Gilded Ashes

Chapter 403: Incomplete Home

The door slammed open.

Raizen stood in the entryway with the dead-eyed expression of a man who had been handed a workload disguised as a homework assignment. Kori’s slate was still in his hand, she let him have it because the "homework" was too much to transfer via cloud. The header on the document had read, in three lines of bold, something like:

VANGUARD CADET RANK 2 EVALUATION COMPETENCIES: MISSION REPORT, COMBAT VERIFICATION, DIVISION PRESENTATION, INDIVIDUAL ASSESSMENT DEADLINE: 7 DAYS

He’d had his life back for approximately two hours.

"BRO!"

Arashi exploded off the couch like a launched projectile. He was wearing the same clothes he’d been wearing the day Raizen left for Ukai, plus a few stains that suggested he’d been wearing them a lot lately. Same loose shirt with the most comfortable pants Arashi had. His grin was huge, arms already opening for what appeared to be an attempted tackle.

"YOU’RE BACK!"

"Mmmyeah-"

"You’re back here!"

"That’s how it works."

Arashi crashed into him at approximately seventy percent speed - enough force to still be considered a hug, not quite enough to dislodge the slate. Raizen absorbed the impact, patted Arashi twice on the back, and was released.

The smell hit him next.

It was a smell that operated on multiple frequencies. The base note was chili - overwhelming, aggressive chili. Layered on top of the chili was garlic, a note of oil, and the distinct burnt-sugar undertone of something that had been added to a pan that was already too hot for it. Underneath all of that was... Smoke.

"Keahi!" Raizen shouted.

"In here!" Keahi’s voice was bright, confident, slightly muffled. "Don’t come in!"

"What are you making?"

"A masterpiece!"

"A masterpiece of what?"

"You’ll see, when it’s done!"

Something in the kitchen produced a sound that was somewhere like a hiss. Keahi answered it with what sounded like a frying pan being aggressively dealt with. The smoke alarm did not go off, which suggested either that Kori had disabled it long ago or that the smoke was somehow being contained by the kitchen. The chili smell intensified.

Raizen exhaled.

He set Kori’s enormous wooden spoon against the wall by the entrance - propped upright, the carved bowl almost reaching his chest, the artifact looking impossibly out of place. He set his luggage beside it, and kept the slate.

The couch was three steps away. He took the steps, then flopped.

The cushions caught him with a small squeak, and Arashi instinctively took a defensive pose, expecting the broken couch to fold in on itself and swallow Raizen. Thankfully, that never happened, so he sat down beside Raizen, bouncing slightly, then twisted to face him.

"So," Arashi said, "you’re not gonna BELIEVE what they did to my hoverboard." frёewebnoѵēl.com

"Mhm."

"They CALIBRATED it. The guys in the Heart, the technicians? The ones who said it would take three weeks? They did it in one, dude. Some kind of priority queue thing. And now the response time is, like, insane. I can do flips."

"Flips."

"FLIPS, Raizen. Plural. Like, more than one in a row. In the air. A few meters off the ground!"

"Mhm,"

"I did a front flip into a slide into a - okay, I almost died on the third one, but the first two? Perfect. PERFECT. There were even people watching, I had a whole crowd! Some kids from the Academy were cheering."

"Mhm."

Arashi paused, studied Raizen’s face, and tried to figure out why his own answer was "Mhm."

"Anyway," Arashi said, "I’m thinking of doing a 720. Like, a full 720. Two whole rotations. You know how hard that is? It’s hard. Most people can’t do a 540 without throwing up. But I’ve been studying - there’s this guy in the lower districts who teaches it, and he’s not GOOD or anything but he’s enthusiastic, and that’s most of it, you know? Enthusiasm? When you really commit to a 720, the trick is to -"

Raizen wasn’t tracking the words. Arashi’s blabbing continued, but he heard about half, and responded with "Mhm." every time. None of the words required answers. Plus, Arashi knew Raizen wasn’t responding, but he was talking anyway, because that was Arashi’s love language - the constant, low-quality filling of silence, the offering of presence in the only currency he reliably had.

But something was missing.

Raizen couldn’t place it at first. The couch was the right couch. Arashi was the right Arashi. Keahi was in the kitchen failing aggressively at her stated goal. The smell was... Acceptable. The whole idea of being home was the right idea. And yet some part of his attention kept reaching for something that wasn’t there, kept waiting for some piece of the picture to slot into place that hadn’t slotted in.

He just didn’t know what.

"- so I’m telling Esen, look, the angular momentum is the WHOLE thing, and Esen says -"

"ARASHI!" Keahi called from the kitchen.

Arashi paused mid-sentence. "What!? Don’t you know it’s rude to interrupt people like tha-"

"Where’s Hikari? She said she’d be back by sunset!"

"I dunno!"

"How do you not know!"

"She’s a person! She has a life!"

"She lives HERE!"

"She’s probably still at the Academy!"

Raizen’s eyes snapped open.

"At the Academy?"

He lifted his head off the couch. Arashi was already turning back toward him.

"What’s she doing there?" Raizen said. "Isn’t it spring break? Doesn’t break end in a few days?"

"Look who woke up," Arashi said, grinning. "You’ve been processing that smell for twenty minutes and that’s what gets you sitting up?"

"Arashi."

"Yeah, yeah."

"What’s Hikari doing at the Academy during break?"

"She’s been going there a lot lately. Like, a lot. Got into a habit of it while you were gone." ƒrēewebnoѵёl.cσm

Raizen propped himself up further on his elbow. The slate slid off his stomach and onto the cushion beside him. He didn’t pick it up.

"Doing what? Training?"

He tried to picture it. Hikari at the Academy during break, alone, working on her techniques in the Eon practice room. He hated to admit it, but it did kind of fit her. The quiet ones often used break time for personal work - Hikari would be the kind of student to choose isolation when the building was empty, when nobody was around to watch her struggle, when the silence let her focus.

Arashi’s smile shifted.

The full-volume grin softened into something else. It was almost fond - the smile a friend uses when they know something bad and are about to share it.

"Well -"