The Saturday afternoon in which Naoki was supposed to be studying was instead spent on grooming his neighbour, the "little shit" Shindou Kurono, and was insulted with "old man" in return. He wouldn't have bothered if the little shit didn't have prime blackmail material with him—a picture he found online of Naoki going to school with bleached hair during the week when Naoki's parents had to go back to their hometown for a relative's funeral. By threatening to show it to Naoki's mom, the boy who was half of Naoki's size and probably half of Naoki's age had pressured Naoki to use his bleaching skills on the boy's own head. Naoki was old and mature enough to know that this effort to look cool was taking it a step too far, but hey, anything to save his own head.
The operation came to an abrupt halt when Naoki's mother, back early from her weekend shopping trip, caught the stench of bleach and hair dye in the apartment. She demanded that the two of them come out of the bathroom, instructed Kurono to wash his head and lectured her son in the corner. Naoki's excuse that "he's like five, who cares if he goes bald" fell on deaf ears.
But that didn't mean that Naoki's mission ended there. Late that night, he stole out of his own home to knock on Kurono's door. When Kurono answered it, Naoki greeted him with a grin and held up the hair products that his mother had forgotten to confiscate.
"Never mind," Kurono said, though Naoki could tell from his being in day clothes that he was kept awake with regretting over missed opportunities.
"I won't let you give up now," Naoki asserted. "I'm going to make sure that tomorrow, you wake up looking at a true man in the mirror and not a little shit."
Kurono opened the door a fraction wider to reach up, pull at Naoki's pyjamas collar and said in his face, "Only an old man would talk about giving up."
The intimation of violence in his action made Naoki seriously consider if he was indeed making a Yankee out of an elementary school kid. However, when they began again from step one, Kurono put a lot of effort into being docile and giving Naoki an easy job.
Once they were finished with the colouring, Kurono's fringe was the pink of cotton candy. Naoki impulsively allowed him to use a bit of his personal hair gel. He should have predicted that Kurono would go overboard and use a liberal amount, which Kurono did in order to style the front of his hair into the shape of an inverted question mark.
As they stood side by side before the mirror in Kurono's home, Naoki asked, "Do you really think that you look like a wild boy now?"
"Yeah." Kurono huffed and thumped a fist against his chest.
"Yeah. You look good," Naoki said, resisting against Kurono's protests as he ruffled Kurono's hair and made a mess of his swirly pompadour.
In his energetic head pat he concealed his motive, which was to pass down the happiness of boyhood to this little shit.
A/N: Please let them interact when S5 rolls around.