From Sailor Moon Flash!
| Featuring: | Tsurian, Rin, Toshiro, Bijiko |
| IC Date: | August, 2002 |
| Status: | In Progress |
| Summary: | Kansou Rin and Giou Toshiro both think they're in charge of housesitting one apartment, which is too small to contain the force of both personalities. And then, doom strikes. |
"Kyoto, huh?"
Kenrou nodded, smiling, and picked up his suitcase. "Yes. Chikara has some cousins there."
"Third cousins," Chikara said. She handed Tsurian a sheet of paper and a hotel brochure. "These are the numbers; we'll have our cell phones. Thank you, again, for doing this."
"No worries," Tsurian said, glancing around the living room. She couldn't resist a dig. "So, Boss, you seem to have more stuff than you did last time I was here."
Kenrou's smile did not waver one millimeter. "We are pleased that Tsurian-kun admires Chikara's figurines," he said serenely.
"I did not say that I admired Ishino's stupidlittlefigurines," Tsurian corrected, bringing out a little black book from her pocket and flipping it open to the middle. She glared, hard, at a cherubic little blond boy extending a daisy to a saccharine-smiled blonde girl, and noted it down in her grid as 'something to do with friendship; b-and-g; five gags on the six-gag scale.' This duly noted, she snapped the book shut and returned it to her pocket. She hated it when Boss bought Ishino new little eyesores; it made her fear for Sumiko's sanity, being surrounded by such horribleness in porcelain.
Thinking of which -
"And where do we keep cat-food these days?" she asked.
"Under the microwave, in the third cupboard from the left," Chikara answered, and picked up her suitcase. "The taxi should be downstairs by now; we'll need to get going. Thank you so much again, Yoshinaga-san, it's very kind of you to feed the cat and keep an eye on things while we're gone."
"I expect a very nice present of Kyoto-souvenir-hood when you get back," Tsurian said. "And no more swords, Boss, I have practically a closetful."
She succeeded in shoving them out the door, telling them all the while that it was good that they were relaxing and off having fun, and then came back to the front door. She scooped up the tiny black kitten who had come to investigate this loss of her people, and tucked Sumiko in the crook of her arm. "You're coming to live with Aunt Tsurian while Daddy's gone," she informed the cat. "There is no point in leaving you here all by yourself all day with Ishino's stupidlittlefigurines just waiting to get broken, and I can't have you in the studio because you will eat Boss's ink."
She gave herself a smug, congratulatory smile on this foresight on her part, and locked Kenrou's front door behind her.
There. All done. Now nothing could possibly go wrong, and Boss and Ishino would be back in three days, none the wiser.
Rin's first scan when she opened the door was satisfactory. The floor was clean (which begged the question: where was the cat), and everything was in its place. She inspected the floor more closely: definitely no cat. Cats were known for, even in the shortest amounts of time, shedding all over creation. It was primarily because of this Rin had decided to utilize her key. Himesama had not specifically requested that Rin come and remove the cat shed from the floor while she was away, but Rin was quite positive that if she did NOT, and himesama were to come home to cat shed coating the floor like unto shag carpeting, that himesama would be disappointed. This was, of course, to be avoided at all costs.
If, however, the cat had not managed to enact her evil plan of sheddery thus far, it was possible that himesama had taken the cat WITH her (why), or that she had been kenneled, or that Tsurian had Done Something. Rin knew from several My-Life-Is-Hard coffee outings that the life of Sumiko the cat was, as she and Tsurian agreed, easier than those of everyone else. After all, the common housecat is used to unrealistic expectations of perfection, and easily gives the air of having met them, just by being that highest of the upper echelon of evolution: the cat.
The second scan, however, proved that something was gravely amiss.
There was a someone on the couch. There was a someone sleeping on the couch. A blonde someone with paint on her shirt, and paint on her jeans. Rin wondered at first if himesama had a sister, or other (less awesome) female relative who she'd invited to housesit. While this was deeply unusual, it was nonetheless not inspiring of Rin's ire. It was the hair that did it. The wet hair.
The wet hair ON THE COUCH, getting a damp spot ON THE UPHOLSTERY which was, as far as Rin knew, POSSIBLY BAD FOR IT, and even if this was a relative of himesama's they should KNOW BETTER THAN TO GO TO SLEEP ON THE COUCH WITH WET HAIR AND POSSIBLY LEAVE A SPOT.
Despite her immediate irrtation, she mechanically slipped out of her shoes before she actually entered the open door, noticing as she did so the pair ostensibly belonging to the couched intruder. She took the time to notice that they were incredibly clonky before crossing the floor in seconds, poking the sleeper right in the center of one of the paint spatters. Whatever she had intended to say left her as she noticed the sleeper was wearing blue mascara, blue mascara that could hit the wet spot left by the hair and SMEAR ON THE COUCH if said sleeper rolled over during the nap.
It was, therefore, that the first thing out of her mouth, accompanying the poke was:
"EXCUSE ME. YOU HAD BETTER HOPE THAT STUFF IS WATERPROOF."
"Mmph." The sleeper frowned and closed his eyes tighter. He hadn't heard anything break, there was no reason to get up yet. So why was there all this noise? And poking. He slid his eyes open. There was something poking h-- there was some one very irate poking him and yelling about waterproof, and there was really only one intelligent answer to this situation. "Huh?"
"I SAID," Rin repeated, increasing her volume as the sleeper was quite obviously deaf as WELL as in possible danger of getting damp mascara on the furniture, "I pray to ALL MY ANCESTORS and possibly some of YOURS AS WELL that the GOO you have on your EYES is WATERPROOF because you will GET IT on the COUCH WHAT WERE YOU THINKING?"
Okay, now the world was coming back to him. Gold eyes narrowed as soon as they were able to focus. Who WAS this? What the hell was she doing here, and above all, why was she screaming?
"Of course it is," he snapped. "I was THINKING of taking a quiet NAP after work!" He sat up and immediately put his hackles up when she didn't back down. There was a streak in her hair. There was a streak in Amakusa-san's hair. This couldn't be one of Amakusa-san's relatives... though Mushio-kun was a righteous little ass. Maybe his sister. That at least explained how on earth she got in here. He glared at her. "Are you going to step back or do I have to argue with your chest?!"
"I'm not stepping back." Rin decided, then and there. "There are other options other than me stepping back or you arguing with my chest. The one I'm thinking of is the one where you GET YOUR LAZY BUTT OFF THE COUCH AND TAKE A NAP AT YOUR OWN HOME, and get your crazy blue stuff on YOUR OWN FURNITURE where it won't UPSET ANYONE."
The battle lines had been drawn. In fire. Twenty feet high. Toshiro's eyes reflected this.
"Perhaps you should get your pushy butt out of this apartment and go yell in your own home, and get your irrational anger all over your own neighbors where it won't cause problems for people who really live here... Especially since the only person upset is you, whoever you are."
"You don't really live here." Rin retorted. She didn't deny that she was pushy, or that she was yelling. "You don't really live here, and you are napping IN FILTHY CLOTHES and goo that MAY OR MAY NOT BE WATERPROOF, I don't know because you still haven't answered the original VERY SIMPLE QUESTION..."
She narrowed her eyes, acknowledging the drawn battle lines, and made a split-second decision.
"... and because you are SO CONCERNED with getting everything out this apartment that DOES NOT BELONG HERE... I am going to go throw your RIDICULOUS CLUNKY shoes DOWN THE STAIRS."
With that, she whirled on her heel and headed back toward the door, deliberately turning as fast as she could in the hopes that her braid whipped him (it was him, she'd noticed after poking him in the chest) in the face.
Toshiro erupted off the couch after the braid whipped past and stormed after her. "Now listen here you deaf old bat! People who HAVE KEYS and aren't causing making lots of noise have every right to be here! And I DID answer your question, which you'd know if you bothered to listen to other people!"
His shoes hit the hallway with a pair of thuds. He growled at her. "You are so ridiculously petty."
"I'm sorry, WHAT? WHAT DID YOU SAY? I'm sorry, I CAN'T HEAR YOU." Rin yelled back, cupping one hand to her ear, the other still holding the door open. "YOU'RE GOING TO HAVE TO SPEAK UP BECAUSE I'M A DEAF OLD BAT."
She tilted her head toward the door with a scowl.
"Shoes are to your left."
Toshiro's inner self was screaming and fantasizing about running this wacko through a food processor. His outer self just hissed. "Why thank you. I'd NOTICED. But the mere fact that you HEARD THAT proves that your ears work fine! It's your brain that fails to interpret the information!"
Rin opened her eyes as wide as she could manage, attempting to convey the image of a stupid gaijin who didn't understand Japanese, but as she was a horrible actress and a horrible English student, and because she couldn't stop scowling, she failed miserably.
"So very sorry," she said in incredibly broken and poor English, "head does not hear you. Too bad shoe fell. Shoe to left."
He gave her an evil look. "You are convincing me that you are not intelligent," he spat in nearly perfect English, and shouldered her aside to snatch his bag. "Congratulations, you vicious pie-faced moron," he chirped, also in English, and not-quite-stomped out the door... ...almost.
The perfect English took Rin aback somewhat, although she would rather have eaten glass than admitted as much. Sometimes it simply was not fair that people who very obviously contributed nothing more to Japanese society than bad hair were better able than her ownself (who was obviously more deserving) to learn English, no matter how hard she studied.
It was this, rather than her original annoyance at finding him... it was a him, she was pretty sure now, which meant he was probably one of those stupid Gackt fans or something, what with the mascara and the fishnets... on himesama's couch, that inspired her to slam the door all the vicious force of a softball pitch.
She was not at all happy when physics, a subject at which she was actually competent, turned its fury on her almost instantly.
The mechanics behind this were quite simple. Toshiro is a beautiful calculating bastard when angry. Especially when angry. While he was not good enough at physics to calculate mass or trajectories, practical experience had made him very good at simple reactions. And he'd left his foot, braced sole-up, just inside the doorframe.
This was a simple action. Combined with the simple action of Rin slamming the door, it had the very simple reaction of rebounding off his heel directly into Rin's nose.
He fancied that the sound of door impacting flesh had never sounded quite so satisfying before, and picked up his shoes.
The sound of the door smacking squarely into Rin's face was followed by an equally satisfying, if not terribly feminine, "OW," as well as some words that crossed the boundary from "not terribly feminine" to "exceptionally inappropriate," and then another shriek. This one, however, was very different, very high-pitched, and far more panicked than the one involving the door to face slam-dunk Toshiro had achieved.
The series of events as Rin, being the one inside the apartment and thus witness thereto, remembered them, was this.
She slammed the door, which immediately assaulted her. She knew it was something Toshiro had done, and was grudgingly impressed, then in considerable pain. Then she realized that she was going to get blood on the floor. She screamed, immediately tearing off her jacket to press it to her face - getting blood out of her clothes was infinitely preferable than bleeding on himesama's carpet - and then saw the figurine... one of himesama's figurines... teetering precariously on the edge of it's shelf.
It fell in slow motion, and all Rin could think was DON'T SLIDE FOR IT YOU WILL BLEED ON THE FLOOR BLOOD CAN ONLY BE TAKEN UP BY PEROXIDE PEROXIDE WILL BLEACH THE FLOOR. She might have thrown something soft underneath it if her hands were not occupied with her bloody nose, but they were, and the figurine hit in slow motion, shards speading out like snowflakes on the tatami. Evil snowflakes.
It was then that the eerie calm set in, because there is nothing quite like the sudden, overpowering, and absolutely certain realization that you are going to die.
Toshiro paused at the sound of panic, but what grabbed his brain and made him march smartly back into that apartment was his ingrained reaction to the sound of something breaking.
When he saw WHAT had broken, he, too, froze. For one horrible moment there was silence, and he broke it by very softly saying "oh shit." His pretty gold eyes lifted from one scene of carnage to the other, Rin's face. "We're going to die."
It was bizarre how easily the bitterness, hatred, and blame for her bleeding nose were shoved aside at the sight of the broken figurine. Rin looked down at the same time Toshiro did, staring at the shards, and she looked up at him at the same time he raised his own eyes. Moments before, she would have argued with anything he said simply because he'd said it. Now she merely nodded.
"Yes. Yes, we are."
There was another moment of silence, then she sighed, her voice muffled under the jacket that was still pressed to her nose.
"If it can't be fixed," she said thoughtfully, "I'll take full responsibility. I took it upon myself to throw you out, so I should take it on myself to accept responsibility for the consequences."
She padded across the floor carefully in her bare feet, squinting at the shards and making certain not to step on any.
"You understand English," she said, having understood what language he was speaking earlier even if she didn't understand the words, "Can you tell me which one this was? I can't read it."
Yes, yes it WAS her fault, and how dare she be noble about it? This was Boss's apartment, and so handling problems was HIS job- But he set that aside. He blinked at the mess on the floor, and looked skeptically at Rin.
"There is no possible way to glue that back together without it being very obvious. There's too many pieces, and bisque is murder to glue... every crack shows up shiny." He squatted next to the remains and looked hard at it, and finally sighed. "I can't read it either; there isn't enough left to read. And all these little demon children look alike anyway."
He watched the broken pieces of porcelain, and realized what they, what HE, had to do. There was no other choice. He had to call Tsurian. She'd know almost as much about the tiny porcelain horror as Ishino-san. They had to replace it. And they had to put the new figurine in the old one's place with precision unmatched anywhere outside of the space program.
And they had barely two days in which to do it.
The blonde boy... Rin was almost certain now that it was a boy instead of a girl, as abject and total terror had a way of making everything stick out in sharp, crystalline relief... had apparently gone into shock, spaced out in the way Rin recognized as thinking hard about something unpleasant. She suspected he was contemplating the many and varied gruesome ways in which they were going to die unless they were able to repair or replace the figurine in record time. She also hated to admit that he was absolutely correct about the impossibility of the first option.
She also also hated to admit that he was correct and they were demon children. It almost made her want to defend the figurines just be contrary (and to be loyal to himesama's strange obsession), but there was taking things too far, and there was... taking things too far.
Suddenly seized by an idea, she squatted next to the shards and carefully sorted a few out of the way, searching for what had been the bottom. As she'd hoped, himesama set each of the figurines on the shelf pristine out of the box, without removing the little oval sticker from the bottom. Not being itself made of anything breakable, the sticker was still intact. Rin peeled it carefully from the bottom of the figure, plastering it firmly to her fingertip, and squinted at it.
"Serial number." She said, showing it to the boy, who she suspected wasn't even listening at this point. Not that she could blame him. Or... well, she could, but there was a time and a place.
"Great," he said distractedly, punching up Yoshinaga Tsurian on speed dial. It hadn't really hit through to him what she'd found. Tsurian answered after one ring.
"What did you do this time?"
"WHY," he said, watching Rin, "do you always assume I've done something?"
"Because Boss is out of town, Shunran is supposedly in school, and you let Ayame tell me when you want to borrow my earrings." There was the sound of gum popping. "Which you STILL haven't given back."
"You haven't given me back my watch or my belt, Yoshinaga."
"I'm holding them hostage for the- Giou, what the hell is that noise?"
The noise was, of course, Rin, who had gone red as beet, and was waving both her hands frantically at Toshiro in the universal throat cutting gesture for WHAT THE HELL ARE YOU DOING ARE YOU INSANE? She had, of course, begun said gesture the moment she heard the word 'Yoshinaga.'
She was, fortunately, smart enough not to actually yell WHAT THE HELL ARE YOU DOING ARE YOU INSANE. However, even Rin's fiercest whisper was too fierce to go entirely unheard, particular over the superior sound system of the Japanese cel phone.
"Whatthehellareyoudoingareyouinsane? That is himesama's best friend she tells her everything are you trying to make us be dead faster than we would be dead otherwise?"
She considered, raising an eyebrow, then continued her whisper, which Toshiro likely noticed would have been a good stage whisper, but was an extremely poor actual whisper.
"I guess I see the wisdom in getting it over with really fast, but I thought we would go with the 'if she finds out' option rather than the 'when she finds out' option."
"Be quiet, I am handling this!" he hissed at her, waving his hand in the universal SHUT UP YOU IDIOT gesture.
"Handling WHAT, Giou? WHEN SHE FINDS OUT WHAT, GIOU?"
"NOTHING- I mean, of course not nothing that's why I'm calling SHUT UP, WITCH-"
"Excuse me?"
"Not you, Yoshinaga." He jerked away because Rin looked like she was trying to go for the phone. "There's this crazy STOP IT THIS IS MY PHONE-"
Rin was, indeed, attempting to go for the phone, and only the fact that she was afraid lunging full scale for Toshiro while he was holding it would lead to further breakage stopped her from doing so, although she continued to attempt to take said phone away from him. Unsuccessfully, as he was taller than she was.
"If by 'handling it' you mean 'calling the papers.'" she hissed, waving the sticker from the bottom of the figurine. Realizing belatedly that Toshiro's 'shut up' gesture meant Tsurian could hear her, she shut up, mouthing the rest of the words at Toshiro without actually making a sound. She wondered, briefly, if she could poke him in the eye with the excuse of waving the sticker some more.
"I am looking up the serial number on the internet," she mouthed, digging her own phone out of her bag. "If you could maybe not alert the media for another twenty-four hours like some punchy American, that would be awesome."
He frowned, listening to Yoshinaga in one ear and Rin with the other and ducking his head away from Rin's phone-grabbing like some bizarre interpretive dance of a fishing bird.
"What do you mean, 'serial number'?"
"Yes, Giou," came Tsurian's drawl, "what does she mean, 'serial number'? For Buddha's sake WHAT DID YOU DO?"
Rin rolled her eyes, punching at her phone to bring up a web browser window while simultaneously hoping that there was a Japanese version of the Precious Moments site, otherwise the serial number would do her far less good.
"... please tell me you know what a serial number is. You know, the numbers they give stuff like this to show which ones they are?"
She waved the sticker at him, again restraining the considerable urge to use it as an excuse to poke him in the eye. That, she told herself, might get mascara on the sticker, which might obscure the number, which would be bad.
"It has a barcode, too. So if nothing else..."
She brought up yahoo Japan on the web browser on her phone and showed it to him.
He narrowed his eyes (partly in irritation, partly in defense against the I Want So Bad To Poke You In The Eye vibes he was getting every time Rin waved her hands, and partly in defense against the waves of You're In Trouble Tsurian was very determinedly sending through the phone) and very grudgingly admitted, TO HIMSELF, that this girl was at least halfway practical. He nodded absently at the website, deciding that with their powers combined, they, as Captain Planet, stood a much faster chance of completing their mission and surviving.
"I didn't know it survived," he said to Rin. Even now he was an actor, and actually turned his head to and away from Rin, indicating which person he was talking to. "I thought they were painted on the bottom or something, not on a sticker." Head turn. "Yoshinaga, I need to you please get out your records, because I know you have them, and look up one of the demon children for me," he said very carefully and deliberately, running over Tsurian's brick-wall silence and Rin's powerful YOU UTTER IDIOT WHAT ARE YOU DOING vibes. "If you do not do this, I am probably going to have to tie myself and this lunatic here up with a big red bow and little paper streamers and offer our lives to Ishino-san as compensation." He sighed. "Possibly with an attractive houseplant and the combined contents of our bank accounts." He then (head turn) glanced at a quite pale, very furious Rin. "Read off that serial number to me," he said, intending to relay it to Tsurian.
Rin hated to admit it, but Toshiro was making very good sense. Despite the fact that Tsurian was himesama's best friend, she did likely have very good records of what she called the stupidlittlefigurines, seeing as how her boss had purchased a good number of them, and was therefore, as Toshiro had assessed, the best source for replacing them without incident.
It made her even paler and angrier that he had come to this good idea and she had not, much as she could tell he was his own equivalent of pale and angry that he hadn't known about the sticker. She was growing steadily more annoyed and more relieved at the same time that he was capable of NOT being an idiot (and in fact smart and competent) about some things, including the disaster. Perhaps if they both continued to work together they could NOT die.
"[PMR747]," she complied in her clearest and most resentful voice, secretly at peace that the tone of his request had conveyed, just as her answer did, you realize, of course, that I hate you. "The website also gives number 526150. It's some little alien boy with a duck."
He dutifully relayed this information, and glanced over Rin's shoulder at the tiny screen.
"...that is a very frightening duck," he added. "If it even is a duck."
"R747," Tsurian muttered, looking through her notes, "blond alien-child, scary duck, shelf by the door- Got it. It is a duck. A stupid, angry, alien duck. Probably pissed at being stuck as a stupidlittlefigurine. Retired six years ago."
"Retired. Great. Do I need to file a will?"
"Only if you can't rustle up about 9,000 yen and get it shipped to Japan in under twenty-four hours."
"..." said Toshiro. "What about flying to Korea?"
"Retired." Rin repeated, making a face. "Korea?"
She rolled her eyes. Korea. Not that these things weren't probably MADE in Korea, or China, or somewhere a million miles away from...
"What about yahoo?" she wondered. "... or ebay. Don't Americans put these things out anyway? Americans sell EVERYTHING if it gets dirty. They sell those Babe Beans if they lose a TAG. Maybe we could find one and clean it up."
She made a face.
"Assuming the shipping is reasonable, and timely."
"That's what I was talking about," he said to Rin, then turned back to his phone. "Yoshinaga, unless you have any further brilliant ideas, I'm going to have to call you back."
"Let me know if you die."
"Yeah." He flipped the phone shut and faced Rin squarely. "Finding one of these little porcelain monsters does not appear to be the problem. Getting it here before Ishino-san returns is." He blinked. "Taking suggestions."
Rin considered.
"They're popular here, too. Mari collected them when she was young. She got rid of hers when she graduated middle school. This one is discontinued, so it won't be in the new stores, but with a little..."
She stopped, making a face abruptly as if she'd swallowed something sour.
"... I can get one here." she said at last, utterly confident in the possibility. "I can get it here. Any ideas on how to restore it when I do? It will still probably be very dirty."
He looked as if he'd gotten lemon juice up his nose. As if he'd been asked to do something so horrible he'd prefer to clean camp toilets with his tongue.
"It really depends on the kind of soil," he said, voice clipped and precise. "I..." he firmed his lips and tried again. "I will have to come with you."
to be continued
