Firestruck
Rating: M for bad language and innuendo. Pretty mild stuff, all told, especially considering no one's put tape over Eiri's potty mouth yet.
Warning: This story deals with an M/M pairing. If this disturbs you, why are you reading Gravitation fanfiction? LEAVE NOW AND DO NOT READ.
Disclaimers: I don't own the rights to these characters and I don't make any money from them; Maki Murakami, Gentosha, TokyoPop and RightStuf do. I do, however, let the guys out to play . . . with each other.
Summary: Shuichi's bad luck with cooking causes a kitchen fire and the sacrifice of Eiri's favorite pan. Shuichi in turn pleads for Eiri to change a bad habit of his, but does Eiri listen? Heck no! One-shot, two chapters, COMPLETE.
Word Count: 2,948 words, including introduction and author's note.
What word begins with "f" and ends with "uck"?
Firetruck -
Popular children's riddle
Chapter 1. Bad Luck
Bad Luck had finally finished preparing new songs in anticipation of recording them the following week. The group's members were enjoying a well-deserved break after two weeks of last-minute changes, hasty rearrangements that tried Suguru's patience, harried rehearsals, and several all-night recording sessions. As a result, Bad Luck's lead singer and songwriter Shuichi Shindou, heartthrob of millions of squealing, drooling Japanese schoolgirls, was home on a Friday afternoon trying to make lunch.
Unfortunately, his performance in the kitchen usually left something to be desired. He could barely boil water without supervision. Forget actual cooking. He burned bacon and toast, melted utensils in the microwave, spilled whatever he was making all over the counter and floor, and generally made a mess.
He lived with his boyfriend of several years, popular romance novelist Eiri Yuki, who owned the apartment and paid the bills for it. Eiri was possessive of anything he considered his. That included his apartment as well as Shuichi.
That is why Eiri had, in terms laced with profanity, forbidden Shuichi from doing anything more in the kitchen than using the microwave to heat beverages or packaged food like instant noodles and frozen pizzas. Anything else was to be left to Eiri, who was, if he did say so himself, a passable cook. Shuichi, on the other hand, had burned the food he was cooking while on a televised cooking contest, continuing his impressive record of rendering food nearly inedible.
Today, however, Shuichi's early arrival home was unexpected and Eiri was out, either walking around the nearest park wrestling with a passage from his latest novel or at the nearest convenience store buying himself more cigarettes, pocky for Shuichi, and the celebrity gossip magazines that were his secret vice. As usual, he hadn't left a note, so Shuichi didn't know which it was.
Shuichi sighed and pondered his dilemma. He really needed to eat lunch and he hadn't stopped to purchase any takeout because he had expected Eiri to be home. Damn it, he should be home. He was always home during the day; after Shuichi moved in, Eiri had turned into even more of a homebody than before. Calling up to order something would take too long; Shuichi knew that all his favorite places nearby would be busy filling existing orders during lunch hour.
Well, there was nothing for it but to make whatever was simplest and least likely to make a mess and bear the consequences. He'd better hurry before Eiri returned and found him in the kitchen. An angry Eiri was truly a scary sight. Since it didn't take much to set him off, it was a sight Shuichi saw more often than he wanted to.
Shuichi pulled out a package of instant ramen, ran water into a pot, put the pot on the stove, and turned the burner to "high". He sat down on the couch, forgetting to put the lid on to hasten boiling.
He turned on the television to watch something to pass the time until the water boiled and he could add the noodles and the seasoning packet. He found a music special about Nittle Grasper and settled in to watch and sing along with Ryuichi Sakuma, his boyhood idol.
He almost forgot about the ramen and the boiling pot until he eventually heard the noise of hissing steam, accompanied by water spilling over the side of the pot. He got up and discovered a boiling waterfall.
He turned the heat on the burner down, nearly scalding himself in the process, and put the seasoning packet and the noodles in. He went back to the living room and sat down again, neglecting to set the timer that would tell him when the noodles were done.
So far, he had escaped without serious injury to himself or the kitchen. Between his fascination with the show and his tiredness from the long hours of painstakingly working on the new songs, which were highly tedious as they mostly involved back and forth between the band's two instrumentalists, he dozed and listened intermittently and forgot all about his lunch.
He woke to the acrid smell of smoke and the blaring of the smoke detector. He scrambled off the couch and tried to enter the kitchen but was beaten back by the smoke. He had the presence of mind to grab a towel and wrap it around his nose and mouth, which enabled him to run into the kitchen long enough to see that all the water had boiled out of the pot and that the noodles were now a stringy burnt black mass. The bottom of the pan was emitting strange fumes. Most disturbing, the burner itself had caught on fire.
He quickly darted in to turn the burner off and looked around, desperately trying to remain level-headed. He couldn't panic! That would prove he was as useless in an emergency as Yuki always said he was.
Although he'd acted decisively to ensure that the situation didn't get any worse, he had no idea how to make it any better. Flames still flared from the burner and the smoke detector still blared. After a few seconds' reflection during which he racked his brain for any knowledge of fire prevention and drew a blank other than a faint memory of 'stop, drop, and roll,' which he didn't think would be very helpful, he decided PANIC was his best, and probably only, option. He completely forgot that Yuki kept a fire extinguisher in the kitchen for this very purpose.
His emotions were roiling just like the pot had been before all the water evaporated. Yuki was going to be livid with him! He'd probably be locked out of the bedroom for a week when he'd been looking forward to some time alone with his lover.
It dawned on him that he should call the fire department, since he didn't know what to do.
He quickly dialed the emergency number. An operator answered, "Tokyo emergency phone line. What is your emergency, please?"
"My-my-my boyfriend's apartment is on fire and…um…um…."
"Your what is on fire?"
Sighing inwardly, Shuichi started over, trying to keep a lid on his emotions.
"There's a – a kitchen fire here in my boyfriend's apartment." It occurred to the higher functioning levels of Shuichi's brain that he was providing more information than was absolutely necessary, but the panicked mammalian brain that was currently in control didn't care.
"Where is your– um – boyfriend's apartment?" the operator asked.
"It's – it's –on Shinjuku-1," Shuichi choked out, his chest tightening.
"What street number?"
"It's, um, Nishi-Shinjuku 7, umm, I'm not sure of the next two numbers. I know they're odd numbers. Maybe it's 7-5-9? No, I think it's 7-3-9. I'm not really sure. The numbers out front are very small…"
The operator sighed audibly. "Can you tell me the name of the building, at least?"
"Oh yeah, it's the Kiritsubo Apartments." The operator proceeded to look the address up in the database they relied on for situations such as this, although it was usually small children and elderly people who were as confused about their address as this caller was.
"And the apartment number?"
"It's 18 um – no, the building's eighteen stories, his apartment is on the second floor –"
"Do you remember the apartment number?"
"2B – no, that's not right – 2D, maybe? I'm not exactly sure – I just know how to get here – I've never sent anything here."
Shuichi could practically hear the operator shaking his head and rolling his eyes. He continued hopefully, "The smoke detector is making a big racket. You can probably hear it. Can't they just follow that?"
After a long pause, the operator responded, "Well, we'll hope that none of the other alarms or the building's smoke detectors go off in the meantime. I've dispatched the firefighters. They should be on their way now."
He heaved a sigh of relief once he heard the siren approaching. . . until he also heard footsteps coming down the hallway and a key being inserted in the lock. He held his breath as the person on the other side of the door realized the door was unlocked and turned the doorknob.
Eiri stood in the doorway, plastic bag hanging off his arm, with his mouth agape and a glare evincing a combination of astonishment and vexation on his face. Shuichi marveled at the way he made 'pissed off' look sexy.
After remaining frozen like a statue for a few seconds, Eiri stepped into the entryway. He was so nonplussed he didn't bother to remove his shoes.
He found his voice and said, "What. The. Fuck. IS GOING ON HERE!!!" His voice got louder and louder, and higher in pitch, with each syllable.
"Ummmm," Shuichi responded in a tiny voice, "I . . . kinda burned some noodles I left on the . . ."
Eiri, glaring at him, said, "YOU FUCKING MORON, SINCE WHEN ARE YOU ALLOWED TO COOK? DIDN'T I SPECIFICALLY FORBID YOU FROM DOING SO ON PAIN OF DEATH, HOPEFULLY YOUR VERY PAINFUL DEATH AND NOT MINE?"
Shuichi wasn't surprised that Eiri yelled at him, but his lover's callous words made him draw his breath in and bite his lip to try to stop the tears that threatened to spill from his eyes.
In the meantime, the smoke was getting worse, despite the burner being turned off, and the alarm continued to blare, so shaking his head and rolling his eyes, Eiri grabbed Shuichi's hand by the wrist and yanked him into the entryway and out the door. Leaving the door unlocked, Eiri pinned Shuichi up against the wall of the hallway far enough away from the door that the noise gave him less of a headache and he felt it was safe enough that they wouldn't burst into flame anytime soon.
"Shuichi," he said in a somewhat calmer, but still irritated voice, "what happened? Are you okay?" He reached out and touched Shuichi's face.
Shuichi's lips trembled and tears once more threatened to run down his face, this time at his lover's tender expression of concern. Apparently Eiri had realized that his hostility had freaked Shuichi out and had decided a calmer demeanor would help. However, his abrupt changes in mood gave Shuichi emotional whiplash.
Just as Eiri started leaning forward, thinking that maybe the best way to calm Shuichi down enough to tell him what had happened was to give him a brief kiss, the downstairs door opened and the fire brigade ran up the stairs. He stopped, not wishing to cause more gossip than already existed about their relationship, and faced the first of the firefighters to run down the hallway.
"It's in here," he said. "My roommate called it in."
Shuichi gave him a questioning look, to which Eiri responded by putting his index finger to his lips and giving him a stare meant to convey that it was none of anyone else's damn business that they were more than roommates. The fact that there were two occupied bedrooms in the apartment – Shuichi used his as an office and to store his stuff, and sometimes slept on the bed there when he was banished from Eiri's bedroom or one of them was ill and needed to sleep separately from the other while recuperating – would help in this endeavor not to let anyone know who didn't already know from reading the gossip columns that they were a couple.
The firefighters rushed into the apartment. One of them, presumably the one in charge, stayed in the hallway to ask questions. "Can one of you tell me what happened?"
Realizing Shuichi might still need time to compose himself, Eiri pointed to him and said, "He'll have to give you the details. I wasn't here when it happened." He held up the plastic bag that was still hanging from his wrist. "I heard the fire engines while I was walking home from the store and I arrived here to find…this."
The firefighter swiveled his head to look at Shuichi. "Sir?" he said.
Shuichi cleared his throat and did his best to compose himself. "Uh," he said, "I'd arrived home early and needed to make lunch, so I got one of those packets of instant ramen and seasoning out and put water on to boil. When it did, I put the noodles and seasoning in…and then I'm afraid I sorta dozed off and let the water boil out of the pan…." His voice trailed off and he looked sheepish.
Eiri tried to suppress his irritation and rage at Shuichi for ignoring his strictures against cooking, especially when he wasn't around to save Shuichi from his mistakes. After all, he hadn't established the rule to be mean, or at least not mostly to be mean; he was looking out for the little idiot. The person most likely to suffer if something went wrong while he was cooking was Shuichi. Eiri couldn't remember how many times he'd had to put cold compresses on burns or bandage cuts on Shuichi's fingers when Shuichi put his limbs in mortal danger. The rule was more for Shuichi's benefit than his, wasn't it?
He tried to make a joke of it. "My friend here has bad luck" – Shuichi gave him a funny look at the use of the phrase – "with kitchen utensils and such. This is just an extreme case. We're both really sorry to have inconvenienced you." He turned to Shuichi and gave him a look that plainly said, 'And we're going to have a long, painful discussion about this later on, when there are no witnesses.' Shuichi mouthed a silent 'I'm sorry.'
The firefighter waved his hand and said, "Don't worry about it. That's what we're here for. Kitchen fires aren't out of the ordinary, although they usually occur later in the day than this, especially after people have had a little too much to drink and forget they're even making dinner." Then he went inside.
They waited outside, standing next to each other leaning against the wall. Suddenly the smoke alarm stopped. They both let out a sigh of relief, Eiri because he didn't have to listen to the damn thing anymore and Shuichi because he knew what a relief the silence would be to Eiri.
Eventually the firefighters trooped out of the apartment. One of them was holding the offending pot with what looked like tongs. The two men looked at it. "This is what caused it," he said cheerfully. "We'll take it and dispose of it."
"You're paying to replace it," Eiri hissed at Shuichi. "That was one of my favorite pans!"
The firefighters obtained the contact information they needed from the two of them, showed Eiri, as the owner of the apartment and thus the one legally responsible for the repairs, what had been damaged – the stove was a mess and there were scorch marks on the wall behind the stove – and what needed to be done to fix it, and left him contemplating an unpleasant call to his insurance agent.
Just before they left, the lead firefighter gave them what looked like a smirk, and Eiri thought uncomfortably that it looked like the local firefighters knew the nature of their relationship, despite his efforts to keep it under wraps. Perhaps someone had been snooping in the bedroom?
Even though Eiri was glad that Shuichi hadn't been hurt, he hardly let him know it. Instead, he harassed him mercilessly about the incident, although Eiri would have claimed it was just playful teasing. Shuichi apologized over and over again, but that didn't stop him either. He told all their friends and acquaintances about it, some of them several times over, until they finally told him they didn't need to be reminded.
Since Shuichi would hardly know which pot to get or where to find it at the store, Eiri condescended to accompany him there to purchase a replacement pot, and he made him clean the entire stove by himself. He complained loudly about the cost of repairs, even though most of it was covered by his insurance.
A/N: This chapter was inspired by the time I left a pot of frozen peas boiling on the stove in a dorm kitchen until all the water had boiled away and the pan was ruined. Fortunately, no fire ensued. I have, however, caused stovetop fires recently as a result of flammable liquids spilling on the electric burner and crud that had built up underneath it. I can attest that a fiery burner is a disconcerting sight. We took care of it ourselves and didn't need to call the fire department, however.
The title's not a typo. Read the author's note at the end of the second chapter for more information on where the title came from.