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“Do you really want to go to Russia Sushi?” Shizuo asks, tentatively following in Izaya’s footsteps as they make their way to the aforementioned restaurant.
“Why, don’t you like sushi, Shizu-chan?” Izaya teases, throwing a smirk over his shoulder as he continues along with his hands in his coat pockets. It’s gotten a lot colder in the past few weeks, and it’s more than apparent that Izaya doesn’t enjoy the kind of weather.
“I do, it’s just I thought you’d want to go somewhere different.” Izaya looks back again for a moment with his eyebrows raised and Shizuo continues. “We go there a lot on our days off.”
“Hmm, I suppose I can see you’re reasoning,” he says, stopping and turning to face Shizuo, when they reach a portion of the road that doesn’t have so many footsteps of seemingly no-faced pedestrians falling along it. “You’re supposed to be the one taking me on the date, so you come up with the place then.”
Shizuo feels his cheeks go warm, and he presses his lips together hard and looks off to the side, away from Izaya’s fine-tuned amusement. It luckily doesn’t take long for the blush to leave, with the chill of the air overpowering it.
“I’m not good with coming up with ideas, so I thought you would think of one,” Shizuo tells him. He hears Izaya laugh in a strange burst.
“That’s a lame explanation,” he says. “Hmm… How about Akihabara?”
Shizuo frowns. “What? What’s there?”
“There’s vending machines,” he says vaguely.
Shizuo sighs frustration. “A little more information maybe?”
“There’s these vending machines off on a side street that have mystery boxes in them. Take me there and buy me some.”
Shizuo shakes his head. “What? You’re telling me that that’s what you want to do? Buy things from a vending machine on a weird side street?”
“You didn’t have any better ideas, or really any ideas to offer, so...” Izaya tilts his head as he continues to stare at Shizuo.
He’s fighting back a smile, and as the silence stretches out longer his features begin to tell of his restraint from letting out full-on laughter. It makes Shizuo smile at least, and shake his head into resignation as Izaya blinks and slides his attention away from his face finally, taking the lead to the train station.
---
“This is dumb,” Shizuo tells him for at least the fifth time since they’ve arrived in Akihabara. “Do you even know what’s in those boxes?” He wrinkles his nose as his eyes catch on the one that Izaya is beginning to pick up from the slot. “They all have creepy stories on them.”
“Exactly,” Izaya lilts. “I’ve never opened one before, so I would have no way of knowing if it has anything to do with the stories.” Izaya hands him the small-sized box he just bought, and Shizuo takes it with a crease in his forehead. The yellow paper covering the thing is almost as creepy as the white one with the story on it, he thinks.
“How many of these are you gonna buy?” Shizuo asks, as Izaya makes his way to a different vending machine to their left, with a slight skip in his step. “Wait, how did you even know about this, anyway?”
Izaya looks over at him and smiles. It makes Shizuo’s heart skip for a moment. “I walked past once after going to visit someone. I wasn’t really interested until I read what was on one.”
At the mention, Shizuo tips his head to the side and holds out the box in his hand, angling it to read the print. It tells of a woman who lost her job by running her boss with a bicycle, and not much more.
He chuckles a bit, lips curving crooked on his face. “I can certainly see why you’re interested. It’s definitely the kind of thing you would like.”
When Izaya looks back at him, he immediately catches his attention at Shizuo’s smile, and his face practically beams at the sight of it. Shizuo suddenly doesn’t care that they’re so far out of the area he wanted to stay in for the day, or that Izaya has pulled him to such a strange part of the town, with strange intentions.
By the time Izaya has satisfied himself with buying a few more boxes, Shizuo is sitting on the side of the road, trying not to laugh at the passerbys that give the pair strange looks.
“OK, I guess we should open them now,” Izaya says idly, turning over the one he just bought in his hands.
“’I guess’?” Shizuo laughs. Izaya rolls his eyes.
“You open one first, Shizu-chan.”
“Why me?” Shizuo asks, though he’s still laughing as he sets down the other two boxes in his hands to leave only one.
“In case it’s a bomb, so I can know to leave the other boxes and make my escape while you’re still trying to figure out what to do with it,” Izaya says, with a playful smirk.
Shizuo growls, but it’s just as playful. “You’re the worst,” he says, but he’s tearing the paper off the box anyway, and hears another short burst of a laugh from Izaya, similar to the one he heard earlier in the day, as the paper comes away and a snack box is revealed. Shizuo wrinkles his nose at the picture of the crackers displayed on the box. He’s never seen this brand before.
“Does that mean the rest of these are just snacks then?” Shizuo says, frowning minimal confusion at the laugh Izaya gave.
“I suppose,” Izaya says, his previous laugh still shining in his voice, as he quickly tears the yellow away from the box in his own hands. Another snack box is revealed, this one animal crackers. “This was a little disappointing, I must say.”
“There’s still two boxes left,” Shizuo tells him, holding up one for Izaya to take.
“They’re probably bad snacks, too,” Izaya says with a breathy laugh. Shizuo doesn’t know why he’s laughing so much today, but he can’t deny that he likes it.
“Hey, this was your idea in the first place.” Shizuo tears the paper off the one left in his hands, and gets a box of some kind of shrimp snack. It’s of another brand he’s never seen.
The one in Izaya’s hands is yet another box of crackers. “I thought that there would be something fun inside, but I guess I was wrong,” Izaya says, with a feigned pout.
Izaya sighs, overdramatic and so put-on that it makes Shizuo smile as one of the boxes in Izaya’s hold comes flying toward his face. He catches it one-handed.
“Well,” Shizuo starts, looking at the multiple boxes of snacks in his hands. “I guess we can bring some strange vending machine food back to Kadota and Shinra.”
Izaya laughs short again, and Shizuo tilts his head. “What’s so funny? You’ve been laughing a lot today.”
Izaya shakes his head, his mouth still holding on to his amusement. “Because as much as it pains me to say so, you’re right.” Shizuo raises his eyebrows and blinks. “This was dumb.” And his face gives a sudden lightness to it, as if his features couldn’t show any more true joy, and Shizuo has to resist the urge to reach out and kiss him.
It’s not as if it’s truly strange that Izaya is smiling like this, especially since Shizuo has spent the last number of weeks seeing this kind of smile nearly every day, but somehow in the context of the moment, it seems just that much brighter than anything he’s ever seen before.