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Chihiro pauses in the kitchen doorway, taking in the sight of Hakuri standing frozen in front of an open drawer. His hand rests on the handle of a vegetable peeler, but he doesn’t move to take it out. He doesn’t move at all, holding himself unnaturally still. At this angle Chihiro can’t really see his expression—just that his head is bowed, staring at the contents of the drawer.
Chihiro wonders…Chihiro tries not to wonder. Hakuri’s already had so much taken from him, privacy included. Privacy Chihiro’s violating right now, without Hakuri even realising.
Chihiro takes a quiet step back, but Hakuri still jumps and wheels around.
“Oh, Chihiro!” Hakuri’s face takes an extra second to burst into a smile, but when he does it’s as dazzling as ever. “You’re back! Um, Char wants lunch, but I don’t really…know how to make much of anything.”
“I can do it,” Chihiro offers, crossing the threshold into the room. “Did she want something specific?”
“Very specific,” Hakuri says. He starts miming ticking items off a list as he talks. Chihiro feels the corner of his mouth quirk up just a little . “She wants…a sandwich, or ice cream, or curry that isn’t too spicy.”
“Well, ice cream isn’t a meal.” Chihiro slides past Hakuri and starts searching through the cupboards. “And we don’t have any bread. So curry it is.”
He starts pulling things out of the cupboards, lining up sweet potatoes and tins of coconut milk, scanning the spices trying to think of a combination mild enough for Char’s tastes. A recipe starts to cobble together in his mind, a muscle he apparently hasn’t lost after years of mostly living off convenience store food. He comes out of his reverie enough to notice Hakuri still hovering, leg bouncing anxiously.
“I can take care of it, if you want to go back.”
“Sure!” Hakuri says quickly. “I will, if you want, I mean—if you’d rather do it by yourself, but…can I help? I want to know how to do it myself next time, so I don’t always have to bug you or Hinao.”
Chihiro notes with amusement that Mr Shiba hasn’t made the list of people to ask, despite his insistence that he can cook just fine. “You’re not bothering me. I like cooking. But sure, I’ll show you.”
“Thanks, Chihiro!” Hakuri beams once more. He seems pretty much himself again, and Chihiro tries to banish the worry he’d felt watching that moment of strange stillness. He should know better than anyone that Hakuri’s sturdier than he looks.
Still, Chihiro ignores the peeler and selects two kitchen knives to work with instead. They hadn’t had a peeler back at home anyway; a kitchen stocked by his dad and whatever random items Mr Shiba brought by was never going to be flush with useful things. Careful strokes with a knife worked just as well.
Hakuri’s a good student, just like in the sorcery lessons Chihiro’s glimpsed him having with Mr Shiba. He listens with almost comically rapt attention as Chihiro shows him what to do, his hands on the blade unpracticed but careful. They chop vegetables side by side, Chihiro leaning over every now and then to check on the rice.
“Sorry,” Hakuri says, “you’d probably be faster on your own, huh?”
“Not really.” Whatever time he’s losing teaching Hakuri is made up for by having a second pair of hands. “Plus, if Char’s gonna be choosy, she’ll have to wait. Or go raid some of Mr Shiba’s bizarre snacks.”
Hakuri huffs a laugh, then his expression flashes back to concentration as he watches Chihiro carve the core out of a bell pepper, hesitantly copying the movement himself. It’s a little weird seeing these familiar everyday actions made novel in Hakuri’s eyes.
“You haven’t cooked before?” Chihiro asks.
“No, I mean…We had, um, staff. At the Sazanami estate.”
Chihiro had figured as much, but it’s still strange to think about. He can’t imagine anywhere feeling like home if he didn’t know his way around the kitchen. If he couldn’t grow herbs on the windowsill and learn just where to set the burner so things stayed on a nice slow simmer. He swallows through the sudden tightness in his throat, refocusing on the blade in his hand.
“I did used to sneak into the kitchen sometimes,” Hakuri admits, “if I hadn’t earned—” He stops, his hands falling still too. “If they weren’t letting me eat,” he finishes. His hands resume their careful movement, a little slower than before. “But I had to be fast, so…no real cooking.”
Chihiro breathes through the vice in his chest, picturing that younger Hakuri, stealing food he’d been told he didn’t deserve from a house that had so much. Starving among all that luxury. And for what?
“You shouldn’t have had to do that.” It’s a sentiment that probably isn’t of any real use to Hakuri—certainly not the younger version Chihiro can see in his mind’s eye, who’d been taught to believe he didn’t deserve the things he was denied—but he can’t bear not to say it either. Not to say something. “You know you can have whatever you want here, right? Even if we were…I don’t know, arguing.”
“I know,” Hakuri says. “Don’t worry.” He nudges Chihiro with his elbow a little, like he can knock the worry out of him. Chihiro feels his expression soften. “But it’ll be nice to know I can make my own meals if I want to.”
Chihiro makes a silent vow to find more time for cooking lessons, whenever he can. He leans over to check on the rice, and Hakuri watches him curiously.
“How can you tell when it’s done?”
Chihiro considers, trying to work out how to translate the image that’s so clear in his mind into words. He’s never taught anyone cooking before; his dad was more than happy to relinquish the kitchen to Chihiro entirely, and in the period after when he lived with Mr Shiba, he couldn’t…it just hadn’t felt like something he wanted to touch again. “When the bubbles die way down, and you can see little holes appearing between the grains,” Chihiro says. “I’ll show you when it happens.”
Hakuri nods with more solemnity than rice really deserves. “How come you’re so good at this?”
Chihiro finds the knife in his hand falling still. It would be easy enough to dodge the question; Hakuri wouldn’t push him, even if he noticed that’s what Chihiro was doing. “My dad was hopeless at it,” Chihiro says instead. Just that one sentence feels harder to put into the world than the whole story he’d told Hakuri shortly after they met. The one where he’d been interrupted first by hitching breaths and then by full sobs, even though he’d just been explaining the bare facts of it: this is who my dad was, this is what happened to him, this is what I have to do now.
“So I started cooking pretty young,” Chihiro manages, his voice mostly even. “He’d always make such a fuss about it. Act like I was doing something unbelievable.”
Hakuri’s hands have gone still too, he realises. Not staring at him, but listening intently.
“I don’t know if it was ‘cause he just didn’t want to have to go back to making stuff himself or…maybe it did seem miraculous to him, since he could barely boil water.”
Chihiro remembers working in their little kitchen, telling his dad he didn’t understand how he hadn’t starved to death before he had Chihiro there to cook for him. His dad responding that he was starving to death right now, keeling over on the kitchen floor, completely in the way, hand clutched dramatically at his stomach—Chihiro, Chihiro, save me, won’t you?
“Or he was just trying to make me smile,” Chihiro finishes, when he can control his voice again.
It shouldn’t feel so gutting, to talk about his dad. He does it all the time: talks about Rokuhira the swordsmith, about the work he'd tried and failed to keep back from the world. He's been over every word his dad said to him about the enchanted blades so many times they've smudged and faded into memories of memories of memories. His father's legacy, his work, his murder. These things are the building blocks of Chihiro’s world.
But it feels different, somehow, to talk just about his dad. His dad who'd told the same stupid jokes every day of his life, who'd been baffled and blindsided every time Chihiro grew out of the last pair of shoes he swore he'd just bought, who'd stayed up with him once through a long feverish night, telling stories Chihiro can't remember now—just the soothing hum of his dad’s voice. Just a cloth laid over his brow, water running down and dampening the collar of his shirt.
His dad. Goofy and infuriating and exactly himself. Just that.
“I wish I could have met him,” Hakuri says, in a quiet voice.
The thought jars right between Chihiro’s ribs. He’s never considered it before, but he can see it so clearly now. How good his dad would be at bringing Hakuri out of his shell, at encouraging that lighter side Chihiro treasures but feels unfit to match. He can see Hakuri hanging on his dad’s words, asking strange insightful questions about his work. It’s so real, all of a sudden. That there’s a table with a place for both of them where Chihiro’s supposed to be. These two pieces of his life, sheared in half forever.
“Sorry,” Hakuri says, his voice so gentle. “You don’t…have to talk about him, if you don’t want to.”
“I do,” Chihiro says, realising as he says it that it’s true. It feels like flaying himself open, but he does want to. He wants to hold these shards of his world side by side, if only for a moment. “I wish you’d met him too.” Wishes he could fold Hakuri into that long-lost kinder part of his existence, before it had shattered. “He’d have liked you,” he says, and doesn’t manage to keep his voice even this time.
Hakuri puts the knife down and reaches a hand over, still littered with flecks of peel. He hovers for a moment, then nudges his hand gently against Chihiro’s. Chihiro presses back, that one little point of contact as real and all-consuming as someone holding him up when he can’t stand anymore.
They’re interrupted by a patter of furious little footsteps. “You’re not even COOKING,” Char shouts from the doorway. “Hinao, they’re not even cooking!”
Chihiro clears his throat, nudging his hand once more against Hakuri’s before moving away. “Yes, we are,” he says calmly.
“No, you’re just holding hands!” Char insists, ignoring Hakuri’s spluttering. “That’s not gonna make food happen!”
Chihiro sighs. “Why don’t you come supervise, then?” he offers. “Might even learn how to make something yourself.”
Char huffs with an annoyance he can tell isn’t genuine. There’s a sparkle in her eyes as she stomps over and demands to be boosted up onto the island so she can see. Hakuri happily obliges, and is rewarded with a litany of complaints about the peel on his hands getting on her clothes. Then the others filter in to see what all the fuss is about, and in the noise and bustle of the full kitchen, it takes Chihiro at least three times longer to finish the meal than it would have by himself.
Still, there’s a strange sort of quiet in Chihiro’s chest as he ladles out bowls of steaming orange curry, as he’s pulled over to the too-small kitchen table to eat. A stillness, a settling. He takes a bite and considers: the spices are about right, but the sweet potatoes are just a little too tender. He’ll have to adjust the timings next time.
He watches Hakuri take a bite, watches his big expressive eyes light up and look to Chihiro. A we made this grin crossing his face. Next time, Chihiro thinks. Next time.