ily jo the first female ghoul and my lovely genderqueer rep 🙂↕️🙂↕️🙂↕️🙂↕️
this is such a good way to describe the genderqueer/fluid experience. like YES. thats rlly all it is. and the way she is even in female firm outside of missions like 🥹
insp by @hayaeto's soft kaito illustration here! ( ˊᵕˋ )♡.°⑅
There are about seven different types of apples good for baking.
Kaito tells you this on the bus to the orchard. There are mutsus and jonagolds for pies, tokis and kinseis for jams, but out of them all, he says, his favourite to bake with is the kogyoku.
He tells you this with a sparkle in his eyes you rarely see. He describes their red skin and sweet flesh with a smile two times wider and hands like music, and as the bus bumbles along the uneven country road his voice rises and falls with the motion.
“We can make apple tarts,” Kaito muses. The world blurs by outside. “We can stop by a grocery store on the way back, get those pre-made pastry sheets so we can put them in the oven immediately. Ah—“ his face contorts suddenly into something like regret, “I should have made some last night—“
You laugh. “Weren’t we reading those anomaly reports last night? We wouldn’t have had the time.”
Kaito grimaces, like the reminder of your mission is a thorn in his side.
Before he can say anything, though, the bus trundles to a stop in front of a run-down bus shelter. It is the type of rusted you’ve only seen in movies (and more recently, mission reports), and as you step off the creaking bus with Kaito the ground seems to sigh beneath your feet.
For a moment you both stand there, dusty sand shifting under your sneakers. The shelter smells half-forgotten in the late fall, with its flaking paint, bent metal ribs and a timetable long sun-bleached into illegibility.
Frankly, you’re not surprised people have been going missing in this orchard.
The biting nip of wind chases your fingertips, but before you can suggest something even close to abandoning your mission you find that the bus is already groaning back into motion behind you.
Well.
The sound of the bus’ engine fades quickly, swallowed by the wide, breathing quiet of the countryside. Kaito runs a hand down his face. “Shit.”
It tugs a laugh out of you. “C’mon, we’ll have to report back to Tohma in two hours.”
Kaito groans. It sounds as reluctant as you feel, but as you turn on your heel to trudge your way towards the faded wooden sign bearing the name of the orchard, you find him squaring his shoulders and pacing his stride to match yours anyway.
-
The orchard is beautiful.
The heavy smell of apple hits you first, honeyed and dizzying, so sweet you nearly stick your tongue out to see if the air tastes the same. Sunlight catches on the red ripeness hanging under shades of green; even from the entrance you can see that there are already quite a few people wandering underneath the trees.
Kaito inhales. “Looks like a pretty popular date spot, huh?”
You hum in agreement. “The mission report did say the owners are luring people in with a buy one ticket, get another free type of deal, so that makes sense.”
“Oh— yeah— of course, yeah.”
There’s nothing quite out of the ordinary at first glance — the families and couples present move quietly between each row of trees, idle chatter stitched together by fence and branch and shadow.
The staff themselves, likely part-timers freshly employed after whatever anomaly lives here scared the full-timers off, are friendly enough too. They hand you empty baskets and show you how to pick the best apples without bruising the fruit or yourselves, and at the end of your first hour you find that your basket is heavier than you expect.
You shift your basket from one hand to the other. “Kaito, should we… should we take a rest?”
Kaito glances down at your basket. It takes half a second, but then he yelps in understanding, “Sorry, it must be really heavy for you! Lemme get that—“
The alarm in his voice slips a laugh out of your throat, light and surprised, and Kaito freezes mid-reach, hands hovering just above your wrists.
“It’s not that,” you say, still smiling, still a little breathless. “I just thought… we could stop for a bit. Review our mission notes before we go on.”
He blinks, then laughs too, sheepish and warm. He rubs the back of his neck. “Oh. Yeah. Yeah, that sounds good.”
It doesn’t take long for you to find a clear spot under the trees. Your baskets land on the grass with soft, weighted thumps, apples shifting inside, and the scent of it rises — red and sweet and alive. The sun still smells like cold, like the morning hasn’t fully registered the slip into afternoon, and as you settle into the grass the earth presses damp through your clothes.
Kaito lays down next to you, his head inches from yours. “Y’know, I think we could get a few uses out of all these apples. I feel like we could make a couple pies, make some crumble, make some salad, maybe turn the rest into jam.”
You hum. The mission notes in your phone burn a hole in your pocket. You ignore it. “I’ve never made jam before.”
“Oh! You should totally stop by the Frostheim kitchen sometime, I’ll teach you for sure!” Kaito holds up his hands against the sun, counting up on his fingers. “We’ll need to get lemon juice, brown sugar, maybe some cinnamon… I can’t remember if we ran out…”
Time loosens its grip.
The clouds drift between the leaves overhead.
It feels… normal. It feels like any other afternoon, pre-Darkwick, just you and a friend making plans for the future.
You breathe in, and for about two seconds you almost believe in a kind universe, a just one, where you are not two pawns of a corrupt institute sent to lay your lives at the feet of anomalies, but just two friends watching the sky turn whiter than blue, throats raw from laughing and the sweet of apples, the concept of time still long and messy and winding before you both.
For a moment everything goes sharp.
For a moment all you feel is the cool hard of the grass beneath your coat. You watch the sun shine so brightly through the leaves it makes their edges blur, fades their shapes into nothing but a reminder of what was there. It burns your eyes, but in a good way. In an I’m alive kind of way.
The breath in your lungs releases, warm.
When you turn to Kaito he has not stopped talking. The ends of his words melt into something bright, all honeycrisp and mint. You lean onto your shoulder to look at him.
“—but I think we can still cook them down with cinnamon and butter,” Kaito is saying. He taps his chin thoughtfully. “If we cook them low and slow maybe we’ll have enough time to rest the pastry—“
“Kaito,” you interrupt. His name comes out round and ripe in the hollow of your tongue.
He shifts to look at you.
“Thank you,” you say. “For being my friend.”
You see Kaito still.
The disappointment that flashes across his face is so obvious it nearly makes you laugh — Kaito has always been so easy to read.
When has he not been, with his loud and his bright? With all his good and his bad and his worries and his courage spelled glass-clear across the constellations on his cheeks, with paragraphs of his sky-green laughter blurring together in the sameness of your days?
But isn’t that all the more why you adore Kaito? In a world full of hidden agendas and lies hidden in postscripts and footnotes, how difficult it is to find someone who won’t — who can’t — lie to you. How difficult it is to find someone so true. How difficult it is to find someone who stays stubbornly and transparently on your side, over and over and over again, even when your narrative draws to a close.
How difficult it is for Kaito, for him to not be the one who caused your storms, but always the one that stands there anyway, lantern in hand, waiting to welcome you home.
You swallow. Suddenly the words can’t drip off your tongue fast enough. “I know I might not have much time left, but. Well. If in this life, being friends with me isn’t too much… I’d like to be friends with you in my next life, too.”
You watch the protest on Kaito’s tongue rise then melt away. You watch his shoulders shift against the hardness of the ground, watch as he turns to you, wide-eyed and solemn.
insp by @hayaeto's soft kaito illustration here! ( ˊᵕˋ )♡.°⑅
There are about seven different types of apples good for baking.
Kaito tells you this on the bus to the orchard. There are mutsus and jonagolds for pies, tokis and kinseis for jams, but out of them all, he says, his favourite to bake with is the kogyoku.
He tells you this with a sparkle in his eyes you rarely see. He describes their red skin and sweet flesh with a smile two times wider and hands like music, and as the bus bumbles along the uneven country road his voice rises and falls with the motion.
“We can make apple tarts,” Kaito muses. The world blurs by outside. “We can stop by a grocery store on the way back, get those pre-made pastry sheets so we can put them in the oven immediately. Ah—“ his face contorts suddenly into something like regret, “I should have made some last night—“
You laugh. “Weren’t we reading those anomaly reports last night? We wouldn’t have had the time.”
Kaito grimaces, like the reminder of your mission is a thorn in his side.
Before he can say anything, though, the bus trundles to a stop in front of a run-down bus shelter. It is the type of rusted you’ve only seen in movies (and more recently, mission reports), and as you step off the creaking bus with Kaito the ground seems to sigh beneath your feet.
For a moment you both stand there, dusty sand shifting under your sneakers. The shelter smells half-forgotten in the late fall, with its flaking paint, bent metal ribs and a timetable long sun-bleached into illegibility.
Frankly, you’re not surprised people have been going missing in this orchard.
The biting nip of wind chases your fingertips, but before you can suggest something even close to abandoning your mission you find that the bus is already groaning back into motion behind you.
Well.
The sound of the bus’ engine fades quickly, swallowed by the wide, breathing quiet of the countryside. Kaito runs a hand down his face. “Shit.”
It tugs a laugh out of you. “C’mon, we’ll have to report back to Tohma in two hours.”
Kaito groans. It sounds as reluctant as you feel, but as you turn on your heel to trudge your way towards the faded wooden sign bearing the name of the orchard, you find him squaring his shoulders and pacing his stride to match yours anyway.
-
The orchard is beautiful.
The heavy smell of apple hits you first, honeyed and dizzying, so sweet you nearly stick your tongue out to see if the air tastes the same. Sunlight catches on the red ripeness hanging under shades of green; even from the entrance you can see that there are already quite a few people wandering underneath the trees.
Kaito inhales. “Looks like a pretty popular date spot, huh?”
You hum in agreement. “The mission report did say the owners are luring people in with a buy one ticket, get another free type of deal, so that makes sense.”
“Oh— yeah— of course, yeah.”
There’s nothing quite out of the ordinary at first glance — the families and couples present move quietly between each row of trees, idle chatter stitched together by fence and branch and shadow.
The staff themselves, likely part-timers freshly employed after whatever anomaly lives here scared the full-timers off, are friendly enough too. They hand you empty baskets and show you how to pick the best apples without bruising the fruit or yourselves, and at the end of your first hour you find that your basket is heavier than you expect.
You shift your basket from one hand to the other. “Kaito, should we… should we take a rest?”
Kaito glances down at your basket. It takes half a second, but then he yelps in understanding, “Sorry, it must be really heavy for you! Lemme get that—“
The alarm in his voice slips a laugh out of your throat, light and surprised, and Kaito freezes mid-reach, hands hovering just above your wrists.
“It’s not that,” you say, still smiling, still a little breathless. “I just thought… we could stop for a bit. Review our mission notes before we go on.”
He blinks, then laughs too, sheepish and warm. He rubs the back of his neck. “Oh. Yeah. Yeah, that sounds good.”
It doesn’t take long for you to find a clear spot under the trees. Your baskets land on the grass with soft, weighted thumps, apples shifting inside, and the scent of it rises — red and sweet and alive. The sun still smells like cold, like the morning hasn’t fully registered the slip into afternoon, and as you settle into the grass the earth presses damp through your clothes.
Kaito lays down next to you, his head inches from yours. “Y’know, I think we could get a few uses out of all these apples. I feel like we could make a couple pies, make some crumble, make some salad, maybe turn the rest into jam.”
You hum. The mission notes in your phone burn a hole in your pocket. You ignore it. “I’ve never made jam before.”
“Oh! You should totally stop by the Frostheim kitchen sometime, I’ll teach you for sure!” Kaito holds up his hands against the sun, counting up on his fingers. “We’ll need to get lemon juice, brown sugar, maybe some cinnamon… I can’t remember if we ran out…”
Time loosens its grip.
The clouds drift between the leaves overhead.
It feels… normal. It feels like any other afternoon, pre-Darkwick, just you and a friend making plans for the future.
You breathe in, and for about two seconds you almost believe in a kind universe, a just one, where you are not two pawns of a corrupt institute sent to lay your lives at the feet of anomalies, but just two friends watching the sky turn whiter than blue, throats raw from laughing and the sweet of apples, the concept of time still long and messy and winding before you both.
For a moment everything goes sharp.
For a moment all you feel is the cool hard of the grass beneath your coat. You watch the sun shine so brightly through the leaves it makes their edges blur, fades their shapes into nothing but a reminder of what was there. It burns your eyes, but in a good way. In an I’m alive kind of way.
The breath in your lungs releases, warm.
When you turn to Kaito he has not stopped talking. The ends of his words melt into something bright, all honeycrisp and mint. You lean onto your shoulder to look at him.
“—but I think we can still cook them down with cinnamon and butter,” Kaito is saying. He taps his chin thoughtfully. “If we cook them low and slow maybe we’ll have enough time to rest the pastry—“
“Kaito,” you interrupt. His name comes out round and ripe in the hollow of your tongue.
He shifts to look at you.
“Thank you,” you say. “For being my friend.”
You see Kaito still.
The disappointment that flashes across his face is so obvious it nearly makes you laugh — Kaito has always been so easy to read.
When has he not been, with his loud and his bright? With all his good and his bad and his worries and his courage spelled glass-clear across the constellations on his cheeks, with paragraphs of his sky-green laughter blurring together in the sameness of your days?
But isn’t that all the more why you adore Kaito? In a world full of hidden agendas and lies hidden in postscripts and footnotes, how difficult it is to find someone who won’t — who can’t — lie to you. How difficult it is to find someone so true. How difficult it is to find someone who stays stubbornly and transparently on your side, over and over and over again, even when your narrative draws to a close.
How difficult it is for Kaito, for him to not be the one who caused your storms, but always the one that stands there anyway, lantern in hand, waiting to welcome you home.
You swallow. Suddenly the words can’t drip off your tongue fast enough. “I know I might not have much time left, but. Well. If in this life, being friends with me isn’t too much… I’d like to be friends with you in my next life, too.”
You watch the protest on Kaito’s tongue rise then melt away. You watch his shoulders shift against the hardness of the ground, watch as he turns to you, wide-eyed and solemn.
His pinkie touches yours.
“Of course,” he says. “We will.”
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