Warnings: None

Chapter Note: Takes place during Yusuke and 2020!NQK's shared childhood.

This one-shot was informed inspired by a recent meltdown inflicted upon the unsuspecting populace by the Tangerine Tyrant. You know who I'm talking about.

RIOT CHILD

Chapter 03:

"Protests. M'm! M'm! Good!"

In the second grade, Atsuko sent Yusuke to school with a can of soup for lunch.

Given she often sent him to school with nothing but a packet of chips for lunch, the soup was a welcome improvement over the norm… with the small caveat that she hadn't also sent Yusuke to school with a can opener. This naturally resulted in Yusuke staring at his can of soup, disgruntled, while his peers enthusiastically opened bento boxes or fetched sandwiches from the cafeteria without trouble. Atsuko had purchased the can of soup because it had a picture of Doraemon on the label, and she thought Yusuke would enjoy it as a result—and while he did indeed enjoying looking at Doraemon, he also enjoyed eating, and he'd have preferred an open can of edible soup to a closed can of visible Doraemon. As the other students ate, Yusuke pillowed his cheek on his desk and stared at the soup can in despondent silence, wondering how the heck he was going to consume his allotment of chicken noodle despite the impenetrable metal armor hiding it from view.

The solution came to him in short order. While he didn't trust the teachers to help him (Keiko's influence on that matter had been, in a word, profound), and when Doraemon didn't leap off the soup can to open the item with one of his trusty gadgets, Yusuke certainly trusted Keiko to lend a hand. Surely she would know what to do. He sat up and turned toward her at the desk next to his in a flash, smiling ear to ear—

So was Keiko. Smiling, that is. Even through the mask and despite her thick glasses, he could tell. There was this little light that sparkled in her eye that he recognized as a byproduct of one of her most devious smiles… but there was nothing particularly devious about this can of soup, so her expression made no sense to Yusuke at all.

Neither did the wink she tipped him a moment after their eyes met.

But soon she was showing him how to open the can with a nail file and a hammer she'd acquired from… somewhere… and he put that odd look of hers out of his head.

Or at least he did for a little while. Only a few weeks later, he accompanied Keiko and her mother to the grocery store to pick up a few things. Keiko's mother instructed each of them to select what they'd like for dinner, and when Yusuke spotted a can of soup with a happily smiling Doraemon on the can, he took it off the shelf and dropped it with glee into their shopping cart.

When he turned around, he found Keiko standing right behind him. Grinning. Winking. And that time, he didn't let his (many) questions slide.

"What?" he said, scowling as he shoved his hands into his pockets. "I just really like Doraemon, that's all."

Keiko's eyes glittered as she leaned in toward him. "Bricks sure are heavy, huh Yusuke?"

"Huh?"

"Soup." She raised her hands, curling and uncurling her fingers like pudgy claws. "The perfect size for little leftist hands."

Yusuke backed up a bit. "What the heck are you talking about?"

"Ask the media," said Keiko with another wink. "They know."

Humming, she skipped off, leaving Yusuke (and her mother, who had overheard everything and understood just as little) to gawk in her wake.

Canned soup didn't come up again for some time—not until they were in middle school, in fact, when Yusuke spotted Keiko across the street as she walked home from the grocery store, toiling under the weight of two large shopping bags. He ran across the road (jaywalking, naturally) with the intention of taunting her for her heavy load, maybe trip her or something, but he stopped short when he heard a heavy metallic rattle rise from the paper sacks held tightly in her arms. She couldn't even see him over the top of the bags, and when he dug in his feet in front of her, she collided with him with a surprised grunt.

Yusuke took advantage of her momentary pause to tug the top of a bag down. Staring back at him from within the bag were… cans. Cans of soup, specifically. Just lots and lots of cans of soup, most of them decorated with smiling Doraemons and other sunny anime characters.

Keiko managed to form a gap between the bags in her arms, masked face poking between them as they tilted precariously to the side. "Yusuke?" she said, blinking with eyes made enormous by her glasses. "What are you doing here?"

He ignored the question, pointing instead at the soup. "What's all that?"

Her eyes gleamed. "It's just soup for my family, Yusuke. What else would it be?"

She spoke with conviction—and he supposed it was a conviction she'd earned. Her words made sense, after all. Why else would she be buying soup, if not to eat with her family? He certainly couldn't think of anything, and as she trudged away down the sidewalk, he nodded a few times in understanding… until a thought occurred to him. One that completely invalidated her claims from the ground up.

"Waaait a minute!" Yusuke dashed ahead of her, digging in his feet until she hit him and staggered to a halt once more. "Keiko, that doesn't make sense. Your family makes soup for a living, so why would you need cans of soup, too, and—hey, where are you going?"

She'd somehow managed to sidle past him in a series of dancelike steps, bags of soup cans swaying precariously above her head. "Nowhere! See ya!" she warbled as she broke into a jog, and before Yusuke could blink, she (and all of her soup) had vanished from sight around a corner.

This wasn't the last incident concerning cans of soup, of course. Eventually (while looking for his stolen Famicon system) he found a suspiciously large stockpile of canned goods under her bed, smiling faces of Doraemon and other anime characters grinning at him amidst the darkness. He wasn't sure why she was collecting so much soup. Perhaps it was in preparation for the end of the world, about which she occasionally muttered in dubious tones… but that didn't explain why she kept a few cans of soup inside a pillowcase on her nightstand, nor why he found a spare can of cream of mushroom in her book bag marked with a label declaring it "for emergency demonstrations only."

"Demonstrations of what?" Yusuke wondered when he stumbled upon that can—but no matter how hard he pushed for an answer, Keiko's eyes only gleamed, and she said nothing more upon the subject at all.

NOTES

This chapter is a reference to something that happened in the last 72 hours or whatever so please google it if you, like Yusuke, are not sure why the hell NQK is grinning maniacally over soup cans.

And please, let's be fair: It probably IS hard to throw bricks when you have teeny widdle baby hands.

This chapter was mostly for shits and giggles, so please don't take it too seriously.

Was really glad to hear from these folks after chapter 2. So glad you stuck around, and I hope you had a laugh: C S Stars, Kaiya Azure, 431101134, YourHomeGirlJen, IronDBZ and guests.