Dokusensha: The Sitcom
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Summary: In which Lee gets tired of Mr. Kim and Sunny Wong freeloading, and kicks them out of his apartment. Witness their search for a new home, and shed tears for (or point and laugh at) the unfortunate soul who just happens to live in the one they decide on. Modelled loosely on "Seinfeld".
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Disclaimer: We do not own any of the characters of ROD TV. We also do not own Seinfeld. However, we do own the idea of putting them together, and giving all of the characters from the former universe the neuroses of the characters from the latter. Aren't we special. :o)
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Chapter 1: The Discovery Channel
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It had been a long, hard day in the life of Lee Linho. He had been wandering around all morning in these silly white pyjamas, he'd run out of cigarettes midmorning and his hands were beginning to shake rather badly as a result, and on his way back to his apartment, he'd been splashed by an errant taxi, whose driver had then proceeded to lean out the window and shout rudely at him.
When Lee finally stumbled through the door of his apartment, deciding that three and a half hours was by far long enough for this day to have lasted, he was in a decidedly bad mood.
"Hello, Lee," the short, round little man called from his position, planted firmly on the sofa in front of the television.
"Hi, Mr. Kim," Lee greeted through gritted teeth, eyeing the dirty laundry scattered about the room. "I see you've had a nice, relaxing morning in front of the tube."
"Yes, quite."
"Grrgh," Lee said eloquently.
"Hey, Lee," a hulking figure in a long, black coat and a faceguard greeted, sauntering out of Lee's bedroom, an open bag of chips in hand. "Y'know, I was just watching the Discovery Channel. Why do they call it the Discovery Channel, anyway? It's not like they found anything; I mean, they've probably known about all this stuff for years, but they're just doing all these shows about it now. What they should call it, is The Useless Information Channel. Do they ever tell you anything that's gonna help you in the real world? Do I really need to know what to do if I get attacked by a great white shark? Is that ever gonna happen to me?"
"It's becoming a possibility," Lee muttered, pressing a hand to the top of his head and taking a deep breath as Sunny continued, unheeding.
"'Yeah, I was just swimming along in the pool, and a great white shark attacked me. Now, if I had been watching the Discovery Channel during Shark Week, I would've survived.' And why do they call it a great white shark anyway? Last I checked, it's mostly grey."
"Yes, I'm sure you see a lot of great white sharks," Lee sighed, already reaching automatically for his sadly empty cigarette carton.
"That's exactly my point!" Sunny exclaimed, gesturing wildly. "Why do we need the Discovery Channel?"
"An excellent point, Sunny," Mr. Kim called from the couch.
"Look," Lee began, spitting out the word. "I've had a long day. A really long day. Three hours that felt like twelve."
"Have you ever notice that that happens someti—"
"Yes! I have. Today, for example. Now, I'm going out for some cigarettes, because I desperately need a smoke, especially if I have to go for that meeting with Miss Sumiregawa. And you guys have been trashing my apartment since you've been here. So here's what we're going to do: you're going to clean up while I'm gone, and if I don't see a significant improvement by the time I get back, you're both outta here."
At that moment, the door slammed open, and the next moment, a white blur shot past his head.
"What is the bird doing here again?" Lee whined, before whirling about and squinting. "Is it…taking my sweater?! It's taking my sweater!"
"He's only borrowing it," Mr. Kim said gently.
"Look, clean or leave! I'm serious this time!"
And with that, the apartment door slammed for the second time in ten seconds, shut this time, as Lee stormed out.
Sunny looked over his shoulder at Mr. Kim, still settled comfortably on the couch.
"So, you gonna clean?"
"He wasn't serious," the shorter man replied.
"He sounded pretty serious."
"I believe Lee was simply going through nicotine withdrawal. You know how he can get."
"Yeah, we were watching that thing about that on the Discovery Channel last week, right? So, why do they call it a 'nic fit', anyway? It's not like he's having a fit because he's got nicotine. He's having a fit because he doesn't. And he's not really having a fit, he's just a little irritable. They should call it a 'not-nic cranky'."
"That doesn't seem to roll off the tongue, does it?" Mr. Kim noted sadly.
"Hey, I bet if I told people about it, they would embrace the new way," Sunny said firmly.
"I don't know…a 'not-nic cranky'? It just sounds a little odd."
"Okay, a 'no-nic cranky'. Is that better? Ah! A 'nic-less cranky'!"
"I like that," Kim said, nodding. "A 'nic-less cranky'."
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"So, you're really gonna do it this time?" Nenene asked, slightly awed. "Good for you, Lee. You've been putting up with those freeloaders long enough."
"Yeah," Lee sighed blissfully, puffing on his cigarette. "Enough is enough, right?"
The young woman smirked a bit.
"You know they're not gonna clean, right?"
"Oh, sure they will," he replied easily.
Nenene sighed and cupped her chin in her hand.
"Lee, open your eyes," she said, exasperated. "They're not gonna clean. They're like my bodyguards, except they clean. And make me coffee. And carry me. And cook my dinner. See, that's all you need to do, Lee. You just need to train them!"
"I don't have your iron will," Lee pointed out. "And Sunny may be a chatterbox, but he's a lot bigger than I am."
Nenene leaned forward and touched his arm lightly.
"Are you gonna be intimidated all your life, Lee?"
Lee gazed morosely out the window, took a long puff from his cigarette, and turned back, his mind made up.
"No, I'm not."
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"Do you think we should clean a little?" Mr. Kim asked four hours later, flipping through the channels.
"Hey, if we do it now, he'll come to expect it," Sunny replied. "Do you want that to happen?"
"Well, of course not," Mr. Kim replied. "But if we don't do it, we might have to find a new apartment to not clean."
"He's not gonna kick us out," Sunny assured the other man easily. "He has no backbone. Besides, if push comes to shove, I'm six-foot-eight. What's he gonna do? And check out these sunglasses! Do they say intimidation or what?"
"Actually, I believe they say Oakley," Mr. Kim replied. "Very nice. I like Oakleys."
"They're fake Oakleys," Sunny informed him.
"Where did you get those?" Mr. Kim asked. "I didn't know they made fake Oakleys."
"I don't know," Sunny replied absently, eyes trained on the television. "Some store."
"I can't believe they make fake Oakleys!" Mr. Kim said, shaking his head. "If they make fake Oakleys, I wonder if they make a fake Ferrari."
"Would you really want to drive a fake Ferrari?"
"It likely wouldn't get very good mileage," Mr. Kim conceded, "but it would look good. And isn't that what really matters? After all, when you're my height, the ladies are few and far between."
"The ladies are few and far between when you're my height!" Sunny said with a gesture of his hands. "They're scared! At least, that's what I tell myself."
Mr. Kim laughed softly.
"We're like the Odd Couple, aren't we?"
"Except we're not a couple," Sunny reminded him, inching away.
"It was only an expression, Sunny."
"We're not an expressive couple."
"Oh, never mind," Mr. Kim sighed, returning his attention to the television. Then he turned back. "You know, we could clean up a little bit. Not sparkling clean, mind you, but enough to make Lee happy."
"It's just gonna get messed up again," Sunny shrugged. "I've never seen the point of cleaning. If you just leave it messy, it's in a constant state."
"Ah, but I don't believe it matters," Mr. Kim announced, glancing over his shoulder as the door swung open. "I believe Lee is back."
"Could be the bird," Sunny pointed out.
"No, it couldn't," Lee announced through gritted teeth, eyes roving over the apartment, littered with exactly the same mess as before. "You people," he ground out, taking a step toward the sofa, "didn't even move."
"Lee," Sunny began, rising. "We strive to give you constancy."
"Out," Lee barked. "Now!"
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"So, we'll find a new place," Sunny shrugged as the two men wandered down the street aimlessly, John Woo flitting every now and again past their heads.
"I don't see the point," Mr. Kim said, shaking his head. "This is only a temporary thing. Lee will let us back into his home soon enough. He simply needs to cool his head."
"It's that nic-less cranky," Sunny announced grimly. "Does it every time."
"Perhaps we should buy him a carton," Mr. Kim suggested.
Sunny nodded thoughtfully.
"It might be a nice, magnanimous gesture."
They continued on in silence for several moments.
"Of course," Mr. Kim pointed out, "if we're to buy a carton, we'll need some money."
"C'mon! You almost run Dokusensha! You're a big head honcho!" Sunny exclaimed, before taking in Mr. Kim's short stature and frowning behind his massive collar. "Well, you're a head honcho anyway. And you still make a ton of money."
"I've told you before, Sunny: I'm saving up."
"Oh, yeah; to buy Hong Kong, right?"
"Really, Sunny, it will work."
"Yeah, sure. So, whaddaya think of this place?"
"I don't know," Mr. Kim replied, peering consideringly up at the building they had stopped in front of. "I don't really like the architecture. It's a little too sterile for my taste. I like a building with some character."
"Well, any building you moved into would automatically have character," Sunny said with a chuckle.
"You know what I mean," Mr. Kim said, exasperated. "I like a place with a lived-in feeling about it. I want a place that I feel I can live in."
"Hey; as long as it's got a good TV, we can live in it," Sunny reminded him. "Don't you wanna watch the Discovery Channel?"
"Why do we always have to watch the Discovery Channel?"
"Why do we…Kim! Just think of all the great things we can discover!"
Mr. Kim frowned.
"Didn't you just finish stating that it's odd that they've called it the Discovery Channel, because nothing they show has been recently discovered?"
"That doesn't mean it doesn't have value!"
"Of course," Mr. Kim sighed.
"So, this place look good?"
"How are we going to pay the rent? And for the last time, I refuse to dip into my Hong Kong savings. Hong Kong won't buy itself, after all."
"Hey, lookit that," Sunny said, pointing idly to the young woman, short blonde hair bouncing in the mid-day sunlight as she made her way hurriedly down the steps of the building and sifting through her purse roughly enough to cause a small white object to tumble to the ground. "She dropped her door card."
"Should we try to catch up with her?" Mr. Kim. "She might receive quite a nasty start later when she looks for it and finds it gone."
"I don't know," Sunny said with a grimace. "We'd have to run. I'm not really a runner. I'm one of nature's walkers."
"Well, then, do we simply turn it into the lobby?"
"Hey, I've got a great idea," Sunny proclaimed, stooping to pick up the card.
"Which would be?" Mr. Kim prompted impatiently.
"We take the card up to her apartment and wait for her to come back!"
"Is that a good idea? What if she carries a weapon?"
"I am a weapon!" Sunny exclaimed, gesturing. "All I need is a phone book or a napkin! Or twenty bucks!"
"I am not touching the Hong Kong fund," Mr. Kim pointed out tersely.
"You don't have to touch the Hong Kong fund! I'll use a napkin! She's probably got a napkin!"
"I suppose," Mr. Kim admitted.
"So, let's go!"
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"Doo-doo-doo, doo-doo-doo, no one's home, so I get to sing," Junior hummed to himself as he phased through the wall next to the door of the apartment.
As a noise from the main room just beyond the front entry caught his attention, he froze and fixed wary eyes on the two men, one tall and hulking, swathed in a long black coat, and the other short and squat, dressed neatly in much the same thing that everyone around him on an average day tended to wear.
"Who are you people?"
"We're friends," the tall man called, adjusting his sunglasses.
"Friends of Wendy's?" Junior asked suspiciously.
"Absolutely," the shorter man chimed in.
"Yeah, us and Wendy, we go way back," the tall man said easily.
"I see…"
"We just came up to return this to her. I'm Sunny, by the way."
"You could leave it with me," Junior pointed out.
"Nah, we'll wait."
"I don't know when she'll be back."
"That's okay. You guys get the Discovery Channel on this thing."
"Sunny has several theories about the Discovery Channel," Mr. Kim informed the bewildered boy cheerfully.
"Er, right. Are you sure you don't want to just give me the card?"
"Yeah, we got nothing better to do. We can wait. Besides, we don't want to miss the reward," Sunny replied.
"I don't think you'll be getting one," Junior muttered under his breath, shuddering a little and feeling nearly sorry for these two poor fools. "I have to go now. We're hunting ghosts at school."
"Yes, that's very nice," Mr. Kim said indulgently. "We'll just wait here for your mother to come home."
"She's not my mother," Junior informed them. "So, you know her really well, but you don't know that."
"She doesn't really talk about her personal life," Sunny said with a shrug, bluffing heavily. "It's always work, work, work."
"Hmm. Perhaps they are telling the truth," Junior said under his breath before turning and leaving, wondering what shambles the apartment might be in by the time he returned, and hoping that the inevitable blood stains would come out of the carpet with relative ease.
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"Oh, God, what a day," Wendy sighed three days later, before glancing at her watch. "Or rather, what a bunch of days. Stupid overtime. Of course, the money is nice, but…well, sleep is nice, too. I wonder if I should go inside at some point before someone happens past and wonders why I'm talking to the closed door. Yes, that sounds like a nice plan. Have a shower, go to bed until some time early next week."
She sighed as she unlocked the door.
"Oh, if only Mr. Joker would let me. As it is, I have to get up and go back to work in…" She glanced down at her watch again, and then grimaced. "Four hours. I swear, if I didn't love him so much, I'd kill him. Of course, it could be considered a crime of passion…"
Here, she trailed off, and then stopped short, rubbing her eyes wearily.
"No, I just need to go to sleep. I'm just suffering severe sleep deprivation right now, and everything will be clearer in the morning."
She continued on, shuffling exhaustedly towards her bedroom, utterly missing the two men watching her curiously from the sofa.
"We found your door card," Sunny whispered at her retreating back, then shrugged when she didn't react. "Hey, we tried. Well, back to the Discovery Channel."
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"I feel so much – well, slightly – better," Wendy noted as she trudged sleepily down the hallway, toward the kitchen and the coffee that might eventually be contained within it. "With only another twelve hours of sleep, I might feel fully rested again. Of course, there's every possibility I'll get that, even if it might be over the course of two months. Honestly, there are times when this job seems more trouble – and sleep deprivation – than it's worth."
Thus grumbling, she reached the kitchen, nearly colliding with a small figure as she reached the doorway.
"Oh, good morning, Junior," she greeted sleepily. Then she frowned. "Growing a mustache, are you? Looks a little silly, honestly. Might want to shave it off."
The figure nodded vigorously, and grinned widely, thus confirming his existence as very decidedly not Junior, and scurried back to the couch with a box of cereal and a carton of milk.
Shaking her head at the odd ideas children had at this age – really, a mustache – Wendy continued on into the kitchen, and then proceeded to fill the kettle, prepare a coffee filter with grounds, and pull the evaporated milk (since the carton seemed to have gone missing, she reflected with some perplexity and mild annoyance) and sugar out of the fridge and cupboard respectively, all without any significant amount of input from her brain, which was still whining that it wanted to go back to sleep.
Soon enough, the coffee was made and half the pot – just enough to lend artificial wakefulness – was consumed. As she set her mug back down on the counter, she turned and looked slowly about the kitchen, something occurring to her at last.
"Junior," she called. "Did you – for some bizarre reason – pull out every dish in the cupboard, dirty it, and leave it on the counter?"
"He's not here," a deep, masculine voice called from the other room, slightly garbled in a manner that suggested a mouthful of something.
Wendy froze.
"I know that there's no answer to this that won't send me into a homicidal fit, but I'll ask anyway: who are you?"
"We're your new roommates," the voice replied.
"Actually, we just dropped by to return your door card," another voice added. "But you were such a long time in coming home, so we decided to make ourselves comfortable for the wait."
"I see," she said in a tone laced with artificial sweetness as she strode into the other room, pausing to grab for the nearest blunt object – a frying pan that happened, by some miracle, to be clean. "And why, exactly, didn't you leave it with the desk clerk, if the little boy wasn't home?"
"He was," the first voice replied easily. "We didn't want to leave it with a kid."
"Even a 'kid' who happens to live here," she said, still with a shred of pleasantness that she could fairly sense wouldn't be there for long. "Which you two don't."
"Yeah, about that," the first voice she had heard, which she could now see belonged to a hulking figure in a long black coat, neck guard, and sunglasses. "We kind of are."
Wendy turned around and counted very slowly to ten. Then she turned back to the men. Then, as the other man stuffed a handful of cereal into his mouth and poured a bit of milk in after it, directly from the carton, she turned away again very quickly, and counted to fifty.
Sufficiently calm after this, she turned back to the men settled comfortably on the couch.
"You're living here," she repeated.
"Yeah," the large man confirmed. "I'm Sunny, by the way."
"May I ask exactly who authorized this?"
"May we ask you why all you had in your fridge was bottled water?" the short, mustached man asked pleasantly.
"Yeah," Sunny agreed, shooting her a reproachful gaze. "Kim here had to dip into his Hong Kong fund."
"His…Hong Kong – oh, never mind!" Wendy finished impatiently. "I don't care what you're rambling about. I just want you two gone by the time I get back from work! Or believe me, there will be words."
With that, she turned on her heel and stormed from the apartment.
Sunny and Kim watched the door expectantly for a moment.
Seconds later, it was flung open again, and the young woman stormed back into the apartment less sheepishly than might have been expected.
"Alright; there has been a slight change of plans. I'm going to put down this silly frying pan, then I'm going to put on some clothes, as Mr. Carpenter would likely frown on my wearing pyjamas to work, then I'm going to go to work, and by the time I get back, you two are going to be gone. And if you're not, there will still be words."
The two men watched her disappear down the hallway, into the room at the far end.
Sunny turned to Kim.
"You think she meant it?"
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End Notes: Tune in next week towitness the epic battle between the might of Sunny Wong and his severely miffed unwilling hostess. Also, the return of John Woo. Whoo...