almost immune to each others’ germs, but it was better safe than sorry. Haruka couldn’t exactly afford time off of activities, just like she knew An was raring to get better and back to performing.
An looked up at her pathetically, her long hair covering half of her face because she denied needing it tied back. Her nose was red from all of the tissues she’d used. “Harukaaaa,” she whined, her voice so scratchy it almost made Haruka wince in sympathy.
“Shh, I have the soup for you.” She put the bowl on the low table and helped An sit up, stacking pillows behind her back. She could tell just from that how feverish her skin was. “It might be a bit hot, you’ll have to blow on it.”
The way An blinked at her with wide, wet eyes, Haruka was reminded of, well, the memes of sopping wet cats Minori occasionally compared Airi to. “Feed me?” she asked, making herself look like the picture of innocence.
Haruka gazed at the bowl of soup. Given that An could hardly push herself up, she was more than likely to spill the soup on herself without Haruka’s assistance. And besides, An had jokingly fed Haruka before while they were on dates, so it wasn’t new to them. “Sure. Let’s take it slow.”
An smiled weakly before coughs wracked her body again. If she’d been holding the soup, she might’ve even burned herself. Much better safe than sorry.
Haruka situated herself next to An’s bed. She’d had the forethought, thankfully, to bring the chair a bit closer earlier. “Here. It might be best if you blow on it instead of me.” She dipped the spoon into the broth, scooping a small chunk of cooked carrot. She offered it to An, keeping a steady hand so none of it spilled. An leaned forward to meet her as much as she could, blowing gently on the soup so it didn’t splatter. Haruka almost anticipated a drama-like moment in which An somehow choked because of how bad the soup tasted, dying right then and there.
Perhaps she’d been internalizing Minori’s habit of catastrophizing more than she’d thought.
An swallowed it just fine, even adding a satisfactory nod. It was good.
Haruka straightened her posture a bit out of pride. She didn’t screw up the soup.
She was helping.