Current mood:	intimidated
Current music:	Come Back Home - HOME MADE Kazoku

Clockwise - Yakitate!!Japan

Tsukino, gen, with references to her backstory. Yakitate!!Japan © Hashiguchi Takashi, et al.


Once or twice, Tsukino deliberately wasted her time by letting her mind reinvent the irreversible: her mother, young and unsentimental, taking her away to another town and severing all ties with the Azusagawa house; herself in a mourning dress, flinging the broken ash jar back at Yukino and waking up in the hospital afterward, wondering which limb she had lost. These daydreams never lasted more than five minutes, usually interrupted by the smell from the oven, a homework waiting patiently on her study desk, her grandfather's voice asking how her day had been. ("Women are complicated," she once said in a burst of confidentiality, and he regarded her with a terrible kindness before changing the subject.)

At other times, curled up half-asleep under the blanket, she recited recipes in her head. The measurements and the pronunciation of the more foreign ingredients were like a cadence, a fierce lullaby. The next day, she kneaded the dough with a vague feeling of having accomplished something. Another exercise in maintaining her retentive skills, probably.

She ran into Yukino on her fourteenth birthday. Later she recalled the gleeful glint in her older sister's eyes, and made a resolution to overcome her terror. When she met Yukino next, that was.

The South Tokyo branch was finding its feet. She was not entirely content to be reduced to a mere spectator - the recipes became less of a comfort if they were not put into practice - but the store did need someone they could dub the boss.

She continued to try out the recipes in the privacy of her own kitchen. To her utter surprise, it helped assuage the thirst.

The new employees were more than friendly faces now; they were gaining the status of a fixture. It was almost a month before she could say to herself that they were friends. The sound of the word made her feel strangely helpless and paradoxically safe.