Prompt: How about a Christmas night blanket scenario? (Aka, Hirumamo get stranded somewhere during a snowstorm with only one blanket to share? ^_^)
My (obnoxious) Secret Santa gift for banditscribe on The LJ. (Yes, 'the' lj. Like 'the' consumption. Or 'the' herpes. Maybe I'm just fond of articles, damn it.)
Also.
I spiked the Nog I left for Santa. If he didn't make it to your house, or if he was violent, or if you found him in the bushes out front, passed out cold, you have only me to blame.
It was a matter of practicality, really. An issue of expediency. A measure of prudence, discretion, comfort, and eventually, inevitably, of survival.
The semantics of the situation were hardly significant, however, because it didn't quite matter how her mind managed to phrase it; she was not going to approach him about it, not going to bring it up or attempt by artifice or subtlety to allude to the subject. Sooner or later, someone would come for them, and no one –Hiruma, most especially—would know that the thought had even crossed her mind. With time and perhaps some clever avoidance tactics, she may herself forget that she had entertained the notion. Even if she was cold and miserable. Even if he seemed –as ever—remarkably contained and otherwise entirely impervious. Even though it was forebodingly dark, even though the walls were craggy and bare and deceptively uniform, thick shadows seeming longer and deeper in the gloom, even though outcroppings were almost impossible to see; oblique, pernicious phantasms waiting patiently to pull her down into the sinister shadows of the cavern—
"I still can't believe we won the Christmas Bowl," she said softly, wistfully, refocusing her mind on something less dreadful than the ominous pitch of the cave. The times she resented her mental gifts were few and far between, but she was cursing her colorful imagination and keen intellect now, when both were conspiring to drag her down with irrational fears that they should have been working to allay. Standing opposite her in the small funnel of a room, she caught a brief flash of white and electric green, just a flick of his eyes, really, before he turned back to the tiny cell phone in his hand and the meager light it provided, using every trick he knew (he had assured her, gruffly) to get a signal. It was that brief look, irritated and dismissive, that had her immediately regretting speaking at all; he was doing something productive and she wasn't being of any use by rattling off non-sequitur comments that had nothing to do with the situation at hand. It wouldn't be helpful to either of them if she inadvertently clued him in to her paranoia (the existence of which she hadn't fully appreciated until now, which was making it all the more difficult to process logically and thereby deal with); she had no business compounding their difficulties by making him worry over whether or not she'd be able to keep her head, not to mention the fact that he'd probably file the information away in his mind to use as blackmail material later, at least if they ever managed to escape and didn't die here…
She should be doing something, anything at all, to keep her mind busy and her frenetic, disorganized thoughts at bay. Crouching, holding her own phone to the ground, she used the small halo of light to examine the cave floor, looking for…well, anything potentially useful. Dry wood for a fire, perhaps stones that might serve well as flint (unless Hiruma had a lighter on him for some reason, but she'd ask about that in a few moments, when he wasn't occupied), any discarded tools left by previous hapless travelers, clues about an exit…
As if it weren't irritating enough that they were (at least apparently) stranded in the middle of fucking nowhere, that even his most powerful and reliable technological contraptions were failing –regardless of expert tinkering and deft manipulation—to get through to the outside world, and that apart from two small pistols, a pack of smokes, a lighter, a blanket and a couple bottles of water (compliments of the only other occupant of this dark prison), an all-important black notebook, and twelve cell phones, they had no tools with which to work –on top of everything else, the fucking manager appeared to be claustrophobic.
It was not a fear he had anticipated from her, which annoyed him, as it was always somewhat vexing to encounter small moments such as these that called to mind the fact that he was not, after all, omniscient. Additionally, he realized with some aggravation that he'd thought her above such illogical anxieties. But the signs were clear even if she seemed to think she was doing a convincing job of covering them up. She was alternately completely sedentary or frenetically occupied, and she appeared not to realize when she repeated actions she'd recently taken. She played distractedly with her phone, her eyes darted about in the dark unseeingly, widening or clamping shut occasionally when something unpleasant occurred to her. And she kept talking to him, making inane, unimportant comments about the team, about school, about her friends or the Christmas Bowl, trying to distract herself from imagined terrors and keep herself upbeat. At length, she always seemed to finally comprehend that she was rambling, and the abnormally slow-firing synapses in her brain at last communicated to her mouth to be silent.
It was fucking maddening. And not just because it was inconvenient, which bothered him.
The only way to remedy the situation was to get them out of it, of course, so he tried to ignore her when she bent down again to comb the floor at her feet for fuck only knows what –for all he knew, she was inspecting the ground for invisible creatures—and he was further displeased that the simple task of tuning out an inhibitory, currently useless element was actually challenging.
He growled out an aggravated curse, rolling his eyes when she jumped at the sound, and focused on the glowing phone in his hand, ignoring his peripheral vision, which was feeding him images of the damned manager staring at him intently.
Mamori was transfixed by the whitish glow suffusing Hiruma's face, and was ephemerally concerned that she might be perilously close to forgetting herself and succumbing to the encroaching panic. His unexpected curse had startled her out of her downward spiral, however, and was a much needed dose of reality: she wasn't here alone, Hiruma was here, too, and he was smart, capable, and if anyone was going to get them out of this, it would be him.
It was because she was studying him, trying to force herself to stay connected to the present and not dwell on other things, that she caught the object of her current fascination: his hair. Even in the dark it was unnaturally bright, somewhere in between gold and platinum, sticking out at odd angles in some places and lying damp and heavy and flat in others from earlier, when they'd been caught outside in the snowstorm. But it wasn't the familiar blonde that held her attention.
She started to chuckle lightly, and Hiruma shot her another look that told her clearly that he thought she was losing her mind, laughing spontaneously as she was in the darkness for what appeared to be no reason at all. But she felt suddenly lighter –not blithe, necessarily, but heartened slightly.
In the next moment she was standing, stepping toward him at a leisurely pace, and before she knew it she was standing beside him, far enough away to not be invading his personal space but still much more closely than she usually came to be standing next to him voluntarily. She watched him glance at her with furrowed brows, suspicious and alert. Then, indulging the giddy insanity of the moment before it could be crushed by either him or herself, she reached up to run her fingers through the matted locks.
And so the fucking manager had clearly snapped. He supposed it was better than having her beating her fists against the walls and screaming for someone to free them, but her behavior was still bizarre and unnerving. He had just managed to get the damned phone to respond to him (and it had taken fucking long enough), and then the cracked girl had started giggling from her crouched position on the ground. Sparing her a quick look that should have told her exactly what he thought about her sanity, he manfully returned to the task at hand, not reacting visibly when she stood and started toward him, but readying himself to take any number of actions depending upon what she did next.
That's when her fingers –bare, he realized, and wondered how he could possibly have missed her taking off her gloves—started to pull through his hair, gently, just soft, cool, curious pressure against his scalp. The sensation was – he couldn't deny it—pleasant. He had the insane urge to exploit her unguarded affection by doing something far less…tame, but, as the Standard Operating Procedure demanded, he shut that train of thought down immediately and settled for glaring at her. At length, it occurred to him that the proper reaction was belated, so he opened his mouth to ask her what the fuck she thought she was doing, but she beat him to it by giggling. Again.
"It's softer than I thought it'd be," she said, and when her eyes slid to his she retracted her hand, but the look he caught in her eyes wasn't as much embarrassment as it was intrigued. "I guess I knew you dyed it; I mean, you're Japanese, after all, so it has to have been black at some point, but I guess I never really thought about it…" He didn't even attempt to check his eyebrow as it popped up in question, and she pointed grinningly at his hair in response. "The roots are starting to show. It's nothing too noticeable yet, I only saw it because…um…anyway, I'm sure it's just because it got so wet outside." She seemed more lucid, but he didn't want to test it out just yet by teasing her crudely about staring at him and very nearly admitting it. "I don't think I ever thought I'd get to see it. Your actual hair color, I mean. I guess I didn't believe you'd be careless enough to ever let it show." She was teasing him now, though, so maybe she wasn't as fragile as she had appeared moments ago. He wasn't about to admit that he might have been relieved, and he certainly didn't dwell on the fact that she had apparently been snapped out of her stupor by a few strands of black hair his injured arm had made difficult to reach the last time he'd dyed it. "Um, sorry." She laughed again, this time nervously, and moved back, crossing her arms before her and shooting her gaze deliberately down at the device in his hand. He smirked, glad to have her off-balance out of self-consciousness and not out of imagined fear. Then, ignoring the blush that blossomed on her cheeks, his fingers started flying over keys as nimbly as if it were a keyboard and not a phone pad.
He sent a message to each of the Deimon players, quick and to the point, but bearing all the details they might need to come and find them. Mere seconds had passed after he sent the message before the fucking manager started talking again.
"Did you…did you get it to work, Hiruma-kun?" She was craning forward slightly, trying to get a better look at the screen.
"We're in the middle of rural fucking Japan, manager. There's virtually no signal. It's fucking wet. The phones are soaked." She dropped her head and seemed to shrink in on herself. The expression on her face was disparaging, and his smirk climbed up another inch. "Of course I fucking got through to someone. What do you think I am, a fucking idiot?" Glee alighted her countenance instantly, and in another short burst of her residual insanity, she unthinkingly leapt the short distance between them to throw her arms around him (which he could have dodged, and perhaps would have, if it wouldn't have meant that she went hurtling face-first into the cave wall --or if he'd wanted to), though she almost immediately pulled away, red in the face until she stumbled on her own feet, grimacing briefly. "Kekeke, don't be so quick to celebrate, fucking manager. We still have to rely on the fucking twerps to find us." That appeared to bother her for a moment, but then she seemed to collect her thoughts and she smiled weakly at him.
"I believe in them." She said, and though her voice wavered her conviction was firm. His smirk became malicious and she turned away from it, spinning and stepping backward a couple of steps behind him before she slid down to a sitting position against the wall. It didn't look very comfortable, but she didn't complain about the wet floor or the cold rock at her back.
He watched her curl in on herself to conserve warmth, saw her clench her fingers into fists and was suddenly angry at her stupidity.
"Put your fucking gloves on, damned manager." He commanded, sadistically glad when she glared up at him with That Look in her blue eyes, perhaps signaling the beginning of one of their fabled fights that had the fucking idiots running for the hills for fear that they'd be caught in the crossfire.
"Don't call me that, Hiruma-kun."
If he had to be stuck in a fucking hole in the middle of nowhere, he supposed he could do worse for company. At least (now that she seemed less irrationally crazy) she'd be entertaining until someone came to shovel them out of their avalanche-engendered cell.
Half an hour and two very exasperating arguments later, Mamori was reintroducing herself to the thought that she'd previously believed to be a product of the claustrophobia-induced madness.
Despite how very cross with him she currently was in the wake of their recent verbal sparring sessions, she found she was perversely glad of his antagonism. It had helped to distract her, to keep her mind exclusively focused on giving as good as she got without stooping to his level or getting flustered enough to concede victory to him. They could have been talking about substantive things –strategy for the upcoming games in America, schoolwork, even, but nothing so uniquely captured her concentration as duking it out with the Devilbats' captain. It embarrassed her to think that he'd been fighting with her on purpose, that he had known after all about her 'condition,' and had been keeping her occupied. It was, she thought bemusedly, sort of sweet, in the only way he knew how to be –indirectly.
And it was this latter thought, coupled with the anxiety she was trying to quash from the less irrational fear of hypothermia (which certainly felt like a very real threat at this point; every moment that went by she felt like something else on her was frozen), that made her think that maybe she should just swallow her pride and ask, or better yet, just force him to—
"Hiruma-kun," she started, not speaking very loudly since he had long-since seated himself beside her, "I…um…" She cleared her throat, tried again. "Mind if I use one of your phones to go hound out my backpack…?" Wordlessly, he produced one for her, extending his long arm across the distance that separated them. She was very careful about not letting their fingers touch; this was going to be hard enough without having to think about how his skin felt. She felt the dull warmth of a blush creeping into her cheeks as she remembered combing her hand through his surprisingly smooth hair and climbed to her feet to retrieve her bag from the other side of the room.
Fearing that even the temporary isolation might let the dark thoughts back in, she felt the need to keep talking to him, more to reassure herself than anything else. She didn't expect what spilled out of her mouth anymore than he could have, though.
"It's so strange, Hiruma-kun. Everyone on the team thinks we're dating –Gen-kun's always teasing me about it—and my mom seems to be on board with the theory, no thanks to Ako-chan, and here we are, stuck in the most convenient and hackneyed plot device ever –by ourselves in the middle of a cave for an extended period of time. This is not going to help the rumors." She had felt completely detached from the speech while it was being made; she was looking for the bag, and some disembodied voice had stolen hers to say outrageous things to the demon quarterback of Deimon High. Backpack in hand, she stood, suddenly frozen by something more than cold. Mortification was apparently rather frigid, as well.
How was any of that relevant? What had brought that on? Why hadn't she thought about the fact that it would make what she was about to do next horrendously complicated? And why, why wasn't he saying anything? She was terrified to look back at him and see the expression on his face.
She was cold, she was afraid, maybe he would be able to dismiss this lapse in sanity as well as he had earlier, when she'd had the gall to touch his hair. Shivering, she hugged herself tightly, opened her bag, pulled out the folded emergency blanket she was suddenly disgustingly thankful she'd packed, and finalized her resolve. This is no big deal, she insisted to herself. I've done this with Sena plenty of times during the winter. We'd sit on his back porch and sip hot tea and watch the snow fall. No big deal. No big deal…
Except that this wasn't Sena, and the longer they were trapped here, the more glaringly obvious that became.
Hiruma was carefully silent as he appraised the damned woman, who seemed utterly incapable of sticking to one mood. None of these were sides of her to which he was accustomed, and each was as frustratingly surprising as the next. The paranoia, the unwitting flirting, the mindless chatter; he was used to her being capable and implacable, compassionate and efficient, burning hot and cold but always sharp, never yielding ground without fighting for it first. She was a singular existence in his life; from the first moment she'd stood up to him to the one evening she'd needed to memorize the entire Amefuto rulebook to her gross (and frankly fucking perplexing) ignorance of the identity of Eyeshield and back again to their startling propensity for working together (and working very well at that), he was never entirely certain what she was going to do. Most of the time, she was just as predictable as the next person, and once he'd spent enough time around her, he gained a strong sense of how to rile her, or hurt her if he so chose, but she persisted on being a rogue element, on somehow circumventing the reach of his impossibly fast mind, and it was –as seemed to be the trend for the day—fucking annoying.
He was fairly sure he knew what was coming next, though, from her telling statement and her odd behavior and also the blanket dangling from the fingers of her right hand, still folded. This time, he vowed, he was throwing the SOP out the window; she was right, after all. This was the perfect fucking set-up, he had nothing better to do until the others showed up to bail them out, and he was eager to see how she would react.
And why not, besides? They had America to conquer, of course, but they'd won the Christmas Bowl, and their celebrations had been truncated by the news of impending battle in the States. They'd get swept back up into the chaos and strategy of football soon enough –for the moment, he was fucking frustrated, she was being fucking obvious, and they were fucking cold. He had one solution for all three problems, and when she turned at last and started walking toward him with fierce determination in the set of her jaw and azure uncertainty glimmering in her eyes, he smirked wickedly.
He'd put this off way too fucking long.
There was only one way to deal with Hiruma in battle mode (which, if his leering grin was any indication, he clearly was): head on, and aggressively. She stopped just short of her feet hitting his shins where he sat, legs crossed, against the wall. She could feel the blush burning up her neck and into her cheeks, but she met his eyes, hoping that the darkness and the cold would keep it from being overly visible. And then she went into aloof intellectual mode and began to explain that the conservation of body heat is crucial in such times as these, that they didn't know how long it'd be until they were discovered and rescued, that they needed to make due with the resources they had, which were –tragically—rather limited. She held the blanket up to indicate just which resource she meant, swallowing heavily while she waited nervously for his scathing rejoinder, and when his grin shifted to Cruel, her eyes widened and then narrowed almost in one fluid motion, and she chided herself mentally for such a silly idea. She wasn't going to beg. She'd keep the blanket all for herself and he could just freeze to death for all she cared!
Scornful and hurt, she turned to sit beside him, albeit a safe distance away, muttering a terse 'never mind' as she started to take a step – only to be forcefully and abruptly jerked by her free wrist sideways and forward onto Hiruma's lap, where his long legs provided a strange, bony sort of seat. She tried to meet his eyes but couldn't; she willed her body to flee but it stubbornly stayed put. She gripped the blanket in her hand tightly when his large hands appeared on her waist and maneuvered her on top of him at a torturous pace. Her breath came in short bursts when he started dragging her forward, and she lost her grip on the blanket when he pulled her so close that she was fully straddling him. She finally met his gaze and became immediately, terribly conscious of him everywhere they were touching. She could feel his cool breath against her hair, the lithe muscle of his thighs beneath hers, the latent strength of his big hands as they continued their irresistible draw forward. Mamori didn't have a name for what she saw in Hiruma's ponderous gaze, but she knew what it was, and when the space between them was gone and she could feel the clench of his stomach muscles against her own abdomen (now roiling with precious, precious heat), she saw it for a madness far more potent and dangerous than any budding claustrophobia could ever inspire.
"You're right, manager, heat conservation is paramount." He released her to flip the blanket open and drape it over her shoulders, pulling on either side of the fabric to cage her against him, his eyes never leaving hers. "This arrangement is fine for now, but if those fucking shrimps take too fucking long, we're going to need to do something more physical to get our body temperatures up." She hated that she enjoyed the way he watched her swallow tremblingly as she realized just what sort of activity he was referring to, and she was horrified that she wished fleetingly that the others would never find them.
The whole thing felt surreal; this isn't happening, she thought. Soon I'll wake up and be home with a terrible fever, and mother will be leaning over me reassuring me that this whole episode was a strange delusion which she will, naturally, never let me live down.
But Hiruma's hands were at her sides again, hastening her back to the present, slipping across her back to link there and hold her in place against him. And his body was straining forward, his eyes dropping from hers and to find her lips, and she found she could no longer help herself.
She closed the distance between them once and for all, and he seemed gleefully surprised only for the instant it took for him to kiss her back and slide ice cold fingers underneath her clothing and begin exploring. She let out a surprised yelp, but she enjoyed the sensation of his cool flesh against hers, which had become suddenly very warm. She arched into his touch and the growl that ripped free from his throat was enticing in primal sort of way she couldn't articulate.
Hiruma took control shortly thereafter, and she found herself thinking that it was one more thing that he was inexplicably skilled at, and then she wondered distractedly if it was just natural talent or if he'd just been getting action on the side from fans of the team, or girls at school…? Soon enough, however, all thoughts spilled out of her skill like an overturned glass, because his long fingers were squeezing her ass, and the sound she made against his lips was totally accidental. She tried to pull away, suddenly self-conscious, suddenly shy, but he only used the opportunity to attack her neck, the shell of her ear, her jaw, and his hands seemed unable to keep still, roaming freely over her stomach, her breasts, her thighs, and by then she was well beyond caring about anything but feeling. Amidst his fervent explorations, Mamori tugged him roughly to her (which he seemed to enjoy thoroughly, if the new pressure against her inner thigh was anything to go by) and tangled her hands in his hair, this time fully relishing the inexplicable silky texture of it, gripping almost painfully as he rocked against her and she whimpered his name in a violent puff of cold air.
Feeling bold, she found the toned flesh of his abdomen underneath his dark apparel, her small fingers tripping nimbly up and across his chest, and he made a hard sound in his throat that she felt everywhere. When she lightly nipped his ear his hands loosened their hold abruptly and for one wild instant she clung to him, afraid that she had done wrong, that he was about to push her away, but he recovered quickly and was on the offensive again in no time.
So caught up in her ministrations was she that at first she was utterly unfazed by the bizarre phenomenon of Hiruma's pants vibrating. She was warm and tingly and didn't want to stop, didn't ever want to stop, and so was duly surprised and dismayed when, grumblingly, Hiruma pulled away from her, breathing as heavily as he had after the game with the Gods and scowling grimly.
Then, in a confounding turn of events (at least to Mamori's lust and trauma-addled brain), Hiruma adjusted their positions and pulled a phone out of his pocket, flipping it open and speaking into it in a tone of voice that had to have been terrifying to whoever was on the other end of the line.
Dimly, she was aware that she recognized the faraway-sounding basso timbre on the phone, but it took a second or two for her to register just what she was hearing.
"…and we came inside, but you two were…occupied. You may have broken the kids, and I'm not sure Kurita was ready for that kind of…exposure." There was a pause wherein Mamori's mind started to work again, and then the indignity of the situation started to set in. And then the horror. "I tried to reassure the little ones that it was all for the sake of staying warm, a survival mechanism, but they're refusing to go back in all the same. The path is clear, but I'll meet you halfway just in case. Don't make us wait too long. I've got a contract I need to get started on." Click.
She stared at Hiruma for a long moment before speaking.
"Gen-kun?" He nodded, his lips twisted into a snarl. "We're free?" Again, a curt, silent affirmation. "…oh." Awkwardly, she moved off and away from him, standing and readjusting her clothing. She didn't look at him as she stooped to recover her blanket, didn't speak as she folded and repacked it, but she startled to discover him behind her after she'd hoisted the bag over her shoulders, questions of what they were going to do with themselves when this was all over flying from her mind when he framed her face with his hands and kissed her, this time slowly, with careful deliberation that left her weak in the knees.
When he pulled away this time, he had that devilish smile back in place and a response ready for her unasked queries.
"Let's go beat the shit out of the Americans. And then we finish this, manager."
He grabbed her hand, and blushing, she left with him.
*meekly* Happy Creezmast, banditscribe. I triiiiiiiiiiied. *dies*
(f***********ck)
