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If Arakita had to sum up just how horrendously messed up his Thursday night was- and it THE Thursday night before the last week into his final examinations mind you- it was probably much worse than that one time he had accidentally burnt off Fukutomi Juichi’s right eyebrow on their date at a local summer festival last July.
He had remembered to never use fireworks within a 20 minute range of his boyfriend. This was the result of Fukutomi drawing his brows back on with a sharpie marker and as ridiculous as it could get- no one had noticed until one day after training when Fukutomi had wiped his sweat off his forehead, along with- I’m sure you know what disaster had taken place after that.
Well, there was more where that came from- but that isn’t the point. Now, the average Japanese person (anyone, for that matter) would agree that it is absolute blasphemy to be able to enjoy oneself with recklessness levels off the charts before an exam that pretty much evaluated your entire existence as a student before being vaulted off into the working world- and getting into trouble would be the last thing anyone would want before their finals.
All his life, it was ever just Arakita finding trouble- it was never the other way around. Sometimes he wondered if being lucky enough to escape road tickets (from speeding on his moped as a high schooler), being able to date his high school sweetheart for a so-far eight years and not flunking any of the papers he had sat for up until now meant that he was “ballin’”-
That wasn’t the case. Luck had indeed completely screwed him over and there was a high possibility that whatever he was doing now could get him arrested for life.
But it wouldn’t be too depressing- he still had his ever-present shrieking; now partner-in-crime driving behind the wheel as they sped through the highway with a 780,000,000 priced Greek antique vase wrapped up pathetically in aluminum foil, a 30 year old European time traveler, a stripper from Ikebukuro and Sohoku High School’s cycling coach; Mr. Pierre in the back seats of Ishigaki Koutarou’s brand new Subaru to drag down along with him to jail.
To make things even better, they had about three black Nissans (with tinted windows and no plate numbers) and a biker gang tail gating them for the past hour. Arakita Yasutomo and Ishigaki Koutarou didn’t have the slightest clue to where they were going or what they were doing- and the both of them have sobered up by now, leaving them to the consequences of mistaking Shinkai’s stash for food flavoring.
and to make things easier to understand- after accidentally getting themselves stoned, Arakita had proposed that they satisfy their first munchies experience with western fast food. So, they set out on a journey to McDonald but ended up at Lotteria and after five different routes and still ending up at the same Lotteria just next to Mitsui Outlet, the sought out to another city- and ended up at Gorilla Curry. This led to the both of them taking desperate measures and well-
This happens.
And Arakita no doubt sees Ishigaki as the most insufferable idiot he had ever come across in his twenty three years’ worth of being against all of humanity.
The road takes a sharp turn and Ishigaki almost drives off the narrow road down into the sea- but he manages to swerve the midnight blue car in time before his reckless driving could end up being the sole cause of their deaths. Arakita lets out a hearty curse as the car is airborne for about a good five meters after Ishigaki had sped over a speed bump- with the cars’ other four passengers yelling in unison and the vase rattling like a house going through an earthquake.
They speed down the decline and drive up another 1 kilometer later, to see two figures clad in black- one held a pipe and the other, can of aerosol and a matchbox at the top of the hill. In the darkness, Arakita could make out two bicycles leaning against the guard rail and somehow had a strange feeling that this was not a good thing. When they were within a two hundred meter range of the two figures, the young woman in the backseat told them to drop her off by the road.
Ishigaki opens his mouth to protest but yelps instead as Arakita jabs him in the ribs as an attempt to shut him up- well, obviously it worked. The dark haired woman nods curtly before she reaches over Mr. Pierre and the European stranger to unlatch the door handle- making them scoot out of the car so she could exit.
After she leaves, the two men get back inside the car and the four of them watch the young woman greet the two figures. They seem to be conversing normally, until the figure in the ‘V for Vendetta’ mask starts walking towards Ishigaki’s car. This was the universal code for “shit is going down for real”;
“ISHIYAN HE’S COMING HERE HE’S COMING HERE”
“Arakita-kun, maybe if we pretend to be dead, he will ignore us!”
“Pierre, what in heaven’s name is going on!?”
“It seems to me that we may have to lie down on each other until that man outside there decides to leave us be..”
The man in the mask peers into the car through its windows- the grin of the mask moves from one side to the other, scanning the faces of the pretending-to-be-dead in silence. He does, however, raise his hand up and in those seconds do Ishigaki and Arakita share a telepathic conversation about driving right into the plot of a horror movie, because as Arakita decided to squint his eyes open to look outside he now sees three masked people with weapons and this probably the end of their li-
“Heeeey! Arakita-san!”
Arakita flinches, because what he heard after that was a bunch of loud obnoxious knocks on his window and that could only be one person who could sound insanely happy with the face of a serial killer-
“Manami..? Manami, what the fuck?!”
He reluctantly rolls down the window and scowls at the laughing man, who’s mask was now off and held underneath his left arm on his side. Ishigaki is now telling the two white men behind him that they could sit up now since it was only Arakita’s kouhai. Ishigaki fixes his glasses and turns to face Manami, who was now chattering excitedly to Arakita about bear traps.
“Hey.. Sorry to interrupt but, what are you doing here? It’s late at night!”
“Oh, hello there Ishigaki-san! Well, I hadn’t planned to come here and neither did Yoshe- oh yes, thank you for bringing her here! But Akira pissed off a bunch of players on Touken Ranbu and they happened to be members of a biking gang, what are the odds, right? Speaking of which, you really should get going because they seemed to have closed in on us and I really wouldn’t want you to be involved with us any more than you already have!”
Manami giggles, bows deeply in apology and starts to walk away from the car when he suddenly stops in his tracks. His head slowly turns to side and he smiles eerily, before whispering-
“Arakita-san, Ishigaki-san. If it’s possible, it’s best that you forget ever seeing Akira, Yoshe and I here tonight. It’s nothing personal, really- but we like keeping what we do unrecorded. I’m sure you understand.”
Manami puts his mask back on and joins the woman and- apparently- Midousuji side by side with weapons in hand before being engulfed by about twenty headlights that emanated from the motorbikes of about roughly twenty angry looking men.
While this is happening- Arakita pulls up the window and yells at Ishigaki to start driving before those guys decide to beat them up as well and also because they seemed to have not been able to shake off the three mystery Nissans that were coming at them at full speed.
Ishigaki pulls away from the scene and the drive is finally peaceful for a good minute- until five minutes later when the sound of an explosion is heard from behind them. The car is struck with the black smoke that has arisen from behind the hills and debris from the aftermath.
Arakita looks out at the side window and yells as he sees the apocalypse taking place with a frenzy of people running around in flames, the screams of terror that came after and the sound of Manami’s laughter resonating through the air.
Ishigaki’s face portrays the perfect example of shock as he drives further and further away from the explosion, sinking deeper and deeper until half of his body took up the driver’s seat. Arakita yells at Ishigaki for driving like a slug but he quickly dismisses it when he realizes that his driving could’ve killed them a long time ago if they weren’t miraculously still alive. Instead, Arakita decides to plug in the car’s aux cord into his phone to play some music.
“What a strange boy. How did he do that?”
“He probably set it off with a few of those aerosol cans that he had with gasoline. So it’d become a more or less makeshift bomb by Yoshe’s wiring to the vehicles and probably after Akira was done beating most of them, they’d set it off by blowing up one of those bikes. Causing some sort of a chain reaction.”
“Wow, Arakita-kun.. that actually is quite the theory!”
“It isn’t. Manami told me the mechanisms of his plan and although in theory it may sound completely absurd- it worked and-”
Arakita and Ishigaki’s conversation turned out to be short lived- and this was due to the fact that they started to hear police sirens blasting away from behind them. Arakita yells in frustration, Ishigaki shrieks, the apparent time traveler hugs onto the vase with all his might and Mr. Pierre laughs in delight as they pick up speed- now trying to pull away from two police cars, ten men in flames that seemed to be running after them and the mystery Nissans.
It continues as the vehicles rip through the roads while Arakita’s phone decides to go on shuffle- and the car's stereo starts playing “Meteor Dreamline” by Plasmagica as the dog chase continues to venture out into the night.
“What in fuck's name.." Is probably what the woman behind the register thought upon meeting the eyes of two incredibly disheveled looking men.
"I want 30 Big Macs, five French fries and four Bepsis."
"I want the same except make mine diet Bepsis."
The cashier nods gravely, then lifts her trembling hands as she begins to type in their orders. She is distracted for a minute, because she notices the one of the men growling as he is staring at her very intensely while the other man has a fresh stream of drool running down from his mouth to his chin as his bloodshot eyes focus onto the lighted menu.
Arakita’s hair is a sodding mess- with signs of gasoline splayed all over the side of his head and his bangs standing upwards. The sleeve of his shirt seems to be torn off and his pants are matted with dirt and grass. Ishigaki on the other hand has only his white undershirt on, his trousers ripped at his knees, a single shoe and one of his lens from his glasses missing.
After she confirms their order, she tells them that it costs 100,000 and she is met with silence from the both of the customers.
The both of them look at each other until Ishigaki checks his back pockets and responds with "I must've lost it when we stopped by Meisou to pass Fukutomi-kun his hair dye" and Arakita responding with “I’ll go check the car.”
Arakita leaves and Ishigaki is left with the worker and the empty restaurant alone. He smiles at her and she suddenly feels relieved. She ponders on whether she should ask the man before him if he was alright but is met with the sound of the door chiming- and Arakita lugging a 2 feet in height porcelain vase into the restaurant that he drops and watches as it shatters into pieces- revealing the biggest heap of 5 yen coins she had ever seen.
Ishigaki reciprocates this by counting the coins at the speed of light and heftily places them on the counter. The woman is shut up completely- as she goes to the back and calls out a fellow trainee to clean up the mess the two men made on the floor. She hands them their meal and watches Arakita and Ishigaki’s eyes light up like they’ve struck gold.
They take the trays in hand and seat themselves in the far corner of the restaurant. They place the burgers onto the table and sit down facing each other, all the while retaining themselves from yelling as their legs were near to breaking into halves. When they are seated, Ishigaki reaches out for a burger, but is intervened by Arakita’s hand.
“Whoa. Wait. Let’s do this together.”
“Okay.”
The two of them take a burger each in their hands and begin unwrapping their respective Big Macs. In synchronized timing, the both of them took a single bite of the burgers and laughed.
What happened after that could only be described but how utterly disgusted and wonderstruck the workers of the restaurant were, as all of them gathered behind the counter to watch Arakita and Ishigaki consume burger after burger, drink after drink and fry after fry.
A lanky brown haired trainee’s face is slowly turning green, and has resorted to stand next to the waste bin- just in case. The cook is completely baffled to how to they had managed to keep going at it, eating non-stop and all the while making a mess of themselves while they did.
Forty five minutes later, the two of them are wiping their mouths with napkins and have about sixty scrunched up burger wrappers in a neat pile on the table. Arakita laughs and Ishigaki follows suit.
“I can’t believe we just *burp* fucking did that.”
“You tell me. They don’t make burgers like these back in Kyoto.”
“Hey, Ishiyan.”
“Yeah?”
“Thanks for- last night. No matter how insane it was- we’re definitely best friends now.”
“But-“
“Don’t even start. I know you heard what Shinkai said but I really hope that you can forgive me for ever thinking that you were some lame nerd.”
Ishigaki blushes at Arakita’s bluntness and waves it off with a cough into a clenched fist.
“Y-yeah. It’s fine.”
The boy with the spectacles stands up and extends a hand to Arakita. The other man smirks, takes Ishigaki’s hand in his and stands up. They walk towards the exit, wave at the workers farewell and is met with a vast empty parking lot with Ishigaki’s Subaru parked just outside the restaurant. They get in, seat belt themselves and get settled into the car until they come to a sudden realization-
“Hey, Arakita-kun.. where exactly.. are we?”