bunnyfic 35
I totally forgot about Miyata's strand of the story, which you know. Fails. So if you like, go back and read the start of the previous part (34). ★ RETCON! Miyata's block was the only thing I added. ♥
More generally, I also went back and edited the whole fic again, retconning a lot of minor details. xD But they're minor, so whatever. Things like Senga's backstory, calling the general language Global, and standardising terms like FD. Why is this so time consuming? I also removed about a hundred commas lol, DEAR GOD MY SUBCONSCIOUS IS A COMMA WHORE.
The Second Guard and T41. M15 and Watchtower.
( 35: in your shoes )
"No!" Kawai shouted as Fujigaya whooped and spun to a stop outside their designated target -- the building where Tamamori was currently passed out, according to Iida. "Damn you."
"Win!" Fujigaya gloated. "This isn't even my homeground and I still beat you."
"Shut up," Kawai laughed. "It's been like ten years since I've been through this place, and if I hadn't messed up the stairs I would've won by heaps."
"Are you listening to yourself, Fumito? You stacked."
"Hey, just because my feet aren't stuck to my board!" Kawai countered. "Watch me laugh you to the grave the day you manage a faceplant on skates."
"Yeah, yeah~ but don't hold your breath waiting, because it isn't going to happen anytime this era." Fujigaya grinned as he kicked the power out of his footwear. Both feet firmly on the ground again, he paused -- and narrowed his eyes critically as he watched Kawai dismount his hoverboard with a little less expansive vigour than usual.
Kawai noticed him looking, and raised his chin. "What?" He kicked his board up. Into his non-dominant hand.
"You hurt yourself," Fujigaya said.
"My ego from losing?" Kawai snerked. "Sure, slightly bruised."
"No, you hurt yourself," Fujigaya repeated, taking Kawai's right elbow and pulling his sleeve up.
"I stacked," Kawai scoffed. "Battle scars, so whatever."
"Fumito, this is so not 'whatever'," Fujigaya reprimanded, inspecting the damage. Peeking out from beneath his arm wraps, Kawai's palm was grazed red raw and the beginnings of some stellar bruising snaked down from his wrist. He'd lost half a nail, and flecks of blood patterned the underside of his sleeve. "That's disgusting. Go see Watta when we get back. And it better not be fractured or anything."
"Can't have an injury detracting from your victory, can we?" Kawai smirked, brushing Fujigaya off and shaking his sleeve back down. His shoulder cracked. Fujigaya raised a pointed brow. Kawai grinned and shrugged -- it cracked again, and he snickered at the appalled look on Fujigaya's face. "Arm's fine, Taipi."
"Sure it is relatively," Fujigaya said, rolling his eyes in a melodramatic huff. "Since the bigger problem is clearly with your head."
"As if this kind of thing hasn't happened before a million times," Kawai snerked. "We're the Guard. Where'd Ii-chan say Tamamori was again?"
"You're the Guard, meaning you're all half suicidal," Fujigaya said. "You can't let Tono see it, you know."
"Like hell," Kawai declared. "You just want me out of the way so you can make him laugh all by yourself."
"Well, maybe that a little too," Fujigaya admitted. "You and Tottsu are stiff competition. But if he thinks you nearly died or something, he'll--"
"Forbid us from racing, I know, I know," Kawai grinned. "Just shut up and tell me where you'd have sex if the whole first floor of a building was free game for it."
Fujigaya did shut his mouth then. For a microsecond. "Walls are good," he said. "For privacy and intimacy, or--"
"Throwing someone up against?"
"That'd have to be 'shoving down' in your case, I think," Fujiagaya corrected mildly, "unless you're talking Gocchi or Mitsu."
"I'll break your kneecaps, Taisuke," Kawai said, just as conversational.
"You could reach them at least," Fujigaya told him. "But you're currently missing an arm."
Kawai wondered aloud at that. "How much of a handicap do you really think that'd give me?"
Fujigaya ignored the probable 'not much' answer to that question, side-stepping the issue entirely: "Well, you asked the wrong question anyway." Counting off the buildings to make sure they had the right one, eighth on the block, he lead Kawai around to its back door. "What we need answered is something more like, 'Where would you cyber if you were a sad hacker, mournfully deprived of real physical attention?'"
"Right," Kawai conceded. "Well, I'd crawl into a closet or something."
"Okay, so we check the most likely hiding places first, before doing a general sweep of--" Fujigaya stopped short as the door swung open with just a gentle push, and he blinked at the sight of Tamamori in plain view, slumped gracefully over the top of a washing machine as if he'd just decided to take a nap.
"Well, okay," Fujigaya said, "nevermind then."
Kawai set his hoverboard down by the door and walked over to Tamamori's prone form curiously. He prodded it. "Are you sure we've got the right guy?" he asked, appropriating Tamamori's netgear. "He's kind of too pretty for what I was thinking. Hackers are usually a bit more fug."
"I'm telling Yokoo-san on you," Fujigaya said, in affected childish tones.
"As if," Kawai scoffed, passing the netgear over. "Watta's best face has nothing on this princess and you know it."
Fujigaya inspected the tech he'd been handed, turning it over a couple of times. "Hm. Custom mods, speakers, serial number acid-rubbed. Fairly screams heavy-duty hacker to me. Plus," he grinned. "He's out cold. In a laundry. On a washing machine."
"Which'd be the ideal place to cyber, right?" Kawai cackled. "Private. Warm. Biggest vibrator on the planet."
"Your mind is a terrible place, Kawai Fumito," Fujigaya snickered, and folded Tamamori's netgear into a pocket.
Kawai just grinned. "As if you weren't thinking worse."
Fujigaya neither acknowledged nor denied that. "We should go now that we've got him," he said instead. "The chasers are going to get here soon whether we left them in the dust or not."
"Yeah," Kawai agreed. "We should go."
Fujigaya looked at him.
Kawai looked right back, still grinning. Then raised his right hand and stiffly waggled bruised fingers.
"What," Fujigaya said. "No. That is not fair, you bastard."
"Sorry I can't jan-ken for this," Kawai crowed.
"But I don't want to carry him," Fujigaya protested, gesturing sharply. "You can smell the mess he's made of his pants!"
"Mm~hm, smells like sex. ♥"
"You stacked on purpose!"
"Kawai Fumito does not throw matches," Kawai grinned smugly. "I'd never." Heading back to the laundry door, he kicked his hoverboard back into gear and smirked over his shoulder. "Anyway, we should go. Now that we've got him."
"You owe me so much for this," Fujigaya groused, leaning over to heave Tamamori across his shoulders like he would a dead animal. Thus burdened, he plodded over.
"Hey, you were the one who said he didn't want me along for the job in the first place." Taking a leaf from Goseki's book, Kawai held the door open like a gentleman.
Fujigaya shuffled through sideways, mindful of Tamamori's head at the doorjamb, grumbling every step of the way. "Yeah, well if you weren't here, I wouldn't give a rat's ass because nobody'd be telling Watta and Gocchi about this later and laughing -- or I'd be the one telling them, and bitching about it instead."
"Sucks to be you, doesn't it?" Kawai snickered. "You know anyway, if I carried him his feet'd probably drag on the floor. Best to pick up someone your own size and all that~♪"
"Fumito," Fujigaya growled, "just shut up before I squash you with him."
*
"...you really have him then?" Miyata asked. "For real? I mean, Tama-chan?"
He wanted to believe what Yokoo and Iida said was true. Relatively powerless as he was, Miyata was tired of fighting so hard and futilely against forces so much more salient. But at the same time, he didn't want to give up just like that. He'd fought hard (sort of! relatively speaking...), and just because an ally with bigger guns had suddenly shown up behind him didn't mean he should stop fighting. If anything, it should give him reason to fight harder, right? But how?
Yokoo leaned forward, elbows resting on his knees and fingers steepled. "Let me put it this way," he said. "I have a homing missile that goes by the name of Fujigaya Taisuke. I set the target. I launch the missile. It's as good as guaranteed."
Technically, there was a chaser on Tamamori that would have to be dealt with, but details like that were almost inconsequential where Fujigaya was involved. Of course, were Iida present he would tell Yokoo that it wasn't a sure sure bet -- indeed, Yokoo could all but hear the other's calm observation in the back of his mind: take nothing for granted. But Iida wasn't present, so assumptions were fine for now: "We have him."
"Oh," Miyata said softly, and looked around his sealed cottage. "So... then I'm just stuck here?"
Yokoo shrugged with blunt eloquence. "Yeah. There's nothing you can do anyway."
"...oh," Miyata said.
"It's for the better," Yokoo assured him. "Especially if your idea of playing superhero was going to Government Central and hacking them from inside their own premises..."
Miyata ducked his head sheepishly. "I didn't really have that many options," he admitted.
"You didn't," Yokoo agreed. "You're pretty useless, but that's alright so long as you can make Tamamori stay with us. The arrangement will be valuable enough in the long run -- if not for his skills aiding us, then for the fact that we won't have to deal with... issues like this, however many times they would have occurred again in the future."
Though not half as liable to blush as Tamamori, Miyata still felt the tips of his ears burning. "Sorry," he said. "If I'd known..."
"You would have done it anyway," Yokoo said flatly.
"Would I?" Miyata said, brows raised. If he'd known, he would have known he'd be jeopardising Tamamori's safety--
"Without a doubt you would, if Tamamori asked you," Yokoo told him.
"Ahh..." Miyata said, attempting to smile. "Well that's true, isn't it. What a troublesome trait to have."
"Easily manipulated," Yokoo shrugged. "But sometimes that's handy--" He blinked the next second though, finding himself suddenly alone in Miyata's cottage. Miyata had disappeared.
Yokoo scratched his head a moment, wondering. How? The other was a passable hacker when he wasn't playing dead fish in the government's employ, but that didn't mean he was by any means advanced enough to have broken through the script Watchtower had cornered him with.
An FD, perhaps? Were Kitayama and Nikaido having trouble with security...? Yokoo frowned.
Calmly putting his impassive face back on against surveillance, Yokoo toggled Iida's shutters on the cottage's security script and unplugged the chimney, once again letting light in through the windows and doors. He didn't bother to stand from the couch, transferring his consciousness to the whiteroom from there as his avatar dissolved into an untraceable heat haze from the point of view of anyone watching.
To them, it would look like Miyata been there one moment, been hacked, then inexplicably vanished.
The fact that he had, well. That hadn't exactly gone according to plan, but it was hopefully no big deal. Yokoo just needed to find out why.
jan ken (pon): rock paper scissors. ♥
1- i should disclaim that a lot of the way this entire thing is progressing is entirely mousi+snowqueen's fault. 8D because really, i wouldn't have thought it up this way. at all. xD
More generally, I also went back and edited the whole fic again, retconning a lot of minor details. xD But they're minor, so whatever. Things like Senga's backstory, calling the general language Global, and standardising terms like FD. Why is this so time consuming? I also removed about a hundred commas lol, DEAR GOD MY SUBCONSCIOUS IS A COMMA WHORE.
The Second Guard and T41. M15 and Watchtower.
( 35: in your shoes )
"No!" Kawai shouted as Fujigaya whooped and spun to a stop outside their designated target -- the building where Tamamori was currently passed out, according to Iida. "Damn you."
"Win!" Fujigaya gloated. "This isn't even my homeground and I still beat you."
"Shut up," Kawai laughed. "It's been like ten years since I've been through this place, and if I hadn't messed up the stairs I would've won by heaps."
"Are you listening to yourself, Fumito? You stacked."
"Hey, just because my feet aren't stuck to my board!" Kawai countered. "Watch me laugh you to the grave the day you manage a faceplant on skates."
"Yeah, yeah~ but don't hold your breath waiting, because it isn't going to happen anytime this era." Fujigaya grinned as he kicked the power out of his footwear. Both feet firmly on the ground again, he paused -- and narrowed his eyes critically as he watched Kawai dismount his hoverboard with a little less expansive vigour than usual.
Kawai noticed him looking, and raised his chin. "What?" He kicked his board up. Into his non-dominant hand.
"You hurt yourself," Fujigaya said.
"My ego from losing?" Kawai snerked. "Sure, slightly bruised."
"No, you hurt yourself," Fujigaya repeated, taking Kawai's right elbow and pulling his sleeve up.
"I stacked," Kawai scoffed. "Battle scars, so whatever."
"Fumito, this is so not 'whatever'," Fujigaya reprimanded, inspecting the damage. Peeking out from beneath his arm wraps, Kawai's palm was grazed red raw and the beginnings of some stellar bruising snaked down from his wrist. He'd lost half a nail, and flecks of blood patterned the underside of his sleeve. "That's disgusting. Go see Watta when we get back. And it better not be fractured or anything."
"Can't have an injury detracting from your victory, can we?" Kawai smirked, brushing Fujigaya off and shaking his sleeve back down. His shoulder cracked. Fujigaya raised a pointed brow. Kawai grinned and shrugged -- it cracked again, and he snickered at the appalled look on Fujigaya's face. "Arm's fine, Taipi."
"Sure it is relatively," Fujigaya said, rolling his eyes in a melodramatic huff. "Since the bigger problem is clearly with your head."
"As if this kind of thing hasn't happened before a million times," Kawai snerked. "We're the Guard. Where'd Ii-chan say Tamamori was again?"
"You're the Guard, meaning you're all half suicidal," Fujigaya said. "You can't let Tono see it, you know."
"Like hell," Kawai declared. "You just want me out of the way so you can make him laugh all by yourself."
"Well, maybe that a little too," Fujigaya admitted. "You and Tottsu are stiff competition. But if he thinks you nearly died or something, he'll--"
"Forbid us from racing, I know, I know," Kawai grinned. "Just shut up and tell me where you'd have sex if the whole first floor of a building was free game for it."
Fujigaya did shut his mouth then. For a microsecond. "Walls are good," he said. "For privacy and intimacy, or--"
"Throwing someone up against?"
"That'd have to be 'shoving down' in your case, I think," Fujiagaya corrected mildly, "unless you're talking Gocchi or Mitsu."
"I'll break your kneecaps, Taisuke," Kawai said, just as conversational.
"You could reach them at least," Fujigaya told him. "But you're currently missing an arm."
Kawai wondered aloud at that. "How much of a handicap do you really think that'd give me?"
Fujigaya ignored the probable 'not much' answer to that question, side-stepping the issue entirely: "Well, you asked the wrong question anyway." Counting off the buildings to make sure they had the right one, eighth on the block, he lead Kawai around to its back door. "What we need answered is something more like, 'Where would you cyber if you were a sad hacker, mournfully deprived of real physical attention?'"
"Right," Kawai conceded. "Well, I'd crawl into a closet or something."
"Okay, so we check the most likely hiding places first, before doing a general sweep of--" Fujigaya stopped short as the door swung open with just a gentle push, and he blinked at the sight of Tamamori in plain view, slumped gracefully over the top of a washing machine as if he'd just decided to take a nap.
"Well, okay," Fujigaya said, "nevermind then."
Kawai set his hoverboard down by the door and walked over to Tamamori's prone form curiously. He prodded it. "Are you sure we've got the right guy?" he asked, appropriating Tamamori's netgear. "He's kind of too pretty for what I was thinking. Hackers are usually a bit more fug."
"I'm telling Yokoo-san on you," Fujigaya said, in affected childish tones.
"As if," Kawai scoffed, passing the netgear over. "Watta's best face has nothing on this princess and you know it."
Fujigaya inspected the tech he'd been handed, turning it over a couple of times. "Hm. Custom mods, speakers, serial number acid-rubbed. Fairly screams heavy-duty hacker to me. Plus," he grinned. "He's out cold. In a laundry. On a washing machine."
"Which'd be the ideal place to cyber, right?" Kawai cackled. "Private. Warm. Biggest vibrator on the planet."
"Your mind is a terrible place, Kawai Fumito," Fujigaya snickered, and folded Tamamori's netgear into a pocket.
Kawai just grinned. "As if you weren't thinking worse."
Fujigaya neither acknowledged nor denied that. "We should go now that we've got him," he said instead. "The chasers are going to get here soon whether we left them in the dust or not."
"Yeah," Kawai agreed. "We should go."
Fujigaya looked at him.
Kawai looked right back, still grinning. Then raised his right hand and stiffly waggled bruised fingers.
"What," Fujigaya said. "No. That is not fair, you bastard."
"Sorry I can't jan-ken for this," Kawai crowed.
"But I don't want to carry him," Fujigaya protested, gesturing sharply. "You can smell the mess he's made of his pants!"
"Mm~hm, smells like sex. ♥"
"You stacked on purpose!"
"Kawai Fumito does not throw matches," Kawai grinned smugly. "I'd never." Heading back to the laundry door, he kicked his hoverboard back into gear and smirked over his shoulder. "Anyway, we should go. Now that we've got him."
"You owe me so much for this," Fujigaya groused, leaning over to heave Tamamori across his shoulders like he would a dead animal. Thus burdened, he plodded over.
"Hey, you were the one who said he didn't want me along for the job in the first place." Taking a leaf from Goseki's book, Kawai held the door open like a gentleman.
Fujigaya shuffled through sideways, mindful of Tamamori's head at the doorjamb, grumbling every step of the way. "Yeah, well if you weren't here, I wouldn't give a rat's ass because nobody'd be telling Watta and Gocchi about this later and laughing -- or I'd be the one telling them, and bitching about it instead."
"Sucks to be you, doesn't it?" Kawai snickered. "You know anyway, if I carried him his feet'd probably drag on the floor. Best to pick up someone your own size and all that~♪"
"Fumito," Fujigaya growled, "just shut up before I squash you with him."
*
"...you really have him then?" Miyata asked. "For real? I mean, Tama-chan?"
He wanted to believe what Yokoo and Iida said was true. Relatively powerless as he was, Miyata was tired of fighting so hard and futilely against forces so much more salient. But at the same time, he didn't want to give up just like that. He'd fought hard (sort of! relatively speaking...), and just because an ally with bigger guns had suddenly shown up behind him didn't mean he should stop fighting. If anything, it should give him reason to fight harder, right? But how?
Yokoo leaned forward, elbows resting on his knees and fingers steepled. "Let me put it this way," he said. "I have a homing missile that goes by the name of Fujigaya Taisuke. I set the target. I launch the missile. It's as good as guaranteed."
Technically, there was a chaser on Tamamori that would have to be dealt with, but details like that were almost inconsequential where Fujigaya was involved. Of course, were Iida present he would tell Yokoo that it wasn't a sure sure bet -- indeed, Yokoo could all but hear the other's calm observation in the back of his mind: take nothing for granted. But Iida wasn't present, so assumptions were fine for now: "We have him."
"Oh," Miyata said softly, and looked around his sealed cottage. "So... then I'm just stuck here?"
Yokoo shrugged with blunt eloquence. "Yeah. There's nothing you can do anyway."
"...oh," Miyata said.
"It's for the better," Yokoo assured him. "Especially if your idea of playing superhero was going to Government Central and hacking them from inside their own premises..."
Miyata ducked his head sheepishly. "I didn't really have that many options," he admitted.
"You didn't," Yokoo agreed. "You're pretty useless, but that's alright so long as you can make Tamamori stay with us. The arrangement will be valuable enough in the long run -- if not for his skills aiding us, then for the fact that we won't have to deal with... issues like this, however many times they would have occurred again in the future."
Though not half as liable to blush as Tamamori, Miyata still felt the tips of his ears burning. "Sorry," he said. "If I'd known..."
"You would have done it anyway," Yokoo said flatly.
"Would I?" Miyata said, brows raised. If he'd known, he would have known he'd be jeopardising Tamamori's safety--
"Without a doubt you would, if Tamamori asked you," Yokoo told him.
"Ahh..." Miyata said, attempting to smile. "Well that's true, isn't it. What a troublesome trait to have."
"Easily manipulated," Yokoo shrugged. "But sometimes that's handy--" He blinked the next second though, finding himself suddenly alone in Miyata's cottage. Miyata had disappeared.
Yokoo scratched his head a moment, wondering. How? The other was a passable hacker when he wasn't playing dead fish in the government's employ, but that didn't mean he was by any means advanced enough to have broken through the script Watchtower had cornered him with.
An FD, perhaps? Were Kitayama and Nikaido having trouble with security...? Yokoo frowned.
Calmly putting his impassive face back on against surveillance, Yokoo toggled Iida's shutters on the cottage's security script and unplugged the chimney, once again letting light in through the windows and doors. He didn't bother to stand from the couch, transferring his consciousness to the whiteroom from there as his avatar dissolved into an untraceable heat haze from the point of view of anyone watching.
To them, it would look like Miyata been there one moment, been hacked, then inexplicably vanished.
The fact that he had, well. That hadn't exactly gone according to plan, but it was hopefully no big deal. Yokoo just needed to find out why.
jan ken (pon): rock paper scissors. ♥
1- i should disclaim that a lot of the way this entire thing is progressing is entirely mousi+snowqueen's fault. 8D because really, i wouldn't have thought it up this way. at all. xD