Work Text:
If the bell over the door hadn't drawn her attention to him, Kiryu would have silently backed out and hoofed it to the convenience store two blocks down. As it is, Majima gives him a jaunty wave before resuming her two-fisted hold on the cashier's lapels. The cashier gargles something that passes for both hello and help me.
"Are we square, mon ami?"
"Y-yeah."
Kiryu hefts his gym bag higher on his shoulder and strolls towards the wall of coolers. His impending doom senses are tingling; for the sake of his after-practice snack supply, he’ll have to intervene if she punches the guy. "Is everything all right, Majima-senpai?"
"Haha! Yeah. This fucker just needed a reminder that his secret Monday night telephone club dates don't stay secret for free." She slides the leg that had been sidesaddle-straddling the counter down to the floor, skirt riding down to cover her laddered tights. Kiryu concentrates very hard on the row of canned coffees, then pretends not to see her blatantly shoplifting fistfuls of cosmetics.
It was infinitely safer not to get too curious about Goromi Majima, lest she pull you into her orbit like the forceful celestial body she was.
“Ho-ly fuck, Kiryu-chan,” she shrills, suddenly far too close behind him. Her sharp chin jabs into his shoulder. “Are you some kinda reverse Superman? All-beef patty on the outside, nerd on the inside?”
Kiryu’s ears burn as he shoves the pocket circuit catalog back into the magazine rack. “No,” he growls. “My bro likes it.”
“And you’re not buying it for him, ya cheapskate?” He hears her back away, pockets jangling, but her perfume lingers. “Some bro you are, but whatever. Meet me out back when you’re done.”
As the cashier rings him up with a pinched, indignant look, Kiryu contemplates not following her, but he knows from experience that if he ditches her, she’ll just ambush him somewhere up the street with a murderous gleam in her eye. He finds her sprawling on a throne of upturned beer crates next to the garbage containers, contorting herself to yank off her pantyhose.
“C’mon, c’mon. I gotta hot date in twenty and my mani-pedi’s gone to shit.” She dumps bottles of nail polish from her pocket onto the concrete with one hand while she tosses the nylons aside with the other.
“What makes you think I could—or would—help with that,” Kiryu says, eyes firmly on the horizon. The sun is setting fast, the way that it still does in early spring, and the sky is a riot of pink and orange. Everything in the grungy alley is rain-damp and smells like wet concrete.
“Oh, please. Don’t pretend the girls never play dress-up with you at home,” she drawls, tossing her hair as she straightens up. Even in a high ponytail, it falls more than halfway down her back. She clearly hasn’t had it cut in a few years, maybe as a final fuck you to the school dress code that she’d despised and blatantly flouted in a hundred ways. “And we both know ya will, ya softboiled egg. Your hero complex is visible from space.”
“I should be—”
“Ya ain’t. Now pop a squat.”
She doesn’t offer him one of her many beer crates, so he drops his duffle and grocery bags under the store’s overhang, where the ground is drier, then sinks onto his haunches next to her. His legs are tired from baseball practice and he nearly topples when she slams her left leg into his lap.
“Here.” Majima hands him a bottle smaller than his pinky.
Kiryu isn't a good talker. Not that he's shy—he just never knows what to say to keep a conversation going. But the nail brush and bottle are similar enough to ones for the adhesive he uses on his model cars, and he finds himself settling into a comfortable rhythm as he floats along in the wake of her story about dodging a drug bust the night before.
They’re blocking the service door, and when the kid doing stock tries to come out to put trash into the bins, she just glares until he shuffles back inside.
"Not gonna narc on me to your old man, are ya?" she sneers as the door clicks shut.
Kazama-san is shady enough that he would (and does) turn a blind eye—is that a pun, wonders Kiryu—to Majima’s lesser exploits, but dealing might be too hot for that. Besides, Kiryu has no desire to out his dad-figure as a dirty cop, least of all to Majima, who would immediately milk that connection for all it’s worth.
“...No.”
"Good boy. A shared secret’s worth more than any bribe, baby."
That doesn’t quite sound like her, and Kiryu wonders who it is she’s quoting. Anyway, he’s extremely doubtful that Majima’s delinquent behavior is a secret to anybody in the neighborhood. But he knows that her so-called mystique is important to her, so he plays along.
"The guy who runs the flower shop said something like that. About plants, though."
"What the fuck are you talking about?"
"Something about flowers being worth more than they cost. Them having a language."
“...Hey. Why the hell are you so good at this?” She squints down at him, flexing her toes appraisingly. The nails on her left hand look halfway decent, but the right hand looks like hell.
He flips through a mental rolodex of possible answers, all promising varying degrees of humiliation.
Playing house with the girls at Sunflower, like you said. I look nice in scarlet.
You need steady hands to install those tiny shocks in a Pocket Circuit car.
I wouldn’t dare make a mess of this, Goromi. You’d hunt me down and make me lick your shoes clean as punishment. His thighs are already burning from holding the squat, and the thought sends a hot shudder up his spine.
Kiryu settles for, “I’m not trying to smoke, talk, and paint at the same time.”
“Don’t try to be a wiseass, Kiryu-chan. You’ll fry your two brain cells.”
“Hey.” That awkward warmth in his belly turns to hot indignation, and he curls his left hand to drag the fingertips along the sole of her foot. She knows that he knows that she’s ticklish.
She screams. And kicks him in the jaw. It knocks him flat on his ass, and the nail polish—glittery, black—spills on the pavement. She’s looming over him with his baseball bat, which had been zipped in his gym bag, behind him, how the hell did she—
Majima barely has enough time to tip his chin up with the end before he yanks on it and uses her counterweight to get his legs under him. She stumbles forward and grabs his face with her free hand, fingertips all red like the talons on some kind of murderous, sharp-eyed bird. In her heels she’d easily be taller than him, but with her barefoot they’re just about eye-to-eye. His eyes cross as he tries to get a better look at the paint job on the long fingers locked around his jaw.
Her wristwatch beeps, and when she shakes back her bomber jacket’s sleeve to peer at it, Kiryu realizes that it’s the same black Casio that she’s had since fourth grade.
She releases the vice-grip on his face with an overblown, rueful sigh. “As much as I would love to keep clobberin’ ya, darling boy, I got places to be.” She pulls biker gloves out of her jacket pocket and is cinching the black leather wrist straps when a small engine backfires halfway up the street.
A little red Honda is idling just outside of the alley, bathed in the fluorescent exterior lights of the Poppo. As usual, Nishida looks too tidy and respectable to be gofering for someone like Majima. She lets go of the handlebars to bow awkwardly at Kiryu, her heavy brows and round face bracketed by a battered motorcycle helmet.
Nishida guns it and they zoom away into the red dusk, leaving serpentine treadmarks on the shiny pavement. As usual, Kiryu feels like he’s just been slammed by a small, fast-moving typhoon. Ducking back behind the store to get his stuff, he sighs at the sight of his ransacked duffle bag.
“She took my bat.”