Title: Lesson 4: Heartstrings (Where The Devil Are My Slippers)
Characters: Hiruma/Mamori, Musashi (Suzuna and Cerberus make appearences)
Disclaimer: I don't own Eyeshield 21.
When his head hit the pillow that night, he felt a moment of complete bliss. There was no one sleeping next to him; no one hording his covers, tucking their cold feet underneath his legs, and especially no one lying on his arm. He yawned and stretched as he reclaimed the center of his bed. It had been a pretty uneventful day as far as he was concerned. Practice just wasn't providing the usual excitement since the brats had become used to torture and pain. Then there was the manager, and her ridiculous posturing about her Hakushuu strategies. When did her mothering switch from the fucking shrimp to him?
It was then that he glanced over at his alarm clock and registered the time. It was 11 o'clock at night. She hadn't called, and that was strange. It was not as if he had told her to call. In fact, he had told her on several occasions not to call him every night before she fell asleep. As it turned out, on the nights that he didn't receive a call, she was in his bed. He sat up in bed and reached for his cellphone on the nightstand. When he looked at the glowing screen that showed there were no new calls, his moment of bliss seemed to evaporate.
The next day, he opened his locker at school to an unexpected surprise. For the past few months that they had been seeing each other, every day he opened his locker to find a neatly wrapped bento waiting for him. Today, it was conspicuously missing. Not that he cared; he had specifically asked her not to make him lunch. He had only given her his combination so she could drop off research one time, and that was it. However, he did enjoy dropping her carefully carved pieces of fruit off the roof during lunch time. Headshots were worth extra points.
As he ate his instant ramen on the roof during lunch, he anticipated her taking the opportunity to disturb his solitude. When she didn't show, he leaned over the side of the building to see her sitting underneath a shaded tree with her friends. Not that he minded; he had frequently told her not to bother him during lunch time. Then again, she had always managed to find some excuse to nag him about something which would lead her up to the roof. He was starting to see a pattern.
So at practice he decided to make things a little interesting, and brought out his hand held RBR-90 mm M79 "OSA" rocket launcher from his underground weapons silo. Despite receiving the general horrified looks from the fucking brats, and blowing up a section of the bleachers, the manager did not utter one word of protest to him during practice. Instead, she calmly took notes, and put out the small fires before the fire department arrived to take care of the bleachers. After practice, the only trace that remained of her being there was the practice notes she left on the table in the clubroom. Oh, she was good!
When he arrived home, he expected her to be tired of all the nonsense, and ready for things to get back to as close to normal as things could ever be between them. But 11 o'clock rolled around and still another night with no call from her. Did she expect him to call? She'd be waiting a long time if she was waiting for that. Even though he had 170 different cellphones, he was not going to use anyone of them to reward her effort. Instead he planned to do what he always did in these types of situations. Fight fire with a short range nuclear missile.
Of course the next day, the short range nuclear missile destroyed the rest of the bleachers, and practice had to be cut short because the monkey pissed himself. Still, there was not one comment from the manager. Not one glare, not a scream, not even a stomp of the foot. While the manager dutifully called the fire department, he stood alone in the center of the field watching the bleachers burn. It was a mesmerizing sight; rivaled only by the coolness of her sapphire blue eyes. As the sounds of the sirens got louder, Hiruma walked the short distance to the clubroom with distinct purpose of finding the manager there. However, for the second day in a row the only sight that awaited him was her carefully recorded notes on the practice. No cryptic notes in the margin about his methods, no horribly drawn depictions; just the plain and simple facts. Now things were personal.
Things were made even more personal when he arrived home to find another steaming pile of dog shit on his pillow. He angrily threw the pillow out the window, managing to make a lucky shot of hitting some poor hapless sap in the face without even trying. The grin on Cerberus' face, though, lead him to believe that the fucking dog was too unusually happy seeing some nameless person slapped in the face with his own shit, so Hiruma peeled back the covers of his bed to discover a large piss spot in the middle.
"Keep it up and I will mail you to her in pieces," he snarled at Cerberus as he dialed the hotel manager to have him bring up a new mattress and fresh bed sheets.
He should have burned those papers when he had the chance. It probably wouldn't have prevented anything, the manager could be very stubborn when she wanted to be, but the action would have made hindsight feel better. Lyng awake in his bed, watching the minutes tick away on his digital clock, he wondered when he had turned into an obsessive bitch. She was only a girl, probably PMSing, and he was absolutely sure he didn't want anything to do with that. But the thing he had grown accustomed to, hearing her voice every night before he fell asleep, was weighing on his mind. It was midnight before he decided to dial her phone number.
"Hello?" The sleepy voice on the other end was barely distinguishable as hers.
"Put some clothes on and come over here now," he commanded.
"H-Hiruma?"
"Who the fuck else would it be?"
"Do you realize what time it is? I was sleeping," she didn't disguise the irritation in her voice, but the words came out a lot softer than he expected. Probably due to the fact that she was actually sleeping peacefully.
"And now you're up. So come over," he decided she wasn't allowed to sleep peacefully.
"What exactly do you want?"
"I want you to come over and help me with some research." Okay so it was a blatant lie, and she probably knew it was a lie, but he truly believed if he told her the real reason, he would lose the slight advantage he had.
"And you want me to get up and go out walking in the middle of the night by myself to come all the way over to your place to help with research? Are you cr...well I already know the answer to that, so I won't even ask..." She was definitely irritable. The possibility of her arriving on his doorstep in that state made him all tingly with glee.
"You actually may have a point there, fucking manager," he conceded.
"What point?"
"I'll call Habishira and have him come over to pick you up. Be waiting outside."
"So you plan on waking another person up in the middle of the night all for the sake of research?"
"That fucking delinquent is probably out riding his…hello?" Did his phone just drop the call? He realized that the line went dead, so he immediately redialed her number. There was no possible way she could have hung up on him.
After six tries, she finally answered on the seventh yelling, "Go to sleep!" before hanging up on him for the second time that night. She was now on his shit list. Hanging up on him when he needed her help, who the fuck did she think she was? Did her silly little PMS woman brain forget who he was? He'd remind her. Oh, how he would remind her! As he lay back down on his bed, fatigue finally began to get the better of him, and he realized that he had grown accustomed to more than just hearing her voice before he went to sleep each night.
The next day, before the Seibu/Hakushuu game, he decided to stop by Kariya's. As he left the bakery with a small package, he came face to face with his Mohawk wearing kicker.
"…The fuck are you doing here?" Hiruma eyed Musashi cautiously as the kicker dug his finger in his ear.
"I could ask you the same thing," Musashi chuckled, acknowledging the package in the quarterback's hands.
"I'll fucking kill you if you say a word to anyone," he spat out menacingly just for show. He knew the fucking old man was never one to gossip.
"I'm not the one you have to worry about," Musashi said as his eyes darted over to across the street. Hiruma turned to look to find the cheerleader, standing on the edge of the sidewalk with her mouth hanging open.
"Tch, I've already got blackmail on her."