| [Sep. 7th, 2013|03:04 am] |
"What, it's not a terrible idea," Ryouma said, grabbing napkins to mop up the spray of tea. "He thinks we're morons, we demonstrate that we appreciate his taste, he thinks we're less of morons, he stops being such a gloomy pain in the ass at 5 a.m. He's not a bad guy when he's not fed up with the world. Besides, he spends all his downtime reading that, it's got to be good—"
Raidou was coughing, red-faced, pounding his chest with his fist. "Oh my god," he strangled out, and coughed harder. "It's porn, Tousaki," he croaked, when he finally had enough breath back to approximate human sounds. "He's reading porn."
Ryouma stared at the flat orange cover, the laughing woman running a little ahead of a disheveled-looking man. "It comes in books?"
Maybe he'd been missing out on that whole reading thing.
Raidou blinked once and then slouched back, wry mouth twisting sideways. He took a throat-soothing sip of tea and wiped his lip with the side of his thumb. "Pretty sure porn comes in every human medium available. There are probably dirty cave etchings somewhere."
"Yeah, but that's pictures. Just words don't —"
"Kitsune soba," the waiter, Jin, announced, settling a steaming bowl lavishly decorated with golden slices of fried tofu on the table in front of Raidou. "And your tensoba." He gave Ryouma a shy smile along with an extra plate of tempura. Ryouma smiled back automatically. The boy darted a glance at Raidou, hesitated for half a second, then bobbed an awkward bow and fled back into the shop.
"You're cramping my style, taichou," Ryouma said, and took a very petty pleasure in Raidou's fleeting frown. He shoved the plate of crispy-fried vegetables into the center of the table in recompense. "Tempura?"
Hopefully the extra plate hadn't come out of Jin's wages. Ryouma'd have to overpay to make up for it.
"This is bad for your heart," Raidou said, mouth crooking sideways again. He took two slices of sweet potato anyway.
"Not plannin' on living long enough to worry about it," Ryouma said, sliding his disposable wooden chopsticks out of their paper packet and splitting them apart. His right middle finger didn't quite have all its dexterity back, but it worked well enough for chopsticks. He ate a battered prawn in two bites. "So, okay, maybe not a porn movie with the team. We don't want to shock the lieutenant too early. An' Katsuko's still young and impressionable, we can't go giving her vulgar ideas."
Still. Kakashi. Porn. And he thought they weren't quite the exemplary ANBU he'd idealized?
"If you can find something to shock Ueno, you'd be the first," Raidou said dryly. He stirred his noodles, and shook his head. "We should change the subject."
Because boundaries, right. Ryouma scowled at his prawns. Were all jokes off-limits, then, not just references to that night in Ryouma's apartment? Maybe just sex jokes, in which case long stakeouts were going to be eternally longer.
Maybe they could get Kakashi to read aloud. |
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