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Akaashi had no idea how he in particular had been roped into this slice of lunacy, but there was no backing out now.
A bulk of his second year upperclassmen were dragging him out to a nearby shopping center on a Sunday to do whatever normal troublemaking teenagers did on weekends. Akaashi tended to stay in the dorms to catch up on the homework he had ignored in favor of volleyball throughout the week. Apparently, that practice was unacceptable.
“Dude, you’re only going to be young and stupid once,” Bokuto had told him while hauling Akaashi in the direction of the door. “All work and no play makes Akaashi a dull boy.”
“I am a dull boy,” Akaashi muttered, but to no avail.
Soon they arrived at the bus stop outside the department store full of tiny niche shops. Akaashi’s eyes drifted up toward the third level, where most of the food shops were, and this time, he was leading the charge. Eating that many meat buns at once should have been enough to knock him dead, but all it did was make him thirsty.
One king-sized slushie later, they meandered onward until they got to a store Akaashi didn’t remember from the last time his mother had dragged him to this very place. It was called Snapz, and Bokuto pressed his face against the shop window and cooed. “Oh, dude, it is so much cooler in person. I could live here.”
Upon further inspection, Akaashi reasoned that this place was some sort of novelty portrait studio. The walls were littered with regular people in all sorts of garish and foreign garb. There were cowboys and knights and fairies and pirates — every iconic visual exactly what an imagination would conjure when one thought of any of those things.
Konoha grabbed Komi and dragged him into the shop toward a scene with a dragon sitting atop a mound of gold. “This is going to be so awesome. You be the dragon, and I’ll be the damsel in distress.”
Komi huffed. “Why are you so hyped about playing a girl?”
Beaming, Konoha framed his own face and whined out a rough imitation of an angel choir. “With a face like this? I can’t help but be beautiful.”
“And then you marry Shrek and live happily ever after, you crazy asshole.” Komi still eyeballed the dragon nonetheless, and Akaashi had a feeling there would be a similar photo leaving the store with them that day.
Sarukui was drawn to a scene of King Kong hanging from the Empire State Building swatting at planes, at which Akaashi could barely stifle a laugh, while Washio flipped through the digital menu humming and hawing at every choice.
If he had chosen for his teammates himself, Akaashi couldn’t have come up with anything better for each of them.
One noticeable absence, however, was Bokuto. He finally turned up from behind a privacy screen, decked in a toga with a plasma tube in hand simulating a lightning bolt.
Akaashi wished he hadn’t finished his slushie; his mouth went dry at the sight.
No need to panic, he told himself. He was well aware that he was attracted to his buoyant senpai, but this was the first time he had ever allowed his eyes to stray enough to see this much of Bokuto’s skin exposed.
“Do I or do I not look completely badass?” Bokuto waggled his eyebrows at Akaashi, who stared blankly because he wasn’t sure he could move. At the lack of response, Bokuto’s enthusiasm flagged. “Hey, I’m your senpai. You’re supposed to agree with me.”
Snapped back to reality by Bokuto’s moping, something he had recently found he had skill in negotiating, Akaashi reacted on instinct. “Yes, very nice, Bokuto-san. Now don’t let those leather sandals chafe your legs where your knee pads go or you’ll definitely suffer.”
Bokuto beamed. “Now that’s more like it. What’re you going to do?”
“Watch.” Akaashi turned his attention toward the picture catalog, and he thumbed through it with more interest than he was willing to admit.
The page with Zeus Bokuto had chosen caught his eye, as well as one noticeable exclusion: the type of costume. The one pictured in the catalog was far more generic and sack-like, unlike the one Bokuto was wearing, which was well fitted and styled. “Bokuto-san, that isn’t the costume in the picture.”
Chortling, Bokuto grinned and rubbed his hands together. “I know. This is mine. Totally cool, right?”
“Right,” Akaashi echoed. Forcing himself to look back at the catalog, Akaashi also noted the lightning bolt in the sample was a simple cartoonish cutout. “Where did you get the lightning bolt?”
Bokuto launched into an animated history of his costume and all its components. Akaashi was almost afraid to ask how much of Bokuto’s lunch money had gone into this venture, but the sheer joy that it brought him seemed worth the price.
One after another, their group went in for their portraits. Akaashi had to admit that Konoha did indeed make a fairly passable damsel in distress, as did Komi make a respectable dragon.
When Bokuto’s turn came about (‘save the best for last’, he had said), Akaashi was definitely looking forward to the finished product.
The backdrop was a vivid landscape of sunscorched clouds, and from a distance the plastic tube enclosing the plasma bolts seemed to disappear, leaving what looked like a crackling bolt of lightning right in Bokuto’s hand. Akaashi didn’t tear his gaze away as the photographer went through five or six shots in varying poses for Bokuto to choose from.
When Bokuto looked at the images on the monitor, he laughed and said, “I’ll take them all.”
An hour later, after trawling shops while their pictures developed, they returned to Snapz for the finished product. Bokuto had been the only one to choose multiples, making his order take the longest. However, once the large envelope was in his hands, Akaashi would have waited days or even weeks for the light of excitement that overtook his features.
Bokuto carefully extracted the decorative paper sleeves from the envelope and looked at every one of them like he was seeing them for the first time. “Oh, wow, these came out great.”
Akaashi nodded. “They did. I don’t know why you own a toga, but you wear it well.”
It wasn’t difficult for Akaashi to find a favorite of the bunch, which was definitely the shot of Bokuto holding the lightning bolt like he was ready to smite someone, tempered by an expression of almost puckish glee. It reminded him of watching Bokuto play volleyball when he was in the zone.
“You can keep that one if you want,” Bokuto said, interrupting Akaashi’s thoughts enough to make him aware that he was staring at the picture. “You didn’t do one, so you should have something to take home with you.”
“I couldn’t take this from you, Bokuto-san.” Akaashi shook his head and pressed the picture back into Bokuto’s grip. “You may want it someday to show off to a new set of kouhai.”
Reeling like he had just been shot, Bokuto let out a dramatic death rattle. “Cut down in my prime by a sassy first year.” With that, Bokuto splayed himself on the floor with limbs akimbo and tongue hanging limply from the corner of his mouth.
A single eye popped open and looked up at Akaashi, who had covered his face against this undignified public display of melodrama. “So, you gonna keep it? If you do, I’ll stop embarrassing you.”
“Done,” Akaashi agreed, once again taking custody of the novelty portrait. He didn’t need too much convincing to retain this slice of fun from his first time out with his new teammates, with Bokuto. “Thank you, Bokuto-san.”
Thumbs up, Bokuto replied, “You bet, Akaashi. It’s about time someone looked at me with the awe and respect I so richly deserve.” When Konoha and Sarukui snickered behind him, Bokuto pouted. “See? No respect. No awe. They clearly can’t see my greatness.”
“Whatever you say, Bokuto-san,” Akaashi murmured, but his attention was fixed on not bending or creasing the picture in his hands.
Their day wound down and the group went their separate ways once again, but when he got home, Akaashi couldn’t drag his brain away from the mental image of toga-clad Bokuto’s excitement.
With a smile, he found a good spot on his wall to hang the picture. Akaashi didn’t mind remembering this day at all.