For a while, the second floor felt like another world entirely.
Ryunosuke sat cross-legged on the couch, the sunlight dragging slow across the floor, catching on the edges of a half-finished sketchbook. Outside, the city murmured—just enough to remind him it was still breathing. But up here, in this little capsule above the corner spot, everything was still.
He could hear the music faintly through the floorboards—his mother always started the day with old boleros or dusty jazz—but the words didn't reach him clearly, and that was fine. He liked it this way. Like being underwater. Like floating.
He closed his notebook, stretched, and stood.
The moment his foot hit the third stair, the spell broke.
By the time he reached the bottom, the calm was gone—crushed beneath the weight of sizzling oil, clanging pans, and voices overlapping in a storm of half-joked threats and shouted corrections.
"¡No, no, no, más cilantro—no estás haciendo salsa para una piñata!"
"Pero Amelia, tú dijiste—"
"¡Dije un poco! ¿Eso te parece un poco?"
The kitchen was alive.
Steam rolled up from the stovetop like battle smoke. Someone had dropped a tray of dumplings on the prep table, and someone else was trying to salvage them with a pair of tongs and a laugh that was clearly not helping. Garlic hissed in oil. The dishwasher clanked open and shut with machine-gun rhythm. Chopped vegetables flew. A rooster crowed from the radio. It smelled like heaven, sounded like war.
And in the middle of it all was Amelia, wielding a ladle like a weapon and a spatula like punctuation. Her ponytail was starting to fray, and flour dusted the sleeve of her black shirt. She didn't seem to notice—or care.
"¡Y tú, Ryunosuke!" she barked, catching sight of him through the haze. "If you're just going to stand there, make yourself useful. The takeout orders are piling up like sins."
He opened his mouth to say something—what, he wasn't sure—but she was already back to arguing in Spanish with Victor, the prep cook, about how thick the tortilla chips should be.
Ryunosuke sighed, stepped into the heat, and tied on an apron. The restaurant might have been his father's dream, but it was Amelia's domain now. And she ruled it with the fierce, exhausted grace of someone who had long ago traded sleep for survival.
Still, as he grabbed the stack of takeout containers and tried to navigate the chaos, a crooked smile pulled at the corner of his mouth.
The peace upstairs was nice.
But down here—this was life.
Ryunosuke didn't speak as he stepped into the chaos—he didn't need to. He rolled up the sleeves of his faded hoodie, tied on a grease-stained apron with one practiced motion, and surveyed the battlefield.
The kitchen was a symphony of combustion: boiling pots, sizzling woks, chopped herbs flying through the air like confetti at war. Amid it all, Amelia barked orders in rapid Spanish, her voice rising above the roar like a conductor snapping her baton.
Most people would flinch, maybe hesitate.
Ryunosuke didn't.
He slid past the line cooks without a word, sidestepped a stack of saucepans on instinct, and grabbed the slip printer as it spat out new orders. Three teriyaki bowls, two shrimp tacos, five orders of potstickers. He read them once, absorbed them, and moved.
He wasn't loud. He didn't have to be. The staff knew his rhythm. He stepped where no one else did, filled in gaps before anyone asked, delivered corrections with a look instead of a shout. One hand on the rice cooker, the other plating tacos with methodical grace—all muscle memory and intuition.
The shift in him was always quiet, but complete.
Upstairs, he was the boy in the window—the dreamer, the observer, half-rooted in memory and sketchbook margins.
Down here, he was Amelia's son.
Built for the noise, raised in the heat. Stoic, focused, unshakable when the kitchen was on fire—sometimes literally. He knew which prep cook would forget to restock the dumpling wrappers, and when the fryer timer was off by four seconds. He remembered every regular's allergy, every substitution, and where the backup soy sauce was stashed when deliveries ran late.
He wasn't trying to impress anyone.
This was just how things ran. How they had to.
And for a little while, as tickets printed and steam rose and orders flew out the back door in neat brown bags, Ryunosuke forgot the quiet. Forgot the ache he sometimes carried. Forgot the shadow of a father whose name still lingered on customer lips and old paper menus.
Down here, there wasn't time for ghosts.
There was only the work. And Ryunosuke never let it fall apart.