The summer sun in the Mekakushi Dan's base was hot. The sick fires, just cooling off after being laid down, were hotter. Dave sat around in his and his friends' room, in between headphones and sweet rap battle victory. No one who tried could have beaten him. Those who didn't try and stayed back to play the beats couldn't have, either, but who was counting them? He was a little too pro for the Dan, and maybe a tad too chill when everyone was raging over their losses in silence. Ironic, since rapping was fire. Dave smiled a bit to himself. The more irony, the better.

And the more quiet, the better, but that didn't happen at all. The door slammed into the wall with a CRASH, sparing the door from being ripped to shreds but not Dave's eardrums. He took off his headphones. Looked at who exactly just went and almost killed his hearing. Rolled his eyes, because if Momo was going to ask for yet another rematch he'd do an acrobatic fucking pirouette off the handle and then some.

"Yeah?" Dave grumbled. "If you're going to ask for another chance to try and beat me at a rap battle, you can abscond from this room. Maybe get onto Sputnik's shitty remains and be launched into space, because you were out of the rap battle a long fucking time ago."

"That's not what I'm here for!" Momo snapped.

"Then what are you here for?"

"A question, that's what," she answered, cooling her anger a bit. "Ene-chan transcribed your rap for me, and I put in Google Translate. Now I want to know something!"

"Fire the fuck away."

"Does it have to be ironic?"

Dave's train of thought froze. Does it have to be ironic, she asked. Does it have to be ironic.

That was the best joke he'd heard all day.

"What?" Momo asked. "What's wrong with what I asked?"

"Pretty much everything," Dave managed in between bouts of laughter. "I mean, the topics you guys chose for the rap battle were fucking grocery shopping and crossing the street. How the fuck do you expect me to play that shit straight?"

"But in our defense, we didn't always pick topics like that! Didn't something like 'loneliness' come up at some point? I don't know about you, but I wouldn't put that subject on the same level as getting groceries for the week."

"So that rap battle was supposed to be a feeling jam in disguise? Well shit, I had no fucking clue." Dave threw up his hands.

"Okay, okay, maybe I asked the wrong question! Here's a better one for you: have you ever written anything unironic?"

Second best joke of the day. The coolkid began to think that Momo should have done stand-up comedy instead of working in the J-Pop industry. "Hell no," he answered. "I mean, I'm a coolkid in case you haven't noticed by now. Why the fuck would I play anything straight? Not only is that shit too low-level for me, it's also just plain fucking wrong. So do you have any actual questions on you or can you leave?"

"I'm not done! Who told you it was wrong, though? It's pretty obvious that you like being ironic, but who ever said it was 'just plain wrong'? What makes you say that, anyways?"

"I was fucking raised on irony. I got low-quality JPEGs saved to my milk formula every night before I went to sleep with my favourite puppet, in which my Bro rapped lullabies off the explicit playlist just 'cause I kept begging him to. And - "

" – don't keep going. Please. Don't." She put a hand up. "So just because you were raised that way, you can't do anything unironically?"

Another stupid question. Clearly the answer was…

But…

Dave's mind was blank, and Momo wasn't such a good comedian anymore. He hashed together some quick metaphor on being cryptic, before thanking the universe that Momo was being called outside. Doors shut and silence returned. Dave thought the question over. So just because you were raised that way, you can't do anything unironically? The answer was a resounding 'no'.

Why? She'd probably ask that next. This time, the answer was easy. Bro would expect it of him. It was an indisputable fact.

But his friends' guardians, with the exception of Rose's, were the norm and not the exception, weren't they?

Normal caregivers didn't ambush their kid at any given moment, didn't they?

John's dad taught him to play the piano. Jade's grandpa gave her good hugs. Kido, Seto and Kano's adoptive dad played secret agents with them, Marry's mom taught her to read. And what did Bro do, Dave asked himself, that actually made him happy looking back? The sword training, evening strifes on the rooftop - they only made his thoughts recoil. Video games were empty noise, the mind games just plain nightmares. Dave didn't know the last time he saw food, true and edible food, stuffed in the fridge instead of katanas.

So the answer was nothing. Bro did nothing good for Dave. Something in the coolkid's mind soured when he figured it out, as if the mere thought would launch him back into the face of Bro's sword. But it wouldn't. And did that tie him to the standards of a long dead man?

Suppose that the answer was a resounding 'no' again.

That was as obvious as it got. But if Momo expected that Dave would stop going off on big subversive metaphors anytime soon, she had another thing coming. Maybe when he died.