Chapter Text
Day eight of the dishes piling up in the sink. Claude was holding out for longer than ever before, and although the kitchen was starting to look absolutely disgusting, Hilda had to admire his strength.
She hated cleaning, but she hated filthy-looking things, too. She was standing there, in awe of the mountain of plates and bowls in the sink. And of course, Claude, as petty and evil as ever, just had to walk past her and top the pile off with a cup. “This is getting ridiculous,” Hilda said.
“Isn’t it? Man, I wish we had someone around here to clean.”
“What, do I have to clean because I’m the girl?”
“If I say yes, will you clean them?”
“No,” Hilda snapped. “Ugh! Why can’t you just do it? You’re so clever and see through every little scheme I have, so you might as well just put an end to all of this and clean the fucking dishes, Claude.”
Claude shook his head, leaning against the fridge. “No can-do, Hilda. I know you better than most, y’know. And if I clean the dishes this one time, well, it’ll turn into two, then three, then a million...snowball effect, or whatever.” Claude glanced at the sink again, then shook his head. “Okay. Fine. Let’s cut a deal: we can do it half-and-half. Real simple. I pull out a dish and clean it, then you pull out a dish. Hell, if there’s an odd number of ‘em, I’ll clean the extra.”
“Okay, whatever, as long as they get cleaned. You do your half to get the pile down, and I’ll do mine later.”
“Hm...now that I think about it, I’ll do mine later, too, then. Or maybe never. Up to you, my lady.”
“Fuck off!”
“Who’s paying for the Wi-Fi, again?”
He always used that excuse. As if he’d really cut the internet off just to spite Hilda. Still, Claude was a schemer at heart, and so was she, and one of them had to give in eventually. So, they washed the dishes, elbow to elbow in the kitchen. There was so much grit and, gods, did it feel gross to have little bits of dried pizza sauce under her fingernails. She was going to go get a manicure the next day. What if one of them chipped?
Really, Claude was so inconsiderate.
“Piece of shit apartment,” Hilda grumbled. She had nothing else to say, so she had to complain. At least Claude let her do it. Around anyone else, she had to risk sounding like a brat, but...well, Claude already knew what he was dealing with. “No dishwasher, never mind the shitty rattling noise from the fridge.”
“You didn’t want to pay high utilities, so we had to settle,” Claude said, rolling his eyes. “Unless you wanna ask your brother to foot the bill for a better place?”
“We’ve been here for a year now. No point in moving now.” Hilda cleaned her last dish. There was an extra one, and true to his word, Claude cleaned it himself. “Besides, he already hates that I’m living with a guy. And, no, before you ask again, it doesn’t matter that you’re gay.”
Claude huffed. He really was about to ask again, then. “Alright, different approach. Does it matter that you’re gay?”
“Apparently not.”
“Okay, no new apartment, then,” Claude said, rearranging the plates on the drying rack. “I might pick up some more hours at work, though. I wouldn’t mind putting in to hire a maid. And by maid, I mean students more desperate than us who clean other people’s places for money.”
Hilda looked down at her nails. The soap had destroyed them. “I’ll put in a few bucks.”
The apartment wasn’t really that bad. Hilda was well-off, but she’d lowered her standards a bit, because Claude hated being too extravagant. He’d even convinced her to start working. And, to be honest, her job was low-maintenance and fun—doing makeup in the middle of a mall? Easy money. And a discount on eye-liner. And she didn’t have to listen to her brother bitch about her shopping habits, because she had her own money. Claude hadn’t lowered her standards by any means, but he’d made her a bit more appreciative of what she had and what she worked for, although she’d never admit it to him. In turn, she made him a bit more selfish, because he suddenly had a greater appreciation for a good mani-pedi.
She wasn’t sure why her and Claude were good friends. A multitude of reasons, probably: they were both really good actors (in the bad way), they both knew how to party, and, lastly, she’d just known him too long to get rid of him. He was like a stain on her personality. Really, it was almost offensive how many times she’d caught herself sounding like him. It was like she’d known him in a past life, or something, the way they were connected.
They shared a friend group, which was a little suffocating at times, but it provided a baseline group of people Hilda could take advantage of, or go shopping with...usually the former, though. Leonie, Lysithea, Raphael, Lorenz, Ignatz, and inevitably Claude made up a rather large, but tightly-packed group of friends that Hilda could rely on. They planned their schedules together each semester, ate lunch together, had sleepovers on the floor of Hilda and Claude’s living room...Hilda loved them all.
But, sometimes Hilda felt like there wasn’t enough. They’d been friends since middle school, and Hilda knew everyone inside and out. Every now and again, though, she wished there was something a little more.
Her and Claude had their own rooms, but he invaded hers so often that they were hardly separated. So, she decided to take advantage of his presence for once. “Do you ever look at us...like, us us, and—”
Claude looked up from his laptop. “Oh, like us us? All of us?”
“Yup.”
“Me, and you, and Lysithea, and Raphael, and—”
“Yeah.”
“Well, I look at you guys pretty often, yeah. Not quite as handsome as me.”
Hilda shut her textbook (which she hadn’t been looking at), loudly. “Claude. Can I ask you to be serious? For a second. Please. Because I’ve been feeling weird, and the short of it is, I need you to tell me if I’m being a bitch.”
Claude snorted. “You probably won’t like the answer, but...okay. If you’re asking me to be serious, I have to be a bit concerned. What’s going on?”
“I love you guys. Like, all of you. But sometimes I wonder if we’re doing something wrong,” Hilda started. “Like, we’re forgetting something, or not doing something right, or...”
“We’re just a clumsy bunch, I’ll say that,” Claude said.
“No, but—” Hilda sighed, rolling her eyes to the ceiling. “Okay. Neither of us are really religious, but, like...spiritually. Something’s off.”
“Mid-life crisis? Maybe you’re gonna die at forty-two,” Claude said. Hilda scowled at him. “You’re really upset, alright. I’m sorry for joking around. But I’m not gonna pretend to understand, because I don’t, really.”
“No, don’t pretend. Good, you don’t understand me,” Hilda sighed. “So, I am just going crazy, as expected. Let’s just forget it.”
Claude leaned back in Hilda’s desk chair, folding his arms. “Can you put it into something more tangible? Like, any actual evidence for me to work with?”
“I felt weird when we were buying movie tickets last week,” Hilda said, without thinking. She was wracking her brain, trying to think of anything strange that had happened to her. “You said ‘we need seven, right?’ and I almost said ‘no’. Maybe that’s it?”
“...You want there to be less of us? Look, I know we’ve all wanted Lorenz to die a little before, but—”
“I was thinking eight,” Hilda said.
Claude looked at her, then laughed. “Oh, my god. Hilda, you’re always going on about how there’s too many of us already, and it turns out you’re actually lonely? Aw, isn’t that cute. You want to start an entire country of friends, or something? Or do you just want more of us so you have to pay less when we split the bill even...?”
Hilda giggled at the last bit. “Okay, that’s kinda smart. Can we, like, recruit people? How about Edelgard von Hresvelg? She’s filthy fucking rich. She might pay the whole tab.”
And that was that. They kept egging each other on, trying to think about how they could trap Edelgard into paying for their next road trip. And Claude was probably right. She did love having friends, she was a social butterfly, she liked having people around. Textbook extrovert.
But even if she was in a crowd of a thousand people, it still felt like there was something she was forgetting.
The dishes piled up again.
Claude was fucking insufferable, and—why did Hilda even laugh at his jokes? Annoying prick. She just fed his ego, steady on, and he kept thinking he could get over on her. Well, she’d show him. Even if the dishes reached the ceiling, she wasn’t going to touch them. And she wasn’t going for that half-and-half bullshit again. No, no. He was going to clean those dishes. She’d been eating take-out—straight out of the box, because even ladies get hungry—so there was nothing in there from her but forks, and that was only when the delivery guy forgot to put a fork in the bag.
Yeah, no. She wasn’t gonna wash the dishes.
A little more than a week after they cleaned them together, they were piling up to the point where putting one in was a genuine health risk. Just one more, and it would all tumble down to the floor.
Once again, Claude came sauntering out with an empty cup, tossing it into the sink. Hilda folded her arms, tapping her foot. Claude glared at her. “What?”
“So,” Hilda said, her voice so high-pitched that she knew Claude knew he was in trouble. “You’re just gonna act like the sink isn’t full.”
“What, you wanna clean them? Half-half?”
“I’ve been eating take-out, so—”
“You say that every single time. I just saw you eat soup in a bowl, which you then put in the sink—”
“That’s it! The bowl, and like two forks—”
“And the spoon you used for the soup.”
“I hate you, Claude. I mean it.” Claude tilted his head. Then, Hilda groaned. “Okay, I don’t. Don’t look at me like that, just...please. Clean the dishes.”
“Half, half,” Claude said, gesturing at the sink.
“No.”
Claude shrugged. “Well...game on.”
A few more days passed, and Claude stuck to his guns just like Hilda did. It got to the point where they had run out of dishes to use because they were all in the sink, so they did end up washing dishes, but only when they needed it. The amount of tension in the kitchen was almost frighteningly high when it came down to that. He’d look her right in the eye as he washed off one plate, one cup, and one fork, then threw it back in the sink when he was finished.
Fucker.
Hilda knew it was only a temporary problem, but it was one that she hated dealing with. It had gotten to the point where Lysithea, Leonie, Lorenz, Raphael and Ignatz had tried to step in. Ignatz had even offered to clean them himself, weekly, but Claude turned him down. “Hilda’s a big girl, and I’m a big boy,” he said. “We can figure it out.”
Hilda was almost satisfied when she heard the glass shatter in the middle of the night. The tower of dishes had finally succumbed. But it was a Friday night, and Claude was out, so Hilda couldn’t gloat over the fact that he had definitely caused the broken dish and he definitely had to clean it up, because she sure wasn’t going to.
So, she grabbed her phone, going out into the kitchen to take a picture of the broken glass on the floor. What should she caption it, she wondered, when she sent it to him? look what you did, maybe, or if only SOMEONE did the dishes! Something like that. Or maybe a very blunt, side-eye i’m not cleaning that up.
Hilda liked that one.
She had her camera at the ready. She knew exactly what she was going to see: glass shards and a leaning tower of dishes that were probably going to be the next ones to land. But she hadn’t expected to see someone else in her kitchen that was definitely not Claude, a random girl who was leaning down on the floor and desperately trying to sweep up the glass with a broom and dustpan.
Hilda looked at her for a few long moments, waiting for the girl to notice her. But the girl was too absorbed in trying to sweep up the glass shards, murmuring to herself madly. “Um...are you one of Claude’s friends, or something?”
The girl looked up, startling so hard that she dropped the broom. Hilda looked at her closer, at her terrified eyes and her messy blue hair. “I’m sorry,” the girl said, stuttering up a storm. “I-I was just trying to help, because...you two were arguing, a-and it didn’t look good...but when I went to turn the sink on, I-I knocked a plate over, and now there’s glass on the floor...”
Hilda was seriously considering using her phone to dial 911, but the girl looked so harmless. Even Hilda could take her in a fight. “...Thanks, but who the fuck are you?”
“I’m Marianne,” the girl said. “Didn’t you know that...?”
And, suddenly, Hilda realized that the girl was almost completely transparent from her head to her toes.