Work Text:
“Happy birthday,” Raleigh says to her on a day that isn’t her birthday, a week after Sensei’s funeral. Inside the parcel he hands her is a squat glass bottle, its contents syrupy and golden.
“Honey?” She turns it over, examines the label printed in Russian and Chinese. “I haven’t seen any of this since I was a little girl…” The sight of it wakes dim memories, of sweetness and security.
“I’ve never had it in my life,” Raleigh says. “We could never afford it when I was a kid, then it stopped getting made after the big crash in ‘16.”
“Where did you get it?”
“Black market. All kinds of stuff is coming back now the war’s over. The guy who sold it to me told me the best story.” He smiles faintly. “He says the best honey is made from the flowers that grow after wildfires. Oh, and -- I brought this, too.”
He pulls a thin packet out of his breast pocket. Mako rips one corner and draws a deep breath as the rich smell of tea, real loose-leaf tea, fills the room.
Irresistibly, she remembers. Sensei handing her a mug too big for her hands to wrap around, saying gravely this will make you feel better, and it does, because he has made it for her and after that she no longer feels like crying. In his office, in every office he used, the lower left-hand desk drawer full of little packets of leaves. It is his treasure, the only luxury he will allow in an otherwise austere and functional life, and her dearest memories are the afternoons when he opened that drawer and brewed some for both of them, sometimes with English simplicity, sometimes with Japanese ceremony. Either way, it was their ceremony.
She looks up at Raleigh, speechless, unable to tell him -- but he knows. He remembers, too.
“There’s more,” he says. “I’ve got a few back in my room, but there’s a shop on the other side of the XZ where they’ve got all kinds -- I wasn’t sure what you’d like best, so I just guessed. But we can go back there -- I mean, if you want. If you want me to come.”
“Yes,” she manages to say. She has room for them in her desk, in the lower left-hand drawer. “Thank you.”