2026-01-11: Keep an Eye Out
- Log: Keep an Eye Out
- Cast: Hyousuke Suzuki, Jun Kashihara
- Where: Kasugayama High School - Classroom Building
- OOC Date: 2026-01-11
- IC Date: Fri Jan 10
- Summary: Hyousuke and Jun meet for lunch. Lighthearted talk of food and the preparation thereof quickly turns to them both expressing worry about Yua's wedding, however, causing Hyousuke to lament his inability to act.
<Pose Tracker> Hyousuke Suzuki has posed.
The plastic bento box that Hyousuke carried with him not seem to be particularly remarkable. It was a modestly-sized thing, mass-produced and wrought from red plastic. In fact, the most notable thing about it - save for its contents, of course - seemed to be the fact that it was new. Not brand-new, as the lack of packaging indicated, but new enough to indicate that it had not been long since he'd purchased it. This caught the attention of precisely nobody, even as Hyousuke fished it out of his bag and walked through the door.
Some few students milling about in there cast a glance his way, but not out of any real interest. It was simply them noticing a new arrival out of the corner of their eye, then returning to whatever their business was when they realised that it was just another member of the class looking to eat lunch. He paid them no mind either, only sparing a brief 'excuse me' to the few people that he had to slip by in order to make his way into the classroom proper. One he did, however, he stopped and glanced around.
He wasn't entirely sure whether Jun was there or not, and it showed. Green eyes darted from seat to seat and from face to face, checking to make sure his classmate was somewhere in the vicinity. He could have just taken a seat, but what would the point have been, if Jun had already picked out a spot? Far better was it, he thought, to take a moment and observe than have to get back up again.
<Pose Tracker> Jun Kashihara has posed.
Jun is in class today; he's in class almost all days, barring sickness or some other necessary absence. He's seated at his usual seat and has his own bento lunchbox in front of him. It's a pretty, dark-lacquered box, and the lunch within is clearly homemade. Sometimes Jun's mother prepares it for him; today, he has prepared his own, and therefore it includes rolled omelets along with a salad, stewed vegetables, a strip of grilled salmon, and of course a bed of rice.
As Hyousuke looks around, Jun has already opened said lunchbox and picked up the matching lacquered chopsticks, both of which he'll wash later; at this very second, he's bowing his head with hands pressed in prayer and murmuring a low Itadakimasu (akin to Thank you for this meal). When he straightens, he opens his eyes and, though one is covered by his silky black bangs, notes Hyousuke looking his way. He smiles to him.
"Oh, Suzuki-kun," he says, gesturing to the desk in front of him. Its normal inhabitant is probably not Hyousuke, but whoever usually sits there has left, so there's space and opportunity to push it up against Jun's. "Would you care to join me for lunch? If you don't have other plans, that is."
GAME: Save complete.
<Pose Tracker> Hyousuke Suzuki has posed.
Hyousuke's neutral expression shifted to an eager smile once he caught Jun's invitation. More than polite, but not quite a broad and beaming grin, it lingered on his features for a few seconds before settling into something more relaxed, but no less genuine for it.
"Kasihara-san!" He said, already striding to close the gap before he'd even begun to speak. "Sure, I don't have any. I was just gonna go hang out on the roof." Was he allowed on the roof? No. Were any of the teachers going to bother enforcing the rule? Also no. Would Shiranui-san try to enforce it anyway? He didn't know, and didn't particularly care to find out.
His lunch, in stark contrast to Jun's, seemed a little messy. Some attempt had been made at egg rolls, but it'd broken down somewhere along the line and ended up more like scrambled eggs packed into the vague shape of a roll. The salad had been chopped roughly, but the pieces were at least somewhat even, and washed about as thoroughly as one might expect salad to be. The rice was perhaps the neatest aspect of it all, but then again, it was rice. To get it wrong was a task and a half.
Despite its appearance, it didn't smell particularly bad. It was no gourmet meal, to be sure, but neither was it some slapdash assortment of ingredients thrown together with little care. The seasonings seemed to have been measured and applied deliberately, while the ingredients of each had been balanced to a particular person's taste. Its appearance was rough, perhaps, but its substance - judging by smell alone - was decent, if amateurish.
"Man, your lunch looks good." Hyousuke said, glancing down at Jun's. "You make that yourself?" He brought out his own chopsticks and started to pick at his food. They were cheap and plain things, that much could not be denied, but no less useful for it.
<Pose Tracker> Jun Kashihara has posed.
Shiranui's recent enthusiasm for enforcing the rules has been... interesting. It's not a concept wholly unknown to Kasugayama, considering the Death Boss who rules atop all other Bosses has strong feelings about, for example, students not smoking; thanks to him, no one at the infamous Cuss High smokes. However, it does seem to be an odd change... Jun doesn't believe the rumors about Mr. Marlowe having 'brainwashed' Shiranui into it, but it does stand out to him all the same.
"Thank you. I did," he says when Hyousuke compliments his lunch. "I enjoy cooking and, if I may say so myself, I'm quite good at it. My mother and I take turns cooking for the family--she's the one who taught me how." He smiles fondly for a moment; then he looks at Hyousuke's. "Yours looks rather homemade too, if I don't miss my mark?" A store-bought bento wouldn't be that messy, after all.
He starts in on his own lunch though, delicately picking up small clumps of white rice and settling them in his mouth. His motions are quite elegant. It's not just his face that's beautiful, it seems.
<Pose Tracker> Hyousuke Suzuki has posed.
"You can just say it's a mess, it's not gonna win any prizes." Hyousuke grinned a little at his own mark, and spoke with a jovial tone. He wasn't wrong about saying it was a mess - the entire thing was a stark contrast to Jun's work, and might as well have been packaged by a one-handed gorilla for all the delicacy and precision it displayed. Nevertheless, he seemed to be happy enough with it as he sectioned off some of the rice, and all but shovelled it into his mouth. Again, he stood as a contrast to Jun - not quite flouting table manners, but certainly appearing rougher when he ate.
"Just wish I could cook like that." Hyousuke said offhandedly, once more gesturing to Jun's neater meal. It wasn't a bitter remark, by any means - merely an idle thought, flitting out of his mind as quickly as it had entered. "And like the stuff at the wedding too. i know that's not exactly bento stuff, but I wanna be able to cook that good for myself too." He chased the mouthful of rice with a quick swig of some bottled tea out of the vending machine. Hardly the healthiest of choices, but hardly the worst either.
<Pose Tracker> Jun Kashihara has posed.
Jun chuckles goodnaturedly as Hyousuke speaks bluntly about the poor aesthetics of his cooking. "What matters is how it tastes, anyway," he says graciously. He is lying a bit there. You eat with your eyes first, so the aesthetics of food are hardy unimportant. However, the spirit of his statement--that it's fine as long as Hyousuke is happy with the taste--is sincere.
From the rice, Jun moves to the stewed vegetables, then to the salmon, and then a piece of rolled omelet, cycling between the foods as he eats. When Hyousuke remarks that he wishes he could cook better, though, he pauses and gives him a thoughtful look. "Oh? The food at the wedding was delicious, but do you mean you'd like to make your cooking look prettier?"
It's important to clarify these matters before making any comments on them!
<Pose Tracker> Hyousuke Suzuki has posed.
Hyousuke certainly seemed to be satisfied with how it tasted. There was no real pattern to what he picked, nor any rhythm to how he ate, but there was certainly a restrained enthusiasm to every bite. Enough that he at least seemed to be aware of the concept of table manners, at the very least.
"The taste's fine, but I figure if I learn ways to make it look prettier, I might learn how to make it taste better too. Gotta be some link between them." He didn't know whether his statement held any truth, and seemed disinclined to give it more than some passing thought. If anything, he seemed more inclined to keeping the conversation with Jun going.
He paused for a moment, gaze drifting away from Jun as his expression shifted a little. It wasn't particularly difficult to intuit that he had thought of something, and that the thought had begun to take root in his mind - on some matters, Hyousuke's face could be read like an open book. Even if one did not manage to intuit it, he spoke his mind a moment later.
"But, between you and me? I kinda felt awkward eating anything there after Ooshi-" He paused, frowned, and collected himself. "After Ijuuin-sensei started panicking."
The words felt odd in his mouth, and sounded strange in his voice. He chalked it up to simply not being used to calling Yua that, but even so, something about the entire affair caused his gut to churn a little, and for a bitter taste to linger on his tongue. Not to mention that he was aware that his phrasing was indelicate at best, limited as it was by his vocabulary.
"Do you think she's doing alright? Maybe I'm just thinking about it too hard, but something seemed off about the whole thing."
<Pose Tracker> Jun Kashihara has posed.
"Maybe you could take cooking classes," Jun suggests. "Or, if you prefer, I could start tutoring you on that too. Looks and taste are connected in cooking--that's why plating is so important in haute cuisine. And doesn't a meal tempt you more if it looks appetizing?" He chuckles. "But you seem quite pleased with your lunch as it is, so you don't need to force yourself, either."
A silence falls as Hyousuke stares into space. Jun continues to munch, letting Hyousuke mull over whatever it is he's thinking about. He's enjoying the conversation, but part of friendship is being comfortable with not talking, too.
Especially when the topic turns to their teacher's distress. Jun frowns faintly, but nods in agreement as he sets his chopsticks down atop his bento box for a moment.
"Yes... She looked so terribly frightened," he murmurs. "She did say she became overwhelmed--" or, more accurately, Jun suggested that and she agreed, "but I agree; something did feel off. The wedding itself was lovely, although I'm not familiar with how Shinto weddings usually go, but some of the post-wedding speeches left a sour taste in my mouth."
Especially from that police captain, Shimazu. Others could be given a more charitable interpretation, like from Miho or Remi, but Shimazu's did not leave any illusions about what it was really about.
<Pose Tracker> Hyousuke Suzuki has posed.
"Yeah, the speeches..." Hyousuke trailed off, but the way he spoke alone made his thoughts on the matter fairly clear. The last word alone had his face curl a little in disgust, the bitterness in his voice - restrained though it might have been - leaving an even worse taste in his mouth than the name Yua had taken during the ceremony. "...Didn't feel like the kinda thing that you're supposed to say when people get married. People're supposed to be, I dunno... Equal when they're married, aren't they?" It was less a question, and more him affirming to himself that he had his thoughts in order.
"But that whole thing, talking about how she was supposed to be submissive... Kinda pisses me off." Foul though his language might have been, the intent was clean enough. Were Jun to peer into Hyousuke's mind, and see how much the entire affair had reminded him of Eiji and his machinations, the reason might have been clear as well. "I'm not thinking too hard about this, am I? She said she was alright..." Hyousuke was not a smart man. Hyousuke was a big, dumb, oaf that hit like a freight train. Those two things were not exactly well-kept secrets, and he was far from unaware of them. Therefore, he supposed it would not be out of the question for him to be overthinking matters - yet the worry in his voice rang clear as a bell, and he knew well that dark thoughts could lurk beneath a joyful facade.
<Pose Tracker> Jun Kashihara has posed.
"I suppose it depends on the country and the era. Equality between husband and wife hasn't always been the case, especially in this country--and it was a traditional wedding." Thus why Jun genuinely doesn't know if those wedding vows about Izanami and Izanagi and how a husband tends to his wife's sins are normal for a traditional Shinto wedding or not. If he ever gets more than just a vague sense of something being off, maybe he'll buckle down and look it up.
Traditional or not, though, Jun can only nod in agreement about what Hyousuke says about the submissive parts. To his view, Ooshiro-sensei's, or rather Ijuuin-sensei's, charm comes from the fact that she is so freely herself and is not afraid to express her uniqueness, even when she might get mocked for it. As a boy who grew up 'different' himself, who is still 'different' by the mainstream standards of Japan, he doesn't like that Yua is being boxed into conformity.
However, she is an adult, and it is her choice. Jun is her student and needs to respect that. Not knowing what Hyousuke's thinking--indeed, knowing nothing about Palaces, in particular Eiji's Palace--that's all he can keep in mind.
"We might be," overthinking it--and it might stand out to Hyousuke that Jun says we and not you. "Practically speaking, even if something is amiss with our sensei, she's an adult and we're her students. We don't have a right to interfere with her private life. We're lucky that she went out of her way to make sure all her students were invited to the wedding at all. If she says she was all right and just a little overwhelmed on what must have been a very overwhelming day, we shouldn't claim that we know her feelings better than she does. That would be very arrogant."
Jun pauses a beat. "But... just in case she was forcing herself to keep from worrying us... I think there's nothing inappropriate about keeping an eye out for her too. Just in case."
<Pose Tracker> Hyousuke Suzuki has posed.
Hyousuke's lips curled at Jun's conclusion, and his throat rumbled in a quiet, displeased, growl. He tried to keep his reaction subdued, but there was no stopping what slipped through the cracks, and it spilled over into something that was obvious to anyone that so much as glanced at him. It seeped into the way he spoke as well, underscoring every word that fell from his mouth with a slight growl too.
"I know, you're right..." He conceded, before shovelling another chunk of food into his mouth and chewing. He didn't know what he'd grabbed, and didn't care. He just needed an excuse to pause for a moment and collect himself.
"It's just... sitting around and doing nothing feels wrong. I know *I* wouldn't like it if someone went poking around in my business, but it's..." His train of thought led to now firm conclusion, and simply trailed off with him shaking his head a little in frustration at it all. "Guess keeping an eye out's all we *can* do." He stabbed at what remained of his eggs, batting them around just to have something to fiddle with as he considered his next words. Were one to look closely, they might have seen some slight shade of pallor in his digits, or a vague trembling in the chopsticks - a sign of tension, as he held them tight.
"I wanna help, but even if I knew what was going on, I don't know that there's anything we *could* do anyway." Hyousuke's frustration with the entire affair was laid out again with that statement. "And that's if there's even anything wrong. Maybe I *am* just being arrogant about this." He didn't know if it was the right word, and his slight hesitation at saying that hinted as much. But Jun had used it, and Jun was leagues smarter than him, so he didn't think to doubt it too much. "...Sorry about that. Didn't mean to bring down the mood. It's just been on my mind a while."
<Pose Tracker> Jun Kashihara has posed.
Jun's eyes widen as Hyousuke starts growling about the matter. Is he really that attached to Yua-sensei? Or... does he know something Jun doesn't? He seems very agitated about this all of a sudden, for all he's trying to hold that back.
His explanation makes sense, at least. Jun nods in sympathy. "No, you're not being arrogant. What would be arrogant is if you assumed that because something felt wrong to you, something must indeed be wrong, regardless of what sensei told us," he explains. "You're still trying to be mindful of her feelings even though you're worried, and you're listening to me even though I'm not agreeing with you."
When Hyousuke apologizes, he gives him a gentle smile and a shake of the head. "Not at all. How about this, then? When sensei's back to teaching classes, we can ask her how things are going with her new husband. We can at least be active about checking in with her, don't you think?"
<Pose Tracker> Hyousuke Suzuki has posed.
A short grunt escaped Hyousuke in response. It was still frustrated, but not nearly as drawn out as the rumbling in his throat had been. Thoughts of the Palace and a foe long since vanquished still lingered in his mind, but it seemed that being given something to do - however minor it might have been - was at least enough to keep things from getting too bad.
"...Guess you're right." He eventually said, not sounding pleased that it was *all* they could do, but satisfied that they could at least do *something.*
"I guess... checking in's the best we really can do right now." It didn't sit right with him. His tone - divided between resigned and frustrated - laid that out for anyone that cared to read into it. But whatever his thoughts were, they didn't matter much when faced with the reality of what he was actually capable of. "I just hope she's recovering alright. Be a damn shame if anything happened to one of the few teachers around here that actually gave a shit."
A wide smile and a joking remark did little to assuage his worries, and even less to disguise them.