fic for shardaunei

[nino-mod.livejournal.com]

For: shardaunei
From: augustfai

Title: A Well-Balanced Diet
Pairing/Focus: Meisa, Nino, kind of Meisa/Nino, mostly Meisa/hamburgers
Rating: G
Warnings: n/a
Summary: AU. Meisa is too busy after her promotion to worry about lunch, but the new catering boy is about to change her mind.
Notes: Shadz, here is your fic! I hope you enjoy it ♥ Thank you to the people who let me talk this fic at them, and for looking it over. Y'all da best.


Meisa is a girl that plans her days by the numbers.

Today she has four press releases to write, five more to proofread, two two-and-a-half hour meetings with the executive board of a research firm, and thirty minutes for lunch. Tomorrow she has a five-hour-long conference in the tenth building down the road from the main office, which is two stops away on the express train, which takes twenty minutes, or forty if she misses the express. She has one major report and two presentations due by next Monday, and she’s already planning on canceling all four of her weekend plans and getting a nice, relaxing two hours of sleep per night.

“Kuroki-sempai,” a younger co-worker asks one day, flagging Meisa down in the hallway, “what day is today? I’ve been on vacation and lost track of time.”

“It’s June the sixth,” Meisa replies, and is about to move away when her junior laughs.

“No, sorry—I know that. I mean, the day of the week.”

It’s the third day of the week.

The third day.

The middle of the work week.

“It’s—,” Meisa is digging a deep grave in her soul with her bare hands. She can’t even remember the day of the week it is because it doesn’t have a number in it. “Um—Wednesday.”

Meisa goes back to her office and stares hard at the numbers on her wall calendar. They’ve always been just digits before, but now all she hears is their laughter echoing through her head.

--

It wasn’t like this before her promotion. When she was still a rookie in the company, Meisa never thought about her week in mathematical equations, and she didn’t have to chart her time down to the nanosecond. She had time for happy hours, for friends, for a boyfriend! She had time to go grocery shopping at actual supermarkets, not convenience stores! She didn’t even need to wear a watch.
But then she got the hang of her job, and even got pretty good at it. The paychecks got fatter, so she bought a watch. She started working overtime, so her boyfriend left. She worked through the happy hours. Her friends started to call her Career Devil behind her back.

Still, Meisa thinks, there are the little things in life that matter. She has a life outside work—a pair of fuzzy slippers at home that she refers to as her puppies. A really nice television. Wine.

And hamburgers. Meisa loves hamburgers, and she never gets to have them anymore.

“Excuse me, I think I got a defective one by mistake.” It’s lunchtime, and Meisa’s internal timer is counting down—she has twenty-seven minutes and forty seconds left, and she can’t waste it talking to the new catering boy. If the old one were still here, he’d have known exactly what to give Meisa, and it would take less than a minute for her to get her lunch and go back to her office.

But not this new kid. He still has to look through each stack of boxes, looking for the right ones to give to each person, and it’s taking him awhile to sort out each employee’s order.

“Excuse me,” Meisa says again, this time a little louder. “There’s no cheese on my hamburger.”

“You’ll live,” he says, barely glancing at her before turning back to the line. “Don’t worry about it.”

Meisa cocks her chin like a gun. “I’d like another one.”

“There aren’t any more.”

“I see one right there.”

“That’s not for your office.”

“So? Can’t you just switch it out? The next office is all rookies anyway.”

He laughs shortly. “So they don’t deserve lunch?”

Meisa digs her heel into the carpet, intent on channeling her building displeasure through her shoe into the ground. “They have time to get a proper lunch.”

“That’s funny,” he replies, not missing a beat. “I thought you higher-ups controlled the clocks around here, like everything else.”

She glares him down, but he just smiles. It’s the kind of smile that makes Meisa want to throttle him—cat-like and thin, a deliberate curve on the edge of another joke. If she were younger, back in the days where she didn’t have her perfect poker face or a business card or a name that people remembered, she might have fallen for that.

But not now. She knows better.

“You’ll get your cheese tomorrow,” the catering boy says, though he doesn’t sound like he cares all that much. This infuriates Meisa, who cares so much about her job—and also the twenty-two minutes she now has left of lunch—that her poker face is about to slip off. “Promise.”

--

The company started allowing private catering companies to sell boxed lunches just last month, but Meisa hasn’t been able to sit down and have a proper lunch for far longer than that. She missed the initial hype, when nobody was in their seats from noon to one because they were all in line waiting for neatly-packed boxes of hamburger and salad.

Now the lines are a little shorter and Meisa has managed more time to eat. It didn’t used to be that way, just like with everything else in Meisa’s life—when she started out at the company as a stoic-faced office lady, the only one of her lot that barely smiled, she would go down to the cafeteria to eat with all the others. Then she got a raise and a different title on her business card and had to sacrifice cafeteria food for convenience store sandwiches and vending machine drinks.
Then she stopped eating at all. But even Meisa knew that wasn’t good for her, no matter how much she liked her steady climb up the office ladder in her tailored suit and high heels. So she ate milk bread for lunch every day.

This was fine, and she never really went hungry, but when Meisa told her mother how degraded her lunch routine became it was almost like telling her mother she’d become a crack addict.

“You have to eat,” her mother said. It was late at night, and Meisa was on her couch half-editing a report in her pajamas. “Do you hear me?”

Meisa said yes just to please her mother, but she bought a hamburger at work the next day anyway. And while there was no cheese on it, she ate it very carefully, trying not to get sauce anywhere but her mouth. It was the most delicious thing she’d eaten in years.

--

The next day, Meisa’s hamburger lunch has cheese on it. But not an entire slice. Just bits, pieced together to form four simple block letters.

N-I-N-O.

“This isn’t funny.”

“No it’s not,” the catering boy agrees. “That spells my name. Not ‘funny.’”

Meisa stares hard at her lunch. She can’t even form words.

“I made it especially for you,” Nino says, and then pauses to hand another boxed lunch to one of Meisa’s supervisors. Even from her peripheral vision Meisa can see that the hamburger her supervisor is getting has a full slice of cheese on it, gooey and yellow and covered in sauce just as it should be. For a second she swears she can taste the sour sweetness resting on her tongue, but it’s been so long since she’s had a proper hamburger meal—or at least, one that she had time to enjoy—that the feeling dies just as quickly.

“And I made this one too, just in case you don’t want to eat my masterpiece.”

Meisa looks up. It’s a proper hamburger lunch, just like the one her supervisor got, only with two slices of cheese still melting on top of the meat. And it’s still hot like Nino buried it under the rest of the boxes to keep it that way, like he was saving it for someone.

“I can’t eat two of these,” Meisa says, except she can and she knows it. And maybe Nino knows too, from the way he’s smiling at her—that stupid smile again, sly and warm, calculated and ridiculous. “And it’s only one per employee.”

“I think you need it,” Nino says, and starts packing his leftover boxes for the next office over. “But if you don’t want it, I’ll eat it.”

He means it, eyebrows gathered and lips taut, and Meisa has to stop herself from laughing at him, so small and out of place in a bright blue apron but so protective of his food, and of his customers. Nobody in any business has ever really cared for Meisa. She’s been a number for a very, very long time.

Even with only fifteen minutes left for lunch by the time she gets back to her desk, Meisa takes twenty to eat both hamburgers as luxuriously as she wants, chewing slowly like her schedule isn’t burning a hole through the table right in front of her.

--

Nino reminds Meisa of a snake, only certainly not as sleek and beautiful. He shows up every day ten minutes before noon in his uniform with his cart almost overflowing with food, not exactly smiling at his customers but not turning them away, either. He returns jokes if he’s given them and smiles back at the people that smile in thanks. He knows exactly what everyone wants before they tell him, like he is flipping their pages without their knowledge, slithering into their personalities and learning only the important things.

She likes him. He breaks up the monotony of her life, which has been centered around business and subdued lip colors and conservative suits since she got out of college. And she liked college. She could do what she wanted there: wear bright red lipstick and run around with boys and still get the best grades in her class with a straight face that didn’t let the curtains down for anyone.

Saying all that is a little weird, she thinks, because Meisa has always liked men taller than she is, with more clients and networking skills, with expensive apartments and shiny shoes.

She’s never liked anyone in an apron. But she’s always liked hamburgers with cheese.

--

Lunchtime comes with a grumble in the pit of Meisa’s stomach. She wants two boxes today, nicely packed, both with cheese. She’s counting on Nino.

But when she leaves her office, there is no one at the door crowding around a surly-looking man in an apron the color of the sky in the summer. There is no lunch cart.

There is no Nino, and no hamburgers with cheese letters.

“Where’s the catering boy?” Meisa stops one of her juniors as he rushes by. “Isn’t it lunchtime?”

“It’s Friday,” he says, looking at Meisa like she’s gone insane—and maybe she has, a bit. There must be something in all that protein she’s been eating lately. “He takes Friday off. You’ll have to go to the cafeteria.”

“I want hamburger,” Meisa says. She’s not sure where the sentence came from or why she said it, especially right in front of her junior, but it’s too late to take it back.

“They have hamburger in the cafeteria, sempai.” Her junior looks at her pityingly. “Do you need help on the metrics presentation?”

You seem out of it, is what he’s really saying. You’re probably working too hard. Go for too long and you’ll snap. Let me help so I can get a promotion.

“It’s not the same,” Meisa replies, putting on her no-nonsense voice, and crosses her arms. “And no, I don’t need your help.”

--

It turns out that Meisa isn’t the only one who misses Nino. Even her accountant loves him, and Sakurai Sho doesn’t love anybody unless they write for the Wall Street Journal and are willing to rap with him at karaoke.

“He’s very charming,” Sho says as they eat cafeteria-bought riceballs and pickled vegetables in the executive lounge. Technically Sho isn’t allowed in, but Meisa needs some company right now, and anyway nobody else in this office would even think to contradict her. “And he always knows exactly what I want before I even get up there. He’s good at reading people, don’t you think?”

Meisa wholeheartedly agrees, so much so she could shout it from the rooftops, but she would rather choke on her lunch than admit it in broad daylight. “He’s infuriating,” Meisa replies, voice light. “He didn’t give me any cheese. Then he did. Then he gave me another hamburger. Then he doesn’t show up!”

Sho frowns. “It’s his day off.”

“That doesn’t matter,” Meisa says, eyebrow twitching. “He should—be here.”

When she looks up Sho is grinning like a madman. This is the kind of grin he reserves for especially hard math problems, or when he gets someone to do Gold Digger with him at karaoke.

“Shut up.” Meisa doesn’t want to deal with this right now. She just wants a hamburger and someone in an apron teasing her so much she wants to smack him in the face.

“I will not.” And Sho won’t: he’s good at that, not shutting up. “Well, this is an interesting turn of events.”

Meisa puts her riceball down. “What do you mean?”

“You do know he’s flirting with you, right?”

Meisa blinks.

“You didn’t know.” Sho now looks more amused than ever, if that was even possible. “You know, Kuroki, you’re a very smart woman, but—.”

“It’s cheese,” Meisa says finally, now not holding back. “It’s cheese! Who flirts using cheese? Are we in the third grade?”

“What do you want him to do, proclaim his love from the rooftops? Write you a business memo and leave it in your ‘to-do’ folder?”

“That’d be nice,” Meisa lies, and hides her face behind a printout of numbers Sho has prepared for the next meeting. This is the first time she has ever blushed at work.

--

On Monday, Nino gives Meisa one hamburger lunch that is perfectly arranged. All the parts are there: meat, cheese, salad, rice, small tin of pickled vegetables. Everything is in its right place.

Meisa holds it in both of her hands like a diamond. “Thank you,” she says, so softly it’s almost a whisper.

Nino stares. “You are one of the weirdest customers I have ever had,” he says, and squints at her.

“Maybe you’re eating too much protein. I shouldn’t have given you two last time.”

He squats down and starts rummaging through another drawer in his cart. It only takes him a second, and before Meisa knows it he’s handing her a small round package.

“What’s that? “

“Milk bread,” Nino says. “I eat these all the time.”

“Then don’t you want it?”

He shrugs. “I have a lot at home. I figured you needed a break from hamburgers.”

Meisa needs a break from a lot of things—mainly her job. She likes the view from the top, but lately it hasn’t been anything but tiring, and she doesn’t know if she can take this numeric reality for much longer.

She needs a distraction. Or maybe three: hamburgers, milk bread and Nino.

“I do need a break from hamburgers,” Meisa agrees. “And I really like milk bread.”

Nino is a professional at playing along. “If I bring you milk bread all the time, that’d be an extra service,” he says, getting ready to pack up his cart and leave. But he’s moving slowly, moving things around instead of actually putting them away. “You’d have to pay me extra.”

“Not on Fridays.” Meisa puts her hand on top of the boxed lunch Nino is about to move aside.

He puts his hands in his apron pockets. “I’ll make you a special Nino milk bread,” he says, and Meisa means it when she tells him she’s looking forward to it.