tampered | LOG; Ongoing

LOG; Ongoing

When; March 31, early in the morning
Rating; PG-13 [language]
Characters; Anezaki Mamori [

fuckingmanager], Hiruma Yoichi [

fuckingqb]
Summary; Hiruma is back in the City after being gone for a little over a week.
Log;

The apartment is quiet this early in the morning, save for the sounds of Kurita's snoring. Far from having kept him awake when he'd arrived several hours ago, it had actually put him to sleep faster. It had helped that he'd been tired as fuck, of course, though really anything that helped him sleep these days was welcome.

His fingers twitched, the skin of his right arm itching. It made him scowl irritably, shifting his arm a bit and baring his teeth in a deeper grimace at the flare of pain this caused. He resented the weight of the cast on his arm, the sling he was forced to wear to keep it from pulling too much on his shoulder. He hated what the cast meant for the team, both the one in his world and the one in this one. Even more he was not happy, at all, knowing he'd been gone as long as he had. His expectations for practice this morning weren't high. The fucking fatass and the fucking shrimp would be there. He'd get the others back.

He held the pot under the tap, listened to the water fill it. Making coffee one-handed wasn't a difficult task, thankfully, and one he managed with a kind of grumpy ease. If he'd been anyone other than Hiruma Yoichi, he wouldn't have gotten out of bed this fucking early. He would have stayed right where he'd been, warm and as comfortable as he could be considering the cast. But he didn't sleep in and he sure as hell didn't lay in bed wide awake when it was time to get up and get work done.

He leaned his hip against the counter, staring at the coffeemaker without really seeing it.

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The noise coming from the kitchen was more than enough to stir Mamori from her slumber, the manager having found it difficult to concentrate on anything in the past week, sleep included. It wasn't healthy, that much she knew, but she had denied herself enough in public, smiled often and held her shoulders high, and to be asked to do the same at night was simply too great of a burden. Unfortunately, night had already given way to day, it seemed, and with a soft yawn Mamori slid her legs over the side of the bed, wondering just who it was that could've been awake at so early an hour. Nero had managed to make every practice on time, but she highly doubted that the man would have found any reason to enter her apartment, and Kurita-kun always slept until the last possible moment...

Quietly, she shuffled to the kitchen, rubbing sleep from her eyes and sleepily peeking ahead, the outline of the person slowly becoming clearer.

Until her breath suddenly lodged itself somewhere in her throat.

A hallucination, Mamori immediately thought. Lack of sleep, perhaps, or maybe she'd simply missed him too much and her brain decided to compensate in whatever manner it could. She rose a hand to her lips, teeth biting down hard on the lower one--worse yet, perhaps it was a curse, the City playing tricks with her mind, as it had done so many times before.

Wasn't her life difficult enough?

"If this is the deities' idea of a joke," she whispered bitterly, breath leaving her lips shakily.

He'd heard her in the hall but hadn't turned around, not immediately. He didn't like admitting that he was still sore from the game, but the fact of the matter was that he did ache. It seemed like there wasn't much on him that didn't, though the sessions in the oxygen chamber had certainly helped clear up most of it. He was grateful for that, at least, though he wasn't looking forward to having to find one of those in this City. At least here the Christmas Bowl wasn't hanging urgently over his head--if he couldn't find one he could just suffer through the length of time it would normally take him to heal.

When he heard her mutter--though the words didn't reach him--he turned, a slow pivot on his feet. One eyebrow arched, giving Mamori a mild look across the kitchen.

Not quite the greeting he was expecting.

"You're mumbling again, fucking manager."

It was his voice, his expression, everything was perfect down to the last hair on his head, and Mamori was all the more bitter for it. Lyra had told her about the City and its particulars, how people seldom returned so soon, seldom retained their memories--if Hiruma wasn't baffled by the location, by the setting they were both in, then it probably wasn't him. Luck wouldn't be that kind to her, she was pretty sure.

But still, perhaps... just maybe.

"It's not really you, is it?" Mamori murmured quietly, doubt etched all over her face. "Hiruma-kun already left the City, last week. And if this is a curse... I'd be happier without."

He didn't blame her for asking. If she hadn't asked, he would have begun to question her authenticity as well. In a way this was almost like a test Mamori could have never known she had just passed; Hiruma was naturally wary, and even if everything seemed to be almost exactly how he left it--except for the part where she was back in her bed at night, rather than his--didn't mean that the City was behaving, not by any stretch of the imagination.

Hiruma couldn't cross his arms over his chest, not effectively, so he reached into his pocket to dig for a piece of gum--more to give his hand something to do than anything else.

Fuck, he wanted both his arms working right.

"I came back," he replied with the air of someone stating the obvious, glancing at the coffee pot, irritated it wasn't done yet.

Perhaps it was still all a trick, a mirage, and experience had taught her to be wary in the City, to doubt until proven otherwise, but there was only so long that Mamori could hold out, human tendencies and emotions overflowing--and she just needed something to grasp onto, just for a moment. Hiruma would probably berate her for wanting to hold onto something despite such deep suspicions, but if it wasn't him, he wouldn't be there to know anyway, and if it was--

...if it was.

She walked briskly over, hands so tempted to wrap around him again, to pull him to her, but they paused in midair, just for a moment. Her gaze dropped to his cast--he'd been away, that much was certain--and her fingers traced over it lightly--it was unfamiliar; had he jumped ahead in time?--slowly taking his words in as well. The City wouldn't have thrown such unfamiliar details at her, would it? And the way he had phrased it, as well.

He was back.

Suddenly, it became simply too painful to hold back any longer, a whimper slipping suspiciously from her lips as she wrapped both arms around his waist, the familiar warmth pressed against her again as she buried her face in the small of his neck.

"Welcome back," she whispered lightly, worrying her lower lip for a moment before composing herself enough to speak again. "Hiruma-kun."

He frowned a bit as she touched his cast--the look on her face set alarm bells off in his mind. If she'd known his arm was broken, she shouldn't have been surprised at all by his cast. It made him suspicious, and he watched her looking at him in that beat before she hugged him with a flare of wariness sparking once more.

It was possible, of course, that she wasn't from the same time he was. Hiruma's understanding of how this fucked up City worked wasn't perfect, but it seemed as if a person could get yanked into this place from any random moment, and there'd been plenty between the time when his arm had been broken and when he'd finally gotten a cast put on. It would explain her initial reaction to it, slight as it had been.

And she never had mentioned them winning the game against the Dinosaurs. That alone was enough to convince Hiruma that she had come to the City prior to its end. It would have been a detail she would have mentioned, especially that day when the City was determined that she say everything that she was thinking.

She was leaning against him to one side, avoiding his arm where it rested against his body, because he couldn't quite get it out of the way, not completely. It hurt to move it even a little bit, though he could take the pain. He didn't indicate it at all as he shifted his arm a bit, letting her move closer to him as his left arm, his good arm, circled around her shoulders. He didn't say anything, just let her lean against him.

A moment of weakness was all Mamori could really afford in the City, but that wasn't enough to stop her, emotions flooding over reason as she pulled back only for the sake of getting a closer look at him, searching for all the little things--the earrings were the same, the curve of his collarbone so familiar, and Mamori let her hand trail up his jawline, fingers weaving into the strands of his hair--to hell with the City, even if it was just a temporary thing. She didn't dare smile yet, brow still furrowed as she gazed at him.

"I missed you," she whispered, perhaps out of consideration for the others in the apartment, perhaps because she didn't want to call any attention to the fact that he'd returned. She wasn't sure which. "I didn't think you were coming back."

Leaning in, Mamori allowed the bridge of her nose to run along Hiruma's jaw before she tilted her head back, pressing her lips lightly against the corner of Hiruma's mouth--he remembered, right? That's why he said he was back, right?

Or so she hoped.

Even if he'd been the type to just come out and say such things--and Hiruma wasn't, not by any stretch of the imagination--he couldn't have told her he missed her. He'd been with her, in his world, and he hadn't remembered the City while he was there. Which had been a good thing, there was no telling how it might have effected what had happened. It wasn't until he came back that he realized that he'd even been gone, so for him it was almost as if no time had passed at all. At least, not in the City.

But it had, her reaction was evidence of that even if the calendar hadn't confirmed it.

This probably meant the fucking fatass was going to try and hug him too. Hiruma hoped he'd have enough fucking sense to avoid his broken arm--it was already going to take too long to heal.

One eyebrow arched as her mouth against the very edge of his lips pulled his thoughts rather forcibly back to the present.

"Is that the best you've got, fucking manager?" His hand wound into her hair, tilting her head. The words were barely said and mostly lost against her mouth as he kissed her, nothing tentative or unsure about it.

Edited 2008-04-01 03:14 (UTC)

Sighing softly, Mamori tilted her head further, mindful of his arm as she draped one of hers around his neck, pulling him closer, body tense in an effort to not press against him in a way that would jar against the fracture. Preoccupations, really, distractions which were apparent in the kiss itself, hesitant in the way her lips trembled against his. It was such a contrast to the way he was acting, almost as though nothing had happened, despite the arm, despite his absence, and everything just seemed to be working against her confidence.

But she couldn't let it on, and when her lips refused to move further, Mamori compensated by pulling back, a tentative smile pulling at her lips.

"I do hope that you don't plan on playing with that arm," she noted, tone as light as she could muster. "Oh, and the team's been doing well this past week. Nero-kun's even stepped up to oversee practices, so I think you'll find the results rather pleasing on the whole."

It wasn't working, and Hiruma was on the verge of giving her an annoyed scowl and waiting for her to tell him what the fuck was up. Except that when she pulled back, it was to tell him something that, frankly, shocked him. So much so that, for that second, he was completely floored into silence, merely staring at her.

"Fucking tilde?" He finally said, recovering himself. Even still, there was a single note of surprise in his tone that he didn't manage to shake in time.

He supposed he shouldn't be surprised. If it came down to it and Nero left the City, Hiruma would do everything he could to make sure the shit he left behind was taken care of, whatever that might have been. And he knew--even though they'd never said it, because it didn't need to be said--that it was a sentiment the other guy shared. Nonetheless, he hadn't expected him to step in and take up the leadership role. He'd said before he preferred working alone and wasn't leader material.

He grinned, a wide smirk as he took this in.

"Hope he ran the fucking team into the ground." And now there was a note of...well, it was almost a fierce kind of pride. She could read that as she wanted to, or ignore it. Hiruma wouldn't elaborate on it if she asked--it was akin to the pride he'd felt when Sena had stepped in and taken over for him, albeit to a much smaller degree. After all, the fucking shrimp had come a helluva lot further than Nero. But it was still there, nonetheless.

Changing the subject to football was always something that seemed to work relatively well with Hiruma, even if it wasn't always enough to completely distract him. Mamori knew it well, that his first and only real love was football, and the dedication was one of the reasons why she had found herself so attracted to him, even if it led to rather frustrating moments spent thinking as she stared at the grain of the table, or moments when she thought she'd have a heart attack when he stuck his neck out on the line again. Where Hiruma didn't worry for his own welfare, Mamori made up double for it.

She was pretty sure she did, anyway.

Quirking an eyebrow and relaxing slightly into her smile, Mamori shook her head. "I don't think anyone can really be as brutal with the team as you are, Hiruma-kun," she noted, slowly pulling away from the embrace--she wasn't supposed to be needy, he needed his space. "But he did a good job, and if nothing else, the team's managed to bond pretty well and the members seem... happy to be here. And in the end, that's one of the more important factors, right?" Mamori yawned lightly, body taking care to note that it was still early, thank you very much, earlier than she usually got up for practice.

"In all honesty, you and Nero-kun are rather similar at times," she added. "I wasn't surprised that he took over for you."

He eyed her thoughtfully. Honestly, he'd predicted a different reaction from her than that. That wasn't to suggest that Mamori was completely unrestrained, or even that openly affectionate in the more public areas of the apartment--if anything she was so careful it bordered on the kind of paranoia a mother might feel about being caught having sex with her husband by her children. Which was an amusing notion, especially when you considered that Mamori usually did act like a second mother to Sena. Still, they both knew there was no chance Sena and Kurita were going to wake up anytime soon, so he'd been thinking that she would probably...

Not that it mattered, really. Hiruma wasn't a fucking pervert--he didn't need her hugging on him all the damned time.

Not that he minded when she did--

He forcibly dragged himself back to the conversation at hand, letting that line of thinking die (at least, as much as it could in his ever-moving mind). It wasn't something that he needed to think about--it just was.

"Tch." His hand dropped out of her hair and slid back into the pocket of his pants, looking again at the coffee. She'd need a cup too, unless she planned on going back to bed. "So long as he didn't turn them into pansy-ass wimps that want to stand around and fucking bond instead of practicing, then I'll concede he didn't screw anything up." The comment about them being similar was not one Hiruma would respond to, not verbally. But it was a notion that had occurred to him, on more than one occasion. He thought that it might be why he'd liked the guy so soon after knowing him. Why he worked so hard to get Nero to join the team willingly, rather than blackmail him into it.

"Not mutually exclusive," Mamori corrected him with a smile, "bonding and practicing. I mean, if you consider what happened to the team last year, I'd say that there was significant progress in both areas, no?" She looked at Hiruma from the corner of her eyes, heart still beating faster than normal, a tightness in her chest that left her breathing shallow--quickly, she averted her gaze, which landed on the coffeepot. With a small smile, she moved over, leaning slightly against Hiruma as she searched in the upper cabinets for the grounds, spooning one into the filter.

"So, given that we have... two hours before practice," Mamori mused aloud, glancing at a nearby clock. "What do you propose that we do, Hiruma-kun?"

He didn't look away from the coffeepot, not for a single moment. Not when she leaned her weight against him, not when she reached around him to spoon the grounds into the filter, and not when she spoke to him, her body still a comfortable weight against the left half of his own. She was as mindful of his right arm as he was--he wasn't sure if he was grateful, or annoyed at the reminder. He probably wouldn't stop resenting the heavy cast on his arm until he was gone.

Part of Hiruma idly envisioned blowing up the cast once he could finally remove it. The thought took some of the scowl out of his expression.

"Not tired, fucking manager?" This was early, even for her. A bit early for him too, but the pain in his arm had woken him up. It still throbbed dully, a reminder in the back of his mind.

"Never said I wasn't tired, but I can hardly just go back to bed now, can I, Hiruma-kun? By the time I'd manage to fall back asleep, I'd need to get up again," Mamori replied, permitting herself to rest her head on his shoulder--just barely. At this rate, she was probably going to drive him crazy with the mixed signals. Actually, she was already driving herself crazy enough, all things considered.

"I imagine you'll be at practice too?"

She didn't even really have to ask; even if she hoped that Hiruma-kun wouldn't try practicing with the team with his arm in the condition that it was in, she didn't put it past him to watch over the game carefully. Directing from the sidelines.

Which couldn't have been very fun, she imagined.

"Tch." He had a sneaking suspicion that she was handling him gently on purpose. It annoyed him to no end that the fucking cast was going to affect not only the way she reacted around him, but probably other people's as well. Hiruma had come to depend a lot on his ability to intimidate, to project a certain persona. The cast was going to do nothing but hinder than ability; in football intimidation won, and here, in this City, that rule seemed just as appropriate. Considering the type of citizens that this place boasted of, Hiruma didn't like carrying around an advertisement that he wasn't fucking invincible.

At least the broken ribs had been inconspicuous.

"Of course I'm going." He wouldn't be able to play, of course, and he wasn't stupid enough to try. He wanted his arm healed as soon as possible, and trying to practice with it would be counterproductive and stupid.

"Need to make sure fucking tilde didn't screw anything up while I was gone." And possible start training him to be another quarterback. Sena had proven his ability to guide the team, to make decisions and plays and actually succeed; Hiruma figured the kid could start filling his position on the team here as well. However, he came from a different point, a different game, than Hiruma did--there was a chance he wasn't ready for it on his own, and besides, the kid couldn't throw. Not like Nero could. Having another quarterback that could make long passes...

...then again, who would he throw to?

Hiruma's mind turned, working strategy over, figuring out how to set things up to run while he was out of commission. Unconsciously, his eyes still on the pot of coffee that was being brewed, his chin dropped to the top of Mamori's head.

"He didn't," Mamori murmured sleepily, letting her eyes close for an instant--just an instant, mind, she wasn't going to let herself fall asleep so soon after his return, wasn't going to let him out of her sight for very long. "He continued running practices generally in the same manner that you did, and I've been... strategizing, about positions, and so forth." She let out a quiet yawn, covering her mouth with a hand.

Not that they really had anyone to play against, unless Sasaki Koutarou was planning to run a single man kick operation against them--which, now that she thought about it, wasn't entirely unlikely, given the man's fervor for the sport. She hoped that Hiruma recognized that as well, that he didn't need to keep up such a front here, especially in the apartment, and that they weren't just about to play in an important game. That he needed to take some time for himself, for his health, in order to recuperate.

She wouldn't be able to voice any of this, however, without him denying it, or ignoring it, or laughing at it.

Unfortunate, perhaps.

And, even worse, Mamori felt herself drifting off to sleep despite pondering the entire situation, so quickly that when the red light of the coffeepot turned on, she never even noticed.

He knew she was asleep. She was breathing too evenly for her to have been awake; he'd slept beside her often enough to know the difference. When the light to the coffee pot flicked on he didn't reach for it, not immediately. If she was tired enough to fall asleep on her feet then she needed to go back to bed. The problem was that she was too stubborn for her own good. It was a trait he shared, but that didn't meant that it wasn't that frustrated him, at least when she turned that stubborn streak on him.

And he couldn't very well pick her up and carry her back to bed.

Fucking arm. He thought to himself, shifting a bit and grabbing her shoulder, giving her a slight shake.

"Anezaki. Go back to bed."

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LOG; Ongoing

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