'Fluffy Japanese Pancakes'

Thursday

Scene I

"WHAT DOES SUNNY FINCH USUALLY LIKE?"

Pollux drops the spoon he's been using to filter the foam of the drink he's working on, while Lyssian, leaning off the counter with a thick book, looks up slowly. The twins are like meerkats behind the fake marble, blinking in unison when Lorcan looks up from his phone to meet their gaze.

"What?" the youngest Delos Reyes asks, unaware of the gears that pulled to a halt in his older brothers' heads.

"Who?" Pollux asks, though he heard it perfectly the first time.

"Sunny Finch?" Lorcan raises an eyebrow; pad of thumb sliding over the screen of his phone, refreshing his message list one after another in rapid succession. "The girl who always comes here with Kit. Kit Pouliot, if you've also forgotten him."

"Are you dating her?" Pollux finally asks, frank, while Lyssian hits his head with the book, muttering about "subtlety".

Lorcan's answer is flat and crook. "No."

Lyssian bumps Pollux away, stepping forward as the responsible one.

"Are you skipping again?"

"It's the last period, and I've always excelled at maths." Lorcan checks his phone, then the glass walls. There's a storm coming in dark clouds and rumbling thunder. Coffee Milk has one or two stranglers, but one of them is already packing up, sensing the impending storm. Lorcan checks his phone again, itching to pace.

Lyssian watches him with imploring eyes. "Just because you excel at something doesn't mean you have to cut class."

Lorcan meets his older brother's stare. The matching gazes are intense; a thunder meeting lightning. They're both backed up by moral high ground, so neither is disillusioned to stand down.

Pollux starts whistling, eyes wide. Here's the thing about the similarities between the two brothers; Lyssian and Lorcan are coin mirrors of each other. Both who prefer the quietness, the grasping solitude that a big and close-knit family so inconveniently can't give. Because of that, they tend to get isolated and scorned for that isolation.

And they're very much academics and artists; Lyssian graduated from the University of Toronto under a scholarship and likes reading, he already works but prefers adding the bustle of Coffee Milk under his plate because Pollux needed him, while Lorcan has grades that can more than enough get him into prestigious universities and has his art as a primary career choice, with a two year apprenticeship in Italy already booked.

Their similarities, though they find a kindred soul in each other in a messy, big family, can get back and forth with cold sharpness, logic, and again, moral high ground.

So when both of them are at a stare down, they go back to the pecking order as an intermediate sign that they still care about each other; Lyssian is still older than Lorcan. And that, in itself, is a big advantage in a Filipino family.

"I'm not cutting just because I want to," Lorcan says carefully. Pollux looks on, knowing better than to intercept between them, his whistling becoming louder. "I think Sunny's having a panic attack and I just wanted to make sure she's okay. I thought you'd appreciate me looking after a friend more than caring about my near perfect attendance."

Pollux whistling stops, making a comically pointed face while Lyssian blinked, digesting all of that. There was a sharpness at the end that he'd rather didn't have, but he ultimately sighs.

"She likes warmed green tea latte," he answers to his earlier question. "Not hot. With a lot of milk and a good froth. She also likes dark chocolate brownies with a sweetened cream. Pollux-"

"- On it," Pollux chirps happily, busy hands already going to work. He turns to his younger brother. "Go to the table by the window but choose a wooden chair- not the sofa. The one at the near back. She'll feel more comfortable there."

"Take care of her," Lyssian says in parting just as Lorcan hears the familiar sound of the Vespa's screech, grunt and halt.

"I'm not so good at that," Lorcan mutters to himself, already sort of regretting asking Sunny Finch to skip. He wasn't much of a consoling type. But then the rain is starting to strike down in a harsh beat like angels cursing the earth, and he can't regret it anymore. Not when she enters pitifully like that.

Sunny Finch harries her Vespa under the awning, settling it against the sidewalk, wet as a dog as she enters Coffee milk with a sordid, Heavens-Hate-Me look. She looks up, and Lorcan's heart clenches and he is assured that he made the right choice in the end.

Though she's not actively crying, her eyes are rimmed red and her skin is unusually paler than her common pale. Her hair is wet and her clothes are darkened in splotches. Sunny sniffs, her eyes roaming until they find Lorcan's stare.

Lorcan raises his hand and waves.

Sunny smiles half-heartedly and raises her hand.

Scene II

It's a warm silence. Not one that's choking and heavy and in need of small talk to breach through, but one that is soften in its need. One that is calm and healing. Sunny's things- her helmet and canvas bag are propped over against the heater so they could dry with a couple of her notebooks flipped open, she didn't bring a laptop, which is a small mercy - while she warmed herself up with the cup of warm green tea than sipping on it. But she did take a few bites of the brownies.

After a second more, Lorcan starts fidgeting again. He felt too rude opening up his phone and he's not used to just sitting and not... doing anything. But Sunny is lost in thought, her face carefully blank. And it felt too rude to break her stare down with nothingness.

"You noticed then," Lyssian says as he comes up with a tray. Both young adults look up; Lorcan surprised and relieved to be interrupted, and Sunny, wide-eyed and almost owlish as she registers another human being.

"Sorry?" she echoes. Her hair has dried, so it's now in bigger tangles framing her face.

Lyssian smiles softly, settling down the plate of fluffy pancakes he's just made. "The brownies," he explains. "We didn't use the usual chocolate because we ran out, so I had to improvise. I called your mom and she said you really like fluffy pancakes when it's raining. I made some extra and I thought you guys might like it."

"Oh, I-" Sunny blinks, her throat caught. Her eyes become misty, and both boys tense up, but she quickly brushes her hands across her eyes. "Thank you," she said meaningfully, voice pitched low.

She pulls the saucer toward her and takes a spoonful. Next thing you know, she hasn't stopped chewing the first one before she takes another spoonful.

Lorcan looks up at his older brother, raising his eyebrows. Lyssian smiles in response, patting his arm as he left. Across the counter, as the rain raged, Pollux jilts two thumbs up and a bright grin. Lorcan rolls his eyes.

Sunny eats slow, savouring each bite in a quiet reverence one might mistake for indifference from her blank stare. But she kept eating, taking one bite after another; just her and the plate and she looks a lot less... panicky.

This time, Lorcan leans back against his seat, feeling a little more at eased. As she continues to eat, he deigns to watch the world outside- between the glass of Coffee Milk with its bright lights and cozy emptiness of soft music and the buzzing, continuous life of the electronics. On the opposite side of the glass, the outside is dark, casted in streams of dark clouds, streaks of lightning and rumbling thunder.

Behind the rain splattered glass walls, Phryne Touk is menacing in its silence.

Lorcan watches the dark clouds, the harsh splatters, and Main Street wide-eyed and bright despite it all. People have turned on their fluorescents as if to battle the darkness; humanity at its core. Unable to stand the darkness. A truck chugs and parks in a wide arch in front of Coffee Milk, a somewhat familiar green. A guy comes out, no umbrella in hand, and he rushes to get inside the coffee shop.

Lorcan squints at his face; something about it was familiar. When they meet eyes, he smiles briefly in embarrassment at having stared him down so blatantly, and drops his head back to the table, forking a piece of pancake. It's buttery, soft and a little hot, melting almost immediately in his tongue with a burning start and a sweet aftertaste.

"That's Sasha Kiurtsch's brother," Sunny speaks up. Lorcan catches her face. She's staring at the new guy point-blank, owlish and continuously munching. "Aron Kiurtsch. He's tall and bigger than I thought."

"That's why I recognize his face," Lorcan hums.

"He looks like that big guy position in rugby."

Lorcan doesn't know anything about rugby, but he nods his assent.

They're not subtle about their staring, but they pick up their forks and continue to snoop in the guise of eating as Aron Kiurtsch, with his broad shoulders, scraggly beard, and sharply cut buzzcut blond head, greets the Delos Reyes twins who came out of the counter to give him tight-bro hugs. Lorcan notices the absolute sympathy on his brothers' faces, but he can't read lips so he can't guess what they're talking about.

"Is he friends with your brothers?" Sunny asks.

"I guess... ? I don't really know."

"He ordered cakes... Walnut cakes," Sunny hums her observations like she's reciting soft poems by the fire. Lorcan fears she might be too loud, in the kitsch of the coffee shop, but the storm raged and the buzz of electronic life is loud. "Kit loves walnut cakes but only to-go. He likes eating them on the bus. Aron Kiurtsch ordered the big ones, like the actual cakes. Kit eats the smaller ones that's actually shaped like walnuts, somewhat." On the counter, his brothers produce four boxes while Sunny continued her humming observation. "I think it's for the wake. He looks tired. His posture is bad."

Lorcan clears his throat uncomfortably. "Well... his sister got murdered. He must be a wreck."

Sunny looks at him then, her eyes curiously blank. "You're going to the wake, then? With your family?"

 Lorcan knew his mom might want to come if she knew his brothers were friends with Aron. That doesn't mean he had to go too. There's just something inherently wrong about going to a murdered girl's funeral. Something about it, the idea, of almost pretending not to know that the girl in the casket had been brutalised.

"I dunno? Why?"

"You should. Kit and I are going. Probably. I have this feeling. Like a tightening. A foreboding. Right here." She taps four fingers below her collarbone, then drags it a sharp down to her stomach. "I don't like it. Like... the forest, with all critters and small animals, and it's silent. Not even a breeze blowing by. Or smaller mammals skirting the branches."

Lorcan swallows. A forest is only quiet if they feel like a predator is nearby. "That seems menacing. What do you think it means?"

Sunny's eyes are serious, not a hint of apprehension or uncertainty. And when she says it, goosebumps had sprung across Lorcan's arms, jolting bolts of electricity from his hair follicles to his toes.

"That the murderer is going to be there."

Massive apologies for the delay in updates! If you hadn't heard, I'd started online schooling as part of the 'new normal' curriculum and it's been a rocky boat. Not to mention I suffered a massive writer's block from this story heh. I've proofread this, but if there's some... inconsistencies and sort of not so structurally sound paragraphs (lol), please forgive me and I'll get on it in a different time.

What I really want to thank is the song above, "Night of Nights" shifting to "Death Waltz", played by fourteen people and really helped ending this chapter. And to Javi, papisongo 's playlist recs that really got me through writing the middle bits (even when they were actually for action, really helped me focus, so thank you, Javi, you're lovely and wildly awesome).

Anyway, are we missing Kit and his very bright mind and aesthetically pleasing arse? Hopefully. He's coming back soon :-) Thank you for reading and sticking with me through these sudden bumpy updates heh.