Chương 396: 181.Christmas Eve 1

By a little after 1800, the Seitokai office had entered a very dangerous atmosphere—nothing was finished, but everyone had already started using dinner as their sole reason to keep existing. That wasn't exaggeration. It was a specific, civilized, and very pathetic state: the paperwork was still breeding, the budget was still shifting, the routes were still being redrawn, and everyone's mouths could still produce normal sentences—but their souls had already started enshrining the word "bento" as a religious icon.

Outside, the sky had darkened another shade without us noticing. Once all the office lights came on, a layer of cold white reflection floated up on the glass. I'd assumed it was just the temperature difference between inside and out, until Lan lifted her head, glanced at the window, and said lightly:"It's snowing." My pen stalled. I turned. It really was. Not the filtered, aesthetic flurries you see in art films.

But real, unreasonable snow—the kind that looked very committed to making life harder for anyone going home late. Fine white pellets slanted down against the night, especially sharp under the streetlights, like someone up there had dumped an entire bag of shreddings onto the city and flicked the "cold wind" setting on for fun. Jess was the first to howl.

"You've got to be kidding me…" She flopped over her desk.

"Snow like this and we're still working overtime—I swear the Council must have built up collective karmic debt to some god in our last lives."

"Doesn't have to be a god," I said.

"Could just be the committees."

"That's worse." Jess lifted her head, weak.

"God at least gives you spiritual value. Committees only give you supplemental funding requests." Roy didn't look up. His pen was still flying across the grid.

"If you still have the energy to talk nonsense, you can do one more sheet," he said.

"Finance really is one of the least suitable professions to interact with while hungry," Jess muttered.

"I can hear you," Roy shot back, cold.

"That was the point." At the other end, Harvey had a hand pressed to the venue map, voice level as ever.

"If she gets any hungrier, she might start eating the budget sheets."

"I wouldn't recommend it," I said.

"Paper has low nutritional value, and Roy will bite first."

"I don't bite," Roy said. I glanced at him.

"Right. You just bury people alive in numbers."

"That's called self-defense." Hedwig sat next to me, sorting the last round of meeting notes and attachments from the day. Her pen paused for a fraction of a second at that line, like she wanted to laugh but felt this particular kind of joke was far too Seitokai. Maki lifted a hand, flattening one of the stacks. Her gaze swept the whole room before she delivered her judgment, calm as always:"Dinner first." For a moment, I almost wanted to stand and applaud. Not because the line was humane.

Because in this room, when Maki Kushima said dinner first, she didn't mean I care about your feelings. She meant: she had determined that if she didn't feed us now, the quality of work would degrade to the point of becoming a new administrative incident. D had clearly been waiting on that line. He straightened from the wall immediately.

"I'll go buy bentos," he said. At that, the room collectively sucked in half a breath of life. Jess's hand shot up first.

"Me!"

"Shut up," I said.

"We haven't even started taking orders yet, stop acting like you've just crawled out of a mountain cave after three days."

"Mentally, I have." D looked around.

"I can't carry everything myself," he added, then turned his head straight toward Harvey.

"You're coming." Harvey looked up, as flat as ever.

"Okay." When he said okay, it always carried that particular reliability—no matter whether you'd asked him to carry bentos, fix a rifle, or sort out trash can placement, he'd agree first and then get it done with minimum waste. Jess watched the two of them with almost tearful gratitude.

"You're too reliable," she said.

"Civilization's last two load-bearing columns."

"You keep talking and I'll have them add green pepper to your bento," I warned.

"Vice President, that's cruel."

"Threatening the starving with food is indeed inhumane," Hedwig said quietly. I turned to her.

"Whose side are you on?" She looked back, voice steady.

"On the side that hopes we actually get to eat tonight." Fair. Too fair, in fact. I had no retort. Which was how, for the next full three minutes, the Seitokai office ended up in the first truly high-risk debate of the night. Not budget. Not route maps. Not the Broadcasting Committee's ritualism corpse. Bentos. Jess wanted a fried chicken cutlet. I suspected she just wanted to fight life with grease. Roy said anything was fine, but it needed to be something he could eat one-handed without getting the forms dirty.

Very Roy. Lan wanted something light; she still had routes to stare at and didn't want to stage a joint stomach-and-brain strike. Maki, as usual, kept it simple—hot, edible, done. Her standards were so low I genuinely believed that if the school ever rolled out an "administrative efficiency nutrition bar," she'd at least consider having it for dinner. Hedwig thought for a moment and only said, "Nothing too heavy."

As for me—at that point I just wanted something that would prove I still belonged in the category of living beings. Once D finished jotting everyone's orders, he frowned down at the paper.

"You people even eat like you're filling out request forms," he said.

"Because we don't have spare souls left for improvisation," I said. Harvey added, calm as ever:"And all of you have a lot of conditions."

"You have room to talk?" Jess glared at him.

"Didn't you just specify no braised eggs from that one place?"

"Their braised eggs are wrong," Harvey said.

"Like weapon parts left soaking in the wrong fluid too long."

"... You realize I may never look at braised eggs the same way again."

"Then don't order them."

"Damn it, that's actually reasonable." And so D and Harvey left carrying the last hopes of the Council and the weight of six dinners. The door shut. Outside, the snow had thickened. Through the glass, the campus looked like it was slowly being buried in quiet, with only a few lights left on to prove there were still humans under the system, struggling to survive. We were, of course, the most representative nest. — By the time D and Harvey came back, it was almost 1900.

When the door opened, a wave of heat, rice, frying oil and soup rolled into the office. It wasn't high-end. It wasn't romantic. But to us, it was deliverance. Jess nearly launched herself at them.

"Our heroes return!" she cried. This content has been unlawfully taken from Royal Road; report any instances of this story if found elsewhere.

"Move," D said, one-handedly holding the whole bag.

"You look like you might eat the bag too."

"If there's chicken cutlet inside, I can't promise I won't." Harvey set another bag on the table and began distributing according to the list.

"Chicken cutlet for Jess.

"Light set for Lan.

"Soup separate—get that out first.

"Black pepper beef for Hoshino." I stared at the box for a second and felt, absurdly, a little moved.

"Harvey."

"Hm?"

"If you ever switch to logistics command, you'd be terrifying."

"I already do logistics," he said.

"No, right now you're the supply god who brings dinner back through a snowstorm." Jess had already opened her box. Even with her mouth full of the first bite, she didn't forget to chime in.

"Agreed. D and Harvey both go on the Council's honor roll tonight."

"We don't have one," Maki said.

"Then make one," I said.

"Unnecessary."

"You really starve romance to death."

"Romance doesn't clear through accounting," Maki replied, perfectly serious. That shut me up for half a beat. In the end I just opened my own bento. Fine. She had a point. Damn it. The moment the steam hit my face, my body actually believed we might survive the night. The rice was hot, the black pepper strong, the meat still warm. The first mouthful went down and, for a few seconds, I even felt a fleeting sense of forgiveness toward life. Hedwig sat next to me with a lighter bento.

Her side dishes were colorful, neatly arranged, and looked like something from a world where things worked the way they were supposed to. I looked at her box. Then at mine.

"This is unfair," I said. She glanced up.

"How so?"

"Your dinner looks like it was well brought up," I said.

"Mine looks like it's just come off a battlefield." Hedwig looked down at both again, then said quietly:"But yours smells better." I blinked.

"You want to trade?" She hesitated for a second, then:"... No. I probably can't finish it."

"That sounded like you were calling my appetite scary."

"I wasn't."

"You'd better not be." Jess, on the far side of the table with a chicken cutlet halfway to her mouth, watched us with sparkling eyes. I knew that look too well. So well that I didn't even need to look at her to know she was already scoring out some low-grade script in her head, probably with the wedding march as BGM. I cut in pre-emptively.

"Jess."

"What?"

"If you say anything right now, I'll introduce your face to a bento box at close range." Jess puffed her cheeks, aggrieved.

"I haven't said anything yet."

"Because I know you."

"That's not understanding. That's prejudice."

"Experience-based prejudice." Lan, quietly eating her own dinner, added:"And highly accurate." Even D actually chuckled once. Maki had a bento in one hand and a sheet in the other. She didn't look like she was eating dinner so much as assigning overtime to the rice and beef. I couldn't take it.

"Maki." She looked up.

"Put the forms down while you eat."

"I am eating."

"That's not the point," I said.

"You look like some department head squatting by a fire line, chewing a rice ball while drafting the next incident report."

"Sounds efficient," Maki said.

"... I give up. You're hopeless." Hedwig ate quietly beside me, the corner of her mouth moving, barely, in what might have been a laugh. I suspected she was laughing; she just kept even her reactions filed as neatly as her paperwork. Terrifying. And unfairly nice to look at. The fact those two things could coexist was deeply unjust. — Nobody actually reached a state of "happiness" after dinner. At best, we upgraded from "near-death" to "battery critically low, but not off."

Once the boxes were tossed and the tea and coffee topped off, the office slid into its second operational cycle of the day. This one was quieter than the daytime version, like everyone knew the finish line was ahead so there was less spare breath for commentary. Roy rebuilt the final total budget and had Maki confirm alignment. Lan and Harvey re-layered environment, equipment, spectators, and evacuation routes, wedging trash cans, toilets, and truck runs into positions that wouldn't strangle each other.

D sent two more follow-ups to Health, hammering stretcher and board replacements into a state where they could no longer wiggle. Hedwig turned every meeting note into formal text and filed them away one by one, so clean she looked less like she was dealing with administrative wreckage and more like she was doing funeral makeup for civilization.

As for me, per Maki's orders, I upgraded the Vice President's brief from a simple summary into something that, if some poor future soul ever read it, would give them a very clear picture of exactly how a group of sleep-deprived students had held the world together. The snow outside thickened. Now and then, someone would look up and catch the slanted white lines under the streetlights.

The campus was almost completely quiet by then, only the occasional sweep of a security car's lights and the sound of snow being pushed up against the railings. Time slid. And finally, a little after 2100— Maki flipped the last confirmation page, let the pen rest, and closed the file.

"Done," she said. Just two syllables. They dropped into the room like someone had finally cancelled a very long-running curse. I was the first to slump back in my chair, nearly ascending on the spot.

"... No way." Jess thumped her forehead onto her desk, producing a dramatic but completely sincere groan.

"I lived to see the end of the year…" Roy set his pen down and leaned back, shutting his eyes for two seconds. For him, that was practically bacchanalian. Lan let out a long breath and filed away the last overlay. Harvey put the ruler and sticky flags back in their places, movements still precise, but his shoulders definitely loosened. D rolled his neck; the low crack of his joints sounded like a heavy machine finally being allowed to enter standby.

Hedwig rested her fingertips lightly on the top sheet of the file stack, then said, very softly:"So that means… this really is everything for the year?"

"Yes," Maki said.

"We're closing here." Someone went quiet for a second. Then, almost as if on delay, we all realized something else. Jess was the first to lift her head.

"Hey." Lan looked over.

"What."

"Isn't it…Christmas in a few days?" The office went quiet. I glanced at the snow outside, then down at the pile of forms we'd just beaten into submission.

"... Would've forgotten if you hadn't said that," I admitted. Roy rubbed his brow.

"I did forget."

"Reasonable," Harvey said.

"If you spend long enough wrestling with budgets and trash can placement, your brain naturally loses the ability to perceive holidays."

"Thanks for putting an epitaph on our youth in such a calm tone," I said. Jess suddenly straightened, eyes lighting.

"Wait, isn't this kind of atmospheric? Snow outside, work done, almost Christmas—""If you so much as start a song, I'll throw you out the window," I said.

"Why! This is the perfect time for a Christmas—""Because I already used up my tolerance for seasonal romance not murdering the Broadcasting Committee over 'ritualism'." Hedwig laughed under her breath beside me. Quiet. I still heard it. Maki stacked the files, crisp and final.

"Pack up. Time to go."

"Wow. The President finally issued a human directive," Jess sniffled theatrically.

"If we don't leave, the snow will get worse," Maki said.

"And we're done for the year. There's no need to stay."

"Maki," I looked at her.

"That almost sounded like you care."

"I do," she said.

"About the process."

"I take it back. You're still you." We started packing. Bento boxes, cups, rulers, maps, folders—each thing went home. The sound of it was strange—not as tight as mid-combat, not as loose as an empty classroom after school. More like taking your armor off piece by piece after a battle, with the battlefield still just offstage. That was when my terminal lit up. Caller ID: Hild. I frowned. Jess caught the name.

"Who?"

"The guard captain," I said.

"Oooh," Jess's eyes went immediately unhealthy.

"Here to check attendance?"

"Shut up." I answered, not even bothering with greetings.

"Yeah?" Hild's voice came over just as it always did—steady enough to sound like military discipline given sound.

"Miss Hoshino, may I ask if Her High—""She's here," I cut him off.

"Spare me." I had zero desire to play relay station. I held the terminal out to Hedwig.

"For you." She hesitated a second, then took it.

"This is Hedwig," she said. She stepped over to the window to talk. No one in the office deliberately strained to listen—but human ears in a room like this do tend to grow a size at times like these. That counted as normal and not worth a self-crit. I didn't follow. I just kept packing. But her silhouette at the window slid into my peripheral vision anyway—Hedwig, backlit by the office lights, with night and snow beyond the glass. Her voice was quiet. Her posture didn't change.

She looked like the sort of person who would listen all the way through before deciding what to do next, whether what was coming down outside was snow or bullets. After a moment, she came back and handed me the terminal.

"Hild's car is stuck," she said.

"Stuck?" I raised a brow.

"The elevated is closed due to snow. They can't get down," she said.

"They can't swing around." Jess reacted first.

"Wow. When even imperial transport is snowed in, that's high-grade snow," she said.

"I'd recommend not using the phrase 'high-grade' for traffic collapse," I said. Maki had already finished processing it.

"Then we split rides," she said. Her gaze went straight to D.

"Your car still runs?" she asked. D picked up his coat and nodded.

"Runs," he said.

"As long as I don't aim it straight at a snow wall." Jess couldn't resist.

"Your car already looks like a mobile club-slash-light armored vehicle. Weather like this is its time to shine." I looked at D.... Honestly, she had a point. Once he flicked the lights on, the whole vibe went from going home to underage party, location undisclosed. I'd always thought if the Disciplinary Committee ever ran a car check on him, their first question wouldn't be for his license. It'd be is there a DJ in there. Maki assigned with her usual speed.

"I'll go with Jess and Harvey in D's car," she said.

"Roy, Lan, stick to your original route. Be careful. Shimo—" She looked at me, then at Hedwig.

"You take her back." The room went still for one beat. In that beat, Jess's eyes lit up like someone had just plugged in a Christmas tree. I cut her off in advance.

"If you hum, I will bury you in the snow."

"I didn't say anything," Jess said, all innocence.

"Because I know you too well." Maki ignored the cheap comedy and added, calmly:"The snow's heavy. Ride slow." I looked at her.

"... Is that concern?"

"It's concern about not having to file a traffic incident report for the Vice President tomorrow," she said.

"Much better. That sounds normal." Hedwig wrapped her scarf, quiet as ever. She didn't say anything extra. When I looked over, she just asked, very softly:"Is it convenient?" The question was so proper it actually threw me for a second. I coughed.

"It is," I said.

"Unless you were planning to walk through this snow." Jess made a small, distinctly unwholesome noise behind me. I didn't even bother turning around. I lobbed a ball of scrap paper in her direction. She dodged, laughing, and immediately went to pester D.

"Let's go, let's go, Mobile Club is rolling out."

"Don't call it that," D frowned.

"But it is."

"Keep it up and I'll make you sit in the middle."

"That's not a punishment, that's public execution." Harvey had already packed up and moved to the door. Roy and Lan did the same. Roy even double-checked that tomorrow's master sheet was in his bag. There are reasons people like that end up in finance. A few minutes later, the office was completely down to the last shreds of warmth and paper smell. Before we turned the lights off, I looked back at the table.

A few hours ago, it had been buried in other people's messes—overquotes, supplements, revisions, memos, and process charts designed by sadists. Now everything was stacked neatly away, like nothing had happened. Except it had. Because the year really did end here. All that nonsense—the ugly, exhausting, nearly-bury-everyone stuff—had been pinned into binders tonight, each one stamped closed. A miracle. And an industrial injury. When we stepped out of the office, the snow had thickened again.

Cold air hit straight on; my shoulders hunched automatically. The corridor lights washed over the snow, turning it blindingly white. D's car had already gone ahead to the lot; I could still hear Jess's voice from that direction, sounding more energetic than she had an hour ago. Not surprising. She runs on gossip and calories. Maki walked ahead, glancing back to make sure everyone was splitting off properly.

She looked like some field commander responsible for getting refugees out of a war zone—only the war zone was the Seitokai, and the refugees were us. When I wheeled my scooter out, Hedwig was waiting. Snow settled on her shoulders, and on her dark hair. She lifted a hand and brushed it off, the movement small but for some reason giving off the illusion that not even the weather really had jurisdiction over her. I held out the helmet.

"Strap up." She took it, fastening the buckle.

"Okay." I put my own on, swung a leg over, and started the engine. The sound cut sharply through the snow-muted night. Hedwig watched me for a second, then climbed onto the back. Through thick jackets and scarves, winter eats most sensations. Some, it doesn't. Like the little dip of the frame when she settled. Like the moment her hands touched my waist. Like the fine, barely audible patter of snow on the helmet shell.

And like the kind of heartbeat that shouldn't have had any spare clarity left after a day like this, sharpening itself exactly when you had the least room for it. I tightened my grip on the handlebars and stared straight ahead into the white.

"Hold on," I said.

"Mm." Her voice came from right behind me, close and quiet. Up ahead, D's overconfident headlights cut across the snow, taking Maki, Jess, and Harvey first. Roy and Lan peeled off the other way. The campus sank into silence hand-in-hand with the snow, like the whole world had politely edged the stage away. In the end, it was just me and Hedwig. And the snow. I pulled in a breath of bright-cold air and twisted the throttle.