bunny 39, 39.5
Yorokobi no Uta'd at karaoke today in Miyata's honor. 8D It's tragically hard to sing alone, though. You need a whole truckload of people in there yelling it with you or it's just not the same.
Anyway. :D Behold the really obvious point where I got BLAZINGLY STUCK, ahaha. Sometimes it's just easier to do away with prose. ♥ (My new resolution? Finish this before November, LOL. God help me. Today is the last day of the holidays and I only got two days at home the entire five, six weeks, how did that happen.)
The Second, T41, K17.
( 39: the messenger )
If it hadn't been some unearthly hour of the night, Fujigaya might have gone to find some of the younger members of the house to play with. As it was though, the little ones would have educational obligations come morning, and Fujigaya was dead bored.
He was good company, but not so much to himself.
Busying himself in the common room, he rearranged the cyber pair so that they both fit on the couch (albeit precariously) - Miyata on his back and knees still bent, shifted closer to the edge; Tamamori slotted in on his side between Miyata and the backrest, legs kind of folded up in the space under Miyata's knees.
That done, and with once again no space to sit, Fujigaya emptied the contents of his pockets onto the coffee table: his netgear, Tamamori's netgear, the rest of the painkillers from Totsuka's medkit, and the medkit itself. Takizawa's residence was quiet as a grave.
The Guard (bar Kawai) was with their boss and Hashimoto, presumably discussing the kid's future as a member of the House; Kawai was getting patched up with Yokoo; and... well, Fujigaya wasn't desperate enough to go looking for Senga and Nikaido at that particular point in time. Iida would be wrapping up reports and stuff. And Kitayama wasn't back yet.
Fujigaya wasn't worried per se, no, though he had started to wonder just a little what was taking the fatty so long. Because he wasn't back yet, and if Nikaido had returned first with Miyata, then it stood to reason that Kitayama had stood ground to divert some sort of force from their tail, and maybe he'd bitten off more than he could chew.
Well.
It took a lot to make Kitayama choke, Fujigaya knew, and Watchtower would be looking out for him, too, but there was no such thing as a sure bet. It was possible (however unlikely) that Kitayama was injured. Or dead. And here everyone else was, sleeping peacefully or just sitting there, safe in the house and very much out of harm's way.
Fujigaya twiddled his thumbs as he perched on the coffee table, trying not to sulk. Such depressing, ludicrous thoughts were exactly the reason he disliked being by himself for too long. Looking around for some kind of distraction, he picked up Tamamori's netgear and turned it over in his hands. It was an interesting piece of technology... kind of. Well... A little... Or not really.
Then Kawai stomped in from the hall like some angry inverse godsend, and Fujigaya grinned.
"What?" Kawai glowered, but continued without waiting for an answer, clearly having more important things to complain about than Fujigaya laughing at him inside his mind: "Watta is a bastard."
Fujigaya snerked and set Tamamori's netgear down. "That's not news?"
"He put a tracking chip in between the layers of cast!" Kawai said, waving his coldpacted wrist with feeling. "Said it would explode if I so much as passed the first perimeter!"
"Tracking chips don't explode," Fujigaya laughed. "He's just pulling your leg, Fumito."
Kawai glared. "Really?"
"Really," Fujigaya told him.
"Really?"
"...well," Fujigaya amended after a beat. He grinned. "You can never be totally sure if it's Watta. Best to play it safe?"
Kawai flopped back onto the floor, skull thudding in a way that couldn't be pleasant. "I don't wanna be grounded! He's not my dad!"
"Hurt yourself some more while doped up on painkillers why don't you," Fujigaya tsk'd, and stood up. But Kawai was saved from a stomachful of knee when the egress hatch slammed open, drawing their eyes, and in stumbled Kitayama trailing a daisy-chain of disembodied hook heads from his belt.
"...welcome back?" Fujigaya said.
Kitayama ignored them, weaving across the hall like a half-drunk. Two doors down, he punched in a keycode and disappeared.
"If you're-" looking for Tottsu, he's not in there, Kawai called out, before Fujigaya clapped a hand over his mouth.
"Kids are sleeping, idiot."
Kawai shook him off. "That was Tottsu's room."
"Obviously." Fujigaya frowned. Kitayama was probably planning to pass out for a good eighteen hours or something if he was hijacking Totsuka's bed. Kitayama's own room had no lock on it-theoretically this was for 'safety reasons', though in practice meant 'hey everybody! feel free to barge in whenever you feel like it'. And barge in they often did, usually in order to validate or sabotage various bets placed on the length of Kitayama's naps...
So he probably didn't want to be disturbed.
With that in mind, Fujigaya went to disturb him, taking Totsuka's medkit along. "I'll be back in a bit," he told Kawai.
Kawai just rolled his eyes. "Sure, 'a bit'. Say hi to your mom for me."
*
Letting himself into Totsuka's room, Fujigaya was entirely unsurprised to find Kitayama sprawled out on his front, still in all his clothes and footwear, the trail of hook heads marking a beeline from the door to the bed. Waving the lights up to full, Fujigaya tossed Totsuka's medkit at Kitayama's head, and waited two beats after Kitayama stirred to point out: "If you never take your skates off, colonies will start to cultivate between your toes."
Kitayama made no effort to move, barely grunting. "Shut up, Taipi."
"And Fumito called you my mom," Fujigaya grumbled, grabbing one of Kitayama's skates and working its laces loose himself, ignoring Kitayama's quiet hiss. "You need to ice your knees, too, and keep them raised, or you'll be useless for days. You're not above the laws of physics, as much as you might like to think you are."
Skating was hard on the body, he knew, especially the knees, especially when fighting, and most especially with that stupid dead-drop move he knew Kitayama liked to pull with the tractor. It was a stupid, costly move that Fujigaya couldn't like, despite its effectiveness.
It wasn't that he was worried per se, but good rivals were hard to find.
"You're sounding like Yokoo-san," Kitayama grumbled back, patting down the medkit and scratching vaguely at it with every apparent intention of never opening his eyes while the light was on. "Just because you don't like slow sex."
"I'm fine with slow sex," Fujigaya said. "I just don't want to be running your jobs into next week when I don't have to. How many of them were there?"
Kitayama made a noise of dissatisfaction, finally cracking his eyes open and sitting up properly as he conceded defeat to the medkit's pockets. "Just two squads."
"Just two squads," Fujigaya rolled his eyes, setting Kitayama's skates on the ground. All business, he undid Kitayama's belt with deft movements and tugged off his pants. "And you didn't call for backup because...?"
"Because you know as well as I do that neither of us needs backup for just two squads," Kitayama snorted, passing two cold compresses over. "You just hate missing out on any kind of action."
"It's not that," Fujigaya started, glaring, but Kitayama's face clearly said he wasn't going to be buying any excuses, and Fujigaya went back to work coldpacting without saying anything more. "I feel like a night shift orderly."
"Where's everybody else?" Kitayama chuckled, changing the subject.
"Everybody else is around," Fujigaya said shortly, smoothing the compresses down around Kitayama's knees and slapping a patch over the raw hook bite in his calf as well.
"Around...?" Kitayama prompted.
Fujigaya sighed, counting people off on his fingers: "Okay. Watta hauled Fumito up for busting his arm in our race, Tottsu and Gocchi took that Hashimoto kid to Tono, probably for initiation. Nikaido dumped M15 in the common room and is currently off with Ken-chan making merry, celebrating the fact you didn't get him killed."
"Mm," Kitayama said, "he did alright."
Fujigaya raised a brow. "Nikaido?"
"Yeah." Kitayama shrugged, tapping absently at the cast around his right knee. "He's got solid enough basic skills and wanted to know how I did some of the harder stuff. He probably has the potential learn it, eventually. Isn't so good with instruction, but figured out we were going to kill M15 of his own accord."
"Going to pretend to kill, you mean," Fujigaya corrected.
"Did I not say that?" Kitayama smiled.
"Tcht, whatever," Fujigaya growled. "Just tell me if you think he's a good match for Kento."
Kitayama rolled his eyes. "It's pretty obvious from the kind of time they spend together, I think, and what they spend that time doing."
"That's not the kind of match I was talking about, and you know it," Fujigaya frowned. "Out in the field, their skills complement and they can watch each others' backs, right?"
"You've totally decided it already, but yes," Kitayama said, flopping back down on his back. He tucked his hands behind his head. "Kento's skating ability will overtake Nikaido's with a few more lessons, too, so you should probably just start teaching them together."
"You just want to get out of schooling your own charge," Fujigaya said with reproach.
Kitayama grinned, unrepentant- "I'll take over and teach them the harder stuff when you get them up to par." -until his smile turned softer at the edges. "They'll make a better pair than we do by then, teamwork-wise. More like Iida and Yokoo-san were."
Fujigaya snorted. "They'd better. Kento could go solo one day, like us, maybe, but that Nikaido? Not a snowflake's chance in hell against anything over a half-squad without someone watching his back. He hasn't got enough spatial awareness to grid a doghouse."
Kitayama sniffed. "Well that'll be fine, won't it? Since they seem to do everything joined at the hip anyway."
"Jealous prick," Fujigaya said, and shoved Kitayama's coldpacted knees out of his lap.
"Never denied that, did I?" Kitayama said, shifting a little to get comfortable.
Darkly, Fujigaya leaned down over him, bracing himself so they were nearly nose to nose. "Maybe not," he said, "but what I don't get is why. Since you know who taught Ken-chan practically everything in his repertoire."
"...jealous prick," Kitayama chuckled, cracking an eye open to level Fujigaya with a steady look, amused.
"Never denied that either, did I?" Fujigaya snorted.
Kitayama grinned. "And here I thought this wasn't the kind of match you were talking about."
"Uh-huh," Fujigaya said. "But then you know I'm not talking about Kento any more, either."
The Second and T41. Again.
( 39.5: trickster's trade )
"Ooh~ Toshiyan," Kawai said, in possibly the girliest voice heard in the Capital since Goseki was three years old.
"What the hell are you doing?" Fujigaya asked, resolutely pretending not to be traumatized by what he'd heard as he re-entered the common room. But traumatized he was, and it took a fair bit to faze Fujigaya Taisuke.
"You took your time," Kawai said, with the tone of a citizen whose low expectations had been entirely met. "I'm halfway through this already."
"This what?" Fujigaya demanded, but then he rounded the couch and saw exactly what. The cyber pair was not as he'd left them. At all. Tamamori was now sprawled rather liberally across most of the couch, his long legs over Miyata's shoulders, and Miyata was draped in half over the armrest - with his face and hands in the front of Tamamori's pants.
"You did this?" Fujigaya said, half disbelieving. But only half, because it was Kawai after all, and Fujigaya supposed that at least the other'd had the decency to leave the cyber pair's clothing on. (Then again, he reasoned a further flipside, removing their clothing would've necessitated dealing with the fact that Tamamori still hadn't had a shower.)
"Wanna see what I've got so far?" Kawai waggled his eyebrows.
"...sure," Fujigaya said. "Though I'm pretty sure there's a law against making the mentally incapacitated pretend to rape each other. Just saying. Or if there's not, there should be."
Kawai waved his hand dismissively. "It's not rape if they'd consent if they were awake. Here-"
Choosing to ignore all that was wrong with that statement, Fujigaya instead glanced at the table then back to Kawai's hands. "You're using Tamamori's netgear?"
"Yup," Kawai grinned. "Have you taken a close look it yet? I mean, it's seriously advanced. Or would be if it weren't a skeleton version. My guess is somebody on the inside stole him a new prototype. The kid has contacts!"
"Yeah, we knew that already," Fujigaya said. "Just tell me how you managed to hack it. Your programming's been the only thing worse than your wit since forever, as far as I can recall."
"That's the beauty!" Kawai enthused, ignoring Fujigaya's insult entirely to give himself a virtual pat on the back instead. "The mounted camera's external. I only had to hotwire the receptors to draw power from my reader pads instead. And...!"
Pressing a couple of buttons and tweaking a small bunch of wires, Kawai clipped Tamamori's camera onto the side of his own netgear, piggy-backing it onto the miniature projector there. A device, Fujigaya was pretty sure, Kawai had been given so that he could deliver reports from in-scenario.
But instead, when Kawai turned to the blank wall and toggled a switch- "Tada!" -what played seemed more like a crude, stop-motion home video, each frame a few seconds long with Kawai's voiceover changing pitch depending on who was 'on screen'.
The picture jarred when Fujigaya smacked Kawai over the head.
"Ow! Hey, what was that for?" Kawai demanded. "You haven't even finished watching it!"
"And I don't need to," Fujigaya told him. "It's obvious where it goes from there. That has got to be the worst porn script I've ever seen."
Kawai sniggered. "And you've seen a lot of those, naturally."
"Naturally," Fujigaya said. "And anyway, what the hell? If you wanted to do something like this, you could've just pulled their avatar sprites and gotten Ii-chan to render it properly. With their actual sound bytes, too. Who even does stop-motion anymore?"
"It's a dying trade," Kawai said solemnly.
"Dead, you mean. Long, long dead."
"Yeah, whatever." Grinning, Kawai unclipping the recorder. "It's a shame. It's funnier this way 'cause it's real."
Fujigaya couldn't help quirking a smile of his own. "I'd say you shouldn't be so happy about actually violating people's physical space."
"Except for how I'd just ask you to help me a bit?" Kawai said, grinning right back. "Tamamori needs to sit up for the next frame, but it's kind of hard holding him in place and getting a good angle for the shot at the same time."
"Your artistic vision has no integrity that needs to be maintained," Fujigaya told him, in case Kawai was holding any delusions. But he went over to Tamamori anyway, propping the inert hacker up from behind. "Fine, but just so you know: I'm only helping because I want to be around when they wake up. To see how badly they beat you to a pulp."
"Flawed logic, since they'll beat you up too this way," Kawai winked. "My higher powers of deduction say you're only helping because Mitsu fell asleep on you in Tottsu's room, and this stop-motion porn is the only action you're going to see for the next three days."
Fujigaya scowled at that. "As if. That fatty has nothing to do with this."
"Uhhh-huh," Kawai gloated. "You just keep telling yourself that."
*
Work went much faster with the two of them on board. "Four is a nice number of hands," Kawai decided.
"So tell me again why Tamamori's on the bottom?" Fujigaya asked.
Kawai gave him an incredulous look. "I haven't told you in the first place, but isn't it obvious? Just look at him! He's such a total princess."
"...right." Fujigaya said. It was true that Tamamori was rather easy on the eyes, especially for a hacker, but still. "What about the height rule, though? Tamamori's taller than M15, and better built to boot."
Kawai snorted. "You know what our Guard thinks of the height rule."
"You mean what Goseki-sama thinks of the height rule," Fujigaya grinned.
"Yeah, yeah," Kawai rolled his eyes. "Whatever, either way it's totally irrelevant."
"Mmm~hm," Fujigaya said in a way that made Kawai mock-glare.
"Just shut up and sympathise when I'm trying to salvage my manliness, okay?"
Reaching out under Tamamori's arm, Fujigaya gave Kawai a pat on the shoulder. "Don't worry, Fumito," he said. "Everybody already knows you couldn't top a bowl of ice-cream."
"I'll kill you, Taipi," Kawai told him.
"But don't you want to finish this before they wake up?" Fujigaya tutted, making a show of checking a chrono he wasn't wearing. "Time's a-tickin'. It's already been over two hours since The Original Incident."
"You're just lucky that I'm heavily invested in the completion of this project!" Kawai declared, raising Tamamori's netgear recorder back up to his eye. "Move Tama-chan a little further down, would you? I want him completely bent in half..."
A SenNika outtake from this chapter:
Sideswipe, by mousapelli