Ink Stained

36: do you see?*

あなたが見るのですか?

Pai couldn't quite believe it, and Shiori adamantly refused to, but Haru turned out to be an actually good teacher. Or so Aoi, Natsume, and Shuusei claimed when they all gathered around Pai's desk in the afternoon for lunch.

She'd watched them all push desks together and pull up chairs to sit in around her desk, and thought, Wait, when did my table become the meeting place?

Natsume hugged Pai as soon as she saw her, and both she and Aoi asked if she had completely healed up while Shuusei tried not to yawn and fall asleep on the desk. Apparently, Shiori told them and the teachers that she hadn't been coming to school because she had a horrifically bad case of the flu. Kouta corroborated the story since he was acting as Pai's legal guardian.

"When do you guys have FT?" Aoi asked excitedly as she snapped up one onigiri from Shuusei's bento. "You guys won't believe how hot the new teacher is."

Shiori choked on the chicken of her soboro donburi. Pai calmly clapped on her back until she was back to normal.

"Oh yeah? How's that." Shiori croaked.

"Yo," Shuusei grumbled irritably. "Your boyfriend is sitting right here, Aoi. Maybe don't gush over the new teacher when he's around?"

"Jea-lous," Aoi teased.

Shuusei raised an eyebrow sky-high, a move that was adequate in conveying how ridiculous he thought that was. "And stop stealing my food, I've got baseball practise today."

Aoi stuck her tongue out petulantly at Shuusei and took another bite out of the onigiri she'd stolen. "Anyway, have you?"

"No, not yet." Pai replied for the both of them. "We have it last lesson of the day." She was worried about that, thinking that Shiori might choose to play a 'harmless' trick on Haru that may or may not involve fire. "How is he?"

Meanwhile, Shiori busied herself with picking out the carrots and peas from her soboro donburi and setting them aside atop the lid of her bento box. When the lid was almost overflowing with the carrots and peas, she nudged it in Pai's direction. Pai scooped them up and chewed them before pushing the lid back.

She and Shiori both had the same thing for lunch – rice with chicken on one half of it, and scrambled egg on top of the other half, with diced bits of boiled carrot and peas separated the chicken from the scrambled egg pieces. Pai loved soboro donburi, and Shiori liked it as well, but she loathed eating boiled carrots and peas. Pai loved peas, and didn't mind the carrots, so Shiori usually wound up giving them to her.

As she pushed the lid of Shiori's bento back to her, she glanced around at the classroom. It was crowded with students from the other classes, with many of the desks pushed together to make groups so that cliques could sit and chat together, in much the same way Aoi, Natsume, and Shuusei had automatically done when they arrived barely a minute after the bell for the start of lunch had rung.

Her lips twitched when a flash of heat and ice shot through her stomach. She couldn't pinpoint where it came from – it frustrated her to no end, knowing that there was an unknown Hengen in their class, but unable to figure out who exactly it was. Watching the other students interact with each other, lively voices filling the air as they laughed and talked, didn't help.

"Oh, he's great," Natsume said, grinning widely. "The best part about him is that he can actually cook. Yukimura-sensei was always getting one of us to even switch on the cookers last semester, he couldn't do it himself. We would do papers and research on cuisines from other parts of the world instead of making any of it. Maybe this year we'll get to cook some of them."