Archive of Our Own ^beta

I.

“Come to Japan with me.”

Ryo regarded the smiling girl with half-lidded eyes. “Is that an order, Miss Alice?”

“Can it be an order?” She said it as if it was a hypothesis she’d been wondering about—one experiment among many, without any personal investment in the result. Then she batted her eyes. Scientist one moment, spoiled princess in another. “If I commanded you to leave everything you’ve ever known behind, would you follow me?”

He shrugged. “Wherever we go, I’ll still be the best. So, sure.”

“No, no, no!” She stamped her foot. “You’re supposed to say you’ll go because you always want to serve me. That’s what Erina’s aide would say.”

Ryo chose not to respond to that.

After a while, Nakiri Alice sighed. The cold weather turned her breath into mist. “It’s not an order. And my parents say that I need to leave that choice up to you.”

“I already said I’d go,” he replied, wondering why she was looking at him with such wide, worried eyes. Even if he hadn’t said it out loud, wasn’t that understood? Wherever she would go, so would he.

“Oh.” Alice stared at him for a moment before her bright, self-satisfied smile returned in full force. “Alright. I never doubted it.”

II.

“Again. Now.”

“What, already?” Alice glanced up from where she was sprawled on the sofa, idly reading a molecular chemistry book. “Someone has a lot of pent-up energy today.”

“I’ll use it to destroy my enemies.” Next time, there will be no ties or indecision among the judges. They will know that his dish was the best, and they will know it violently.

“I’m sure. That would make it our eighth food competition today, though, and even that can get boring sometimes.”

“You’re only saying that because you lost,” he growled.

She turned a page in her book. “You remind me of that every time you challenge me.”

“And every time,” he countered, “it needles you.”

She clapped the book shut with a huff. “You know me too well.”

He did, but he saw little to no use remarking on such an obvious fact. What was more important right now was what he didn’t know, like what that red-headed trickster was scheming, or the pathetic concoction of spices that Shiomi Seminar guy was going to throw at him next.

“Hey.” Alice touched him on the shoulder. The white-haired princess was always throwing herself around his personal space, but rarely when his bandana was on and he was in one of his moods. It was enough, for a moment, to get his frenetic body to stand still. “You’re going to win.”

“Because you say so?”

“That,” she acknowledged, “but also because you’re the best.”

“I know I am. My cooking will force them to admit that!”

“Not just because of your cooking, Ryo-kun.”

He didn’t understand this. What made him the best, if not for his cutthroat skills that refused to let anyone look down on him? He was going to ask her to clarify, but Alice had already stridden to the door. “Well?” she inquired, glancing at him from over her shoulder. “Kitchen?”

He grunted and followed her. Whatever explanation she could’ve given about that strange comment probably didn’t matter, in the long run.

III.

“I was thinking,” Alice said, fiddling with the Moon Banquet Festival form as they walked, “That we should enter with Akira Hayama.”

“Why?” he snapped.

She stopped on the dirt path. “Do you have your bandana on right now and I just don’t see it?”

He didn’t respond. In truth, he wouldn’t have been able to give her an answer. He didn’t know why he asked that with so much bite; only that, when she gave that unexpected proposal, his mind flew to how much she’d probably like the spice master. Hayama was handsome, smart, and – according to the Autumn Election – a better chef than Ryo. Definitely Alice’s type.

The thought of that filled him with blinding anger.

“We don’t have to if you don’t want to,” Alice said. She began walking again. “There are other spaces we could steal. It’s just that—you guys and Yukihira-kun have been spending an awful amount of time together.” She didn’t even bother hiding the petulance.

“You can order me not to,” Ryo suggested in a monotone.

Alice rolled her eyes. “You’re allowed to have friends. I’m actually glad you spend time with Akira-kun and Yukihira-kun; it makes you marginally less of a grump.” Her hands fidgeted with the application form again. “I just want to make it clear that time doesn’t have to be exclusive. I can blend in, if that’s what’s bothering you.”

It was his turn to stare at her, though she was studiously ignoring his gaze. What Alice seemed to be saying was that, if it was what Ryo wanted, she would adjust.

And she’d do it because – he could never be sure with her, but Ryo hazarded a guess – she missed him.

IV.

“Of course I want to help Erina!”

Ryo raised his hands. He didn’t mean any offense. “I’m just saying, she left you out in the cold for years.”

He was there. He remembered how in the early days of their strange acquaintanceship, Alice would make a big, smug show about how her beloved cousin had begged her to keep in touch, how it was a hassle but of course she needed to write a pileful of letters so that the other Nakiri princess across the sea wouldn’t just die from missing her. The boasting came to a stop, eventually, and for a while, Ryo heard little about Alice’s cousin; just felt Alice’s skills become even sharper and more deadly as she came in for their daily bouts in his restaurant.

It was only when they became closer – when he’d won and felt finally that they were on equal ground, when he was sure enough of his place that he’d deigned to call her Milady and Miss Alice – that she’d allowed him to accompany her on her weekly rounds to the post office. They were quiet walks, and when Alice inserted her new letter into the mailbox her face was always so full of strained, bitter hope.

It was partially why Ryo wanted to win the Autumn Election so badly. That victory, along with many other ones he’d planned to ensure, would’ve given him the chance to blow the Tenth Seat off her chair.

But Alice shook her head. “Mother called,” she told him. “She explained to me that—that it wasn’t like that.”

He wanted to ask her what the story was, then—what justification and right anybody thought they had to hurt Nakiri Alice. She was biting her lip, however, and Ryo knew that now wasn’t the right time to push. “Okay,” he said. “It wasn’t like that.” He would take her word for it, for now. “Even so, why do you want to help her?”

“Because she’s important to me!” Alice exclaimed. “Next to you, Erina’s the most important person in my life!”

Ryo blinked. Next to…?

“We don’t have time for this,” she declared. Alice had a wild gleam in her eyes—the kind she got whenever she decided to just throw her hypotheses and theories out the door, and go mad. “Let’s rescue my cousin.”

V.

Ryo rarely ever made jokes.

But Alice was never this distraught, and he decided that desperate times called for desperate measures. He took a deep breath. “I guess I should just quit.”

It worked, sort of. Alice looked up from the table she’d collapsed on after that snide Central professor announced her failing grade – before Ryo had lifted him by the collar until he trembled and ran like a squirming fish – and stared at him with red-rimmed eyes. “What?”

“Quit,” he repeated. “As your aide.”

She kept staring at him blankly.

He heard somewhere before that you shouldn’t explain the joke, but Alice, the smartest person he knew, was looking utterly lost and confused and heartbroken and he wanted to fix it. “You know, because—because you said I should be more like Erina-san’s aide, and Hisako-san quit when she lost to Akira and she thought she wasn’t good enough-“

“You think you’re not good enough?”

The question took Ryo aback. “Uh-“

Alice’s voice heightened in pitch. “So you’re going to just leave me,” she hissed, “after one food competition which was rigged, by the way, just because of your own stupid complex about how it always has to be all or nothing. After everything we’ve been through, Kurokiba Ryo, you choose nothing?”

Her face crumpled in an instant, and she looked as if she would cry again. Then she straightened up. “You can leave if you want,” she told him. “But I’ll have you know, you idiot, that I liked you more than all your stupid cooking successes combined! You always said that bonds between chefs made them weak, but I never thought that about us. I thought we made each other stronger. That there wasn’t anything we couldn’t handle as long as we did it side by side.” She rubbed her eyes fiercely. “But I guess I was-“

He strode the last few steps between them and hugged her. Alice froze, so it worked, sort of.

Desperate times.

Besides, it was oddly nice, holding her like this. He had always been by her side, but never this close; close enough to smell the sharp citrus she’d used in the dish that had failed her, the dish that she’d given her all; close enough to hear her breath near his ear slow; close enough to feel her body relax, little by little, as she put her arms around his shoulders. He said, “I’m not going to leave.”

“But you said-“

“I was joking.”

“You are a horrible comedian.”

“Well,” he deadpanned, “you’re horrible at being sad.”

“Excuse me?”

“You didn’t even last twenty minutes sobbing before you went into lecture mode again.”

“You needed a lecture.” But at last, he felt a small laugh reverberate through her frame.

“How about this,” he proposed. “We both stop doing what we suck at and get back to what we’re excellent in.”

“And what would that be?” Alice murmured in his ear.

“Figuring out a way to win.”

+I.

Something most people didn’t know about Alice and Ryo: Both of them liked surprises.

Alice liked it whenever the once-in-a-blue-moon smile crossed Erina’s face—though that was becoming more and more often, now that her father had been dealt with. And loathe as he was to admit it, Ryo held a deep sense of satisfaction to learn that Soma and Hayama were worthy opponents. He liked knowing that they would never run out of twists for him to eventually conquer and get better than them at.

Occasionally, Alice and Ryo liked surprising each other.

He expected her to be forthright and eloquent and imperious. When, one bright, sunny day, as they were picnicking in the gardens of the Polar Star dorm, of all places, Alice turned to him with a scarlet blush on her cheeks, he knew something momentous was going to happen. “Ryo-kun, I-“

He cupped her cheek gently.

She expected him to be blunt and aggressive and perhaps a little slow on the uptake, at least when it came to this. But even he wasn’t so blind as not to see when a brilliant, beautiful person cared for him, nor was he oblivious enough to overlook that he returned those feelings.

He wasn’t Soma.

He leaned forward until their foreheads touched. His bandana was still safely wrapped around his arm, but he let a little bit of his wild side peek out anyway, a small, feral grin curving at the corners of his mouth. “May I, Miss Alice?” he asked in his most docile voice.

She giggled. “If you must.”

When he kissed her, it was everything he was afraid of and more. He felt as cracked open as a lobster, his vulnerable heart beating wildly near the soft hands pressed against his chest. Nakiri  Alice could kill him if she wanted, could leave him torn to pieces and drying in the sun, and the best and worst part of it all was that he didn’t care.

When they finally parted, she looked at him with a smile just as savage as his own.