Fic post! Finally.
Title: Half And First
Fandom: Eyeshield 21
Pairing: Kuroki/OC, brief Togano/OC
Rating: PG-13 for language and vague sexual references (teenage boys, basically)
Summary: Going out with girls is easier said than done. Kuroki's probably going to need some help with this one.
Author's Note: For
hinas_otaku's birthday, because she needs more love and so does Kuroki, and this was all her fault from the beginning.
He met her at the arcade.
“Dude,” said some guy with a maze of facial piercings, leaning over the back of the machine Kuroki was occupying, “this girl is going for the new high score on Tekken and it looks like she’s gonna get it!”
Kuroki looked up, startled and suspicious. “Bullshit,” he said, abandoning his post to squirm through the weekend gamer crowd toward the Tekken machine. That high score was his, and like hell some girl was going to top it.
No sooner did this thought cross his mind before he managed to break through the gathering of spectators to witness some girl topping his high score.
A cheer went up from the gathering of gamers. The girl, smallish and pigtailed and wearing converse sneakers with what appeared to be a stripy dress made from a giant sweater, leapt into the air, shrieking a warrior cry of victory. She turned to her left, grabbed the shirt of the nearest spectator, and yanked him down to her level to administer a triumphant noogie before jumping to the next and crushing him in what seemed to be a surprisingly powerful hug. She then whirled to her right, ran smack into Kuroki, reached up to grab him by the ears and pulled him down to kiss him right on the side of the mouth.
Now, Kuroki had been planning to confront the girl. He’d wanted to challenge her to a match to regain his honor at the very least. But now he was thrown off his guard; the last thing he’d expected was to be on the receiving end of a spontaneous victory kiss. He was busy wondering what the proper response was, and if he should try to get her reported for something, and if it counted as a first kiss if he hadn’t consented to it and only about half her mouth had actually been on his lips. He was also praying to every god he knew that he wasn’t blushing. He felt like he was blushing.
“Dude, you’re totally blushing,” facial piercings guy pointed out.
Fuck.
Spurred into action, Kuroki followed the girl across the room where she was procuring high fives from a knot of wary-looking gamers grouped around the Bomberman setup. Gathering up what little noticeable courage he possessed, Kuroki prodded the girl on the shoulder and tried to look imposing as she turned around.
“That was my high score, and I challenge you to a game to fight for it, but I warn you there’s no way you’ll win,” Kuroki had planned to say. What he actually said was something more along the lines of “I-I wa-…uh…”
He was probably blushing again.
The girl, and now he could see that she was about his age, although at first she’d looked a few years younger, grinned widely. “It’s you!” she exclaimed, clapping her hands together in delight through the oversized sleeves of her sweater dress.
That pissed Kuroki off. “Yeah, me, the guy you just violated by the Tekken machine,” he spat, indignant. To make matters worse, she laughed, high and giddy, and grabbed for his hands, curling sweater-clad digits around his clenched fists.
“No, I mean you’re the one whose high score I just beat!” she explained, smiling up at him. “I come here every weekend and most Tuesdays and Thursdays to watch you play. You’re really good! No wonder it took me forever to beat your score, hmm? Sorry I didn’t recognize you at first; I was pretty excited.”
Kuroki blinked.
“I’m Akina,” the girl offered. “Your name’s Kuroki, right? I hear your two buddies call you that. Are they here today?”
“I, uh…no,” Kuroki managed. He was supposed to meet Togano later, and Jumonji was being forced to spend time with his family. But this conversation was headed into weird territory. She knew him? She knew his friends? What, was she stalking him now? Or was this not unusual? Kuroki was lost.
“How come your score just says 52 instead of your name?” Akina asked. She was still holding onto his hands.
“It’s my jersey number,” said Kuroki, defeated.
“Jersey number? What for?”
“American football,” he mumbled. “I’m a lineman. Deimon Devil Bats.”
“Really? Kick ass!” said Akina. She was bouncing on her toes and grinning elatedly. “I totally watch your games! That was you? That is so awesome. We should hang out sometime!”
“We…we…should?” he asked.
“Yeah!” said Akina. For a second, she was silent, and then she grinned again. “You’re totally blushing.”
Fuck.
---
And so they hung out sometime, and some times after that as well.
The guys liked her, in a rough, pretending-to-be-intolerant sort of way. She came to the games. She was probably afraid of Hiruma, but it was impressively hard to tell. (He nicknamed her “fucking pigtails”.) Mamori thought she was sweet.
Kuroki never did get that high score back.
---
One day they were in Akina’s living room playing Street Fighter, because sometimes you get nostalgic for the classics, and she hit the pause button, tossing down the controller like she was going to get up for more chips. But she didn’t move
“Hey, Kuro-kun,” she said tentatively, holding her ankles, “can we talk?”
“Sure,” said Kuroki, confused, because they’d been talking perfectly well when Chun Li was kicking Jet in the head, and he wasn’t sure what was different now.
Akina rocked back and forth on the carpet, apparently nervous. Finally, she sighed deeply and flipped her pigtail braids over her shoulders, giving him that look girls give you when you’re doing something dumb and they want you to know they’re suffering for it. “Kuro-kun, when are you going to ask me out?”
Oh.
“…Uh,” Kuroki said, suddenly holding his controller hard enough to leave fingernail marks in the plastic. Akina looked expectant, wary, slightly annoyed. Kuroki panicked. “I didn’t know I was supposed to!”
That, it seemed, had been the wrong answer. Akina’s eyes went wide. “You didn’t know?”
“You never told me!”
“Kuro-kun!”
“Well!” Kuroki shot back. It was all he could think to say.
Akina was going red in the face. “Oh, you-- you-- oh!” she sputtered, and stood up, hands on her hips. “Well, are you going to or not, you spineless, cowardly, motor-breathed amoeba!?”
“I am not a motor-breathed amoeba!” Kuroki countered, getting to his feet, “And what the hell does that even mean? Look, just because you can’t talk to me straight because you’re a girl--”
“Oh, is that it?” Akina snapped. “I can talk plenty straight! You’re the one who never said you wanted me to, Hypocrite Boy! You want straight talk? Fine.” She stood right up to him, glaring into his face and jabbing his chest with one finger for emphasis. “The truth is, you’re lucky to have me, buster! I’m cute! I’m friendly! I’m very low-maintenance! I don’t ask for much! I let you eat all my chips! And I could do better than you, and I wouldn’t have to try all that hard, you walnut-brained twit! But I’m about as good as it gets for boys who can’t talk to a woman to save their lives and couldn’t find their asses with a map despite being endearingly bizarre and the best Grand Theft Auto player I’ve ever seen, so you make your mind up right now, mister: are you going to man up and ask me out or not? Because the arcade on the corner is full of boys who haven’t been out of the dark long enough to spot a double X chromosome in years, and some of them wouldn’t look half bad cleaned up, either, so you’d better make your choice before I decide to give up on you and go trawling for geeks!”
She stood back on her heels, arms crossed, red-faced and breathing hard, waiting.
Kuroki cleared his throat.
“Akina?” he mumbled.
“What?”
“…Will you go out with me?”
A grin broke out over Akina’s face like a rainbow after a storm. She lunged forward and wrapped her arms around him, crushing the air from his lungs. “Yes!”
---
Going out with girls was easier said than done.
Kuroki called the first person he knew who could be considered a leading expert on women, in the sense that he had a girlfriend and hadn’t managed to get himself killed or castrated by her thus far. (Although, to be perfectly honest, he would have called Togano first anyway. It was before noon and Jumonji liked to sleep in, and besides, he probably would have laughed.)
“Hello?”
“Hey, it’s me. Listen, where are you supposed to take girls on dates?”
“I don’t know.”
Kuroki paused. “You don’t…know?”
“Nah,” said Togano. Kuroki could hear a rustling sound on the other line, like pages crinkling. “Me and Lee just order pizza and sit on the couch reading Jump, mostly. Why?”
Kuroki let his forehead thump against the kitchen wall. “Akina made me ask her out.”
“Huh, really?”
“Don’t sound so fucking shocked, dude.”
“Sorry. I didn’t think she liked guys.”
“…What?”
“Just sayin’. Look, I’m pretty sure the idea is you’re supposed to like, get food…and do something…uh, entertaining. I mean, that’s what people on TV do, so…”
“You want me to take dating advice from television?”
“Why not?”
Kuroki thought this over. “Well…”
But Togano interrupted that thought pattern. “Look, man, you know what you could do?”
“What?”
“Try looking up in some shoujo manga or something.”
There was a long, oppressive silence.
“Toga--”
“No, listen. It’s for girls, right, so it has shit that girls like, so you could like, look for stuff that girls like in it and then…do that.” There was a pause. “Actually, I’m pretty sure Akina doesn’t like shoujo…”
“Dude,” Kuroki said desperately, “comic books can’t be your solution to every fucking problem.”
“Sure they can,” Togano said calmly.
“You can’t get dating ideas from manga!”
“Works for me.”
“You don’t count; your girlfriend has a poster of the cast of Bleach on the ceiling above her bed!”
“Actually, that one’s on the door, the One Piece one is on-- look, it doesn’t matter, you’re the one who asked and I told you what I thought; take it or leave it.”
“I’ll tell you where I’m leaving it,” Kuroki muttered.
“At least Lee doesn’t kick my ass at Halo every weekend.”
“At least Akina doesn’t like Ichigo more than me.”
“To be fair, I like Orihime better than her.”
“Freak.”
“Loser.”
“Motor-breathed amoeba.”
“…What?”
They argued for ten more minutes, agreed to meet up for pizza on Monday, and hung up. Kuroki sat on the kitchen floor cradling the phone like a lifeline and sighed, forlorn.
---
It was two in the afternoon by the time Kuroki deemed it safe to call Jumonji’s house.
“Hello?”
“Dude, it’s me. I have a problem. Well, I have a question. I have a problem that I have a question about.”
“Uh…huh. What?”
“Where do you take girls?”
There was a pause. Kuroki could hear Jumonji breathing on the other line.
“Um, the back seat if you’re lucky,” he said at last.
“I’m serious, man.”
“So am I. What’s going on?”
“Akina made me ask her out.”
“She made you…?”
“Yeah, at gunpoint. Look, you know stuff about women, don’t you? Where am I supposed to take her?”
“I don’t know,” Jumonji muttered. He sounded embarrassed. “Look, uh, I’ve like…I’ve been with girls but I haven’t been out with girls. So.”
Kuroki slammed his head against the kitchen wall again and groaned. “I’m doomed.”
“Did you call Togano? He’s got a girlfriend.”
“Yeah. He told me to buy shoujo manga.”
Jumonji was silent for several seconds. “What did you tell him?”
“Well, basically I called him a motor-breathed amoeba and we argued for ten minutes over which one of us is more likely to be mistaken for our girl’s dyke tyke. Oh, we’re going for pizza Monday; you coming?”
“Sure. You called him what?”
“What am I supposed to do, man? If I fuck this up she’s totally gonna ditch me for one of the Bomberman dorks.”
“Harsh. Ask your older brother? He’s married and shit, right? So…”
“Dude…look, you remember just the other day when he was staying at my place and you and Toga were over and we were talking about how hot Mamori is, and he was all like, ‘Oh, you guys are talking about girls, why I remember the days, blah blah blah…’?”
Jumonji’s disdain was practically audible. “Yeah…”
“Okay, that was when I didn’t even ask.”
“Point,” Jumonji conceded. “I guess you could ask your cousin or something? I mean, they’re still staying with you, right?”
“She’s twelve, dude.”
“Well, yeah, but…she probably knows shit about girls, ‘cause she is one.”
“…I guess. Yeah, okay, that’s better than girly comic books.”
“Yeah, so…uh, good luck with that.”
“Right. Uh. Thanks, or whatever.”
“Hey, uh…look, if you do make it to the back seat, by any chance--”
“Man, I had this talk when I was thirteen, I’m covered.”
“No, I just meant, uh. Make sure her dad isn’t out looking for her.”
“…Oh. Gotcha.”
“Yeah.”
“Seeya Monday.”
“Right. Cool.”
“Later.”
Kuroki hung up, banged his head against the kitchen wall for several seconds, and went to find his little cousin.
---
Sakuya was in the living room pasting colorful stickers to a school binder.
“Hey, uh. Sakuya.”
“What?” she asked, without looking up. Kuroki stood in the middle of the room, hands in his pockets, shifting awkwardly from right foot to left.
“Okay, you’re a girl…”
At this, Sakuya looked up. It was that look again, the you’re-an-idiot-and-I’m-suffering-for-it look. Kuroki was getting sick of that look.
“I just meant,” he tried to explain, “that I need some advice from a girl, and you’re a girl, so…give me some advice.”
She looked leery. “What kind of advice?”
“I just, um. Uh…okay, say a guy asked you out, right? Hypothetically, obviously, because if a guy asked you out now I’d have to kill him--”
“Kouji--”
“Okay, never mind, look. If a guy asked you out, where would you want him to take you?”
Sakuya spent several seconds looking at him with a confused sort of suspicion. Finally, she rolled her eyes and sighed. “You’re supposed to take her somewhere romantic, nimrod.”
“Shut up,” Kuroki said reflexively, and then, “Romantic how?”
“You know, romantic. Like a fancy restaurant or something.”
Kuroki spent several seconds wondering if anything with a drive through constituted ‘fancy’ before concluding that a safe bet was no. “I think I’m too broke for that.”
Sakuya rolled her eyes and sighed again. She did that a lot lately, probably practicing to be a teenager. Kuroki took comfort in knowing that any boys were probably going to find her too annoying to ask out. “Well, if you’re that poor, maybe you shouldn’t ask girls out. Or you should get a job.”
“She made me; it wasn’t my idea,” said Kuroki. “And I don’t have any time, being on the team. And shut up.”
Sakuya pasted on the last of her stickers and tucked the binder under her arm. “Not my fault,” she said breezily, standing up. “But you asked her out even if she made you, so you better come up with something good or she’s totally going to ditch you.”
“For a Bomberman dork, yeah,” said Kuroki, twisting his fingers into his hair and trying not to panic.
Distantly, he heard Sakuya’s sigh again. “Ugh. If she made you ask her out and you did and she said yes then she probably likes you. I don’t know why, but she does. So even if you screw up really bad she’ll probably give you a second chance. So as long as you don’t screw that up I bet she’ll forgive you.”
Kuroki opened his eyes and looked down at his cousin, considering this. “…Thanks,” he said eventually, grudgingly.
She almost smiled, but covered it up with another sigh and eye roll. “Whatever. You’re still a loser.”
“Yeah, well, you’re a motor-breathed amoeba.”
“What?”
---
It took Kuroki all day and several minor internal crises to figure it out, but figure it out he did. And if it went wrong, at least Akina would probably give him a second chance.
Failing that, some Bomberman dork was going to be very happy.
---
He picked her up at seven.
“So where are we going?” Akina asked, stepping onto the sidewalk. She was wearing one of those sweater dresses again with stripy stockings, but she looked like she’d done something complicated with her hair, and she was smiling in a way probably best classified as nervous, although that wasn’t a look Kuroki was used to seeing on her.
“You remember that place we went the first time, where you got the teriyaki chicken and accidentally dumped it all over my lap?” said Kuroki.
Akina put her hand to her forehead. “I was hoping you’d forget that eventually.”
“Yeah, well,” said Kuroki. He scratched the back of his head. “I figured we could go there, ‘cause…I mean, I know it’s nothing special but that was the first place we went together and we-- well, I had a good time, even with the teriyaki sauce on my pants, so…I guess it’s just like, uh, for sentimental reasons and shit. Unless you don’t want to. ‘Cause if you don’t want to we can go somewhere else.”
Akina was grinning, that big cheesy grin that usually meant he was going to get a hug at some point in the near future. He liked that grin. “Kuro-kun, that’s actually…pretty romantic.”
“Really?” said Kuroki, feeling proud. “I mean, yeah. That’s…that’s what I was going for.”
Akina laughed. “Well, are we going, then?”
“Yeah,” said Kuroki. “Oh, wait. I got something for you.” He dug through the inside pockets of his jacket until he found what he was looking for, and pulled it out to show it to her. It was a CD in a paper case. “Here. It’s, uh…not like completely legal or anything, and I swear I would have bought it but I couldn’t find it anywhere.”
Akina took it and turned it over in her hands. “Is this…?” she asked, wide-eyed.
“It’s Painkiller. I know you wanted it, so--”
But she leapt at him before he could finish the sentence, latching onto him in a rib-crushing hug that, aside from significantly reduced ability to breathe, Kuroki didn’t mind in the least. And then she grabbed him by the ears and yanked him down for a kiss.
Shortly, she let him go, and he stood there reeling slightly and feeling dumbstruck. Akina giggled.
“You’re totally blushing,” she pointed out.
Fuck.
“Well,” he muttered, because it was all he could think to say.
“That was totally your first kiss, wasn’t it.”
“Half and first.”
“Huh?” said Akina, and then realized, grinning sheepishly. “Oh. I guess I should apologize for that, huh?”
“No,” said Kuroki, maybe a little too quickly. “It’s, uh…I don’t mind.”
“Okay,” Akina said brightly, and grabbed his hand, heading down the sidewalk in the direction of their destination. Kuroki followed until he caught up with her stride, walking beside her, and she laced her fingers through his. “And, Kuro-kun?”
“Yeah?”
She was looking away, pretending to be busy tucking the CD into her pocket. “That was my half and first, too.”
Kuroki attempted, in vain, not to totally blush again. “Oh.”
Akina walked a little closer, smiling up at him. “And you don’t really have motor breath.”
Kuroki grinned. “Neither do you.”
---
He did not screw up the first date.
And even if he had, she would have given him a second chance.
The Bomberman dorks would have to fend for themselves.
Fandom: Eyeshield 21
Pairing: Kuroki/OC, brief Togano/OC
Rating: PG-13 for language and vague sexual references (teenage boys, basically)
Summary: Going out with girls is easier said than done. Kuroki's probably going to need some help with this one.
Author's Note: For
hinas_otaku's birthday, because she needs more love and so does Kuroki, and this was all her fault from the beginning.He met her at the arcade.
“Dude,” said some guy with a maze of facial piercings, leaning over the back of the machine Kuroki was occupying, “this girl is going for the new high score on Tekken and it looks like she’s gonna get it!”
Kuroki looked up, startled and suspicious. “Bullshit,” he said, abandoning his post to squirm through the weekend gamer crowd toward the Tekken machine. That high score was his, and like hell some girl was going to top it.
No sooner did this thought cross his mind before he managed to break through the gathering of spectators to witness some girl topping his high score.
A cheer went up from the gathering of gamers. The girl, smallish and pigtailed and wearing converse sneakers with what appeared to be a stripy dress made from a giant sweater, leapt into the air, shrieking a warrior cry of victory. She turned to her left, grabbed the shirt of the nearest spectator, and yanked him down to her level to administer a triumphant noogie before jumping to the next and crushing him in what seemed to be a surprisingly powerful hug. She then whirled to her right, ran smack into Kuroki, reached up to grab him by the ears and pulled him down to kiss him right on the side of the mouth.
Now, Kuroki had been planning to confront the girl. He’d wanted to challenge her to a match to regain his honor at the very least. But now he was thrown off his guard; the last thing he’d expected was to be on the receiving end of a spontaneous victory kiss. He was busy wondering what the proper response was, and if he should try to get her reported for something, and if it counted as a first kiss if he hadn’t consented to it and only about half her mouth had actually been on his lips. He was also praying to every god he knew that he wasn’t blushing. He felt like he was blushing.
“Dude, you’re totally blushing,” facial piercings guy pointed out.
Fuck.
Spurred into action, Kuroki followed the girl across the room where she was procuring high fives from a knot of wary-looking gamers grouped around the Bomberman setup. Gathering up what little noticeable courage he possessed, Kuroki prodded the girl on the shoulder and tried to look imposing as she turned around.
“That was my high score, and I challenge you to a game to fight for it, but I warn you there’s no way you’ll win,” Kuroki had planned to say. What he actually said was something more along the lines of “I-I wa-…uh…”
He was probably blushing again.
The girl, and now he could see that she was about his age, although at first she’d looked a few years younger, grinned widely. “It’s you!” she exclaimed, clapping her hands together in delight through the oversized sleeves of her sweater dress.
That pissed Kuroki off. “Yeah, me, the guy you just violated by the Tekken machine,” he spat, indignant. To make matters worse, she laughed, high and giddy, and grabbed for his hands, curling sweater-clad digits around his clenched fists.
“No, I mean you’re the one whose high score I just beat!” she explained, smiling up at him. “I come here every weekend and most Tuesdays and Thursdays to watch you play. You’re really good! No wonder it took me forever to beat your score, hmm? Sorry I didn’t recognize you at first; I was pretty excited.”
Kuroki blinked.
“I’m Akina,” the girl offered. “Your name’s Kuroki, right? I hear your two buddies call you that. Are they here today?”
“I, uh…no,” Kuroki managed. He was supposed to meet Togano later, and Jumonji was being forced to spend time with his family. But this conversation was headed into weird territory. She knew him? She knew his friends? What, was she stalking him now? Or was this not unusual? Kuroki was lost.
“How come your score just says 52 instead of your name?” Akina asked. She was still holding onto his hands.
“It’s my jersey number,” said Kuroki, defeated.
“Jersey number? What for?”
“American football,” he mumbled. “I’m a lineman. Deimon Devil Bats.”
“Really? Kick ass!” said Akina. She was bouncing on her toes and grinning elatedly. “I totally watch your games! That was you? That is so awesome. We should hang out sometime!”
“We…we…should?” he asked.
“Yeah!” said Akina. For a second, she was silent, and then she grinned again. “You’re totally blushing.”
Fuck.
---
And so they hung out sometime, and some times after that as well.
The guys liked her, in a rough, pretending-to-be-intolerant sort of way. She came to the games. She was probably afraid of Hiruma, but it was impressively hard to tell. (He nicknamed her “fucking pigtails”.) Mamori thought she was sweet.
Kuroki never did get that high score back.
---
One day they were in Akina’s living room playing Street Fighter, because sometimes you get nostalgic for the classics, and she hit the pause button, tossing down the controller like she was going to get up for more chips. But she didn’t move
“Hey, Kuro-kun,” she said tentatively, holding her ankles, “can we talk?”
“Sure,” said Kuroki, confused, because they’d been talking perfectly well when Chun Li was kicking Jet in the head, and he wasn’t sure what was different now.
Akina rocked back and forth on the carpet, apparently nervous. Finally, she sighed deeply and flipped her pigtail braids over her shoulders, giving him that look girls give you when you’re doing something dumb and they want you to know they’re suffering for it. “Kuro-kun, when are you going to ask me out?”
Oh.
“…Uh,” Kuroki said, suddenly holding his controller hard enough to leave fingernail marks in the plastic. Akina looked expectant, wary, slightly annoyed. Kuroki panicked. “I didn’t know I was supposed to!”
That, it seemed, had been the wrong answer. Akina’s eyes went wide. “You didn’t know?”
“You never told me!”
“Kuro-kun!”
“Well!” Kuroki shot back. It was all he could think to say.
Akina was going red in the face. “Oh, you-- you-- oh!” she sputtered, and stood up, hands on her hips. “Well, are you going to or not, you spineless, cowardly, motor-breathed amoeba!?”
“I am not a motor-breathed amoeba!” Kuroki countered, getting to his feet, “And what the hell does that even mean? Look, just because you can’t talk to me straight because you’re a girl--”
“Oh, is that it?” Akina snapped. “I can talk plenty straight! You’re the one who never said you wanted me to, Hypocrite Boy! You want straight talk? Fine.” She stood right up to him, glaring into his face and jabbing his chest with one finger for emphasis. “The truth is, you’re lucky to have me, buster! I’m cute! I’m friendly! I’m very low-maintenance! I don’t ask for much! I let you eat all my chips! And I could do better than you, and I wouldn’t have to try all that hard, you walnut-brained twit! But I’m about as good as it gets for boys who can’t talk to a woman to save their lives and couldn’t find their asses with a map despite being endearingly bizarre and the best Grand Theft Auto player I’ve ever seen, so you make your mind up right now, mister: are you going to man up and ask me out or not? Because the arcade on the corner is full of boys who haven’t been out of the dark long enough to spot a double X chromosome in years, and some of them wouldn’t look half bad cleaned up, either, so you’d better make your choice before I decide to give up on you and go trawling for geeks!”
She stood back on her heels, arms crossed, red-faced and breathing hard, waiting.
Kuroki cleared his throat.
“Akina?” he mumbled.
“What?”
“…Will you go out with me?”
A grin broke out over Akina’s face like a rainbow after a storm. She lunged forward and wrapped her arms around him, crushing the air from his lungs. “Yes!”
---
Going out with girls was easier said than done.
Kuroki called the first person he knew who could be considered a leading expert on women, in the sense that he had a girlfriend and hadn’t managed to get himself killed or castrated by her thus far. (Although, to be perfectly honest, he would have called Togano first anyway. It was before noon and Jumonji liked to sleep in, and besides, he probably would have laughed.)
“Hello?”
“Hey, it’s me. Listen, where are you supposed to take girls on dates?”
“I don’t know.”
Kuroki paused. “You don’t…know?”
“Nah,” said Togano. Kuroki could hear a rustling sound on the other line, like pages crinkling. “Me and Lee just order pizza and sit on the couch reading Jump, mostly. Why?”
Kuroki let his forehead thump against the kitchen wall. “Akina made me ask her out.”
“Huh, really?”
“Don’t sound so fucking shocked, dude.”
“Sorry. I didn’t think she liked guys.”
“…What?”
“Just sayin’. Look, I’m pretty sure the idea is you’re supposed to like, get food…and do something…uh, entertaining. I mean, that’s what people on TV do, so…”
“You want me to take dating advice from television?”
“Why not?”
Kuroki thought this over. “Well…”
But Togano interrupted that thought pattern. “Look, man, you know what you could do?”
“What?”
“Try looking up in some shoujo manga or something.”
There was a long, oppressive silence.
“Toga--”
“No, listen. It’s for girls, right, so it has shit that girls like, so you could like, look for stuff that girls like in it and then…do that.” There was a pause. “Actually, I’m pretty sure Akina doesn’t like shoujo…”
“Dude,” Kuroki said desperately, “comic books can’t be your solution to every fucking problem.”
“Sure they can,” Togano said calmly.
“You can’t get dating ideas from manga!”
“Works for me.”
“You don’t count; your girlfriend has a poster of the cast of Bleach on the ceiling above her bed!”
“Actually, that one’s on the door, the One Piece one is on-- look, it doesn’t matter, you’re the one who asked and I told you what I thought; take it or leave it.”
“I’ll tell you where I’m leaving it,” Kuroki muttered.
“At least Lee doesn’t kick my ass at Halo every weekend.”
“At least Akina doesn’t like Ichigo more than me.”
“To be fair, I like Orihime better than her.”
“Freak.”
“Loser.”
“Motor-breathed amoeba.”
“…What?”
They argued for ten more minutes, agreed to meet up for pizza on Monday, and hung up. Kuroki sat on the kitchen floor cradling the phone like a lifeline and sighed, forlorn.
---
It was two in the afternoon by the time Kuroki deemed it safe to call Jumonji’s house.
“Hello?”
“Dude, it’s me. I have a problem. Well, I have a question. I have a problem that I have a question about.”
“Uh…huh. What?”
“Where do you take girls?”
There was a pause. Kuroki could hear Jumonji breathing on the other line.
“Um, the back seat if you’re lucky,” he said at last.
“I’m serious, man.”
“So am I. What’s going on?”
“Akina made me ask her out.”
“She made you…?”
“Yeah, at gunpoint. Look, you know stuff about women, don’t you? Where am I supposed to take her?”
“I don’t know,” Jumonji muttered. He sounded embarrassed. “Look, uh, I’ve like…I’ve been with girls but I haven’t been out with girls. So.”
Kuroki slammed his head against the kitchen wall again and groaned. “I’m doomed.”
“Did you call Togano? He’s got a girlfriend.”
“Yeah. He told me to buy shoujo manga.”
Jumonji was silent for several seconds. “What did you tell him?”
“Well, basically I called him a motor-breathed amoeba and we argued for ten minutes over which one of us is more likely to be mistaken for our girl’s dyke tyke. Oh, we’re going for pizza Monday; you coming?”
“Sure. You called him what?”
“What am I supposed to do, man? If I fuck this up she’s totally gonna ditch me for one of the Bomberman dorks.”
“Harsh. Ask your older brother? He’s married and shit, right? So…”
“Dude…look, you remember just the other day when he was staying at my place and you and Toga were over and we were talking about how hot Mamori is, and he was all like, ‘Oh, you guys are talking about girls, why I remember the days, blah blah blah…’?”
Jumonji’s disdain was practically audible. “Yeah…”
“Okay, that was when I didn’t even ask.”
“Point,” Jumonji conceded. “I guess you could ask your cousin or something? I mean, they’re still staying with you, right?”
“She’s twelve, dude.”
“Well, yeah, but…she probably knows shit about girls, ‘cause she is one.”
“…I guess. Yeah, okay, that’s better than girly comic books.”
“Yeah, so…uh, good luck with that.”
“Right. Uh. Thanks, or whatever.”
“Hey, uh…look, if you do make it to the back seat, by any chance--”
“Man, I had this talk when I was thirteen, I’m covered.”
“No, I just meant, uh. Make sure her dad isn’t out looking for her.”
“…Oh. Gotcha.”
“Yeah.”
“Seeya Monday.”
“Right. Cool.”
“Later.”
Kuroki hung up, banged his head against the kitchen wall for several seconds, and went to find his little cousin.
---
Sakuya was in the living room pasting colorful stickers to a school binder.
“Hey, uh. Sakuya.”
“What?” she asked, without looking up. Kuroki stood in the middle of the room, hands in his pockets, shifting awkwardly from right foot to left.
“Okay, you’re a girl…”
At this, Sakuya looked up. It was that look again, the you’re-an-idiot-and-I’m-suffering-for-it look. Kuroki was getting sick of that look.
“I just meant,” he tried to explain, “that I need some advice from a girl, and you’re a girl, so…give me some advice.”
She looked leery. “What kind of advice?”
“I just, um. Uh…okay, say a guy asked you out, right? Hypothetically, obviously, because if a guy asked you out now I’d have to kill him--”
“Kouji--”
“Okay, never mind, look. If a guy asked you out, where would you want him to take you?”
Sakuya spent several seconds looking at him with a confused sort of suspicion. Finally, she rolled her eyes and sighed. “You’re supposed to take her somewhere romantic, nimrod.”
“Shut up,” Kuroki said reflexively, and then, “Romantic how?”
“You know, romantic. Like a fancy restaurant or something.”
Kuroki spent several seconds wondering if anything with a drive through constituted ‘fancy’ before concluding that a safe bet was no. “I think I’m too broke for that.”
Sakuya rolled her eyes and sighed again. She did that a lot lately, probably practicing to be a teenager. Kuroki took comfort in knowing that any boys were probably going to find her too annoying to ask out. “Well, if you’re that poor, maybe you shouldn’t ask girls out. Or you should get a job.”
“She made me; it wasn’t my idea,” said Kuroki. “And I don’t have any time, being on the team. And shut up.”
Sakuya pasted on the last of her stickers and tucked the binder under her arm. “Not my fault,” she said breezily, standing up. “But you asked her out even if she made you, so you better come up with something good or she’s totally going to ditch you.”
“For a Bomberman dork, yeah,” said Kuroki, twisting his fingers into his hair and trying not to panic.
Distantly, he heard Sakuya’s sigh again. “Ugh. If she made you ask her out and you did and she said yes then she probably likes you. I don’t know why, but she does. So even if you screw up really bad she’ll probably give you a second chance. So as long as you don’t screw that up I bet she’ll forgive you.”
Kuroki opened his eyes and looked down at his cousin, considering this. “…Thanks,” he said eventually, grudgingly.
She almost smiled, but covered it up with another sigh and eye roll. “Whatever. You’re still a loser.”
“Yeah, well, you’re a motor-breathed amoeba.”
“What?”
---
It took Kuroki all day and several minor internal crises to figure it out, but figure it out he did. And if it went wrong, at least Akina would probably give him a second chance.
Failing that, some Bomberman dork was going to be very happy.
---
He picked her up at seven.
“So where are we going?” Akina asked, stepping onto the sidewalk. She was wearing one of those sweater dresses again with stripy stockings, but she looked like she’d done something complicated with her hair, and she was smiling in a way probably best classified as nervous, although that wasn’t a look Kuroki was used to seeing on her.
“You remember that place we went the first time, where you got the teriyaki chicken and accidentally dumped it all over my lap?” said Kuroki.
Akina put her hand to her forehead. “I was hoping you’d forget that eventually.”
“Yeah, well,” said Kuroki. He scratched the back of his head. “I figured we could go there, ‘cause…I mean, I know it’s nothing special but that was the first place we went together and we-- well, I had a good time, even with the teriyaki sauce on my pants, so…I guess it’s just like, uh, for sentimental reasons and shit. Unless you don’t want to. ‘Cause if you don’t want to we can go somewhere else.”
Akina was grinning, that big cheesy grin that usually meant he was going to get a hug at some point in the near future. He liked that grin. “Kuro-kun, that’s actually…pretty romantic.”
“Really?” said Kuroki, feeling proud. “I mean, yeah. That’s…that’s what I was going for.”
Akina laughed. “Well, are we going, then?”
“Yeah,” said Kuroki. “Oh, wait. I got something for you.” He dug through the inside pockets of his jacket until he found what he was looking for, and pulled it out to show it to her. It was a CD in a paper case. “Here. It’s, uh…not like completely legal or anything, and I swear I would have bought it but I couldn’t find it anywhere.”
Akina took it and turned it over in her hands. “Is this…?” she asked, wide-eyed.
“It’s Painkiller. I know you wanted it, so--”
But she leapt at him before he could finish the sentence, latching onto him in a rib-crushing hug that, aside from significantly reduced ability to breathe, Kuroki didn’t mind in the least. And then she grabbed him by the ears and yanked him down for a kiss.
Shortly, she let him go, and he stood there reeling slightly and feeling dumbstruck. Akina giggled.
“You’re totally blushing,” she pointed out.
Fuck.
“Well,” he muttered, because it was all he could think to say.
“That was totally your first kiss, wasn’t it.”
“Half and first.”
“Huh?” said Akina, and then realized, grinning sheepishly. “Oh. I guess I should apologize for that, huh?”
“No,” said Kuroki, maybe a little too quickly. “It’s, uh…I don’t mind.”
“Okay,” Akina said brightly, and grabbed his hand, heading down the sidewalk in the direction of their destination. Kuroki followed until he caught up with her stride, walking beside her, and she laced her fingers through his. “And, Kuro-kun?”
“Yeah?”
She was looking away, pretending to be busy tucking the CD into her pocket. “That was my half and first, too.”
Kuroki attempted, in vain, not to totally blush again. “Oh.”
Akina walked a little closer, smiling up at him. “And you don’t really have motor breath.”
Kuroki grinned. “Neither do you.”
---
He did not screw up the first date.
And even if he had, she would have given him a second chance.
The Bomberman dorks would have to fend for themselves.