So the Australian formation it was. And he found himself crouching
below the net a la Kikumaru the Cartwheeling Catboy, with Kaidoh right
behind him, ball in hand, and trying not to think about the fact that his
ass was right in the Mamushi's face. No wonder Oishi had liked this
position so much. Foreplay without tarnishing his reputation as a momma's
boy. In public, too. Pretty kinky. And of course Kikumaru was not one to
pass up such a beautiful opportunity to display his assets to his
boyfriend, oh no heaven forbid that he would actually try be modest and
preserve his dignity, because what was dignity compared to some good old
flashing on the field?
It was a good thing that about three meters of green rubber with white lines seperated the two of them. Momoshiro was very happy that the courts were big and wide, and also, he was more squatting than crouching, and he wasn't swaying from side to side like Kikumaru had done, and he was most definitely not smiling the way Kikumaru did. In fact, his teeth were ground so tightly together he could feel the ache in his jaw spreading. Mentally, he indulged in his favourite pastime of thinking of various ways to kill Kaidoh to keep his mind off his current precarious position.
Kaidoh hissed and served, the two tails at the ends of his bandana flopping upwards like the rotting cores of half-eaten orange peel as they were thrown into the garbage bin. Kaidoh had a very predictable way of serving, he put his right foot forward and tossed the ball and leaned down and looked like he was going to throw up.
Well, if he put his right foot forward, that meant that he was going right, right? From there, Momoshiro concluded that he should go left, ostensibly in order to block the net but in truth in order to prevent possible ass-flashing, or at least any more ass-flashing than what had already occurred, which was quite a lot when you came to think about it. That being done, he got up, and ran due east.
And Kaidoh ran left too. Evidently, putting his right foot forward has been a fake. In fact, it had been so effective it had managed to fool his partner as well, and so there was a huge empty space at the right side of the court. Even the refree was staring.
The pro was that the opponents were busy staring as well, because they, too, were not the smartest people in the world, nobody who watches wrestling is, and therefore were not making any moves to play the game and whack the ball. The con was that where the ball should be whacked was so easy to see Momo might as well have stuck a neon sign saying 'hit here' there.
Momo seethed. How could Kaidoh fuck up like this? And after he was trying so hard to correct his mistakes too! Kiriyama of Jousei Shounan had hit the ball – Momo dimly recalled something about retards having faster reaction time, that probably accounted for his rapid recovery from the shock – and it was flying like a tacky neon yellow comet towards the completely open and unguarded right side of the court.
And Kaidoh, who had been running left and slightly up, to take Momo's place because he had thought that Momo would be going right, swung himself around to go right and dive volley the ball, disreguarding the fact that Momo, too, had turned to dash right and downwards to get the ball, and had not bothered to get up from his crouch because running like that was faster, and as he swung with his long reach so that the racket would get it, Momo's feet whirred past him and the knuckles of his hand grazed something...
And then Momo was shrieking and he suddenly ran faster than he had ever run before, sprinting at a speed that would have made Kamio cry (though whether the tears would be out of joy or envy would be up to Kamio himself), and not only did he manage to get to Kiriyama's powerball, he got into a good position, leaped off his right foot, and Jack Knifed it right back at a superb angle, slicing right across the court, all this while screaming as though he had been molested.
Which he had been, actually.
The ball bounced off the bars of the court, and dropped to the ground, rolling a little. Kiriyama and his partner stared at it in awe, the pupils of their eyes half dilated in shock. The refree was staring again, but this time he, too, looked like his brains had been frizzled by the enormity of what had just transpired. He recovered enough to give the call, "40-30, advantage Seigaku!" but straight after that he slumped back into his chair, his jaw loose.
"Kaidoh, kono HENTAI!" (Kaidoh, you PERVERT!) And with that, Momo whacked the viper a good one across the head, but, unfortunately, since he was a) not a girl, b) not Kaidoh's secret love interest whom he had thought that he hated but actually liked a lot, and c) not secretly interested in Kaidoh either, the normal laws of anime Physics, (for those of you who don't know, it's the law that states that when a girl whacks a boy after he has accidentally or purposely peeked at her privates, said boy will go flying into the sky and reappear as a twinkly star or else find himself seventy feet under) did not take effect and Kaidoh neither flew nor was he buried. He remained alive, whole, above ground, and very angry.
The mamushi grabbed Momo's collar and attempted to haul him up, all the while giving him Kaidoh's famous death glare that had been known to make young girls pour juice on themselves and Horio play even worse than he usually did. "What the fuck?" he questioned, the syllables enunciated but the calamari-rings he had for lips. "What the hell did you hit me for, you punk?"
Momo glared right back. "What did you think your were doing, mamushi?" He grabbed Kaidoh's shirt as well. He was in such a state he thought himself perfectly justified in throwing sportmanship into the winds and getting into a vigourous insulting session – his favourite pastime where Kaidoh and him were concerned besides tennis – on the field in front of everyone because hadn't he just been sexually assualted? By the mamushi, no less, who was his arch-enemy and man, he'd thought that Kaidoh at least had enough sportsmanship to refrain from using such underhanded tactics when trying to win.
"What was I doing? I was trying to get the ball, you idiot!"
"You molested me, you perv! What the fuck's up with you!"
"Molested you!!??" Kaidoh seemed unable to digest and assimilate the statement. To him, the idea of grabbing or looking at Momo's privates for any reason was more repulsive than drinking all of Inui's juices, past, present and future, at the same time. In fact, he would have found it easier to digest that than Momo's previous accusation.
Kaidoh was too busy reeling in shock to compute the wordy spectum of Momo's allegations. So that was what the warm softness he had felt against his fingers for a second had been. In the light of this ray of sudden understanding, Kaidoh's carefully set up and even more carefully maintained disguise as a bad-boy gangster with a perchant for snakes and batik bandanas crumbled like Horio's knees after being on the receiving end of his glare, and his own personal code of honour, which he kept very closely to even though he would never admit it, kicked in. It reminded him that he was, normally, a fair and honourable player (except where Momo was concerned, and that was because that idiot deserved it), and that he was, normally, above underhanded tricks and groping beneath the enemy's defenses for unguarded territories and previously unknown weak spots, and that in these situations, one should... well... apologise.
It was that last deduction that Kaidoh found himself unable to stomach or even come close to comprehending. His mental state was a personification of the saying that emotion could overcome the most logical conclusions. Of course, in this case, since Kaidoh was by nature not the most logical person on earth, and his hatred of Momo ran deeper than Ryoma's desire for Ponta and was wider than Kikumaru's grin at the sight of food, it looked more like logic was small twig in the face of the Yellow River while said river was busy flooding.
However, Kaidoh's honour was more important to him than his bandanas (this is fact, because he has his honour even when he doesn't have his bandana), and he could not chose the easy way out, and simply get angry. He was a mature teenager, he was above his petty anger. At least that's what he told himself. After all, a twig can stop a flood.
But he also hated Momo. Why had he chosen to dash there, with his ass in the air, when it was blatantly obvious that he, Kaidoh Kaoru, had been heading there himself? Why had he run so close to Kaidoh anyway, unless he had wanted... Kaidoh shook his head violently at the thought. He would not pursue it.
And so, because of this inner war with no conclusion, and the fact that he had wasted a full five minutes figuring it all out, and currently had a rather dazed look on his face – it was because of all the thinking he had been doing which Inui used to do for him, but in fact gave him the vapid-eyed expression of a person who has just copped a feel on somebody else while said somebody is unable to undo what's done, which looked very incriminating, but unfortunately Kaidoh's mental capabilities were not high enough for him to understand this yet – and Momo's hand around his neck, while Ryuuzaki-sensei screamed something about how he shouldn't be so happy he'd managed to grope Seigaku's No.1 bachelor (Fuji and Tezuka and Oishi had left the school, and Ryoma's appeal ran along the lines of CardCaptor Sakura's, cute and dangerous and decidedly underaged, which left Momo the dubious honour), Kaidoh Kaoru's brain shortcurcuited and his yound mind processed, as young minds will, only the sexuality of the situation, and he did what any good momma's boy would do. He blushed.
Momo blew his top upon seeing that. Some girls even commented later in the safety of their bedrooms that they believed that his hair had actually stood up straighter than usual, as though to justify his anger a la 'power-up' scenes in shonen manga where the main character releases his full power by glowering and looking 'scary' and blasting all his clothes off in a golden ball of energy. Momo was as of yet unable to do the golden part of it because the only people who knew how to turn golden – at least with any degree of reliabilty – were Ryoma and Tezuka and because they both were grouchy farts, they weren't telling. Anyway, to get back to the previous topic about how it was genetically impossible for a snake to blush and this startling phenemonenon had occurred, it was, according to Momo's decidedly unjust and judgemental opinion, all the evidence he needed to incinerate Kaidoh to the depths of hell, a place where the letter 's' does not exist, and there are no bandanas, and there is a law against having lips that stick out more than 1.5 centimeters from one's face. He pulled his fist back to give Kaidoh "a good one," and I wasn't talking about kissing, while Kaidoh, hissing in outrage, did the same.
They were then seperated by the Hulk, only this time he was brown in colour. Briefly, Momo wondered if the movie directors had gotten something wrong, or if the CG animators had found green a more attractive colour than the original pigments, before realising that his feet and the ground were currently seperated like a pair of long-lost lovers who would rather die than be broken apart, and that said Hulk was, in fact, Kiriyama of Jousei Shounan.
Kaidoh looked up, into the eyes of the Witch of the West, or Urusula, or whatever wicked old crone she was playing today, because frankly they all look pretty alike (blame Disney animators, got no originality) and are pretty alike once you sit down and think it through. She opened her mouth, and Kaidoh was reminded of a certain episode about a cursed racket which had caused them all to assume Ryuuzaki-sensei had been and was now a ghost. He found himself wishing that that would happen. The future – dead or alive or in purgatory – did not look good. But that might have simply been because he was afraid of the dark, and still needed a Hello Kitty "Twinkly- Star" night-light to go to sleep. His family had been sworn to secrecy.
"Both of you!" Ryuuzaki blared like a faulty foghorn. "Back on the court!"
Kaidoh glared through his blush, and Momo growled like the wild boar Ryouma had said he was, and they both walk.. no, they didn't walk, they skipped and slithered, back to the court.
..........(It means, time passed.)
And Seigaku won a great victory – 6-1. At the end of the game, Kiriyama looked like a stick of grilled pork that had been lathered with too much butter, and his partner looked like a scrawny chicken leg given the same treatment, except that chicken legs did not have blue hair and outdated sunglasses. On the contrary, Momo was standing as straight and tall as his hair, and Kaidoh's bandana was perfectly clean despite the fact that it was a rather bright shade of orange that looked really tacky and should have been dirty by then. However, Momo and Kaidoh both envied the Jousei Shounan team. The hurts on the inside are harder to heal, a wise man had said, and both of them were indeed suffering.
It had been a hard-earned victory. Kaidoh's head ached from a Jack Knife that had bounced off his bandana to turn into a court ball that neither Kiriyama nor Daiichi could catch, and his vision was very blurry, because, as far as he recalled, there hadn't been any yellow chicks anywhere nearby and yet now there were a few flying in circles around his head. Momo stood as straight as possible, because if he bent even an inch, his ass would protest his violent moment violently. The groping incident had been the kindest of all the incidents, he reflected as he tried not to wince. After that Kaidoh had hit him THERE with his racket, his hand, and this Snake. Each time, it had scored them a point which would have otherwise belonged to the other team. This didn't make Momo feel any better. He was now wondering, in the words of a famous poet, "at what price victory?" and finding the price far higher than the victory.
The fangirls cheered, Ryuuzaki-sensei smiled, and the Seigaku Doubles 1 again wondered how they had come to win, when their partner was clearly so incompetent.
******
"Hey, Seigaku!" a voice called, a voice which sounded as though it couldn't decide whether to be friendly, antagonistic, or pitying. Momo looked up to see a short and stocky boy who looked like he was suffering from a bad case of anemia and a few muscle-relex-disorders – he was constantly twitching to some unseen beat – walking towards him in a style that resembled an African American breakdancer the way Taiichi Dan had resembled Ryoma Echizen. (In other words, a failed imitation.)
"Fudomine's Kamio!" Momo smiled in welcome and tried to stand. 'Tried' being the operative word, because his agonzied ass refused to move. It had gotten comfortable and cramped, and Momo may as well have stuck his bottom to the bench with superglue, it would have had much the same effect. But finally, after lots of heaving and grunting, he managed to do it.
Kamio grinned at him. "Don't try," he advised. "It must hurt as much as if someone whacked you in the as..." and then he realised what he was saying and shut up before Momo could give him his Death Glare, which was nowhere as effective as Fuji's but still did a decent job. "Great match, as always," he continued. "Seigaku always manages to win, somehow. And at great price, sometimes."
"It was that Mamushi's fault, not mine!" Momo shouted.
Kamio nodded like a wise father allowing his son's petty indulgences. "Gotcha," he murmured. Momo was going to round on him and explain to him fully, with choice explatives, exactly what he meant when Kamio did the unthinkable –and he smirked and said, "See you at the Nationals, Seigaku," while his hand accidentally on purpose brushed across his bruised buttocks.
Momo screams of pain echoed through the courts, hiding the shadow of his more restrained and fishy teamate, standing under a tree nearby, small- pupiled eyes having watched the entire exchange.
It was a good thing that about three meters of green rubber with white lines seperated the two of them. Momoshiro was very happy that the courts were big and wide, and also, he was more squatting than crouching, and he wasn't swaying from side to side like Kikumaru had done, and he was most definitely not smiling the way Kikumaru did. In fact, his teeth were ground so tightly together he could feel the ache in his jaw spreading. Mentally, he indulged in his favourite pastime of thinking of various ways to kill Kaidoh to keep his mind off his current precarious position.
Kaidoh hissed and served, the two tails at the ends of his bandana flopping upwards like the rotting cores of half-eaten orange peel as they were thrown into the garbage bin. Kaidoh had a very predictable way of serving, he put his right foot forward and tossed the ball and leaned down and looked like he was going to throw up.
Well, if he put his right foot forward, that meant that he was going right, right? From there, Momoshiro concluded that he should go left, ostensibly in order to block the net but in truth in order to prevent possible ass-flashing, or at least any more ass-flashing than what had already occurred, which was quite a lot when you came to think about it. That being done, he got up, and ran due east.
And Kaidoh ran left too. Evidently, putting his right foot forward has been a fake. In fact, it had been so effective it had managed to fool his partner as well, and so there was a huge empty space at the right side of the court. Even the refree was staring.
The pro was that the opponents were busy staring as well, because they, too, were not the smartest people in the world, nobody who watches wrestling is, and therefore were not making any moves to play the game and whack the ball. The con was that where the ball should be whacked was so easy to see Momo might as well have stuck a neon sign saying 'hit here' there.
Momo seethed. How could Kaidoh fuck up like this? And after he was trying so hard to correct his mistakes too! Kiriyama of Jousei Shounan had hit the ball – Momo dimly recalled something about retards having faster reaction time, that probably accounted for his rapid recovery from the shock – and it was flying like a tacky neon yellow comet towards the completely open and unguarded right side of the court.
And Kaidoh, who had been running left and slightly up, to take Momo's place because he had thought that Momo would be going right, swung himself around to go right and dive volley the ball, disreguarding the fact that Momo, too, had turned to dash right and downwards to get the ball, and had not bothered to get up from his crouch because running like that was faster, and as he swung with his long reach so that the racket would get it, Momo's feet whirred past him and the knuckles of his hand grazed something...
And then Momo was shrieking and he suddenly ran faster than he had ever run before, sprinting at a speed that would have made Kamio cry (though whether the tears would be out of joy or envy would be up to Kamio himself), and not only did he manage to get to Kiriyama's powerball, he got into a good position, leaped off his right foot, and Jack Knifed it right back at a superb angle, slicing right across the court, all this while screaming as though he had been molested.
Which he had been, actually.
The ball bounced off the bars of the court, and dropped to the ground, rolling a little. Kiriyama and his partner stared at it in awe, the pupils of their eyes half dilated in shock. The refree was staring again, but this time he, too, looked like his brains had been frizzled by the enormity of what had just transpired. He recovered enough to give the call, "40-30, advantage Seigaku!" but straight after that he slumped back into his chair, his jaw loose.
"Kaidoh, kono HENTAI!" (Kaidoh, you PERVERT!) And with that, Momo whacked the viper a good one across the head, but, unfortunately, since he was a) not a girl, b) not Kaidoh's secret love interest whom he had thought that he hated but actually liked a lot, and c) not secretly interested in Kaidoh either, the normal laws of anime Physics, (for those of you who don't know, it's the law that states that when a girl whacks a boy after he has accidentally or purposely peeked at her privates, said boy will go flying into the sky and reappear as a twinkly star or else find himself seventy feet under) did not take effect and Kaidoh neither flew nor was he buried. He remained alive, whole, above ground, and very angry.
The mamushi grabbed Momo's collar and attempted to haul him up, all the while giving him Kaidoh's famous death glare that had been known to make young girls pour juice on themselves and Horio play even worse than he usually did. "What the fuck?" he questioned, the syllables enunciated but the calamari-rings he had for lips. "What the hell did you hit me for, you punk?"
Momo glared right back. "What did you think your were doing, mamushi?" He grabbed Kaidoh's shirt as well. He was in such a state he thought himself perfectly justified in throwing sportmanship into the winds and getting into a vigourous insulting session – his favourite pastime where Kaidoh and him were concerned besides tennis – on the field in front of everyone because hadn't he just been sexually assualted? By the mamushi, no less, who was his arch-enemy and man, he'd thought that Kaidoh at least had enough sportsmanship to refrain from using such underhanded tactics when trying to win.
"What was I doing? I was trying to get the ball, you idiot!"
"You molested me, you perv! What the fuck's up with you!"
"Molested you!!??" Kaidoh seemed unable to digest and assimilate the statement. To him, the idea of grabbing or looking at Momo's privates for any reason was more repulsive than drinking all of Inui's juices, past, present and future, at the same time. In fact, he would have found it easier to digest that than Momo's previous accusation.
Kaidoh was too busy reeling in shock to compute the wordy spectum of Momo's allegations. So that was what the warm softness he had felt against his fingers for a second had been. In the light of this ray of sudden understanding, Kaidoh's carefully set up and even more carefully maintained disguise as a bad-boy gangster with a perchant for snakes and batik bandanas crumbled like Horio's knees after being on the receiving end of his glare, and his own personal code of honour, which he kept very closely to even though he would never admit it, kicked in. It reminded him that he was, normally, a fair and honourable player (except where Momo was concerned, and that was because that idiot deserved it), and that he was, normally, above underhanded tricks and groping beneath the enemy's defenses for unguarded territories and previously unknown weak spots, and that in these situations, one should... well... apologise.
It was that last deduction that Kaidoh found himself unable to stomach or even come close to comprehending. His mental state was a personification of the saying that emotion could overcome the most logical conclusions. Of course, in this case, since Kaidoh was by nature not the most logical person on earth, and his hatred of Momo ran deeper than Ryoma's desire for Ponta and was wider than Kikumaru's grin at the sight of food, it looked more like logic was small twig in the face of the Yellow River while said river was busy flooding.
However, Kaidoh's honour was more important to him than his bandanas (this is fact, because he has his honour even when he doesn't have his bandana), and he could not chose the easy way out, and simply get angry. He was a mature teenager, he was above his petty anger. At least that's what he told himself. After all, a twig can stop a flood.
But he also hated Momo. Why had he chosen to dash there, with his ass in the air, when it was blatantly obvious that he, Kaidoh Kaoru, had been heading there himself? Why had he run so close to Kaidoh anyway, unless he had wanted... Kaidoh shook his head violently at the thought. He would not pursue it.
And so, because of this inner war with no conclusion, and the fact that he had wasted a full five minutes figuring it all out, and currently had a rather dazed look on his face – it was because of all the thinking he had been doing which Inui used to do for him, but in fact gave him the vapid-eyed expression of a person who has just copped a feel on somebody else while said somebody is unable to undo what's done, which looked very incriminating, but unfortunately Kaidoh's mental capabilities were not high enough for him to understand this yet – and Momo's hand around his neck, while Ryuuzaki-sensei screamed something about how he shouldn't be so happy he'd managed to grope Seigaku's No.1 bachelor (Fuji and Tezuka and Oishi had left the school, and Ryoma's appeal ran along the lines of CardCaptor Sakura's, cute and dangerous and decidedly underaged, which left Momo the dubious honour), Kaidoh Kaoru's brain shortcurcuited and his yound mind processed, as young minds will, only the sexuality of the situation, and he did what any good momma's boy would do. He blushed.
Momo blew his top upon seeing that. Some girls even commented later in the safety of their bedrooms that they believed that his hair had actually stood up straighter than usual, as though to justify his anger a la 'power-up' scenes in shonen manga where the main character releases his full power by glowering and looking 'scary' and blasting all his clothes off in a golden ball of energy. Momo was as of yet unable to do the golden part of it because the only people who knew how to turn golden – at least with any degree of reliabilty – were Ryoma and Tezuka and because they both were grouchy farts, they weren't telling. Anyway, to get back to the previous topic about how it was genetically impossible for a snake to blush and this startling phenemonenon had occurred, it was, according to Momo's decidedly unjust and judgemental opinion, all the evidence he needed to incinerate Kaidoh to the depths of hell, a place where the letter 's' does not exist, and there are no bandanas, and there is a law against having lips that stick out more than 1.5 centimeters from one's face. He pulled his fist back to give Kaidoh "a good one," and I wasn't talking about kissing, while Kaidoh, hissing in outrage, did the same.
They were then seperated by the Hulk, only this time he was brown in colour. Briefly, Momo wondered if the movie directors had gotten something wrong, or if the CG animators had found green a more attractive colour than the original pigments, before realising that his feet and the ground were currently seperated like a pair of long-lost lovers who would rather die than be broken apart, and that said Hulk was, in fact, Kiriyama of Jousei Shounan.
Kaidoh looked up, into the eyes of the Witch of the West, or Urusula, or whatever wicked old crone she was playing today, because frankly they all look pretty alike (blame Disney animators, got no originality) and are pretty alike once you sit down and think it through. She opened her mouth, and Kaidoh was reminded of a certain episode about a cursed racket which had caused them all to assume Ryuuzaki-sensei had been and was now a ghost. He found himself wishing that that would happen. The future – dead or alive or in purgatory – did not look good. But that might have simply been because he was afraid of the dark, and still needed a Hello Kitty "Twinkly- Star" night-light to go to sleep. His family had been sworn to secrecy.
"Both of you!" Ryuuzaki blared like a faulty foghorn. "Back on the court!"
Kaidoh glared through his blush, and Momo growled like the wild boar Ryouma had said he was, and they both walk.. no, they didn't walk, they skipped and slithered, back to the court.
..........(It means, time passed.)
And Seigaku won a great victory – 6-1. At the end of the game, Kiriyama looked like a stick of grilled pork that had been lathered with too much butter, and his partner looked like a scrawny chicken leg given the same treatment, except that chicken legs did not have blue hair and outdated sunglasses. On the contrary, Momo was standing as straight and tall as his hair, and Kaidoh's bandana was perfectly clean despite the fact that it was a rather bright shade of orange that looked really tacky and should have been dirty by then. However, Momo and Kaidoh both envied the Jousei Shounan team. The hurts on the inside are harder to heal, a wise man had said, and both of them were indeed suffering.
It had been a hard-earned victory. Kaidoh's head ached from a Jack Knife that had bounced off his bandana to turn into a court ball that neither Kiriyama nor Daiichi could catch, and his vision was very blurry, because, as far as he recalled, there hadn't been any yellow chicks anywhere nearby and yet now there were a few flying in circles around his head. Momo stood as straight as possible, because if he bent even an inch, his ass would protest his violent moment violently. The groping incident had been the kindest of all the incidents, he reflected as he tried not to wince. After that Kaidoh had hit him THERE with his racket, his hand, and this Snake. Each time, it had scored them a point which would have otherwise belonged to the other team. This didn't make Momo feel any better. He was now wondering, in the words of a famous poet, "at what price victory?" and finding the price far higher than the victory.
The fangirls cheered, Ryuuzaki-sensei smiled, and the Seigaku Doubles 1 again wondered how they had come to win, when their partner was clearly so incompetent.
******
"Hey, Seigaku!" a voice called, a voice which sounded as though it couldn't decide whether to be friendly, antagonistic, or pitying. Momo looked up to see a short and stocky boy who looked like he was suffering from a bad case of anemia and a few muscle-relex-disorders – he was constantly twitching to some unseen beat – walking towards him in a style that resembled an African American breakdancer the way Taiichi Dan had resembled Ryoma Echizen. (In other words, a failed imitation.)
"Fudomine's Kamio!" Momo smiled in welcome and tried to stand. 'Tried' being the operative word, because his agonzied ass refused to move. It had gotten comfortable and cramped, and Momo may as well have stuck his bottom to the bench with superglue, it would have had much the same effect. But finally, after lots of heaving and grunting, he managed to do it.
Kamio grinned at him. "Don't try," he advised. "It must hurt as much as if someone whacked you in the as..." and then he realised what he was saying and shut up before Momo could give him his Death Glare, which was nowhere as effective as Fuji's but still did a decent job. "Great match, as always," he continued. "Seigaku always manages to win, somehow. And at great price, sometimes."
"It was that Mamushi's fault, not mine!" Momo shouted.
Kamio nodded like a wise father allowing his son's petty indulgences. "Gotcha," he murmured. Momo was going to round on him and explain to him fully, with choice explatives, exactly what he meant when Kamio did the unthinkable –and he smirked and said, "See you at the Nationals, Seigaku," while his hand accidentally on purpose brushed across his bruised buttocks.
Momo screams of pain echoed through the courts, hiding the shadow of his more restrained and fishy teamate, standing under a tree nearby, small- pupiled eyes having watched the entire exchange.