I used to be able to write in years gone by.
Two BMU-inspired Tosei fics I entirely forgot I had because slumberwood takes up the majority of my creative time these days. Creating your own college baseball team is fun stuff, y'know?
Anyhow, these are very old (and probably horrible as a result, go figure). And to do the traditional fanfiction thing, I don't own any of these people; they are all the property of Higuchi Asa, who is probably one of the reasons I'm working on Slumberwood right now.
Riou didn't want to be a gymnast.
Granted, she was Brazilian, and he wanted her to do well, but Junta didn't have to say she was him. He glowered at the television from his seat on the couch as she finished up her floor exercise. He didn't want the makeup or the leotard or the flipping, even if the thought of having a bouncy floor was kind of cool. This was just plain stupid.
He noticed Junta and Kazuki whispering off to the side, but he paid them no heed because that was perfectly normal. Even hearing his name a few times didn't make him nervous - he was, after all, a popular topic of conversation between the two of them. But when they sat down on either side of him grinning evilly at one another, that was cause for alarm. "What?" he asked them.
"Nothing," Junta told him, then giggled. That meant it was something.
"We just thought you could use some cheering up," Kazuki explained. "You're always so dour."
Somehow the two of them had realized that it would be more annoying to Riou if they tried to make him laugh while he was pissed off at them than if they just kept him angry. It was clever, Riou acknowledged, but he wasn't going to let them get away with it. He crossed his arms and clamped his mouth shut, still glaring at the television straight ahead.
Kazuki smiled, knowing Riou's actions would be in vain. "Junta, take that side," he ordered, putting his hand on Riou's right shoulder and holding him down on the couch. Junta smirked and mirrored him on the left, and it suddenly made sense.
Riou immediately went into panic mode, his eyes darting nervously between the two of them. "This won't work!" he insisted. "I'm not Tajima!"
"What does not being Tajima have to do with it?" Junta was not Haruna, so the smirk had begun to dissolve into a small giggle fit. "We aren't aiming to make you squeak."
Riou's eyes were the size of saucers anyway. "But you're still going to - " His words were cut off as the attack was launched on his ribcage and he had to fight to hold still and keep a straight face.
He lasted about two seconds.
His first reaction was to try to get away, and he gave up on keeping perfectly motionless and put most of his attention into squirming out of the way although his muscles were quickly weakening due to his laughter. Wait, laughter...He knew exactly what to do - he instantly started gunning for Junta. He grabbed the pitcher around the waist and squeezed.
Junta shrieked and immediately let go of him, falling backwards onto the couch. "No! What're ya doing?"
Riou responded with a malicious grin and kept going - he knew very well that a giggling Junta was a helpless Junta. He felt a renewed surge of energy shooting through him as he watched the sinkerballer attempt to sit up only to collapse and fall limp on the couch again, unable to do anything but laugh like a five-year-old.
Junta managed to collect enough breath to yell, "Help me, Kazu-san!" once, but that was all he was able to squeak out.
Kazuki looked at Riou and nodded, pointing at his batterymate. "That's definitely more fun," he agreed, releasing Riou and moving his one hand to a specific spot between the pitcher's shoulder blades that he'd known about since Junta was in seventh grade and he was in eighth. "Here, let me show you something. Sorry, Junta, but you've got a cute laugh," he added, drawing circles on the spot with his index finger.
Junta wailed, caught completely off-guard. "YOU!" he yelled at Kazuki, making an incredibly futile attempt to glare at him. The fact that he was giggling hysterically made that nigh impossible, so his only retaliation had to be physical - after a lot of struggling around, he broke free from Riou, who was merely watching the action and halfheartedly restraining him at this point, and found his batterymate's kneecaps, which he squeezed gently.
Kazuki gasped and stared at him, his mouth agape. "Junta..."
Junta smiled to himself. "Did you think I didn't know?" he asked, then went back to goosing his batterymate's knees.
The catcher held himself remarkably still, but it was clear that this was not going to last. "I didn't, no, but I didn't think you'd stoop to it!" His voice was starting to choke up.
"Well, you pulled out that one from when we were in middle school," Junta pointed out.
"I couldn't resist doing thaaaaah, hey!" Kazuki's voice rose in pitch as the pitcher snuck a finger behind his right knee. "You stop that right now!"
Junta was having too much fun to stop. "Nuh-uh."
"No, I mean it! You can't!"
"Yes I can!"
"No!" Kazuki gave in and allowed himself to laugh in the hope that letting Junta win this one would get him to stop.
Much to his surprise, it actually worked. Junta let him go and smiled at him. "There, see?"
"Junta, that wasn't necessary."
"Nope, totally was!"
Kazuki gave him a thin smile. "You'll get it later," he promised, which made Junta sputter and turn a lovely shade of crimson. "Now, I believe we've got some forgotten business to attend to, don't we?" He motioned in the general direction of the third individual in the room.
Riou had been lounging on the couch lazily watching them, thrilled that he had temporarily escaped. They never failed to become so absorbed in each other that the rest of the world simply vanished. Except this time they'd remembered that he existed. Oh, shit. He stiffened up and sat straight up on the couch, his back perfectly aligned with the furniture.
Junta was grinning at him now. It was that teasing grin that he was all too familiar with, too, not the ‘I’m genuinely happy’ one. He was in for it. “Riou, I’m so sorry!”
The backup catcher pretended not to care, although his body language gave him away. “About what?”
“We ignored you. We apologize.” Kazuki looked rather less evil, but Riou knew he couldn’t trust him, either. He began shifting his eyes between the two of them, but he was cornered again and he knew he wasn’t getting away as quickly this time.
And soon the whole ordeal began anew and he was curled up in the corner of the couch desperately swatting away four hands until his wrists were caught and he was resigned to simply laugh. And laugh he did, even squealing when Junta hit particularly bad spots (Kazuki had his wrists, which was what made escape so difficult). They let him go before long, though, knowing that prolonging things would put them on the Yamanoi Keisuke level, which was certainly not where they wanted to be. At all.
Riou shut his eyes and remained in the corner. He knew he couldn’t let them get away with it completely, and yet they were well aware that he wasn’t afraid to retaliate and would probably be on their guard. His only chance to pull this off, he realized as he wiped tears of laughter from his face, was to bring them both down at the same time. He opened his eyes and watched them sitting together on the couch, staring at the Olympics on the television. In one last ditch effort he yelled and flung himself at both of them.
Chaos ensued as all three of them grappled for position, and the revenge attempt degenerated into a complete free-for-all. Kazuki won the grappling part handily and at one point had the other two down, one squirming and giggling under each of his large hands. They eventually managed to work their way out of it and dragged him back in, Junta going for the knees and Riou physically pulling him down. This treachery meant, naturally, that Kazuki immediately had to go for that location between his batterymate’s shoulder blades, which reduced Junta to incredibly contagious hysterics instantly. Riou couldn’t resist joining in, and for a short while the catchers double-teamed the pitcher until Junta was at the point where he was laughing so hard that no sound was coming out. They let him go then, and after he caught his breath he made an attempt to get both of them at the same time, but failed miserably and collapsed harmlessly onto Kazuki, which set him off again. He was infectious enough to get the other two laughing again, and they remained there for some time in a giggling heap.
The Olympics carried on forgotten on the television, the Brazilian gymnast who had started the whole affair long out of the top three in floor exercise. The gymnastics gave way to swimming, the swimming to Noggin, and the three of them refused to move except to raise the remote control to change the channel. They were comfortable that way.
As Noggin was switched to USA, which was airing a sport that was not Olympic Powerwalking, they began to nod off. Riou fell asleep first, curling up next to the other two on the couch. Kazuki followed him around 3:30, the remote control sliding out of his hand and clattering onto the floor. Junta stared mindlessly at the television for maybe a minute more, then drifted off in his batterymate’s arms. It wasn’t like Noggin was going to show Peppa Pig, anyway, so there was no reason to change the channel back and stay awake.
Conking out on the couch as a family was better, anyway.
Speaking of which, Junta has currently dubbed all but six of the episodes of season one of Peppa Pig on Noggin/Nick Jr. Six of them continue to evade him and his digital camera.
“So it’s a dialogue.”
“Yes. An English dialogue.”
“A dialogue in English.” Shingo blinked and stared at the paper with the instructions on it.
“…yes.” Kazuki nodded. “To be done in groups of two, due next Friday. Let’s start it now so it’s out of the way.”
Shingo stared at him incredulously. “But that’s not for a week and a half!”
“So? I don’t want to worry about it in a week and a half. Trust me, this is easier.” Kazuki leaned back on his bench in the practice field’s dugout. “We can start it now and finish it over the weekend.”
The second baseman understood. “Sure, let’s try it.”
They got nearly nothing done at practice, as expected, but that Saturday night they found themselves in Kazuki’s room with their English books cracked open and their dictionaries out. Kazuki also had a pitcher leaning on his shoulder since Junta was omnipresent at his side whenever they were not in class and he was required to keep the second-year he had “married” around at all possible times.
Of course, Junta wasn’t going to do much for his concentration. But he was going to try.
“Okay, so our scenario is about two people on vacation in a hotel,” he read off the sheet of paper. “Everyone in the class has to do some variation on that.”
Shingo perked up. “Can we make it a love hotel?”
Kazuki shook his head as Junta snorted with amusement beside him. “Somehow, I doubt we could get away with that.”
“I know, I’m just tossing it out there.” Shingo crossed off ‘love hotel’ on what appeared to be a list of ideas for the dialogue but which was dubiously entitled ‘Let’s Write the Smuttiest Dialogue in Class 3-6!’ “Let’s be serious for a minute and create our characters.”
“Sure.” Kazuki looked at the sheet again. “Okay, so it says one of the characters has to essentially be an idiot, to summarize,” he read.
“Name that one Riou!” Junta interjected, grinning deviously. “It’d be fitting!”
Shingo pointed at him. “Seconding that.”
Kazuki thought about it for a moment, then decided that the allure of making fun of Riou was too strong and named one of the characters ‘Nakazawa.’ “And for a dash of realism, let’s make him have trouble reading kanji,” he added as Shingo gave him a thumbs-up and Junta giggled into his shoulder.
“I like it,” Shingo told him. “So now he can misread his map and only recognize the katakana for ‘hotel’ and end up in a love hotel!”
“Er…I really don’t think we could get away with that. Not in Hayashi-sensei’s class - we’d be killed,” Kazuki reiterated as to his right Junta sank down to the floor helpless with laughter. “I have a reputation to uphold, anyway.”
“So do I!” Shingo retorted, crossing his arms. “I have to retain my title as class pervert!”
“Here, we’ll compromise. We’ll have Riou come in and say, ‘Sorry I’m late, but I misread the map and almost went to a love hotel,” Kazuki concluded.
Shingo sat back, content for the moment. “Works for me!” He looked around. “Where’s Junta?”
Kazuki pointed in the general direction of his batterymate. “Down.”
“Ah.”
Junta placed his hands on the table and pulled himself up. “Hey.”
Kazuki smiled at him. “Good evening, Junta.” He picked up his pen and glanced the assignment over. “We need to put them in a real hotel now. Let’s see…the other character could then say, ‘You’re an idiot.’ And Riou could say, ‘But I’m here, aren’t I?’”
“Wait, are there any grammatical structures we need to use?” Shingo asked, pulling the assignment towards himself across the table.
“There are. We have a few things to put in there - future tense and the like.” Kazuki took a long look at their current script. “So far, we only have this: Riou walks in and says, ‘Good afternoon, person,’ and the other person asks, ‘Where were you?’ and Riou says, ‘Sorry I’m late, but I misread the map and almost went to a love hotel.’ That’s it - we have past tense, but no future tense.”
Shingo blinked, confused. “Good afternoon, person?”
“We haven’t named that character yet.”
“Mashiba,” Shingo suggested with a perfectly straight face.
Kazuki wrote it down. “Okay. And we just added Jin’s ‘You’re an idiot’ line and had Riou say, ‘But I’m here, aren’t I?’ That’s present tense.”
“Hayashi-sensei wants us to do all three - past, present and future,” Shingo read from the assignment. “And commands, and an invitation to do something, and any big English words we like, presuming we use them correctly.”
“How about Jin asks Riou about lunch?” Kazuki started writing again.
“Yeah, and when he and Riou can’t agree Jin just orders Riou to pick something - and that takes care of the command!” Shingo appeared somewhat pleased with himself for actually contributing.
“But now we need food,” Kazuki replied. “Any suggestions?”
“Is there any food that sounds really funny that we could use?” Shingo gazed at the ceiling, his mind apparently blank.
The room fell silent for a short while - until Junta pounded the table with his fist, blurted out, “Kielbasa!” and grinned proudly at the other two, who stared at him until he broke down giggling over it.
Kazuki looked at Shingo. “You got anything else?”
Shingo shook his head.
“Then kielbasa it is,” the catcher concluded, penning in the line ‘I like kielbasa’ for the Riou character. “Then we’ll have Jin invite Riou to a restaurant with kielbasa - shit, I almost wrote ‘kielbasa restaurant.’” He crossed it out and rewrote ‘restaurant with kielbasa on the menu’ as Shingo snorted and Junta got the giggles again.
“Do those even exist?” Shingo asked, cocking his head slightly to the right.
“We could open one!” Junta declared, pointing at the ceiling semi-dramatically. “And someday, people’ll look at the restaurant guides in the culinary magazines and see, ‘Tosei Kielbasa: Voted best Kielbasa Restaurant in Saitama Prefecture.’”
Kazuki was clearly beginning to grow tired, because he actually laughed a little. “Maybe later.” He ruffled Junta’s hair, and the pitcher smiled and affectionately leaned on him once more. “Junta, your logic never makes sense.”
“I know,” Junta mumbled into his batterymate’s shoulder.
“So…” Shingo drawled, attempting to get things back on track, “why don’t we have them go up to the room first? Not even Riou’s stupid enough to bring a suitcase to a restaurant.”
“That’s good,” Kazuki answered him, adding a few corresponding lines to get Riou and Jin in the elevator. “And then they can talk about elevators, too.”
“How about one of ‘em gets sick in elevators?” Shingo leaned on the table, propping himself up with his elbows. “That’d put a little life in that scene…”
“Sure. Here, we’ll have Jin say, ‘I love elevators, don’t you?’ And then Riou can get sick and Jin can just sort of inch away from him.” Kazuki wrote in two or three more snatches of dialogue for the characters.
“Well, shit.”
“Hm?”
Shingo sighed. “Now every time I see Jin I’m going to think, ‘I love elevators.’”
“And?” Kazuki was rereading the assignment sheet again.
“And I’ll laugh.” The second baseman stuck his pen behind his ear. “And Jin won’t know why.”
“I do that to people all the time,” Junta reminded him, sitting up. “It’s fun.”
“That’s true, you do,” Shingo agreed with him. “But I don’t, usually.”
“You should learn, then.” Junta peered over at the dialogue. “Think they could get into a fight in the hotel room?”
“That’d give our story some conflict, so yes.” Kazuki tapped his pen on the table until he noticed the other two getting annoyed. “Riou can start by complaining about the size of the room…”
“Right, and then Jin can say it’s bigger than their last hotel room - ooh, that sounds wrong!” Shingo added. “I like it!”
“Okay, fine, we’ll leave that one in, too.” Kazuki figured that following the path of least resistance was the best idea, and Shingo’s delighted grin proved him right. “And Jin can call Riou selfish…”
“And Riou can say he isn’t…”
“And Jin can insist he is…”
“And Riou can keep insisting he isn’t…”
Junta decided that now was the time to make another contribution. “…and Jin can throw Riou out the window,” he said casually.
The other two looked at him momentarily, then burst out laughing. “Are you serious? Jin’s half Riou’s size! I love it!” Shingo clapped the pitcher on the back. “Junta, you’re a genius!”
“There’s…there’s an…an English word for that…I think!” Kazuki was having considerable difficulty talking through his own laughter. “Dictionary!”
Junta passed him two dictionaries, one of the Japanese-English dictionaries on the table and an English-only dictionary. “Here you go!”
Kazuki recognized them both as his own dictionaries and tried to catch his breath. “I underlined it a long time ago,” he explained as he leafed through the pages, laughter still present in his voice. “Yes! Defenestration!” he got out before losing it again.
Junta and Shingo blinked. “Defenestration?” they asked in unison.
Kazuki attempted to read the definition from the English dictionary that he also had in his possession. “De…de…defenestration: the act of throwing something or someone out a window,” he managed, then resorted to leaning on the tabletop to support himself.
Junta shot Shingo a sly look. “Remember that word. We can use it.”
Shingo understood. “We can. We really can.”
Junta nudged Kazuki with his elbow. “Hey, want to defenestrate Riou?” he said in English, and he was rewarded by a little role reversal when his batterymate started giggling like a five-year-old and nearly fell on him. He grinned broadly at Shingo. “I like this.”
Shingo raised an eyebrow. “I’d imagine you would.”
Junta was caught off-guard and turned a lovely shade of red. “Hey!” he snapped as Shingo started laughing at the expression on his face.
“Sorry, but you just set yourself up for it!” the second baseman remarked, giving him a wide grin. “I had to!”
Junta tried to ignore him by looking away, but caught sight of Kazuki wiping tears of laughter from his eyes and got butterflies all over again. He decided not to push the issue and let it drop. “Gonna add that word to the dialogue?” he asked instead.
Shingo nodded. “I think we have to.”
Kazuki sat up like a shot and shook his head, his eyes wide. “No,” he whispered.
It was too late, for Shingo had already made Jin defenestrate Riou’s suitcase and was now adding a line in which Jin threatened to defenestrate Riou, as well. “You cannot stop me this time, Ultraman! The device is already complete! Prepare to die!”
He didn’t realize that over the previous winter break, Junta and Kazuki had caught an episode of Ultraman at three in the morning and that the show had become yet another one of their countless inside jokes as a result. He was therefore confused when his comment set the battery off giggling to themselves yet again, and he decided not to investigate, instead preferring to sneak the word ‘defenestrate’ into the dialogue a second time by having Jin go through with his threat and toss Riou out the window into a dumpster. The Riou character desperately shrieked, “NOOOOOO! THE KIELBASA!” as he fell for some general humor, and after a few quick concluding lines the piece was complete. Shingo put his pen down and pretended to look innocent as Junta and Kazuki recovered themselves. “You okay?”
“Yep!” Junta made an attempt to sit up, but he was still a little wobbly. Had he tried to stand, he would have fallen back over.
“You added lines,” Kazuki noted, looking at the dialogue.
“I finished it,” Shingo replied. “What do you think?”
Kazuki read it over and started choking with laughter over the new lines. “You put it in there again! Oh, God, you!”
“I think you should play Jin so you can pick me up and pretend to throw me out the window,” Shingo continued. “Besides, I want to say ‘love hotel.’”
“But I’d have to say ‘defenestrate!’” Kazuki wasn’t walking into that one. “I just can’t!”
“You’ve got a week!” Shingo shot back. “You can learn to say it without laughing in a week!”
“Maybe not,” Junta piped up. “He might’ve been triggered on it.”
“Triggered?” Shingo cocked his head, puzzled. “Whaddaya mean by ‘triggered?’”
“Trigger-worded. It’s when you think something’s really funny and that sort of gets, like, embedded in your brain and every time you hear about it again, even out of context, you laugh automatically. It happens to me a lot.” Junta shifted his gaze from Shingo to his ‘husband.’ “We’d have to wait until he wasn’t thinking about it to test it, though.”
“‘Test it?’ Great, now it’s going to be at the back of my mind for the rest of the night!” Kazuki sighed. “I’m stuck.”
“We finished the dialogue, didn’t we? Why don’t we take a break from it?” Shingo suggested, and the other two took him up on it and before long they all were watching Kinniku Banzuke on the television.
Neko de Drive was clearly the highlight of the evening’s programming, and they instantly began to create teams of two out of people they knew who might just do it successfully - although they admittedly had more fun picking people who wouldn’t. This kept them entertained for far longer than it should have, and they didn’t notice the first time there was a knock on the door as a result. They heard it, along with cries for big brother, the second time, however; Kazuki got up and opened the door to see his younger sister waiting for him. “Yes?”
“Ooh, you have to help me! This brat,” she explained, pulling the youngest male Kawai into the doorway with her, “threw my stuff outside!”
The little boy grinned proudly. “Out the window,” he said.
Shit. “J-just a minute!” Kazuki shut the door again and tried to fight the inevitable laughter, but it broke through and he slid down the wall onto the floor, completely done in.
Junta was practically family at this point, so he went and reopened the door. “Hey. Don’t mind your brother - it’s a long story. He’s not making fun of you.”
“Ah, Takase-san!” the sister exclaimed. “How are you? How’s your brother?”
“He’s okay. How are you?” Junta smiled at the girl he referred to as his sister-in-law.
“Good,” she said, “‘cept my stuff’s outside. Can you get big brother to take care of this thing?” She pointed at the younger of her two siblings.
“Hey!” he shouted at her. “I’m not a thing! People are not things!”
Junta bit his lip so as to not laugh, and against all odds he actually succeeded for a change. “You can just go outside and get it, can’t you?”
“Yes, but…he’ll just throw it out the window again.” The girl sighed, then cocked her head in confusion as a new bout of hilarity audibly overtook her older brother in the other room.
Junta grinned sheepishly at her. “He’s fine!” he said quickly, stepping completely outside and shutting the door. “Here, I’ll watch your brother while you get your stuff.”
“Thank you! You’re great, really!” The little girl ran downstairs as Junta began to babysit.
“Takase-san, do you watch Doraemon?” the littler Kawai asked inquisitively, his eyes wide.
Junta balked. He did watch shows geared towards a younger audience, but his only goal was to make fun of these shows and he never took them too seriously. “Sometimes. Why?”
“‘Cause it’s awesome! Ooh, y’know what else is awesome?”
The pitcher shook his head. “What?”
“Pantsu Pankuro!” The young boy jumped into the air. “I’m a little big for it now, but it’s funny.”
The thought of the anthropomorphic toilet on the show was all it took to bring Junta down, and soon he was leaning against the door and giggling immaturely. This fascinated the young Kawai, who repeatedly prodded at him, speaking his name over and over. In the meantime, his sister snuck back into her own room and locked the door, and upon realizing this he screamed and ran off to bang on her door with his tiny fists.
Shingo decided it was time to find Junta, and he opened the door to Kazuki’s room, which Junta promptly fell through backwards, hitting the floor. “Oof!”
“Well, shit. You okay?” Shingo peered down at the pitcher. “That looked painful.”
Junta did not attempt to sit up. “Fine. Completely fine.”
Kazuki had snapped out of it and was hovering over Junta, concern wrought on his face. “Are you sure you’re fine?”
Junta let out a small laugh, and Kazuki was taken back to the day they met, another occasion on which Junta had managed to fall over himself. “You’re fine,” he murmured. “You’re fine. Now…why’d you put my siblings up to that?”
“I didn’t,” Junta replied, sitting up. “Her stuff was actually outside. I saw her go and get it.”
Kazuki looked him in the eyes. “…you’re not lying. I can tell.”
“Nope.” Junta shook his head.
“Shingo?”
Shingo raised an eyebrow. “Did I leave?”
“Good point.” The catcher exhaled loudly. “So it was likely completely random, then. Wow.”
“Mmhmm.” Junta inched closer to him. “It made you look cute,” he whispered when he was much nearer.
Kazuki stared at the floor, presumably to hide a blush. “Thank you.”
“I’m saying that word all the time now,” Junta went on, giving his batterymate a smug look.
“You…don’t have to do that.”
“Yes I do.”
Shingo whistled at them in a rather ribald manner, and they both glared at him, their faces flushed. “You two’re smoldering!” he commented.
He was promptly hit in the face by a pillow and bowled over. “You should’ve been able to catch that,” Kazuki informed him. “We have to be able to get stealing runners out at second.”
Shingo sat up and tossed the pillow aside. “Psssh.” He yawned. “What time is it?”
Kazuki consulted his watch. “11:30.”
“Seriously? No wonder I’m exhausted.”
“Do you just want to stay here tonight? Because that can be arranged,” Kazuki offered.
Junta shrugged. “I do it all the time.”
“I’m sure you do,” Shingo remarked, causing one of Junta’s errant locks of hair to stick straight up like a radio antenna. Turning to Kazuki, he added, “Sure, I’ll take you up on it,” as if nothing had happened.
At about 11:45, his older brother, who was visiting for the weekend, arrived with his stuff, which he had requested by telephone, and to the battery’s amazement he was asleep by 12:30.
Junta blinked, watching him. “I’m confused. Isn’t he normally awake later?”
“He is. We just wore him out.” Kazuki sat down on his bed and patted it, beckoning his pitcher over. “C’mere, let’s see if Ultraman is on again tonight.”
“Okay!” Junta jumped onto the bed and curled up next to him. “I hope he throws somebody out the window,” he went on.
Kazuki actually giggled into his shoulder. “Stop it.”
Junta grinned wickedly at him. “Never,”
Kazuki impersonated Shingo’s voice. “Well, shit.”
That took both of them down, and they spent the rest of the night watching horrible infomercials and coming dangerously close to waking Shingo up by laughing hysterically at them. The later it got, the funnier the things on television seemed, after all, even if they really weren’t.
And even if nobody went flying out the window.
Those are so beyond old it's frightening. I can vaguely remember writing them, but it was back when the Sox were playing the Rays in the ALCS (after a certain shortstop's walkoff against the Angels), which means it was a very long time ago. So...yeah. That's that!