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Akito has changed her clothes three times today, from a standard-issue black turtleneck to a deep red kimono to a festive plaid skirt and then back to her turtleneck. In the interest of simplicity, she keeps her original outfit and discards the rest on the floor of her room before remembering that she’ll need to pick them up later.
There isn’t anyone around these days to do it for her.
It’s a bit chilly to take a lap around the Zen garden, so she paces the long halls of the estate like a fidgety specter, trying to run out her nervous energy before she has a guest to entertain. It’s been eerily quiet the last week or so - no quieter than it has been recently, but astonishingly silent in comparison to the New Year’s festivities of the past.
She rang in the new year by herself with a cup of tea, a good book, and a faint awareness that it wasn’t just another day. She wasn’t expecting guests, but she also wasn’t going to say no when Tohru asked if she could visit around the holiday.
Tohru’s voice echoes through the halls of the estate as she calls, “Hello?” and Akito rounds a handful of corners and half-jogs the last few corridors to meet Tohru at the front door. “Akito-san! Hi! Happy New Year!”
“Hi,” she says through panting breaths. “Welcome.”
“Did you have a good holiday?” Tohru asks.
“Fine.”
“I brought lunch,” Tohru holds up a bag that Akito can only guess holds some kind of soup, and Akito would hug her if she wasn’t afraid to exhaust her annual supply of embraces so early into the year.
“I’m starving,” Akito says, and it feels like an admission of guilt. “Thanks for coming.”
She plays with the long sleeves of her turtleneck as she leads Tohru into the inner sanctum of the estate. It’s even emptier than it used to be, populated with more sparsely-furnished niche hobby rooms where Akito has tried to fill in the gaps. Earlier this week, she cleared out the harp she demanded for her fourteenth birthday, dusty and discarded since then, so that she could set a room up to more comfortably entertain guests.
Or guest, rather. Singular. For now, at least.
She slides beneath the thick quilt of a kotatsu she had lugged down the hallway for the occasion, pleased to be warm away from the bitter drafts that populate the Sohma house.
“How was your New Year?” Akito asks as Tohru unpacks lunch. Soup, as predicted, and a small box full of mochi.
“It was nice!” Tohru says brightly. “I watched the New Year’s programs with Kyo-kun and Shishou-san and then in the morning, Kyo-kun and I made a wish on the sunrise like we always do.”
Akito nods, slurping at a noodle and feeling suddenly silly for the cheesy novel she read to christen the new year. She read all night, even through sunrise, and the sun was well into the sky by the time she realized it was the new year already.
“That does sound nice,” she says.
With nothing left to say and feeling self-conscious about making Tohru shoulder the conversation, Akito makes a suggestion. “Would you like to watch something?”
“Yes!” Tohru smiles brightly, as she always does, congenial and chipper. “Whatever you want, I don’t really have a preference.”
The crystal clear display of the television vacillates between melodramas, punchy comedies, and sporting events in a wild blur of color as she skips through the channels.
“Oh! Can you go back?” Tohru asks. “What’s that?”
Akito flips back, blazing over a game show host’s sparkling smile and returning to the channel Tohru asked about.
On the screen in front of them, two women in formal dress lean over tatami, poised with coiled kinetic energy over a set of cards splayed out nearly between them.
Behind the two players, a reader belts the opening lines of a poem poem and they both lurch forward, but manage to stop their momentum before they careen ahead. The card must not be in the playing field then.
The chyron beneath the two women declares that the darker-haired player is the reigning Queen, the top female player, Wakamiya Shinobu. The other woman, her light hair pulled back into a ponytail, is the challenger, Chihaya Ayase.
“It’s karuta,” Akito says, the image of green cards swirling in her head. She’d bought them once in a fit of boredom, intent on unearthing a new hobby, but she’d given up shortly after she memorized the hundred poems since no one in the estate would be bothered to play with her.
“Oh, right!” Tohru says. “I think Kaibara had a little karuta club. They played an exhibition match my second year. It looks like fun.”
“I like their hakama,” Akito murmurs, drawn in by the deep burgundies and golds of the reigning Queen’s ensemble.
Tohru leans in, no doubt entranced by the challenger’s soft pinks and peaches. “Yeah,” she breathes. “So pretty.”
They move like ballerinas in their grace and gymnasts in their speed, both players springing forward the next time the reader calls out a poem. The challenger attacks the Queen’s side, rising triumphantly with a card in hand.
Akito and Tohru watch as the two wage battle against each other, leaning into the ebb and flow as cards shift and disappear, moving around the tatami like dancers.
It’s really anyone’s game, Akito thinks as the Queen’s lead grows slimmer. She looks over to see Tohru with both hands to her mouth, watching the match enraptured.
With one card on each side, the commentator announces gravely that the deciding match for the Queen title has come down to luck of the draw. It’s anyone’s match.
Both spectators flinch when the players lunge at the first syllable of the next poem, but it doesn’t belong to either of the cards on the field.
“Dead card,” Akito supplies helpfully, as though she knows the intricacies of the game.
Another false start as the reader reads out another dead card. Akito would be worried that her soup was getting cold if she wasn’t so invested in the last few moments of this match. She’s awed by their gravity, these two players in their formal dress, poised to race ahead.
When it happens a third time, Akito finds herself almost irritated. But when she looks over at Tohru, Tohru is watching through the spaces between her fingers like it’s a horror film.
“Are you okay, Tohru-san?”
“It’s a real nailbiter,” Tohru admits. “No matter who wins, they should both just be proud that they made it this far. But it’s stressful and we’re not even the ones playing!”
It’s just like Tohru, Akito thinks, to be worried about the mental states of two people she’s never met playing a game she only knows distantly.
At last, the reader calls out the final card. The challenger taps her hand down over the card on her side and the Queen’s fingers brush hers.
The crowd erupts as the reader finishes out the last verse of the poem and a muffled sniffling draws Akito’s attention.
She digs around in Tohru’s lunch bag, procuring a napkin.
“Thank you,” Tohru says wetly.
Akito waits for Tohru to elaborate, but only if she wants to. It spares Akito having to ask what’s wrong.
“They both played so well,” Tohru says at last. “You can tell they love it.”
Her waterworks are interrupted when the newly-crowned Queen slumps over on the tatami.
“Is she okay?” Tohru cries.
The commentator’s face seems to echo her sentiment, face screwing up in concern as she listens to her earpiece. “Not to worry,” she chirps. “It seems she’s just fallen asleep.”
“You know, I had to learn the hundred poems in elementary school,” Tohru says, smiling through her red-rimmed eyes at Akito as the commentators provide their post-match recap. “But I never got to play. I probably wouldn’t have been any good anyway.”
“Do you still remember them?”
“Some, I think.”
She’s not confident, but Akito thinks she might know more than some of the hundred poems. And she thinks back to the deck of cards in a dusty box somewhere in the game room with a few of her other discarded avocations, short-lived in their tenure as her hobbies.
“Do you want to try playing?” she asks, wincing as she drags herself out from beneath the warmth of the kotatsu.
Tohru tears her eyes away from the screen, where the newly crowned karuta Meijin is giving a youthful, impassioned speech. “I wouldn’t be any good at all,” she says.
“Probably not,” Akito says flatly.
“But it could be fun!” Tohru’s hands go off on their own accord, waving frantically as though to dissipate any supposed hurt feelings. “Let’s try it! Let’s do it anyway, even if we’re bad at it.”
Tohru loops an arm through Akito’s, the TV still playing post-match coverage as Akito leads them down the corridor to the room that she would have considered calling a game room if she called it anything at all.
She digs through the cabinets, past a dusty Monopoly board and a bag full of go pieces before she finds a compact box, cracking it open to reveal the green-leaf-adorned cards inside.
“Can you remind me how you play, exactly?” Tohru asks, admiring the vibrant art on one of the first-half cards.
“The reader recites the first half of the poem and the players try to touch the card with the second half,” Akito says. “Whoever gets there first gets to take the card, and if it’s on the other player’s side, they send a card. The objective is to run out of cards.” She’s a bit surprised, though not displeased, to find that she remembers the rules well enough to explain them.
“But we don’t have a reader,” Tohru laments, but then brightens. “Oh, I could always call Kyo?”
“Don’t drag him all the way out here, he’ll get annoyed.” A minute spark of smugness smolders in Akito’s chest when she says, “Actually, I think there might be an app.”
It still takes her a moment to poke around her new phone, but she manages to navigate to the app store and download the app. Tohru’s mouth hangs open just slightly, impressed by Akito’s tech prowess.
Tohru starts to divide the deck, counting out twenty-five cards for each of them as Akito attempts to remember her iTunes password. Tohru lays the cards out neatly in rows in front of her and Akito watches the download for her app inch up, then moves to arrange her own cards as she waits.
She’s sure there’s some kind of system, a uniform strategy employed by the best players to ensure that the cards are in their optimal positions, but Akito hasn’t a clue what it is. Eventually she gets self-conscious and lines them up at random.
“I think we’re supposed to get fifteen minutes to memorize,” she says. “That’s what the instructions say on the app.”
“Oh,” Tohru’s eyes go saucer-wide. She glares down at her cards, concentration apparent in the deep furrows between her brows.
After about three and a half minutes, Tohru clears her throat. “I think they’re as memorized as they’re going to be,” she says sheepishly. “If you want to get started early!”
Akito gives her cards another quick scan and decides she’s probably reached the limits of her own memorization skills too. “We can start,” she says, and she taps a button on the app to get the reading started.
The automated voice calls out the first poem and Tohru reaches out to tap at one of the cards hesitantly.
“This is just the opening poem,” Akito says. “They read the whole thing, and then they’ll start reading the poems in the playing field.”
“Oh!” Tohru blushes scarlet. “No, you’re right, that makes sense.”
The air between them sizzles with anticipation as they wait for the first real poem to be read, Tohru’s nose scrunched and serious, Akito’s face an attempt at placid.
The tinny speaker of Akito’s phone announces “Yu sareba / Kadota no inaba / Otozurete,” and Akito scans her cards.
“I don’t remember this one!” Tohru cries.
“I don’t think it’s on the playing field,” Akito says, but she’s not sure. Her rudimentary knowledge of the hundred poems is slipping away in the anxious haze of competition.
The next card isn’t on the board either.
“This is fun,” Tohru giggles. “But I can’t believe we haven’t gotten to take any cards yet.”
The third poem, starting with Konu hito o, elicits a gasp from Tohru. “I remember I saw the second half of this one!” she says, hands hovering over her cards as she tries to find the right one.
Akito spots the second verse before Tohru does and, heart pounding, shoots her hand out to capture it.
“You’re so fast!” Tohru cries. Akito scowls a bit in the hopes that it’ll drive away the blush that has taken up residence in her cheeks. She sets the card down next to her, pleased with her take.
The next card is on Tohru’s side too, but Akito feels awkward reaching out to take a second one, like she’s showing off, so she lets Tohru hunt around for it until she slaps her hand down on the tatami. “It’s this one!” She cries. “I got one, Akito-san!”
“Beginner’s luck,” Akito says, but she softens the jab with an attempt at a smile.
The next card is a dead card, but an enthusiastic Tohru tries to take a card from Akito’s side. “I think I get to send you a card, since it was a fault,” Akito says, and she hopes she doesn’t look smug as her field of cards shrinks just slightly.
“This is fun,” Tohru says, leaning closer to inspect her cards. In the pause between poems, she looks intently at Akito. “Are you having fun?”
Akito almost misses the start of the next verse. “Yes,” she says. “Yes, this is fun.”
“Okay, good!” Tohru says, and in what Akito is convinced is a stroke of pure luck, she snags the next card right out from under her opponent’s nose.
“I got this one!”
The game drags on late into the day, slow where their knowledge of the poems is limited and faster when they both set their sights on the same card.
Akito wins with Tohru a handful of cards behind.
“Wait!” Tohru says as Akito starts to pick up the cards. “We should bow to each other, like the Queen and the challenger do.”
Akito leans forward, self-conscious as she performs formality not unlike her traditional Sohma song and dance. “Thank you for the match,” she says.
“Thank you for the match!” Tohru repeats, the tips of her brown hair brushing the tatami. “That was so much fun!” Her lips part into a small o when she looks past Akito, realizing for the first time how late it is. “How is it dark already? I’m always losing track of the time.” She presses a palm to her forehead and Akito squashes down whatever that made her feel.
“You can stay here if you want,” she says, trying for noncommittal, attempting casual. “I’m sure I’ve got an extra futon somewhere.”
“In the morning we can try again,” Tohru says eagerly. “And maybe if we get really good, we’ll get to play in the Queen match someday too.”
“It’ll take a lot of practice,” Akito says. Tohru nods, sage and serious. “But you can come over whenever you want to work at it.”
And Akito knows that the two of them will never share a stage like that, probably not ever but certainly not any time soon. They likely won’t get very good at karuta, and at best they can hope to win some local tournaments against small children (who are probably very bad at karuta).
But the more she thinks about the promise of playing with Tohru - holding any kind of hobby between the two of them - the warmer she feels.
It might be the best gift she gets all year.