Marionette

Oceans, Chapter Fourteen - Utsusu [映す]

Ignoring Yuta's tantrum at her over her obento, and declaration that she was banned from preparing them from now on, Amaya's evening was as close to that happy, familiar normal as she could get.

Karma had made good on his word that he was going to make Amaya forgive him by cooking dinner, and he succeeded with flying colours, like always. Just him cooking something for her would normally make her very, very happy, but he of course decided to make damn certain she couldn't complain, thus it was chicken and sweet-potato curry for dinner.

The quickest way to Amaya's heart was through her stomach.

Truer words had never been spoken.

But of course one had to have earned Amaya's trust in order to learn this, let alone actually utilise this little fact. One also had to know what Amaya's favorite foods actually were.

That basically guaranteed that the only person who could ever sway Amaya so effectively with food was Karma.

The evening was spent more or less with the group of four elementary school students camped out in Yuta's room studying, while Karma talked Amaya through his plan for Koro-sensei in her room with the door open, just so they could make sure that their discussion wasn't being eavesdropped on.

The plan was more of a play on the fact that very little was known about Amaya amongst their classmates - So he wanted her to do a little bit of acting to distract Koro-sensei, while Karma would try to attack the creature from behind. They were going to put the plan in action just after lunch, after Koro-sensei had come back from whatever place he was going to visit that afternoon.

Once the planning and fine-tuning was done, Karma left, and Amaya locked up, cleaned what needed to be done, and then sent herself to bed.

Much like Yuta had sworn, she was banned from preparing obento - He got particularly hostile when she woke him up at the usual time, and a batch of rice had already been prepared in the rice-cooker.

So Amaya humored him and left all the kitchen jobs to him in preference for attending to her injured hand.

Amaya found that the stitches had torn just a tiny bit after yesterday's events, however on the whole, she could get away with just a light set of bandages. That meant that in a couple of days, she could probably just have a few plasters over her hand and get back to wearing her gloves, again. If she had of been wearing them at the time she grabbed that delinquent's knife like that, she probably would have just had a couple of scratches in the end. Not a set of sawing cuts that had to be sewn shut.

Despite Yuta being adamant that she was forever banned from preparing obento, Amaya knew it was just a matter of time before he forgot all about it. He might have been upset with something else, and finding Amaya's obento just set him off. He wouldn't normally get so mad about the things that she did - The both of them understood why she did these things, after all.

Once she was dressed and hair pulled back in her stock-standard ponytail, Amaya gathered her belongings for the day and left. Yuta handed her obento to her on her way past with a small pout, causing a small chuckle to escape Amaya.

Right now, she was slowly trudging towards the train-station, shivering in her boots as she chowed down on a heated anpan she'd bought from a convenience store on her way.

She had no idea why it was so cold today, but she could barely stand it right now.

She was quite a bit later heading to school than she normally would - It had just gone 7am by the time she left the apartment, and she was having doubts as to whether she'd even get to the Class E campus in time for attendance.