It is a truth universally acknowledged, that the way to a guy's heart is through his stomach, right? Well, it is, unless you're Usagi Tsukino and can't cook to save your life. Ignore that curry she had made a year ago because that was a once in a lifetime moment where it came out edible and it never happened again since.
However, Usagi didn't want to give up. She had finally gotten a boyfriend and she wanted to do what girls her age did – which was make homemade bentos and bring them to school to share with Mamo-chan. After seeing how he ate all her cookies for their first Christmas and then had to be taken to the hospital for food poisoning, she had stopped making him food. She felt really bad about that. It was their first Christmas together and she had to go and muck it up by making poisonous cookies.
Usually, when she had brought him something to eat, he ate it (with a secret grimace), but it had never been as bad as on that Christmas day.
Instead, she kept bugging her mum to teach her how to cook for her man. She knew that Mamo-chan was the one she wanted to marry when they were older and spend her life with. And to be a good housewife, she had to learn how to cook... even if she had almost set their kitchen on fire more than once.
She was lucky her mum understood and was patient with her when she made poisonous food after poisonous food. But as the months went by, the food she made went from poisonous to bad, to okay, and finally, she graduated to good.
Her grades suffered a bit for this (but this wasn't anything new what with almost nightly fights with the enemies), but she kept on practicing her cooking every day until finally, she was happy with how her meal came out and everyone at home praised her for a delicious dinner. Even Shingo in his own way ("I'm glad I don't have to worry about being sick because of your food again."). Dad, of course, went overboard by crying tears of happiness... until he found out the reason why she was trying so hard to learn how to cook. He was overprotective of his baby girl to the extremes and was already planning to purchase a shotgun to threaten Mamo-chan when he came to visit them (she had to promise her mum to bring him home someday soon. She would take care of dad. Usagi could almost imagine how that encounter would work. Her dad acting like a bull with angry breaths coming out of his nose and mum holding him to her side to stop him from grabbing that shotgun he wanted to buy and shooting Mamo-chan on the spot.
And so, D-day came. By D-day, I mean the day that she brought her bentos to school.
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It was a nice spring morning, with sakura blossoms flying through the air as the wind blew them away from their trees.
Mamoru being Mamoru immediately noticed that Usagi was different this morning. She was tense and unlike her bubbly self. He had noticed that she had grown a bit quieter over the last few months and was steadily growing more and more worried about her.
Today was the day, Mamoru decided, that he had enough of her quietness. While it was nice at first, he had grown to miss her bubbly personality. Which was strange, since he was quite an introvert – but Usagi being Usagi had made him open up to her quite a bit and he had grown used to being surrounded by all that cheeriness. Not that she wasn't cheerful anymore, she just seemed to be more preoccupied lately.
It worried him.
During lunch, he decided. I'll speak to her during lunch and make her tell me what was wrong.
He thought of how to start the topic all through the classes instead of paying as much attention to what they were being taught as usual. He was almost relieved when the bell for the lunch break came. His thoughts were getting away from him.
