Author's notes: Some readers may notice that the idea of Keigo with a compressed-air horn is something which had already made its way into several of my stories, as an aside. I decided that it was about time for Keigo's air-horn to star in a story of its own. Also, I have never actually written Keigo before, so I thought it might be a nice challenge. :D
This fic is set before the events of Bleach. :)
"HAPPY APRIL FOOL'S DAY, BROTHER!"
If the sound of Mizuho screaming hadn't woken him up, the foot which firmly planted itself in his face afterwards would have ensured Keigo's alertness.
Keigo shot up into a sitting position and scowled at his older sister, who was standing on his bed. "What, no 'happy birthday, my dear darling brother'?" Keigo demanded. "What did I ever do to you?"
A tic went in Mizuho's forehead and Keigo could practically see the air around her heat up by several degrees. "Thanks to you," she spat with all the venom of a particularly un-cuddly cobra, "I am no longer an only child. That makes me so angry!"
"Whoa," Keigo said under his breath. "You really need to chill out, Mizuho."
Mizuho rolled her eyes. "Fine," she muttered, irritably, holding out her hand reluctantly. "Here's your present. Five hundred yen. Go nuts."
Mizuho scattered a handful of coins on Keigo's duvet before flouncing out, slamming the door behind her.
"Wait!" Keigo yelled after his sister's retreating back. "That's it? I'm turning fifteen, you know, I think I deserve a better gift than pocket change!"
Mizuho's incensed voice bellowed through the door. "I don't know what you want!" she practically screamed. "Go and buy yourself something! Do you seriously expect me to know what sort of a gift a teenage boy would want?" And with that, Keigo heard the sound of feet stomping against the floorboards of the landing until a door somewhere slammed shut.
"O...kay," Keigo said to himself, sitting up and collecting his change. "Now, what could I buy myself which would really annoy my dear, darling sister?"
Half an hour later, Keigo found himself falling out of a joke-shop, pockets a bit lighter, clutching a bright red bag. Smiling broadly to himself as he began the walk to school, he decided to make the best of the time he really didn't want to have to spend in such a dire place better by livening everybody up. After all, such a wonderful object as the one he had just brought (which, for the canny reader, ought to already be apparent) tended to bring out the best in people. Or so Keigo thought.
"Hey, Mr. Asano!"
Keigo spun around, hearing the voice of one of his best friends calling his name. "Mizuiro!" he exclaimed, stifling a frown as he reached for the item in his bag. "How many times have I told you not to call me by such a formal name? It makes me sound like a nerd!" he lamented, taking out a compressed air-horn and holding it in Mizuiro's face.
Mizuiro frowned lightly as Keigo let off a blast of air by his head, but otherwise showed no signs of being disturbed. "Birthday present from Mizuho?" he inquired politely, turning sideways and beginning to walk in the direction of Karakura High, sans Keigo. "I always thought she was crazy."
"I thought you liked older girls?" Keigo asked, an expression of utter confusion adorning his face.
Mizuiro laughed as Keigo ran to catch up with him. "Ha ha ha. Mizuho's older than me, granted, but she's not a woman. Not like my Hikari."
"Yeah, you've probably got a full head of hair too much for Mizuho anyway," Keigo yawned, before his words caught up with him and he went into full-on panic mode. "Besides which, it would be totally creepy if you started dating my sister, man! She's, like, not even a girl at all! She's a monster!" he shrieked, letting off blasts from his air-horn as he spoke. A ground-floor window in one of the houses the pair passed opened and a woman threw a wet sponge at Keigo, hitting him in the face.
"This one's for you, ma'am!" Keigo cried, holding out the compressed-air horn and tooting it at the irate housewife as she leapt out of the window with surprising agility and began running after Keigo, brandishing an heavy-looking wok. "WHOA!" Keigo cried, eyes opening in fright as he took off, leaving Mizuiro standing alone on the pavement, pinching the bridge of his nose in resignation.
"See you at school, Keigo," Mizuiro shrugged, before flagging down the woman chasing Keigo. "He tends to turn left at the next crossroads, Madam," Keigo said, calmly, smiling pleasantly at the harrassed-looking woman.
The woman blinked at Mizuiro, before smiling back briefly. "Thank you, er..."
"Mizuiro Kojima, Ma'am," Mizuiro added, his smile becoming more wide by the second.
"Thank you, Mizuiro," the woman finished, taking off after Keigo again and appearing to accidentally drop a small scrap of paper on the ground as she ran. Mizuiro strode forwards, picking up the paper. Chuckling to himself, Mizuiro pocketed the woman's phone number and began walking after the distinctly un-manly shrieks around the corner of Keigo being clouted by an heavy kitchen implement.
"IIIIICHIGOOOO!" Keigo screamed at the top of his lungs, racing towards his other best friend in the courtyard. Running up behind his back and throwing one arm around the orange-haired boy's neck, Keigo used his other hand to bring his compressed-air horn to Ichigo's right ear and blasted the abominable noise.
Ichigo turned around to face Keigo. Keigo saw Ichigo's face. Or rather, Keigo saw that it wasn't Ichigo's face.
"Do you think I ought to have pointed out to him that that guy was too short to be Ichigo?" Mizuiro muttered to a nearby classmate as the orange-haired stranger put Keigo into a full-nelson and frogmarched him into the school building.
"Nah," the classmate responded dispassionately. "I think he'll soon work out for himself that he just challenged that new delinquent in the third year."
Mizuiro sighed as Keigo reappeared, hanging halfway out of a top-floor window. "You're right, I think he probably has realised by now."
Thoroughly spooked by his ordeals before school, before registration Keigo put away his new toy in his locker. However, the morning had been thoroughly uneventful to the point of tedium, and at lunch time, Keigo couldn't stand the temptation any more. He withdrew his compressed-air horn from his locker.
Keigo prowled the school corridors for five minutes, searching for a victim. Just as he was beginning to grow bored of jumping into empty classrooms, Keigo struck gold; from the other side of a music room door came the sound of somebody softly strumming a guitar.
Keigo flung the door open and burst into the room, air-horn blasting, only to notice Yasutora Sado plucking away quietly in the corner.
"Oh, hey, Chad," Keigo said, anxiously, as the giant just looked at him silently.
After a few seconds, the giant nodded wordlessly and plugged in the electric guitar he had been playing noiselessly, turning the dial up to eleven. Saying nothing, Chad simply upped the distortion and strummed a chord so loud and distorted Keigo found himself clutching his ears, marvelling at how unaffected Chad seemed to be.
"Okay, you win," Keigo grudgingly conceded, fleeing from the room to look for his next victim.
"So, then, I simply picked him up and threw him on the ground!" said a voice through a door as Keigo walked past. Never one to pass up an opportunity to eavesdrop, Keigo pressed his ear to the door just in time to hear another voice responding enthusiastically to the first one.
"That sounds so amazing, Tatsuki! Tell me what you did next!"
Tatsuki.
Keigo grinned broadly to himself as he took his compressed-air horn out of his pocket and prepared to leap in through the door. However, before he could, he heard Tatsuki's voice again.
"Oh, I'd love to tell you, Michiru, but it's not really too easy to explain. I'd have to give you a demonstration, instead. I know, Keigo Asano would make a great sparring partner!"
Oh, so now Tatsuki was talking about him! Keigo smirked, mentally preparing to walk in and break her heart with a blast of compressed air, when the door flew open.
"Ah, Keigo!" Tatsuki said, a smile exuding pure evil alighting her face. "Just the guy we wanted to see. Get in here and let me demonstrate my throw to Michiru, Ryo and Mahana!"
"Actually, I have somewhere I need to be," Keigo stammered, slowly backing away as the lion's smile grew wider.
"Nonsense, it'll only take a sec," Tatsuki insisted, seizing Keigo's left arm and forcibly dragging him into the classroom, which had already had the desks pushed conveniently to the walls to make space. "Besides, the sound of that air horn has been getting on my wick all day."
Keigo scrabbled at the door, but was dragged back by Tatsuki just before he could open it.
After having spent the remainder of the evening in the infirmary, nursing a swollen arm (how such a small girl had managed to injure his limb that badly using only a chalkboard-duster Keigo had no idea), Keigo was just about to pack up and leave for home when the bell rang, signalling the end of the school day.
"Good afternoon, Mr. Asano," Mizuiro's voice said, and Keigo looked up to see the smiling face of his friend in the door. "I see you managed to get out of all of our afternoon lessons. You really are an expert in time-wasting."
"Time-wasting?" Keigo wailed, waving his bandaged arm around. "See this? That Arisawa is not a lady."
"Well, she's tough," Mizuiro shrugged, helping Keigo out of his chair. "Come on, is it okay for you to leave the infirmary?"
"Well, the bleeding has stopped and I have missed as much class as it is possible to miss for one afternoon, so I'm out of here," Keigo stated, breezing from the nurse's office as quickly as he possibly could, followed by Mizuiro. Just as he was about to turn and head for the main doors, Keigo froze as Orihime Inoue burst in through the doors and rushed past him, heading up the stairs to the top floor. Keigo spun around instinctively and found himself walking slowly after her.
"Uhh, Keigo, you okay?" Mizuiro asked. "You're going the wrong way."
"Come with me!" Keigo demanded, grabbing Mizuiro's arm and beginning to run, heading after Orihime as she disappeared around a corner.
"Well, it's a good thing I'm not meeting Kanako until this evening, then," Mizuiro muttered to himself. Keigo ground to a halt.
"Wait, I thought your current girlfriend was Hikari?" he asked in confusion.
Mizuiro shook his head and sighed, wistfully. "When I stopped and thought about it, Hikari wasn't enough of a lady for me," he replied. "I decided that what I needed was somebody tougher."
"Well, each to his own," Keigo said. "And there's my Orihime!" he declared, ducking behind a corner and watching covertly (or so he thought) as the girl bounced into a classroom.
"Ah, I do believe that that is where the handicrafts club meets every week," Mizuiro said thoughtfully. A second later, an inscrutable smile appeared on his face. "Hey, why don't you go and show Orihime your compressed air-horn?" he suggested. "I bet she'd be really impressed."
"YOU'RE TOTALLY RIGHT!" Keigo announced, taking his air-horn out of his bag and dropping said bag to the floor. "Wait for me, Mizuiro, I'll be just one second!"
"Whatever," Mizuiro replied indifferently, watching as Keigo casually strolled towards the closed classroom door and knocked politely, sniggering slightly.
After a couple of seconds, the door opened. Keigo grinned broadly, his eyes shut, and pressed the button on his horn. The blast of air hadn't even stopped before Mizuiro caught sight of a thin arm grabbing Keigo's shoulder and roughly hauling him into the room. Before the door closed, Mizuiro saw a pair of glasses and a flash of dark hair.
Mizuiro pondered abandoning Keigo's school bag where it was and heading home, but eventually decided against it. After all, it could be interesting to see what the famously standoffish Ishida boy could possibly inflict on the hapless Keigo.
"Worst. Birthday. Ever," Keigo mourned, emerging from the classroom an hour later in what appeared to be a wedding dress. Mizuiro glanced up from the book he had been reading in the corridor and did a double take, before busting into laughter at the ridiculous sight before him. Keigo nervously tugged at a sleeve.
"How?" Mizuiro asked, in between his laughter. "How did they possibly make you wear that?"
"Orihime's stronger than she looks," Keigo wailed. "I mean, it would have been okay if she had been the one taking my shirt and trousers off, but as it was she just held me down while Ishida stripped me of my modesty. Ishida! If he hadn't been watching Orihime out of the corner of his eye so much, I would swear he was gay!"
Mizuiro raised an eyebrow, making an effort to stifle his laughter. "Did they not even give you back your school uniform?"
Keigo shook his head miserably. "The president of the club said the material would come in handy, so he confiscated it."
"I guess you'll just have to walk home dressed like this, then," Mizuiro said, his laughter completely subsided. "Actually, this might not be so ideal. What if Kanako sees you with me and thinks you're my bride?"
Keigo frowned at Mizuiro and picked up his bag from the floor. "You mean your new girlfriend lives on the route we take home?"
"Yep," Mizuiro said, happily. "In fact, you met her this morning. Actually, so did I..."
Keigo dropped his bag again, standing stock still and staring at Mizuiro. "You mean that woman who tried to kill me?" he wailed. Mizuiro nodded. "Damn it, Mizuiro!" he cried, abandoning his own bag and rushing off on his own, the train of his white dress trailing on the ground behind him.
As Keigo stormed off, Mizuiro caught sight of the handicrafts club leaving the classroom.
"I'm really sorry, but Mr. Asano appears to be ruining your marvellous creation," Mizuiro said apologetically to Uryu Ishida, who happened to be the member closest to him.
"Ha," Uryu responded, pushing his glasses up his nose. "Right now, I'm not sure I can bring myself to care."
Mizuiro sighed. "You're right. Lovely dress, but it doesn't suit him much, it has to be said."
The next day, Keigo woke up early and picked up his air-horn, intending to give Mizuho some payback for yesterday's rude awakening. Keigo sneaked out of his bedroom and stood outside his sister's closed door, air-horn at the ready, when he heard his sister giving a small cough. Deciding to burst in before she could wake herself up, Keigo flung the door open and burst into the room, finger pressing the trigger on his air-horn.
No sound came out.
"Oh, morning, Keigo," Mizuho said, glancing disinterestedly up from a book. "You know, I'd prefer it if you knocked, but I'm in such a good mood I don't really feel like beating you up for it this time. Thanks for the birthday present, by the way," she said, a slight smile spreading slowly across her face. Keigo didn't like that smile. It was pure evil.
"Eh?" Keigo said, articulately. "What present? I didn't get you anything..."
"Yeah," Mizuho responded, her smile filling her entire face as she withdrew several pictures and threw them at Keigo. "You really, really did."
Keigo's heart sank as he made out several images of himself dressed in the handicrafts club's wedding dress, trying to sneak into the house unnoticed.
"I thought nobody saw that!" Keigo wailed as Mizuho turned on her computer, booting up a page full of the pictures.
"You thought wrong," Mizuho grinned. "Is there something you'd like to tell your big sister, Keigo?"
Keigo wailed unintelligibly as he fled from the room and slammed the door behind him.