Note: I have one and a half hour before school starts. I have 400 more words to write till I can consider my English article done. What the hell am I doing uploading this? Oh, and sorry about the poor grammar.
Extra note: Hikaru no Go does not belong to me.
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The janitor looked around the room and grunted in distaste.
With the lights off and only the weak shaft of light coming from the hallway, the room actually looked pretty orderly, and clean-he could see the outlines of shelves, no doubt filled with books, and antique go boards, neatly stacked. But bathe the room with real light and it turned into...well, into something not clean.
Really. The room ought to be a zone for dust-loving creatures-an inch-thick layer of said material covered the whole place; they were on the shelves, on the gobans, on the floor. Hell, the floor was so dusty he could actually see footprints. A person susceptible to dust could walk in, take one good whiff, and die.
That wouldn't do at all.
He'd been instructed not to touch a thing in the place with a vacuum or a mop-like some errant child ordered to keep his hand out of the cookie jar, he thought, sniffing in an offended way-but he'd be damned if he followed that order now. Looking at the place and not freeing it of its filth...why, it went against every rule in the Every Janitor's Book of Conduct.
Besides, he thought wryly, looking down at his hand, he was holding a duster. His employer didn't forbid him to touch the place with a duster.
Feeling vindicated, he took a step and began to dust the shelves nearest him.
He did not see the two sets of footprints that led up to a closet in the far corner of the room.
Somebody-perhaps one of the janitors-was playing very bad and very loud music in the hallway, and it was irritating Akira to no end. He had a very busy schedule that day, but being forced to listen to tacky music wasn't one of them.
He felt a body squirm against his.
That was not included in his schedule, either.
Surely this was torture at its cruelest form.
"Would you mind removing your hands off my pants?" he growled, looking down at a head of yellow and black hair and repressing the mad urge to shave it all off-with garden shears. Not that he could at that moment. He was trapped in a dark, cramped closet, with no way of getting his hands on a pair of garden shears. He was also in a very uncomfortable position.
This was all Shindo's fault.
"This is all your fault," he hissed. "And your hands are still on my pants."
The person-who-was-currently-the object-of-his-ire looked up and glared.
"My fault? Who wanted to sneak around in a-" an emphasis "-very restricted section of the building after hours just so he could catch up on his go history?" Shindo grunted, making another attempt to pull his hands away. They remained stubbornly wedged between the walls and both sides of Akira's hips.
"My hands are stuck," he said, finally giving up. "Your hips are too wide."
Akira bristled in indignation. "I do not have wide hips," he said. "You take that back."
Shindo rolled his eyes. "You have wide hips, Touya. Why else would my hands be stuck?"
"Because you aren't trying," Akira retorted. "If you just shift back a little..."
"I can't. I'd have to be less tangible to slip through whatever is behind me and put more space between us, and I'm not."
"If you don't stop italicizing your words, I may have to hit you." Akira looked heavenward. "I cannot believe I'm stuck here, with you, of all people, arguing about my hips, which aren't wide, thankyouverymuch, and couldn't you have picked a less cramped closet to shove us into?"
"And when would I have had time to do that?" Shindo said crankily. "'Sides, there's only one closet in this room. Stop being unreasonable and shut up."
Akira opened his mouth to make another retort, and then promptly did what Shindo told him to, which was to shut up. He was being unreasonable. He was never unreasonable, unless-and here he scowled-unless he was with Shindo, blast him, which he was.
Akira didn't think he wanted to know why.
"You know," he said in a dour tone, "if we had allowed ourselves to be discovered, we could've talked our way out of the situation and gotten out of this place unscathed."
His right arm, which was flung over his head, was beginning to tire. Without thinking, he brought it down with the intention of resting it on his side, momentarily forgetting his current predicament of being restricted of movement.
His arm landed on Shindo's shoulder. He sighed.
"But no, you had to act like some bloody hero from some bloody espionage novel and throw us both in here instead. I suppose having the insight to foresee this is too much to ask for."
"Well, remind me to never again try to help," Shindo retorted, deliberately ignoring the heavy weight on his shoulder-rather uncharacteristic of him, Akira noted. "The next time I even think about your well-being, I'll just shrug it off and leave you to fend for yourself! And don't you place all the blame on me! Who dragged me in this room in the first place? Who?"
Since when did Shindo use the word well-being in a sentence? And he was thinking about his well-being? "I didn't drag you," Akira said stiffly, "I asked you to come with me and you did. Voluntarily, too, might I add."
"'Voluntarily?' You threatened to hide one sock out of each and every pair that I have!"
"I'm sure I have no idea what you're talking about," Akira said, non-committal. He shifted his eyes to look around the room-a fruitless action, as it was too dark in the closet to see anything clearly. The only thing he could see was the yellow streaks in Shindo's hair. He wondered briefly if some fluorescent substance was added to the hair dye.
"Anyway," he continued, "there must be a way to make ourselves more comfortable while we wait. We didn't have to wait, of course. We wouldn't even be here had you allowed yourself to be governed by your brain for once...wait, never mind. You lack that particular organ. Truly I am sorry for having overlooked that one-ouch!"
Shindo had stepped down on his foot. Hard. Akira glared.
"That hurts," he hissed.
"Sorry," the other boy said, not sounding sorry at all.
"No need to sound so apologetic about it," Akira said sarcastically, "It's not as if it's going to be of use to me, anyway-and don't even think about it."
"Think about what?"
"Stepping down on my other foot."
"What makes you think I'll do that?"
"Aside from having felt your leg shift up, ready to strike? I have no idea," Akira said, already pressing his ear against the closet door. Trying to hear if the person who had walked in on them were still outside was always a good thing to do, after all. But this, too, turned out to be a fruitless action, as the music made it virtually impossible to hear anything but. Damn music and its inconveniences, he thought moodily. It ought to be considered illegal to play music that loud-
"Oww!" He suddenly yelped, then bit his tongue to prevent himself from letting out a full-fledged howl. Akira stared angrily at the head of yellow hair in front of him. "That was my shin you hit! Why in the blazes did you do that for?"
Akira could almost hear the other boy shrug. He scowled. If he says, "Because I felt like it and I am Shindo and you did say that it would be a very Shindo thing to do", I swear I...
"Because I felt like it and I am Shindo and you did say that hitting you would be a very Shindo thing to do."
Bastard.
"You, Shindo Hikaru," he snarled softly, "are a menace to society."
And with that, he grasped a bit of flesh on Shindo's upper right arm, and twisted.
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To be continued.