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Knowing his best friends and finally turning twenty, Megumi thought that his birthday might be something exciting. Unfortunately for him, his best friends are also an idiot and someone who will take anything you say as a challenge to call your bluff, and so the surprise birthday part he had definitely not known about beforehand turns out to be...
Well.
"You actually got me a clown," Megumi says, his voice dry with disbelief. "A clown."
Yūji's face falls slightly, clearly thinking he'd been clever to do what Megumi had said he wanted. Behind him, Nobara scoffs, typing away on her phone. "I told you he was being sarcastic," she says and Yūji frowns, turning to her with arms crossed.
"You said it was a good idea! You said he was using the sarcasm to cover the fact that he actually really wanted this!"
"You're the one who said he needed a bit of joy and whimsy in his life!"
Megumi pinches the bridge of his nose and reminds himself that they both pay a third of his rent and so he cannot kill them, no matter how much he may want to.
"Just..." He sighs, looking at the stage that's already prepared and the rest of their friends arrayed on the folding chairs that had been put out especially. The clown is setting his things up and drops a roll of tied together handkerchiefs from his breast pocket.
Great. He also had to watch an incompetent clown.
"Just sit down," he says, to both Yūji and Nobara who have begun arguing over whose fault the clown is.
The show starts badly, with a nonsensical joke that doesn't land and an attempt to use the handkerchiefs he'd haphazardly stored back in his breast pocket. Yūji - and Gojō would probably say something along the lines of bless his cotton socks in that annoying tone of voice he likes to use - claps, although he is the only one.
Second-hand mortification has Megumi sinking lower in his chair. This situation doesn't help the fact that they're surrounded by all the people Megumi has ever met, bar Gojō who's on holiday with whoever it is he's fucking at the moment, and they all think he wanted to spend his twentieth sitting in a slightly shitty rented out room watching a very shitty clown.
He can hear Maki snickering behind him.
The clown fumbles with the balls he's meant to be juggling which does get a chuckle out of someone in the crowd when he accidentally steps on one and falls over backwards. Megumi sinks further into his chair, considering whether he could escape Nobara and Yūji if he flung himself backwards off his chair and bolted for the door.
Probably not. They're both freakishly fast.
Then-
How to describe what happens next?
In trying to get up, the clown stumbles again a few times and the right leg of his onesie-suit-lycra-thing catches on the sharp edge of his display table. He tugs it a few times, now well and truly caught, until-
The entire right side of his suit tears off and Megumi gets a full eyeful of another man's dick at eleven thirty in the morning.
To his side, Nobara shrieks with laughter. "Yūji, did you get a stripper clown?"
Whether Yūji did this intentionally or not - Megumi would bet not, because his friend is unfortunately very well-meaning but has the same tech literacy as his grandfather and probably misread an advert online - Megumi doesn't know. He's a little distracted.
The clown - thank god - has angled himself away and is laughing off his last mishap, carrying on as if nothing has happened.
Something has happened though. Now Megumi has to watch a grown man embarrass himself to a room of other grown adults while knowing that that man is ripped.
Okay, perhaps not ripped, but his muscles are clearly defined as they flex each time he moves and Megumi, his face still flaming, can't help but watch as he goes.
"Oh my god," Nobara says, quietly so only Megumi can hear, "you like the stripper clown."
"I'm going to post all the pictures I have of you without makeup on, onto my public Instagram when we get home," Megumi hisses back even though he doesn't take his eyes off the one clown's pectoral muscle, flexing as he pulls a number of things that are not the rabbit he was looking for from the depths of his bowl hat.
So it goes on, Megumi trying to come to terms with the fact that he might be attracted to the half naked clown making a fool of himself on stage while the clown in question goes through an abysmal routine that continues to go wrong over and over again.
Mortifying, but also now strangely arousing? He makes the decision to never think about this again once he's stepped outside the building.
"For my last trick," the clown declares, spinning around with an excessive amount of vigour so that Megumi gets an eyeful again, "I need a volunteer from the crowd."
Dead fucking silence. Megumi sinks lower into his chair and tries to become one with the shadows.
"Megumi, you should go up!" Maki says, saccharine sweet. "It is your birthday, my dear cousin."
So, onto stage Megumi goes, dragging his feet as if this will do anything more than delay the inevitable. Of course, in that delay, they could be hit by a freak meteorite or a terrorist could choose this slightly rundown building in this small suburb in Tokyo to attack.
Neither of these things happen and then Megumi is standing on stage, uncomfortably close to a man only wearing half the appropriate amount of clothing.
"Since it's your birthday, I have a present!" the clown declares and Megumi wishes for death as he resolutely ignores both the general snickering and his own flaming red face. "Do you like pie?"
"No," Megumi says, and then adds, "I'm allergic."
This does not put the clown off whatever he was planning. "Aw, I'll have to give it to someone else," he sighs, dramatically mournful, and Megumi hates that his heart does a little jump of pity. "No matter! I have something else instead."
And he reaches forward with one red-gloved hand. Megumi, intent on not being touched by a stranger, no matter how unfortunately attractive, jerks away.
Because today is Megumi's birthday and the god's have blessed, at that same time, the clown had been leaning forward and Megumi's attempts to escape his hand lead him to have his lips against the clown's painted ones.
It takes about three seconds for Megumi's brain to catch up with the rest of him, at which point he pulls away with as much speed as he can and jumps off the stage in an attempt to get back to his seat quicker.
"Don't you want you present?" the clown asks, and in his hands are a bouquet of plastic roses that he had "magicked" from behind Megumi's ear.
Megumi hides his face in his hands and prays that his end is swift; Yūji takes the flowers for him.
"You are going to find me on the news tomorrow," Megumi mutters darkly after they leave, Maki crowing something about destined love to his hastily retreating back, because his therapist said he wasn't allowed to make suicide jokes anymore and this was the next best thing, "when I have hung, drawn and quartered you both, and left your bodies on the streets for the crows to pick over."
Yūji looks genuinely a little distraught that he fucked up but Nobara is grinning. "You've got a little bit of paint right there," she says, pointing to the corner of his mouth, and Megumi thinks he deserves a medal for the amount of self-control he has in not threatening to cut all her hair off.
It is a close thing.
When they get home - Megumi refused to talk to either of his friends for the entire half an hour journey - he finds the flier for the clown stuck to the fridge. Takaba Fumihiko, it says his name is, in bold kanji beneath a bright picture of his face.
It makes no mention of him being a stripper.
And if that flier ends up in a drawer with a bunch of plastic flowers, that is neither Yūji nor Nobara's business, especially if they don't want every blackmail photo he's ever taken of them pasted across the internet.