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Mondo’s woes began, as was customary, by a single ill-thought out sentence that spilled out of him halfway through a dinner of overcooked chicken and undercooked rice.
“Oy, Daiya,” he addressed the man with more makeup and ink and metal on his face than bare skin, “you ever kissed anyone with a tongue ring before?” He pointed his chopsticks at his older brother’s face, rice falling from his dangling chicken strip and instantly cementing to the floor. (Not that it particularly mattered, as the Oowadas didn’t tend to go barefoot in their home. The last time Daiya had walked to the fridge for a midnight milk chug, he’d been crippled by a toenail so small it could only have been from Mondo’s toddler years.)
Daiya swallowed before talking. “Yeah? ‘S pretty great, actually. Feels nice. Why’d ya ask?” Some of the metal in his ear jangled as he chewed through his tough meal.
The younger ink-and-piercing enthusiast watched the chain hanging from Daiya’s ear cuff and earlobe swing a few times. Why had he asked? He looked down at the dragon tattooed on the back of his forearm and tapped his tongue against the cool metal backing of his left snakebite spike.
“You wanting one? Remember, lil bro, don’t go getting piercings just cause we can do it for ya,” he warned, not as a sensible father, but as a man who would have electromagnets take a rather strong fancy to his face.
“Naw, that’s not…I mean, I just wondered…” Mondo mumbled, managing to keep most of dinner in his mouth.
Daiya nodded knowingly.
And that should have clued Mondo in that something was bound to go horribly wrong.
-
Ishimaru sat in the tattoo parlor for the eighth time that week (he’d managed to show up twice on Saturday) waiting for… nothing, really. He read his book in silence, only glancing around at the buzzing of a tattoo needle or a client spitting out a “fuckin’ hell!” after the clang of a clamp opening. He shifted uncomfortably when he heard those exclamations.
Truth be told, needles terrified Ishimaru. Being within eyesight of a clinic or rehab center forced his hands to fists and his eyes to watery messes. He would fumble with words and the hem of his shirt and he would shake in his decidedly un-metaphorical boots.
Yet he spent his free time seated in the window of this tiny tattoo and piercing shop, earring guns and ink needles within sneezing distance, and didn’t bat an eye. He felt safe here, under the watchful eye of—
“Oh shit.”
Ishimaru’s eyes flicked up from the page, frowning slightly. “Oh shit” was the singular worst phrase you could hear when getting a body modification, perhaps only second to “Did you clean this?” A phrase which Ishimaru had only heard the artists mutter once (and Leon Kuwata deserved that infection, dammit.)
A sigh of relief rang out from the back room. Ishimaru went back to his book. One of them had probably dropped a stud or something.
Speaking of studs, Ishimaru bookmarked his place and looked up expectantly at the tapping of footsteps. All six-foot-two-plus-heels of Mondo Oowada rounded the corner into the parlor’s cramped lobby, and he stopped combing back his pompadour at the sight of the blushing bookworm.
There are only two things you need to know about Ishimaru Kiyotaka for the sake of this story, excepting, of course, his aversion to needles and the resulting eccentricity of his preferred study spot. One, if he wasn’t firmly between a three and a seven on the emotional scale, he was crying. And two, as stories like this often go, he was irrevocably gay for Mondo Oowada.
“Oh, uh, hi,” Mondo stuttered, his eyes narrowing with suspicion.
Ishimaru felt his mood rise from a comfortable five and a half to a very dangerous high six. His eyes began the pre-crying process with a passion.
“Hello Oowada-kun!” he replied, overwhelmingly trying to scramble to his feet, keep a hold on the book in his lap, and not remember how badly needles like the one Mondo was fiddling with scared him.
“Ya know what you want yet, kid? You’ve been in here every day for…” Mondo trailed off, trying to count the days in vain.
“The last seventeen days, Oowada-kun!” he chirped. Mondo had remembered him! He beamed and barely kept his emotions below a seven, reminding himself that Mondo would surely never date him. Oops. He dipped down to a low four, staring down at his bootlaces with a grimace.
“Uh, so, yeah. Have you looked through our…” he struggled for the right word. “Menu” wasn’t it, even if it did have a list of things to put into your body. “Catalogue” wasn’t it either; they weren’t selling couches, and there weren’t any photographs. “Brochure” was out, and “flier” implied either something distributed to every person in a neighborhood for the sake of advertising, or something with the power of flight. Even though Mondo often turned them into airplanes when nobody was around, he didn’t think that counted.
“Services?” he chose. “Ya need a consultation for any tat bigger than my hand,” he held out his broad palm warningly, “but otherwise, big bro can just fix ya up if you’ve figured out what ya want.”
“Oh, is lil Kiyo back?” Daiya hummed from around the corner. “Y’know, bro, I can handle this. Duck in next door and grab some grub for lunch break, be a dear?” He shooed Mondo away with a wave of his hand and a Meaningful Look, and the younger Oowada cleared out with a jangle of bells against door.
“So, Kiyotaka,” Daiya said with a familiarity that raised Ishimaru’s spirits back to around a five, “I know you’re in here scopin’ the wares. It’s damn obvious. So, you wanna kiss my lil bro or not?”
Ishimaru’s embarrassment hit an eight on the emotional scale, but a single breath rebounded it. He could handle this. Daiya was a nice guy.
Instead of speaking, he opened his mouth and closed it a few times weakly. His knees turned in a little (a pose that Daiya would later tell him made his ass look great) and he nodded with a blush high in his cheeks.
“Lemme guess, you head over heels for him? Willing t’do anythin’ to get that idiot’s attention? That why you want a piercing?”
Ishimaru didn’t stop nodding through Daiya’s words. His brain caught up a second too late. Piercing? No, he didn’t want—
“Good, that’s what I like to hear,” Daiya told Ishimaru, who had been silent the entire time. “Come right back here with me, gonna fix you up with the perfect thing.”
Ishimaru found himself shunted to the back room by strong arms and quiet cooing The man who spent hours at a time carefully buzzing rows of sterilized needles into people’s skin had a secure hold on his shoulder and a glint in his eye. They entered the back room lined with benches and equipment like an operating room might have, and Ishimaru tried to wheel around with terror on his face.
“It’s fine, I’ll pay for it,” Daiya crooned, as if Ishimaru was worried about money leaving his pocket instead of steel being invited into his skin.
“That’s, it’s not—” Ishimaru flapped his jaw again, getting about as far as he ever would.
Another man sat in the room, perched on the edge of a tattooing bench like a great red-crested parrot. He wore purple latex gloves which stretched and squeaked as he clicked a small scissor-like clamp habitually. He stood when he saw Daiya and a potential customer, tucking the tool into his front pocket before realizing who the customer was.
“Heeeey,” he greeted Ishimaru the way only smarmy younger brothers and Call of Duty players could. He smirked a little and produced the clamp again, examining it carefully for lint before going back to his annoying clicking.
“Oh, hello Leon,” Ishimaru returned the greeting, “I’m so glad to see you standing straight again, after what happened!” He tried to laugh, but fear and Daiya slapping him on the back turned it into an awkward hiccuping snort.
Leon didn’t share their amusement.
“So, where’s the stud going?” he drawled.
“Hopefully back to my apartment with my brother,” Daiya told him, unaware that the joke had already been made. “Which reminds me, hey Leon, can I crash on your couch for a night?”
The two of them laughed boisterously at each other. Ishimaru had just joined in, confused, when Leon went deadly serious.
“No,” he stated in perfect monotone, and clicked the clamp closed again with finality.
“Damn,” Daiya clapped a palm on Ishimaru’s shoulder, cementing the fact that he wasn’t about to get away, “looks like you kids’ll have ta wait a couple days.”
“But I don’t think that—” Ishimaru tried again, as Daiya steered him over to a chair kind of like a dentist’s, and pushed him, ass-first, into it.
“‘S fiiine, kiddo,” Daiya drawled at him. “That way the two of ya can go at it as loud as you like, and I won’t lose any beauty sleep.”
“Lord knows you need it,” Leon snorted. Daiya flipped him off without breaking eye contact with Ishimaru. His soft smile and expectantly raised eyebrow never faltered.
“Sir, I woul—”
“It’s fine, we cleaned the barbells twice this time,” Daiya assured him with a wave. Leon leaned over Ishimaru looking unamused, and poked a purple finger into the corner of his jaws. It DID seem like a dentist’s chair, Ishimaru supposed, so he let the redhead open his mouth.
“Stick out your tongue,” Leon sighed, as if he’d done this a hundred times (one hundred and seven, actually.)
“Why, is there something wrong with—”
Now, as I’m sure many of you will try after reading this, making a “th” noise forces your tongue to stick out of your mouth a little ways. Leon saw this as an opportunity, and grabbed it firmly with the alligator jaws that made up the end of his clicky clamp.
“Shhh,” Leon shushed him, “open up, gotta see what I’m working with here.”
Ishimaru’s eyebrows furrowed. Why would Leon be doing a dental assessment in a tattoo and piercing parlor? Was this normal? Well, the place sat much closer to his home than his dentist’s office did, perhaps he could have them check his teeth the next time he had an appointment. He’d ask as soon as this infernal pinchy thing wasn’t attached to the tip of his tongue.
Leon pulled.
“Yeah I don’t need to mark it, I can see the little flappy thingy,” he informed Daiya.
“Frenulum,” Daiya groaned as if he’d corrected Leon a hundred times before (one hundred and six; Leon had managed to pierce one middle-aged woman’s tongue without uttering the words “flappy thingy.” Possibly because he hadn’t wanted to say anything at all. The woman’s breath had been rancid, and Leon kept his lips firmly pressed together. Daiya wondered how much she charged per hour.)
A barbell appeared in Leon’s hands, the top unscrewed. He grasped the clamp firmly, lifting Ishimaru’s tongue once more. Was there something interesting under there? Ishimaru couldn’t remember.
A needle appeared between Leon’s fingers.
Ishimaru sucked in a sharp breath. He was in a piercing chair, wasn’t he? The kind people sat in when they got piercings. In a tattoo parlor that did piercings. In front of Leon Kuwata, the establishment’s devoted piercing artist. Who was currently holding a piercing needle.
Oh. Oh no.
“Okay man, I’ll do it on three. One—”
Leon did not, in fact, do it on three. He said “one,” stuck the needle up through the underside of Ishimaru’s tongue, slid the barbell over the needle, pulled the sharp metal out with a flourish and a drop of blood, and surveyed his handiwork. Leon screwed the end on for the captive in his chair, then unclamped his tongue.
Eleven. Ishimaru hadn’t known his emotional scale reached eleven, but then again, he’d also never had metal stuck through his skin before.
His pupils narrowed to pinpricks. He crossed his eyes but couldn’t quite see the silver ball perched neatly at the center of his tongue.
First came the wailing. It started slowly and kind of soft, a scream that had almost been contained properly. But, it grew in pitch and volume as it stretched on, and even Ishimaru looked as though he couldn’t believe the sound was coming out of him. Leon and Daiya looked at him, then at each other, then back to him. He ran out of breath with a whimper.
“No, no, no, no, no,” he tried to mutter, but with a sore tongue it came out more like “doe doe doe doe doe.”
On his thirty-eighth “doe” the floodgates opened. Tears streamed from his eyes, cascading down his face in fat gross lines. He managed to hold in the noise, finally, which only made the tears worse.
Leon and Daiya watched in abject horror.
“Hey guys, hope ramen’s fine, I—whoa, what the fuck happened here?” Mondo stumbled in on the two parlor employees staring, dumbfounded, at what appeared to be a new water fountain dribbling all over their piercing chair.
"Just a routine piercing," Leon informed him with a dismissive wave. He leapt up from his seat and grabbed the first ramen cup his hand met, a spicy shrimp one, and chugged half the broth in one go.
"Oh, hey, you finally decided!" Mondo offered another cup of beef ramen to Daiya, who poked it around a few times before slurping up as much as he could fit in his mouth.
"Godda ‘ongue ring," Daiya spoke with noodles spilling out over his chin. He gave Mondo a meaningful look diluted by his eating habits, and Mondo, who was worse at catching meaningful looks than Leon was at catching dates, raised a carefully sculpted eyebrow at Daiya’s odd expression.
Ishimaru’s eyes were wide and he was still holding back any noise he might make as he panicked. He was a disgrace to his family name, he would be admonished, kicked out, left for dead in the—
"Can I see it?" asked the object of his affections.
"Yea-hah-ah?" Ishimaru sobbed brokenly, opening his mouth for the first time.
Mondo looked concerned.
"Yes," he sniffed. He poked out his tongue, trying to stare cross-eyed at it again.
"O-oh." Mondo narrowly avoided crushing his styrofoam ramen cup. "Th-that, it, uh," he stammered, face warm, "It, uh, looks good on ya."
Ishimaru slowly put his tongue back in his mouth. Well, Mondo sure liked it. He congratulated himself on choosing such a wonderful piercing. How brave he was to get Daiya’s gentle counselling.
-
Ishimaru’s tongue grew three sizes that day.
He woke the next day feeling like his face was stuffed with cotton, a dull throb radiating outward from the center of his mouth. He pressed his lips together tightly. He wouldn’t say a word all day if he had t—
His cell phone rang. It wouldn’t ring a second time. Usually people noticed when they had a wrong number and had the courtesy to hang up when—
It rang a second time. Ishimaru scrambled for it desperately, tangling himself in bedsheets he’d tucked neatly under the mattress the night before. He slapped the phone off of his bedside table mid-flail and fell out of bed on the third ring. Just as the fourth ring started, he slapped his hand down on it, composed himself, and flipped it open.
“Uh?” he grunted.
“Oh, is this Ishimaru? Daiya had your number somehow and I was, uh, sorta hoping ya’d want t’ come over on Saturday and hang out or somethin’.”
Ishimaru’s eyes went wide.
Here it was, this was his chance. A whole weekend just to hang out with Mondo Oowada! What luck!
He opened his mouth.
“Yes, I’ll see you that night …at six o’clock?” he asked Mondo in a cheery tone.
Unfortunately, he had spoken around a swollen tongue and the result filtered through a two-year-old cell phone mic.
What Mondo heard was much closer to “Yes, I’ll see you that night …and suck your cock?”
A full minute of silence passed.
A short scuffle. A different voice.
“Oy, sounds great lil Kiyo! He’ll see ya on Saturday!” A click as Daiya hung up.
Ishimaru wondered what that had been all about, but shrugged it off.
Saturday would be a day Ishimaru would never forget.
-
Ishimaru showed up two minutes before six, when the parlor closed on Saturdays.
Mondo pretended not to see him standing outside the doors for all two minutes, tapping his foot against the floor and chewing on his sweatshirt tie. Finally, he had to go turn the sign from “open” to “closed” and let Ishimaru in.
“Uh, hey!” Mondo greeted him a little too loudly. He’d thrown his hood up over his head. Never a good sign. “Daiya’s sweepin’ so, we can jus’ go upstairs if ya want.”
Ishimaru fidgeted with his shirt hem. He’d worn something other than his uniform for once, a pressed white shirt like the ones he normally wore under the uniform jacket, and a pair of black slacks that still fit him (admittedly a bit tight in the, uh, hip area) tucked into his omnipresent boots.
“I have never seen your living area, Oowada-kun, are you quite sure it will be okay to be up there without supervision?”
Super…vision? Mondo stared for a moment. Wasn’t he going to…why would he want…? And then he blanched, eyes wide, turning his head away. Was he…into that? Mondo looked over at the door to Daiya’s tattooing room, where his older brother swept while dancing with the broom and yowling some awful pop song. Then he looked back at Ishimaru with a hard swallow. This kid was into exhibitionism?
Mondo regretted the next words that came out of his mouth.
“Uh, I’m sure he’ll come upstairs when he’s done,” he muttered in confusion. He found himself actually wishing Leon hadn’t left early.
“Wonderful!” Ishimaru chirped, with no idea what he’d just confirmed about himself. “Please lead the way, Oowada-kun!”
Mondo walked funny, like he had something disgusting tickling the small of his back, or like he’d just suggested they let his older brother walk in on them. Could he really let that happen? He considered it for a moment.
Embarrassment was fleeting. A blowjob from a kid with a tongue ring lasted…well like, at least five minutes. He hoped. Besides, it’s not like Daiya hadn’t fucking waved to him mid-blowjob once. Mondo grimaced.
He slammed the stairwell door open and plodded up the stairs with Ishimaru on his heels. Would he want to do this in Mondo’s bedroom? No, it would have to be in the living room, on the couch. His hand shook as he turned the handle.
The door swung open with a waft of something Daiya had left in the oven for dinner. It smelled like beef this time, which was a step up from the usual smell of burning. That was assuming Daiya had started off with beef, of course.
“Uh, here’s the apartment,” Mondo grunted and waved his hand towards the open door.
“Ah, yes, I never would have guessed,” Ishimaru said with a small smile.
Mondo scratched his ear.
He then held the door open for Ishimaru, staring at the tight section of his pants as he passed. He could do this, Mondo told himself. He just needed to take off some of his clothes and wait for the kid to take a hint that he was ready. That’s how it worked, he was pretty sure.
Now, how was he gonna discreetly take his clothes off?
Ishimaru sat at the dinner table instead of the couch, picking at a piece of hardened rice stuck to the tablecloth. Not that the Oowadas had a tablecloth; Mondo had thrown an old bedsheet over the table once upon a time and it hadn’t moved since. And now that he really looked at it, was that stain from cream of mushroom or…something worse?
“Ahhh, it’s kinda warm in here,” Mondo sighed. He reached for the zipper of his hoodie, but his big fingers kept slipping against the tiny pull. Then, he properly grabbed the metal, and yanked so hard the zipper jammed.
“Uh, shit, uh…” he stammered, face burning red and fingers fighting the little teeth frantically.
Ishimaru frowned, eyebrows bunching up more than usual. “Are you okay?”
“Yeah, just, uh…fuck…” he fumbled.
Finally he pulled the caught fabric out of the zipper teeth and threw the article of clothing off. Serendipitously, or perhaps subconsciously, he tossed it over the suspicious stain in the tablesheet.
Fuck! That must have looked so stupid! He reached up to throw his hood up over his head, and ended up grasping awkwardly at his neck. Shit!
Ishimaru’s eyes followed his every move, and Mondo almost shouted at him before realizing he wasn’t looking at what Mondo was doing. He was staring at Mondo’s tattooed sleeves.
Okay. He inhaled deeply. He could use this. It would be okay, the kid hadn’t even noticed. He just needed to get his tank top off somehow. He breathed through his nose one last time to calm himself.
“Did ya see my dragon?” Mondo asked, flexing his bicep to show off the golden dragon twined around his arm and definitely not to show off his muscle definition.
Ishimaru gazed down a bit, eyes wide, before realizing Mondo meant the dragon on his arm.
“Uh, yes but…only from far away,” Ishimaru stuttered, turning away with red in his cheeks.
“Oh, ya never seen my waves up close either?” Mondo asked, and managed to strip off his shirt with no other preamble. It joined his hoodie with a whumph.
Mondo’s wave tattoos were gorgeous, sure, framing his abs and littered with beautiful red lotuses. But Ishimaru could see them up and down his broad arms almost every day. So instead, his gaze wandered to the jewelry Mondo typically kept hidden beneath tank tops and comfortable hoodies.
Ishimaru remembered the first time he saw Mondo Oowada. As fate would have it, Ishimaru had been walking down the street and minding his own business while two rowdy men moved into a long-empty storefront. None of them had paid any mind to one another, Daiya hauling in laundry while Mondo strong-armed a chair across the concrete sidewalk.
Mondo had sighed in disgust loudly enough to catch Ishimaru’s attention. And then, he ripped his shirt off and tossed it over the chair. His bare torso turned just right for the waves to ripple down his sides, showing off his immaculate figure. And then the sun glinted on metal.
Nipple rings.
Ishimaru, like a parakeet, found himself wanting to play with those shiny bits of metal. And that’s how the boy ended up sitting in the front lobby of a piercing parlor day after day, eyes forever torn between Mondo’s gorgeous face and his thin cotton shirt.
“C’mon, yer so far away, can’t see the detail way back there,” he offered. “Get up close so you can see.”
Ishimaru got to his feet, wringing his hands nervously. Was he allowed to be this close to such a gorgeous man? He felt as though his skin might burn up, or his hands might melt off, or he might cry again.
Ishimaru leaned in close to study them. Preposterously close. So close, Mondo tensed at the feeling of Ishimaru’s short puffs of breath on his skin. So close, goosebumps spread up Mondo’s entire torso.
Ishimaru stepped forward out of the Michael Jackson lean he’d been pulling off.
Ishimaru’s foot planted in the carpeting, which hadn’t been cleaned in a lifetime or so.
A tiny baby toenail happened to be sitting beneath the soft arch of Ishimaru’s foot when he put weight on it. He pushed his foot down and switched to a sturdier posture. It took a split second for his mind to catch up with the shooting pain in the bottom of his foot.
“Ahh!!” he shouted, understandably. But for some reason, he stuck his tongue out at the stab of agony.
He jumped off of the afflicted foot when his weight was still leaning forward too far, his nose only millimeters away from Mondo’s chest.
His tongue, however, didn’t miss.
The forward and upward motion of his little jump, combined with the way he stuck out his tongue and accidentally licked Mondo’s chest, jammed the barbell in his tongue straight through Mondo’s nipple ring.
Mondo roared when Ishimaru tried to pull away. Ishimaru screamed right back, tongue pulled tight with the tip resting awkwardly on one of those sensitive pink nubs he’d admired on so many occasions.
“Ow-what-the-fuck-are-you-doing-get-off-my-damn-nipple!” Mondo grit out with machine-gun rapidity, slapping at Ishimaru’s hair and stupidly trying to pull away.
“AaaoooOO?!” Ishimaru tried his best. He dug his nails into Mondo’s sides, pulling his face closer to Mondo’s chest in the hopes of his tongue ring slipping out once it went slack.
“Get off get off get off!” Mondo shouted down at him in pain. He flailed and pressed Ishimaru’s forehead away from himself.
Ishimaru fought back as best he could, clinging tighter while sobbing around his stuck tongue.
“This is not how you suck a cock!” Mondo hollered.
The door hinge squeaked as it opened. Daiya poked his head in.
Ishimaru froze midway through a particularly violent sob, even his tears stalling on his cheeks. Mondo’s head snapped over, face paused in a wild-eyed grimace.
Daiya looked impressed for half a second, then waved at them both and ducked out again.
Mondo looked down at Ishimaru. Ishimaru looked up at Mondo.
They both resumed squirming and shouting as if on cue.
“Get back here you complete fuck, we’re stuck like this - stop fucking laughing, he’s gonna tear my fucking nipple off!”
Ishimaru sobbed.
-
Ten minutes later, Mondo leaned against his straight-backed chair with his lip between his teeth. He held an ice cube to his nipple, breathing like a dying animal.
Ishimaru tipped his head back, holding his ice in his open mouth. He stared at the ceiling as if he’d been through a war, only moving when his piercing froze in his tongue.
Daiya sat on the back of the couch, alternating between howling like a hyena and scolding them for their carelessness.
“What the fuck were ya even thinkin’?” He dabbed tears from his eyes, trying not to touch his immaculate eyeliner. “There’s gotta be some kinda story here.”
“He licked my nipple,” Mondo groaned, and said no more.
“Akiden’ally,” Ishimaru choked around the ice cube.
“Well why the fuck were you shirtless in the first place? I told ya, no fuckin’ hanky panky where people put their food,” Daiya said, and then dissolved into another wave of giggles.
“So he’d take a fuckin’ hint and get on with it?” Mondo answered, raising his eyebrow.
“Ge’ ah wi’ wha’?”
“You said you wanted to…that you would…” his face went beet red. “I thought you were gonna be fuckin’ interested in me! Shut the fuck up, Daiya!” Mondo raised a middle finger at his older brother, who almost fell from his precarious perch.
Ishimaru took the ice cube out of his mouth for a moment. “What did I say? I do not remember confessing to you, Mondo.” The ice clicked against his teeth as he popped it back in.
“When you called, you said…! You said that you’d…!!” Mondo couldn’t bring himself to say it, especially not with Daiya snickering and slapping the couch. He growled and turned his head away.
Ishimaru thought back to that phone call. What had he even said?
“I sai’ I’ll come a’ sik o’ c’ock?” he sputtered, thinking out loud.
Both Mondo and Daiya spun to look at him.
He removed the ice cube. “Six o’clock? That’s when you close on Saturdays, is it not?”
“Fuck,” Mondo said slowly. “That…that fuckin’ explains a lot.”
“So yer not gonna suck a cock?” Daiya asked with a snort and a wink.
Both Oowadas stared him down, Mondo looking like Ishimaru was a grenade and Daiya had just pulled the pin. He waited for the explosion, the offended spluttering, the sound of Ishimaru running down the stairs. He braced himself, guilty, horrified, ashamed. Why did Daiya have to go and say something like that? What a piece of shit, he never should have asked about kissing someone with a tongue ring.
“I never said that,” Ishimaru answered, serious but blushing.