BiTTER (Shokugeki no Souma Fanfic)

23. Reason For and Reasons to Be.

"Oh, you're not going to stop them?" Kiyo wondered, a little concerned. "It's Fumi-pon's dear kitchen, too. I'm worried."

"It'll be fine," Tamako assured her, "we'll make them clean up later on. Now they just gotta fight it out! It's youth!"

"Ah, if you say so then..."

-

(They eventually do stop.)

"Geez, just admit you're too much of a scaredy cat," Shinomiya groaned, swabbing the floors and trying to get a particularly stubborn clump of wet flour off the tiles, "you have the skills to tell 'em to fuck off. You've got nothing to fear."

"Says you after spending the last months telling me how I'm shit at everything," Eda sneered back, incredibly bitter about everything.

Shinomiya had to catch himself. "Urk. Okay, you got me there. I've been a dick. My bad."

"Fuck you."

"Don't start," Shinomiya threatened, and Eda complied.

Eda wrung out the cloth before gathering the salvageable ingredients back to their proper storage spaces. They destroyed quite a bit, including eggs, but there was no helping that.

"I can't taste it," Eda admitted, "but I remember how to make them. I remember what ingredients go well with which combination," he said. "The rest of it, I go on everything the taste-testers tell me. It's guesswork."

For a moment, Shinomiya said nothing.

Then, "do you really think you can make it through Tootsuki with that kind of handicap?" he said. "It's like archery by a blind man. Fundamentally, people believe it's not feasible. Not even worth the challenge."

It's not an insult, but it still hurts to hear, because it was true.

Eda scoffed at that. "I'm doing it right now, aren't I?" he turned to him. What is he doing right now? Failing every other class, acing a few, and trudging on. It doesn't matter, because he's-- "I'm doing my best to prove them wrong."

(A visually-impaired archer does exist in this world.)

(A taste-deaf cook can become the best patissier in this world, too. It's feasible.)

"If I never tried-- I'd regret it," Eda told him. "That goes for you, too, right? That's why you came all the way here, from the countryside," he turned to Shinomiya, "it's the same for everyone in the school. We're no different."

(We all bring an array of personal handicaps.)

(Some people are allergic to the most basic foods, but they still have to handle it in a meal. Some people have learning disorders, but they still bring their food to the table to be judged the same way as everyone else.)

(Some people have never cooked outside of their homes in their lives. Some, like SHinomiya-- barely had a full kitchen array before they came here. And yet-- they were competing now, on equal grounds.)

(Visible or invisible-- small or big-- those handicaps were there.)

(Eda just had a slightly steeper one than most, and that was no one's problem but his own, right?)