Work Text:
Putting up holiday decorations was something that Sho hadn’t even thought of doing in years, but because Kasumi enjoyed it that meant that this year there was now one of those fake pine trees covered in sparkling ornaments sitting in the corner of the living room, strings of colorful lights hanging up in the windows, and shiny tinsel garland over nearly all of the doorways.
He hadn’t even calculated the possibility of Kasumi even caring about the holidays like this, it didn’t seem like something that would factor into her own equations. She didn’t care about the trash littering the streets, but in her own words there was “something about the lights, sweets, and warm cozyness that came with the season” that she always loved even if her own value didn’t align with the concept of giving that was usually associated with this time of year. And so as soon as November had started she had come barging into their apartment talking about the cake she managed to reserve early and had started digging through her own things to find the lights and ornaments she had brought over from her old place, throwing more than a few new unexpected variables into his equations in the process and not taking no for an answer.
That night Kasumi had dashed through the whole apartment setting up decorations, finding what she deemed to be the “most logical” placement for everything, and in only a few short moments Sho had found his apartment to be more festive than it had ever been since he’d started living here. It wasn’t anything too outrageous, but it still exceeded any calculations he could have made regarding the subject, and every time he asked her about it she just cackled at him as if he’d just asked her to solve some absurdly simple equation. For some reason though she had insisted on both of them putting up the tree together.
(Though he assumed the main factor in that decision had been her height value being too low to put the star on top.)
Getting the damn tree up had been an event in and of itself as well, the whole evening had mostly been Kasumi deviating from his own equation and moving ornaments as soon as he turned around and him putting them back whenever she looked away, the two of them arguing about every single bauble they hung up. Even now he was still finding that some of the ornaments had been moving away from their calculated points, most likely because of Kasumi using her speed to rearrange them when he wasn’t looking.
A faint tinkling sound echoed across the floor and managed to break Sho from his thoughts as he looked down to find the other reason that some of the ornaments had been moving around. Pumpkin Pi was busy batting around a sparkling blue ball that she had managed to pull off of the tree, the calico cat apparently having the time of her life with the new toy she had found, that is until Sho took it away and put it back on the tree. Even the cat wasn’t safe from Kasumi’s festive takeover, seeing as she was wearing a little reindeer hat with antlers that flopped around as she tilted her head and let out a confused meow, wondering why her new toy had been taken away from her.
“Hey, you’ve got exponentially more toys over there, Pi. Stop messing with the coordinates on the tree.” Sho said as he leaned down to scratch her ears.
Spotting a little mouse shaped toy that Pumpkin Pi had left on the floor nearby, Sho picked it up and tossed it across the room, watching as the cat sprinted after it and pounced on her new target. He would have liked to play with her some more to try to keep her from going after the tree again, but right now there was another equation that needed his immediate attention, and the first thing he would need was some wire from his art supplies.
About half an hour later the front door flew open as Kasumi walked inside humming to herself, her arms weighed down with a large collection of plastic grocery bags.
“What did you get, Brain Freeze?” Sho asked as he watched her come in, leaning against the doorway that led into the living room.
Kasumi scoffed as she placed each bag on the kitchen counter, “Wouldn’t you love to know?” one by one she started unloading the bags, “They're all limited edition seasonal ice creams. If you even think about touching the peppermint cocoa ones I will kill you.”
“Heh, if you think you can reduce me to zero that easily,” Sho said as he walked over and started reaching for one of the aforementioned pints of ice cream.
But before he could blink Kasumi had already swiped it and moved it to the other side of the kitchen, the daggers in her eyes daring him to try it again. With the theft of her precious cargo averted for now, Kasumi smirked at him as she continued pulling out various pints of holiday flavored ice creams, “Well, we’ve already proven plenty of times that you can’t actually manage to kill me, so logically it stands to reason that if you can’t stop me from killing you then yes, I could kill you pretty easily, you numerical nutjob. Which I will absolutely do if you touch my peppermint cocoa ice cream.”
Once all of the bags were empty it looked like she had bought nearly twenty five pints of ice cream, most of them being the peppermint cocoa flavor she had mentioned before. Meanwhile, Sho had gone back to standing in the doorway, now glaring at the horde of frozen containers on his counter. He would get her back for that soon enough, he just had to wait for everything to factor itself out.
He huffed as he crossed his arms and his attention shifted back to the pile of ice cream containers, “I think you’ve zetta miscalculated how much room we have in the freezer.”
But Kasumi just waved him off as she surveyed her small army of seasonal desserts and then turned around to open the freezer. She had, of course, strategically neglected to buy her usual stock for the week in preparation for this.
“It’s fine. Besides, the berry cheesecake one is almost gone, I’ll finish that one off tonight and there will be plenty of room,” she looked over to see the skepticism on his face and rolled her eyes, “Look, I’m not fluent in math and numbers like some people but I do intimately understand the exact amount of ice cream that will fit in that freezer. And they’re all limited edition anyway. As in, after next month they will all be gone for a whole year. I need to make sure that I’m properly stocked before they go away, so you just go crunch your dumb numbers or whatever and I’ll deal with this.”
Immediately she got to work rearranging the freezer and stocking it with her precious haul, moving containers around and stacking them into precise formations, turning each one very deliberately so they would slide perfectly into place but making sure they were positioned so she could still take out whichever flavor she wanted without collapsing everything, like she was fitting together the pieces of a frozen puzzle. And after only a few moments she had managed to seamlessly fit every single pint of ice cream on the counter into the freezer, closing the door and turning to her boyfriend with a smug, triumphant grin.
“How’s that for ‘perfectly calculated’, hm?”
It really was like she had calculated absolutely everything down to the very last yoctogram, and Sho couldn’t help but smile as his heart skipped a beat, his golden eyes shimmering with awe for just a split second. Of course Kasumi had noticed the brief moment that his face had changed away from his usual arrogant smirk and she cackled as she pulled out the almost empty carton of berry cheesecake ice cream and went to grab a spoon to enjoy her well earned treat, only for her smug grin to be replaced with anger as she was met with an empty utensil drawer.
“What the hell?!” she turned to yell at her boyfriend, “It was your turn to do dishes! Where the hell are all of the damn spoons?!”
“Heh. I must’ve been too busy ‘crunching my dumb numbers’ to solve that problem.” he said as he leaned against the doorway.
“Ugh! You absolute idiot!”
Kasumi slammed the ice cream carton on the counter and started stomping off towards the bedroom for the box of plastic spoons she kept in there just in case something like this happened, when Sho suddenly put his arm out to block the doorway, his dumb cocky smirk back as he looked down at her.
“You know for someone who can move faster than 299,792,458 m/s you sure are zetta slow on the uptake today.”
Kasumi glared at him, ready to push his arm away and dash for her secret spoons, but he just looked up at the top of the doorway and continued talking, “You’ve failed to add in an important integer.”
Tied to a nail with a length of wire and hung directly above was a bundle of mistletoe wrapped in red ribbon.
And Kasumi froze, her face starting to flush an even brighter festive red as her brain connected the dots.
Sho’s grin only grew as he watched his equation finally beginning to factor itself out exactly as calculated.
“Normally I’d say traditions like this are garbage, but I think I can let this one stick around.”
While Kasumi was still frozen from the unexpected sudden implications of what he’d done, Sho tilted her chin up and leaned down to meet her lips with a quick, soft kiss.
Kasumi let out a tiny squeak as Sho kissed her, so he kissed her again, and again, and with each kiss Kasumi felt herself melt more and more as her surprised little squak transformed into a rise of bubbly giggles that erupted into the sounds of real, pure, joyful laughter. A sound that Sho found exponentially better than the mocking cackle she’d let out earlier, and it was the perfect solution his little equation had been solving for.
When they finally pulled away from each other Kasumi’s cheeks were still tinged with red and there was a slight giggle left in her voice when she spoke, “I’m still mad about the dishes though.”
Sho just chuckled, one of his arms having found its way around her waist to hold her closer, “I solved that one already, just changed their coordinates, had to subtract the possibility of you walking past here with a carton of ice cream in your hands. Check in the cabinets.”
“Wow. You know you really are just so terrible,” Kasumi laughed, her arms now linked around his neck as she kissed him one more time.
He held her close, smiling into her lips again. “I could say the same to you.”
And Sho found himself thinking that if every year progressed exactly like this one, then he could definitely factor in putting up holiday decorations again.
Meanwhile, somewhere behind them a familiar tinkling sound echoed across the floor once again followed by a tiny excited meow.
Later that night the two of them were sitting on the couch together making fun of a dumb romantic holiday movie. Kasumi was leaning against Sho, finally finishing off her ice cream from earlier, and Sho had an arm around her shoulder while Pumpkin Pi was curled up in his lap contentedly purring away.
As the credits began to roll on the movie Kasumi tapped her spoon on the side of her empty ice cream carton as if deep in thought.
“I'm going to put a tree in the lounge,” she finally said.
Sho raised an eyebrow at her, “What, right now?”
“No, not right now, though the look on Her Frostiness’s face would be pretty priceless. Ha! She’d be so pissed,” Kasumi laughed then hummed to herself, “I mean when I'm the Conductor. I'm going to put a huge tree in the lounge once December starts, maybe even earlier, and decorate it however I want. It’s going to be great.”
“If the Composer lets you, that is.” Sho replied with a devious little grin.
“What? Hey!” Kasumi looked up at him, smacking him with the empty carton, “No! You're going to have the entire city to do whatever you want with, I can decorate the lounge how I want!”
“Hm, let me crunch the numbers on that equation.” Sho cackled as he reached for the remote and started looking for something else to watch.
Kasumi grumbled, still halfway lying against him, “Stupid trash calculator.”
“You’re the one who was laughing while kissing the ‘stupid trash calculator’ earlier.” Sho said as he looked down at her with a smirk.
Kasumi just rolled her eyes. “Yeah, because the stupid trash calculator put mistletoe in our apartment and tricked me into walking under it.”
“All perfectly calculated.”
“I really hate you sometimes.”
But despite that comment Kasumi didn’t move, staying right there cuddled next to her stupid boyfriend, and Sho kept his arm around her, holding his annoying girlfriend close to him. It was the most logical observation anyone could make that they drove each other mad more often than not, but they wouldn’t want to solve this equation any other way.