Work Text:
“Are you scared of guys?” Momoko asks, stepping lightly through the deserted parking lot, her poofy dress trailing along behind her.
She wears a lot of lace, Ichigo has noticed, and also a lot of perfume, and at times like this, when they’re alone, both of those are especially apparent. The stark white detailing on her dress stands out against the yellowing facades around them, and though Momoko always lags a few paces behind—Ichigo swears she takes the smallest steps known to mankind—the gentle breeze carries J-Scent’s On The Cloud forward, directly into Ichigo’s face. Or was it On A Cloud? She can never remember.
Momoko isn’t saying anything, which means Ichigo is supposed to respond. She defaults to, “Are you crazy?”
This is the wrong answer. Momoko’s curiosity multiplies tenfold. “Ever been on a date?”
“Shut up!”
“Ever been kissed?” Even the twirl of Momoko’s umbrella comes off as teasing, and Ichigo blocks her path, stares her down, wills the conversation to take a turn, any turn at all.
“Wanna die?” she grits out, close enough to see each of Momoko’s mascara-lined lashes.
Momoko has never once backed away when faced with Ichigo baring her teeth, so it’s no surprise that she doesn’t today. She does nothing but stare back, wide-eyed, the faintest smile on her lips. Haloed by the smell of vanilla and something minty.
On A Cloud, Ichigo decides, turning away.
“A girl like you in love,” Momoko sing-songs. “A guy with a blue jacket and white patent-leather shoes!”
Momoko deftly evades every one of Ichigo’s aggressive advances, putting her umbrella in between them, giggling. So what if his shoes are patented, Ichigo thinks, annoyed. What’s special about that? And why does it matter to her?
“You know,” Momoko tells Ichigo’s back, when they finally start moving in the right direction again, “when you spoke to him, you looked so beautiful. Isn’t that what they call love?”
Beautiful?
—
He comes up over and over and over: at Momoko’s place, her grandmother puttering about in the next room over; on the streets, where half the town seems to have decided that blue jackets are in season; at the supermarket, when a large zucchini reminds Momoko of his hairstyle. It almost seems like it’s Momoko who’s in love with him, but when Ichigo probes—always nonchalantly, even though she can’t quite grasp why—she gets the full rundown of Momoko’s own love life, and the man just doesn’t fit.
So, Momoko had started, the two of them lying supine on her cool tatami mats one afternoon, there was Touma, in elementary school. We held hands and everything. This was before I found out about Rococo, obviously, so I guess I was just doing it for fun. I remember thinking he was cute, I think, but he ate too quickly at lunch one day and vomited all down his front and I just couldn’t look at him after that.
And then there was Hideyoshi in the first year of high school, but this is about when I started dressing differently and getting weird looks, so he got embarrassed and said we could only meet behind the school, after classes ended. I thought it was a chore, and he also wouldn’t eat dessert because he said it made his teeth hurt, so I didn’t show up one day and he started spreading rumors about me, too.
Ichigo had stared resolutely up at the ceiling. Like what?
Like, I was a vampire. And that it took me an hour to take all my clothes off, because they were so complicated. And—
Where’s this kid now?
A blasé shrug, accompanied by the rustling of fabric as Momoko shifted to straighten out her skirts. Who cares?
Let’s go beat him up.
And then Momoko had laughed, and Ichigo forgot all about the man she was supposed to be in love with, and, for the first time, realized—with a start, all at once, horribly and heavily—why she couldn’t stand the idea of it.
—
Momoko recruits Ichigo into another one of her Tokyo trips. They just make the last train back, which means that it’s pitch dark when they leave the station, stiff-jointed and yawning. Ichigo likes it because Momoko always sticks a little closer, despite insisting that she isn’t scared of anything, but it also means that the gangster-man comes up now, as they walk past a drunk man pissing into a sewer grate, warbling an off-key love song.
To be fair, it is Ichigo who mentions him first: “The pachinko gangster’s hair looked kinda like a dick, don’t you think?”
Momoko gives the pissing man a wide berth, tugging on Ichigo’s sleeve so that she does, too. “I guess. Do you really want to make that comparison?”
“Yeah. ‘Cause it did.”
Twenty minutes later, in the warm glow of the light from her house, Momoko stops and tilts her head at Ichigo, the way she does when she’s considering something. Ichigo fumbles her key into the ignition, just for something to do, and takes comfort in the low rumble of her bike as it starts.
“Oh, I remember now!” Momoko beams. “There’s a word for that.”
Ichigo rewinds their conversation. (Talking to people who are still in school, she will never admit, often feels like mental gymnastics.) The dress Momoko had found in a tiny boutique. The strawberry pudding they shared at a new café. The pissing man. “Remember what?” she says, giving up.
“When something looks like a dick,” Momoko says brightly. “That’s called phallic. And, also, his hair. The hair’s called a pompadour. It took me forever to remember those. I was thinking the whole way back.”
“Well, don’t hurt yourself,” Ichigo mutters, but she dips her head to hide a smile, folding up the kickstand with the toe of her sneaker.
“Now, you can call him Phallic Pompadour Pachinko Gangster,” Momoko steamrolls on. “At least until you get his name. You are getting his name the next you see him, right?” She forces herself into Ichigo’s field of vision, blinking pointedly.
“Sure,” Ichigo says, knowing that she would much rather prefer to call him Phallic Pompadour Pachinko Gangster for as long as she lives. “Yes.”
Momoko skips inside and hauls open a window. “Thanks for coming with me today!” she calls, waving goodnight. “I had fun!”
Ichigo raises her hand in response, then straps on her helmet, muffling the world, determined to leave all thoughts of Phallic Pompadour Pachinko Gangster in her dust. Where, hopefully, he stays.
—
With Momoko’s masterly stitching lending her extra strength, Ichigo makes it through all of Akimi’s farewell parade without an issue, even though a worm of unease coils in the pit of her stomach. With Akimi gone, she has no clue where the Ponytails will end up, and she isn’t confident in their direction at all. Besides, she’s heard other members whispering behind her back, thinly veiled resentment at the fact that Ichigo has been spending more and more time with an outsider. To her knowledge, the Ponytails are all outsiders themselves, so she ignores them as best as she can. Less and less, by the day.
Phallic Pompadour Pachinko Gangster ruins her knife’s-edge peace by making a surprise appearance as Akimi’s new husband, and the father of her unborn child, no less. This is news that will make it back to Momoko—any sort of marriage spreads like wildfire in their neighborhood, even if it is between two gangsters—and Ichigo decides that she’ll break the news herself.
As she waits for Momoko to arrive, staring down at the paddies, Ichigo realizes that this could be a good thing. For once, she has an actual, valid reason to fall out of love with Phallic Pompadour Pachinko Gangster. Ichigo tells Momoko so once she hears the other girl’s footsteps behind her, her white, heart-shaped purse dangling loosely from her grip, her hair mussed from the walk over.
“I can’t betray Akimi,” Ichigo says, summoning what she hopes is an appropriate amount of disappointment.
“Why not?” Momoko demands. “If you like something, take it, no matter whose it is. If it makes you happy, do it! Humans will always betray each other!”
Touched by Momoko’s conviction, Ichigo asks, “Really?”
A pause. “Not really,” Momoko whispers.
Ichigo is close to severing her tie with Phallic Pompadour Pachinko Gangster for good, she can feel it. She repeats the line that Akimi told her all those years ago, that women should never cry in public, because it seems fitting for a quasi-breakup and might also explain away her lack of tears. She expects that Momoko will roll her eyes the way she did when Ichigo told the story the first time, in the dessert store, and they can put everything behind them. It will finally be just her and Momoko again, and perhaps Ichigo will quit the Ponytails, and Momoko could sew silly things for rich people with too much money…
Instead, Momoko turns around and says, softly, “Out here, we’re alone.” Cradling the delicacy of the situation with both hands, even though she’s already holding her purse and her umbrella, and providing Ichigo with the greatest kindness she can imagine.
Ichigo can’t remember the last time she was treated so gently by someone who wasn’t related to her. She can’t help it. She cries.
—
Momoko’s needlework could make more people than just Ichigo happy.
This is difficult for her to come to terms with. She is scared of the possibility of needing Momoko more than Momoko needs her, although she knows too—somewhere deep down—that this has always been the case, ever since she followed the Versace ad expecting a severe adult woman running a secret garment business out of her house, and instead finding a dolled-up high schooler.
For some reason, miraculously, the universe placed Momoko into Ichigo’s path. This… slip of a girl, buried in satin and silk and tulle and J-Scent On A Cloud. Stronger than she looks, who pushes forward when Ichigo pushes away, and doesn’t back down for anything. Who can shove a cabbage into Ichigo’s arms, proclaiming that it will be her new friend, and yet shows up if Ichigo calls and wants her. Needs her. Whatever.
She resists the urge to spit on the train tracks, because at this point, she knows that Momoko hates it when she does. “I loved what you stitched for me,” she tells Momoko, wishing she was wearing the jacket so that she could run her fingers over Momoko’s pinpoint-precise lettering. The feel of those characters has already been seared into her memory. “Doesn’t that mean anything to you?”
“Yes, but…”
Ichigo wants to shake her until her vision clears. Momoko has something that could make people happy. She owes nothing to anyone—least of all to Ichigo. But it would be an incredible waste to not even try.
“You’re the one,” Ichigo says, over her shoulder.
—
On the day of the challenge, Momoko should be finishing up the skirt for the reedy homosexual boutique guy, so Ichigo cannot believe her eyes when she sails through the air on her grandmother’s ride, hair billowing, dress magnificent, plowing through no less than five girls before crashing to a stop. Ichigo twinges with anxiety—she’s going to see me get beat up.
“She’s stronger than any of you!” Ichigo shouts, when they turn their snide comments away from herself and toward Momoko. Are you hearing this, Momoko? You concussed? “Not like you sheep!”
When Ichigo is on the ground: Get up, she’s still watching!
For three hits in a row: Mo-mo-ko. One for each landed punch, right as Ichigo’s knuckles connect against flesh and bone. She grins, her teeth stained pink, lipstick a mess. She barely feels it, getting thrown to the ground, the bats that thrash her ribs, her back, her shoulders. They slap her around some more, and Ichigo stays silent because none of this matters to her. She should have quit when Akimi got hitched. She should have quit in high school. Hell, maybe she should have kept up the piano.
No, she hates the piano.
And then, in a moment of weakness, Ichigo’s blood splatters against Momoko’s dress. Before she can apologize for it, Momoko screams, and one of the girls throws her into the mud. Before Ichigo can do anything about that, Momoko picks herself up and starts swinging like her life depends on it, terrifying in a bloodstained gown. From the ground, Ichigo watches her holler and spit and wreak havoc, and thinks, Phallic Pompadour Pachinko Gangster could never, ever do this. Triumphant, she trips the girl who’d pushed Momoko as she tries to run away.
When they win—because they do win, of course, a decisive victory spearheaded by the self-proclaimed daughter of Himiko (Ichigo only barely manages to hold in her laughter)—Ichigo calls her my lady. It is so much easier than Phallic Pompadour Pachinko Gangster. For more reasons than one.
Momoko’s laughter is bright and clear as they fly away from the stunned silence of Ibaraki’s bosozoku girls. She is pleased that her story worked; Ichigo can tell from the way she hums, her chest vibrating against Ichigo’s back as her hold on Ichigo’s waist tightens.
“Ichigo,” Momoko shouts suddenly.
“What?”
“We need to go back!”
“What?! Why?”
“I need my grandmother’s bike! I promised I would return it!”
They’re already turning, even before Momoko finishes her explanation. Momoko pokes Ichigo’s side and yells, “You’re the worst delinquent ever!”
Ichigo removes one hand from the handlebars and reaches for Momoko’s mud-splattered hand, heart racing. Momoko leans into her, hooking her chin on Ichigo’s shoulder, pressing their cheeks together. “You’re the worst delinquent ever,” she repeats, lips against Ichigo’s ear. The smile in her voice is exuberant.
Maybe, Ichigo thinks, meeting Momoko’s eyes, I am.