I wanted to write more Nekoma, so I asked a terrible question: what if the members of Nekoma were the victims of incredibly tasteless and illegal pranks that damage the team's reputation and ruin individual players' lives? Because I didn't want to write something happy apparently.

This will be some dark, hard angst. The story will have a happy ending however. (Not "happily ever after," but happy.)

WARNING: mentions of internet porn in this chapter

Without further ado, here's some undeserved Inuoka angst.

Sou Inuoka bounded through his front door after finishing another day of practice, plopping his bookbag on the floor. Last week Nekoma secured a spot in nationals, and this week's practice had been intense even for the benchwarmers. After greeting his parents and younger siblings and getting a whiff of his mom's cooking, Sou proclaimed he'd check his computer before supper.

He zipped upstairs and sprang into the computer chair like he always did. Thumbing through some texts on his phone while the PC booted up, he set the mobile device aside once he was on the desktop and automatically opened his browser. He opened his favorites list and highlighted Facebook.

But he paused. His favorites list was longer than he remembered. About 30 entries longer, peculiarly. Every one of the unfamiliar saved links was not a website name but a cryptic URL with country codes he'd never heard of. Wracking his brain for when and why he would have visited any of these mysterious websites, he clicked one of the links.

His browser blinked and began to load the page. Sou was aghast when numerous nude men splattered across the screen.

Some of them weren't of age.

He reflexively closed his browser, his heart pounding and stomach churning. With great reluctance, he opened the web again and was superfluously relieved when his regular homepage opened.

He glanced over the favorites once more, anxiously skimming the IP addresses. He was too nervous to click another.

Sure, he wasn't that innocent. He'd looked up porn before.

But he never saved it.

And he never looked up that before.

This was obviously some awful prank, but in the moment, Sou was so nervous about having any connection to the disturbing and technically illegal stuff that he started to delete each item from the list one-by-one. All the while his brain strained for who would have pulled off this terrible joke. His parents? Of course not. His siblings? They were 8 and 9! His teammates? They all just left practice, and no one could have beaten him home.

One of his friends outside the club? That had to be it. But if one of his buddies arrived when he wasn't here, his parents would have mentioned it when Sou got home.

And Sou didn't believe any of his friends would plant something like this.

After a nerve-racking two minutes, his favorites list was exactly the way he remembered it. Yet the shock of his earlier experience made him hesitant to even click the familiar Facebook link, and he instead went to type the address directly in the browser. As he started, his throat closed at the sight of all the same URLs in the dropdown of recently visited websites. Highlighting each one systematically, he pressed delete until they were gone.

Now he was too nervous to even try checking social media. He hoped to find some relief by searching the web for some answers and opened his favorite search engine. While contemplating how to phrase his exact question, he clicked on the search bar. His heart sank as a series of undesirably explicit search terms populated as "suggestions." He repeated his earlier process and systematically erased the evidence. Not satisfied, he went into the options and forced the search engine to wipe his entire search history clean.

By the end of it, Sou was officially done with the internet. He wanted to pretend this wasn't real, but saying it was a dream merely made his anxiety more tangible. He drooped in silence, running scenarios through his head that would explain the situation in a rational and innocent way.

Who was using his computer without his knowledge?

Who was looking up that without his knowledge?

He shook his head to wipe his brain clear of the pointless questions. Instinctively he went to play some music to calm his nerves.

The evidence was gone. He could just pretend it never happened. Some weird network glitch. Yeah, that's it. A random fluke. Some computer virus did it maybe, and now that the links were gone, the virus whisked itself away, he baselessly asserted. There was no danger now. He could just go on.

When he opened his hard drive folder, he spotted a new folder in his saved files that he was positive wasn't there before:

"Private."

Sou was afraid to open it.

But he did anyway.

His eyes had barely focused on the five dozen thumbnails before he selected the entire folder and dragged it to the recycle bin.

"Sou, get down here!" his mom angrily screamed spontaneously, making the boy literally yelp in shock.

"Uh, in a minute!" he fretfully yelled back. Before he left the room, he would make sure all the stuff he knew of was gone. There might be some hiding elsewhere on the computer, but he'd turn off his machine and figure it out after dinner. He didn't know why his mom was so insistent tonight that he present himself, but this had to come first. He opened the recycle bin folder and prepared to purge it.

Then his bedroom door opened without warning. Panicking, Sou closed the bin without deleting its contents.

The boy was dumbfounded to see four strangers in dark suits file into the room, wearing armbands associating them with a government investigative bureau. All four adults—three men and a woman—wore dark sunglasses and solemn frowns. As soon as they entered, their attentions fixated on the teenager at the PC. One of the men signaled Sou to vacate his seat and proceeded to occupy it after the teen moved. Another man hunched over the first agent's shoulder.

Sou migrated warily to his bed, breathing heavily, staring uninterruptedly at the officer opening his browser: checking his favorites, search history, everything. He even opened Sou's Facebook page and briefly scrolled through it. Sou sensed the third man standing between him and the bedroom window, while the woman stood partially blocking the open door. His younger siblings began to peek through the threshold, but Sou's mom itinerantly ordered them to get away and come to her.

When Sou looked back at the screen, he saw the agent in the chair skimming his saved files.

Not satisfied, the cursor closed the window and then went to the recycle bin.

Sou jolted one arm out as if to stop the man but reeled it back in. What good would interfering do besides alert them to what he knew was there?

Even if it wasn't his.

Sou guiltily peered at the female agent who seemed to notice his arm reflex and was eyeing the boy from behind her sunglasses.

The agent at the desk moved the folder from the recycle bin to the desktop in order to view it. And then, with a double-click, he found what they were looking for.

"Got it," muttered the man leaning over the seated agent's shoulder. With a finger snap, he squarely approached Inuoka, towering fiercely over the now shivering teen. The seated agent inserted a USB drive into the PC.

If this was a practical joke, it was the least funny joke of all time.

"You are the only one who uses this computer, right?" the agent asked.

"Mhm," Sou nodded meekly, his reply barely audible, his cheeks red and forehead sweaty.

"You'll be coming with us."

Me, in disbelief I'm posting this: "What on earth am I doing? (post) Well, too late now."

Let me know your thoughts, tears, hate mail, requests for clemency (Sou needs 'em; his teammates might need them too for future chapters), and whether or not you want to see more: one-shots, a full-length fic, or either. I'd like to see the person behind this get their due if you all do as well.

~Breeze