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Sakura spends his new year eating cold pizza and ham straight from the packet on the freezing floor of his tiny apartment.
It’s rare for him to even have food in his apartment, with his cupboards usually left bare as the day he first moved in. The cold pizza was a split-second decision, when he took one look outside at the bustling streets on New Year’s Eve and decided to order delivery for a late dinner instead of venturing outside.
There is a disconnect, almost, between him and the rest of the world as he puzzles through the food delivery app that Kiryu sneakily downloaded for him a while ago. He squints at his screen while the sounds of lively chattering rise from the buildings around him, from the townspeople below him and from every corner except his dead-silent apartment. He clicks through pixelated digital images while the raucous sounds of cheering and celebrating grow until he can almost shut his eyes and pretend he is amongst them as just another who belongs in this place.
He swallows down the peculiar choking sensation in his throat and clicks “order” on a pizza.
Sakura tracks his order nervously, unused to delivery services. When his screen notifies him that it’s delivered and knocks sound at his door, he jumps and scrambles to the door. He manages to stammer out a “thank you” to the delivery driver, clumsily dipping his head in a half-bow as he takes the pizza box. It can’t have been easy, working the night shift on New Year’s Eve and fighting through the crowds to get here. Though, as Sakura glances at the joy splashed across people’s faces and the way they mill about in tight-knit groups, the fact that he can retreat back behind his door with his dinner is an overwhelming relief.
He eats half the pizza before he can’t stomach any more. Hoping the cold weather means the remainder can last overnight, he opens a random cupboard to shove it into. He stills when he finds a near-full cupboard in contrast to the empty one he expected and is long used to.
Sakura forgot how insistent his classmates were on filling his apartment with food, once Suo and Nirei came over to his apartment. He refused basically all of them, pushing them back into his classmates’ arms with stubborn blushing.
Although, after days of Suo and Nirei ambushing him with extra groceries from “stocking their kitchens”—they all know clear as day that they bought those just for Sakura, he finally gave in. Not much, regardless, because he accepted only one plastic bag of food, but the small victory satisfies his vice-captains enough that he’s left alone afterwards.
He rifles through the goods now, finding he left them practically unpacked. There’s instant noodles and canned fruits and jars of pickled radishes. They’re all food with long shelf lives, as if Nirei predicted accurately that he would shove it into a cupboard and forget about it for a while.
Sakura retrieves a packet of ham, squinting warily at it. It doesn’t seem to have gone bad, luckily, thanks to the freezing weather lately. He peels it open to sniff at it carefully, double-checking just in case. It still smells fresh, so he brings the whole packet over to his small foldable table with one more slice of pizza.
He’s finishing off the last piece of ham when the buzzing outside explodes into shouting so loud that he swears it shakes his apartment. His first thought is that a fight has started. His second thought is washed away by the distinct words being repeated loudly, over and over again, outside his lonely apartment.
Happy New Year!
Sakura licks the rest of the ham off his fingers and stands to dump the empty ham packet into his bin.
In the morning, Suo deposits a nondescript paper bag on their tables.
Sakura startles like he’s a cat and the mysterious package is a cucumber, staring suspiciously at the brown paper. Nirei looks similarly wary, though the way his notebook appears magically in his hands suggests he is much more excited about the possibility of new information.
“What’s this,” Sakura deadpans when Suo doesn’t offer any explanation.
“I’m glad you asked, Sakura-kun!” Suo smiles. “See, my master sent me some teacakes as a new year’s gift that I’m afraid I can’t finish.”
“Oooh,” Nirei perks up instantly, observing the paper bag with doubled interest, “So there’s teacakes in this bag?”
Suo opens the bag in lieu of answering, tilting the bag for them to see as a response to Nirei’s question.
Sakura spots a flash of pink before he’s turning the same shade of pink. Those are sakura teacakes, dough shaped to look like the petals of his namesake and dyed rose to mimic the flower’s colour.
Beside them are flat, yellow-ish pastries, dusting crumbs over the inside of the bag. Suo notices him observing and clarifies, “Those are suncakes! They have maltose fillings, I quite like them myself.”
Suncakes, huh? Sakura judges. First sakura teacakes and now suncakes…He squints at Suo, knowing damn well this is too close of a coincidence for these teacakes to have been accidental leftovers. Suo just smiles back at him.
Nirei launches straight into his usual interrogation, and Suo is more than happy to indulge in his questions. Sakura takes the chance to peer closer at the snacks, sniffing it cautiously. It smells sweet.
He extracts a sakura teacake and bites hesitantly into it. It’s soft, giving easily beneath his teeth and basically melting in his mouth. There’s no specific flavour to it, just mild sweetness that brings the freshness of spring. He chews appreciatively, taking another bite after swallowing the first.
“How is it, Sakura-san?” Nirei asks, already sketching a vague drawing of the sakura teacake in his notebook.
Sakura’s lifting his hand before he even thinks. The other half of his sakura teacake lies in his open palm in a silent offer, one that was extended without any conscious thought.
There’s a pause. Nirei is staring at the sakura teacake, pupils wobbling in a way that betrays his tearing up. Suo is staring daggers into the side of Sakura’s head, gaze burning like a live wire. None of the three expected Sakura to do that, it seems, especially the grade captain himself.
God, Sakura thinks, an old wound pulsing in his chest, when was the last time I shared food with someone else?
It might have been offering half of his cupcake to another kid, watching them burst into tears at Sakura’s appearance and running off. It might have been asking shyly for a taste of someone’s noodles, and being stared at with disgust and rejected with mockery.
Maybe, Sakura recalls, it was one afternoon in Cafe Pothos with his vice-captains. Maybe it was when Nirei asked for a bite of his omurice and he pushed his plate over to let him steal a spoonful. Maybe it was when Suo whined about not getting a bite and Sakura scowled at him in between eating mouthful after mouthful.
Now, Sakura just murmurs, “Go ahead.”
He doesn’t retract his hand with the pink pastry sitting innocently on it.
“T-thank you, Sakura-san,” Nirei sniffs, sounding suspiciously like he was using all of his might to not burst into tears. He picks up the teacake as if it were made of fragile glass and takes a tiny bite out of the untouched side. As he chews, he doesn’t even seem like he’s analysing its taste at all.
After Nirei returns the rest of the teacake politely to his hand, Sakura leaves it suspended there for a moment longer to make sure Nirei doesn’t want another bite. Once he’s sure, he shoves the whole teacake into his mouth with his whole face aflame. He swallows it as hard as he can, trying to push down the funny feeling in his throat.
Suo swoops in like a falcon spying opportunity. Before either of them react, Suo is carefully splitting a suncake in half.
“For you both to share,” he grins, offering each half to Sakura and Nirei respectively.
Nirei takes it thankfully, nibbling nervously on it like a hamster. Sakura crams it into his mouth and chews through the crumbs that fall everywhere. His face is searingly hot.
A rectangular object wrapped neatly in cute cat-patterned fabric is dropped onto his desk the next morning. Sakura glances up, still processing what he’s seeing.
Nirei fidgets before his desk, shifting from foot to foot and fiddling with his fingers. It’s a clear show of anxiety if Sakura’s ever seen one.
“Suo-san brought us something for the new year, so I thought I’d make something for you two as well,” he explains nervously.
That same feeling lodges again in Sakura’s throat. He unwraps the cloth delicately, handling it like pure gold. He lifts the cover as if it would crumble with too much force and freezes.
It’s adorable. There’s slightly lopsided onigiris and sausages cut crookedly to resemble octopi and potato salad scooped messily into a corner. Sakura lowers his hand until it’s hovering just above the lunchbox, fingers trembling so slightly he doubts anyone else would notice.
“Oh?” Suo’s voice rings from behind Sakura, making him jump. “A homemade bento?”
Nirei perks up at his arrival. “I wanted to try making a bento for you both, Suo-san!”
Their voices are distant like waves crashing onto shore. Sakura swallows twice, thrice, fighting back the emotions twisting so strongly in his chest that he can barely hear his own thoughts.
He has a vague memory, something covered in dust bunnies of the past and abandoned in the back of his mind, that resurfaces now like a reanimated corpse. He clenches his fist in his lap and tries to cling onto the shreds of deja vu.
Making a bento for someone means the food delivers your love to that person, he thinks, as if reciting something he memorised long ago. Maybe he did, when he was still a child, unfamiliar with the gentle emotion people showed on their faces and expressed in deliberate actions when interacting. Maybe he stumbled upon it somewhere amongst the moments of trying desperately to learn about this alien concept called love, something as attainable to him as the moon.
Sakura grabs an onigiri and bites into it as violently as he can manage, crushing the rice grains between his teeth. Flavour bursts onto his tongue. This one is tuna mayo, deliciously salty and tangy as he shreds the filling with his molars. It’s so delicious he thinks he might cry. He swallows instead, licking a bit of mayo off the edge of his mouth.
Onigiri in one hand, he pinches a sausage octopus with his other hand and lifts it with his forefinger and thumb. The cuts in it are uneven and jagged, some longer than the others, but the legs have been painstakingly bent outwards to resemble those of an octopus. There’s undeniably so much care put into it. Sakura pops it into his mouth and chews.
Before he can do something ridiculous like scooping up the potato salad with his fingers, Nirei frantically pulls out a spoon and hands it to him. Sakura takes it and digs a fraction of the potato salad into his mouth, rolling it around his mouth so it melts onto his tongue.
“It’s good,” he tries to say past his mouthful of food. It comes out a little more like “F’s guh”, though Nirei seems to understand him perfectly.
“Thank you, Sakura-san!” he beams, bouncing lightly on his heels. “I’m glad you like it so much.”
Sakura nods and turns away from Nirei’s overjoyed expression before his blush has a chance to form.
“Are you gonna eat?” he asks Suo.
Suo blinks. “I’m still on my diet, Sakura-kun.”
“He made it for both of us, y’know,” Sakura grumbles, his nerves lowering his volume to a murmur and smearing his words together. “And it’s not like you have to eat it now.”
It’s not usual for him to push like this, he knows. It’s just that the onigiri, though imperfect, were clearly not first attempts and the sausages were dotted with sauce, like Nirei tried to draw faces on them, and the potato salad tasted of just a little too much milk, as if it took multiple tries to tinker with the ratio. It’s just that bentos are supposed to carry the love of the person who created it, and Sakura’s observant enough to catch how Nirei lit up when he devoured the food. In the first place, this bento was made for both of them.
Suo is quiet. Then, he smiles and says, “I’ll have to trouble Nirei-kun to help me pack some of this to bring home, then.”
Nirei brightens like a Christmas tree.
Sakura spends his fourth night of the new year snacking on sakura teacakes and onigiri.
He had dinner earlier, after being dragged to Cafe Pothos. Both his vice-captains ambush him after his scheduled patrol ends, having seemingly obtained more food.
Suo miraculously got more of the “leftover” teacakes, pulling out dozens of sakura teacakes and suncakes. Nirei pulls out a lunchbox filled to the brim with horribly misshapen onigiri, some of them already falling apart into rice grains. The next one that follows is filled to the brim with potato salad. He sheepishly admits that he made a bit too much food trying to perfect the bento he prepared, depositing them on the table one after another.
In the end, when Kotoha chases them out to close the cafe, Sakura is sent home with as much as he can carry. There’s Suo’s sakura teacakes and a few suncakes, stacked haphazardly on top of Nirei’s boxes of onigiri and potato salad.
He chews on them now, sitting on the floor of his apartment. It’s less from physical hunger and more from the desire for the soft, warm feeling that fills him when he eats food from his vice-captains. He’s not quite sure what it’s called yet.
Though, if he was really honest with himself, somewhere deep down—
Sakura might admit that he’s starting to think this new feeling is the love he always chased.