Duran-kun and Kiyo-chan's Omake Theater
(featuring the Yuuki family pet)
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A/N: Happy Black Friday! As is apparently now an annual ritual, here's a fresh dose of Natsuki and Nao's Christmas shopping experiences. This one takes place a week after last year's edition, "Black-and-Blue Friday."
~X X X~
"Seriously, why am I here again?" Natsuki Kuga groused. Despite the colorful decorations set up everywhere and the cheery carols piped in over the mall's sound system, she was not particularly full of the Christmas spirit. On the contrary, she was particularly crabby. Then again, she was never at her best when hanging around with Nao Yuuki.
"You're here because you owe me. Last year I had to take out an old lady to help you buy a Christmas gift for Fujino, and just last week I helped you again only for that fight to break out."
"You weren't even in the brawl. Hell, not only weren't you part of it, but you didn't even bail me out of jail when it was over!"
"Because I was busy buying and stashing your present. Without me some cop probably would have bought it for his wife while he was arresting everyone. So you owe me, and now you're going to pay up."
"Fine," Natsuki huffed. "So what are you after?"
"This."
Nao pulled out an ad flyer for the mall's anchor department store and pointed to a picture of several designer sweaters with a Christmas theme, on sale for sixty percent off, one day only.
"Huh, these are nice. They're last year's fashion, though, right? That's why they're clearing them out at that price?"
Nao raised an eyebrow.
"Since when do you know anything about fashion, Kuga?" Since Natsuki was actually wearing her biking leathers, it was a fair question. "Wait, never mind. I know the answer to that one."
Sighing, Natsuki said, "Yeah, it's from hanging out with Shizuru when she's buying stuff. Go on, make the wiseass remark you're dying to get out."
"Nah, I can't decide if I want to mock how the little wifey is civilizing you or just call you whipped and have done with it."
"...If I'm not Christian, do I still get punished if I punch out a nun?"
"You shouldn't make threats like that until after you pick up Fujino's gift from me."
"...Damn, that's a point. So who's the sweater for? Did you give up on guys and hook yourself a girlfriend?"
"It's for my mom, Kuga."
"Oh." Mothers were the only topic that Natsuki and Nao never gave each other a hard time about. For all their various flaws, neither girl was a hypocrite.
"Look, can we just get a move on? We're late enough as it is."
"Hey, that wasn't my fault. It was Julia who ran off and cost us an hour to find. Did you have to pay for that fishing line she spun into a web?"
Julia, who'd been perched on one of Nao's shoulders, scuttled over to the other one and hid from Natsuki behind Nao's head. After all, the drider thought defensively, it wasn't like anyone had told her that the sporting goods store's sale on fishing flies meant fuzzy lures, not lunch!
"No, and I won't, so long as they didn't get my face on the security camera footage."
"I'll call Alyssa and tell her to get your bail money ready."
They pushed their way through the dense throng of holiday shoppers and made their way to the end of the mall wing where the department store was located. Inside, the crowds were even thicker as men and women alike fell upon the displays of merchandise like starving jackals with particularly bad table manners. With a judicious use of knees and elbows, they forced their way through to the clothing department.
Which was where they stopped.
"There is no way we're getting through that," Natsuki sighed. At least this time they hadn't started the brawl; the pushing, shoving, cursing, howling, and general mayhem was already well underway, all of it surrounding the racks (well, she presumed there were racks; she couldn't actually see past the crowd) underneath a prominent sign advertising the sale from the flyer.
"Oh ye of little faith," Nao declared. "Ask, and ye shall receive."
"I didn't know the Bible gave shopping advice."
"Hush."
Nao then demonstrated why she'd brought her CHILD along by picking Julia off her shoulder and tossing the drider into the crowd.
It will be noted that shoppers in the grasp of bargain fever are not among the sanest of people. Their crazed, single-minded pursuit of sale goods has on multiple occasions resulted in the literal deaths of people crushed or trampled by the horde; distracting them from their quarry was like trying to reason with an avalanche or a forest fire.
Still, a spider-like creature with leg-span about a foot across landing on someone's face did a pretty fair job of it.
The sound of the screams was the girls' cue to move. It wasn't just that one person was no longer wrestling over sweaters, it was that the sudden shift in her behavior and that of people around her made for a change in the whole dynamic of the crowd, the balance of forces. Like a stone hitting a windshield and sending out a crazy quilt of fractures, Julia's arrival broke up the perfect mass of the cluster and Nao and Natsuki were able to force their way in. Elbows to the belly, short-arm jabs into the ribs, and knees to the groin were all techniques used as they forced their way ahead, intent on their goal. It was brutal, ugly work, but in under three minutes they'd managed to force their way through to the sale racks.
"Oh," Nao began, then rapidly followed up with a series of words that really should not have come from the lips of any nun, not even a mere novice at a chapel whose practices definitely were not strictly orthodox.
"What is it?" Natsuki asked, even as she bent a middle-aged woman with fingernails like daggers into a reverse headlock.
"They're out of the sale sweaters. All they have left is the full-price ones from the designer's new line."
It was remarkable the effect that the concept of "sold out" had on the crowd. From a seething mass of rage, avarice, and violence, it went at once to apathy as people streamed away in search of fresher prey.
Natsuki dropped the woman before the crowd thinned enough for store security to figure out who was doing what to whom.
"So now what?"
"Now we go to plan B."
"There's a plan B?" In Natsuki's experience, plan B was what usually prompted language following Nao's earlier example, so she wasn't enthusiastic about whatever was on Nao's mind.
"Yeah. If I can't buy Mom a nice sweater, I'll give her a hand-knit one instead."
"You can't knit. And I sure as hell can't knit, even if I were stupid enough to get roped into knitting your gift, which I'm not."
"Chill out, Kuga. I keep you around to lift stuff and break things, not do art. But luckily, there's someone here who's really good at working with thread." She scooped Julia up, dangling the drider by her scorpion tail so that they were eye-to-eye. "Someone, I may add, whose fault it was that we were late getting here in the first place!"
"Well," Natsuki mused, "if your mother's anything like Shizuru, she'd probably appreciate something made from all-natural silk."