Chapter 12: Woes of Being Wooed
'I don't need to flirt. I will seduce you with my awkwardness.'
Yori blinked awake on a day where the temperature was just a few degrees shy of boiling.
A mild day, then, she thought irritably, after her few moments of obligatory freaking out. I wonder if there's a way to take off your skin if you get too hot...
Yori walked, as per usual, to the kitchen to make breakfast, but she never got around to it because by the time she reached the living room, Papa Shin had helpfully let Ikanago-san into the house. Yori contemplated patricide, but decided against it.
Too much effort, especially in this heat.
She froze at the archway like a deer caught in the headlights as Ikanago-san turned around from Papa Shin's rather eclectic story about a parrot that liked eating its own hamstrings.
Yori didn't get the punchline to that one.
"Ah, Yori-chan! I have come," he said, getting up with a flourish and nearly tripping over, "to woo you!"
The part of Yori that wasn't freaking out at this declaration snorted. Because that'scompletely different to what you've been doing since day one.
"I-Ikanago-san…" she tried saying assertively. "I-I'm not in-intere—"
"Yori-chan, Ikanago-san brought papa lots of special booze!" Papa Shin exclaimed happily, overriding Yori's feeble stuttering.
Shingi appeared out of nowhere and added her two cents. "And he's got a big dick too. I'd rate his performance at 2 stars, but you can't have everything," she said, perfectly chic hairstyle perfectly in place.
Yori didn't want to know how she knew.
"I," Ikanago-san said, eyes narrowing at Shingi, "have had sex two times in my life, and I've heard no complaints!"
Shingi felt a certain affront to this man, who seemed to be dissing her rumour mill. She responded appropriately. "In my experience, corpses don't tend to complain."
Ikanago-san went bright red, Yori went pale, and Papa Shin was too tipsy to care.
Nae blinked at the doorway. "Didn't know you could have sex with corpses…" she muttered, a whole world of possibilities suddenly opening up to her.
Yori was taking the pile of laundry to the laundry unit when a balding man with an unfortunate lisp blocked her path with an unnatural smile.
"Yori~" he sung.
She yelped in fright and dropped all the linen to the ground. "Oh no…" she whimpered.
"I am Tonchiki~" he declared, looking every bit the numbskull he was named as. "I wrote a ruv poem fo' you~"
Yori dithered. To polite or not to polite?
"I know it's kind of corny~ But you make me really horny~"
Yori didn't even pause to listen to the rest of the shoddy rhymes. Somethings, once heard, could not be unheard.
And she was all out of brain bleach.
A boy who looked about nine but was actually thirty two gave Yori a terrified look.
Behind him stood two extremely buff macho men, looking menacing.
Yori regretted ever leaving the house.
"A-Are you a chicken?" he squealed in a strained soprano.
Yori trembled as the two buff men leaned into her personal space. One of them sniffed her. The other one's scowl deepened.
"B-Because y-you're impec-impec-impeccable," he finished, staring at the ground. He then proceeded to vomit.
The two buff men instantly started patting him on the back, booming voices echoing around the marketplace. "WELL DONE RIKU-SAMA! EVERYONE, LOVE RIKU-SAMA!"
The other man said in the girliest voice Yori had ever heard, "I LOVE RIKU-SAMA! DO YOU LOVE RIKU-SAMA?"
"YES I DO! DO YOU LOVE RIKU-SAMA?"
"RIKU-SAMA INVENTED LOVE!"
"ALL PRAISE RIKU-SAMA!"
"Mother, father..." he whispered, eyes sparkling with unshed tears of the dramatically ironic variety.
Leaving the strange group to their shenanigans, Yori quickly grabbed the toilet paper she'd come for and bid a hasty retreat.
Somethings were better left unquestioned.
"YOUR FACE."
Yori turned around mechanically to see a bearded hobo wearing his underwear on his head.
She really regretted leaving the house.
"I like that shit!"
Yori crab-walked away.
"Hey baby," a man called out with a cheesy grin.
Yori didn't even bother with pretences. She just fucking ran.
When she got home after a long day of hard work, trying to ward off all the stupidity of the day (someone had let the sea snakes out again!) (Also, Shingi was crazy.) (Also, she'd had to spend an hour telling Nae that it wasn't normal to go to the morgue to request a corpse 'for sexual practice') (Also, for some bizarre reason, Rasa-sama's sheets had blood on them. She knew for a fact Karura-sama wasn't a virgin), Yori tiredly headed to the kitchen.
It was dinnertime soon, and Papa Shin would be back from his bender in an hour. Nae would soon follow, right after she'd apologised to the hospital morgue for the 'misunderstanding'. It was time to scrounge around the kitchen for something edible (the rationing was getting worse the longer the war dragged on), but when she reached the kitchen…
There was a bouquet of wilted cauliflowers waiting for her.
Yori robotically walked to the wall and banged her head on it. She looked at the table again.
It was still there.
"Why?" she muttered. "Why is this my life?"
There was a note attached to the cauliflowers. Yori treated it with the excessive caution it deserved.
Yori blinked at it for a few seconds before taking it to the stove and burning it.
She put the wilted cauliflowers in the icebox though—no sense in wasting perfectly edible food.
Yori ran into her house, frantically locking the door.
Ikanago-san was back.
Over the last six days, she'd had five proposals, nineteen requests for a one night stand, and seventy sixpick-up lines thrown her way.
I'll kill papa for this! I'm fucking done!
She turned away from the door and found a stripper in her house.
Her first thought was, we eat on that table, and now I'm going to have to throw it away.
Her second thought was, wait, papa has needs?
Her third thought was, no, no he doesn't. This one's mine again.
She was completely correct.
"Yori-chin, correct?" she drawled in a throaty voice, skeins of brown hair in a pixie-cut giving her a predatorial appearance.
It must be noted that Yori looked like a lamb waiting for slaughter.
"What do you say to a good time?"
Papa crawled out of his room. "Yori-chan! Papa is…who's this?" he asked, face flushed. He'd been drinking again.
The stripper gave him a flirty wink. "I'm here to turn your daughter into a real woman."
Yori was scared witless.
No, seriously, she was. So witless that she actually said something. "…had it."
Papa Shin and the stripper were too deep in their conversation to notice.
"But you can't marry my daughter!" Papa Shin pointed out.
"I have booze," replied the stripper.
"On second thought," said Papa Shin, nodding sagely, "you're making several excellent points, and I think—"
Yori frog-marched to her room and slammed the door shut, tears leaking from the corner of her eyes in hysteria.
Why is this my life?
She just wanted to go to bed now. She'd stopped caring that she had work in a few minutes, that she had responsibilities that she couldn't shirk without letting Nae and papa starve (though the latter was giving her really good reasons to not care about that) and even that the tomatoes had run out. She was done. She was notfacing the world!
She turned to go to her bed.
She paused.
She stared.
What's Akasuna no Sasori doing in my room?
He was staring at her with half-lidded eyes, and Yori knew she ought to be scared. Really, she should.
But she'd reached fuck this shit I don't carelevels of stress.
Yori took this moment to note that his tousled red hair and sleepy face made him look…strangely cute.
She mentally bludgeoned the little voice that noted this into a coma.
His red eyes didn't lookmenacing, and for the first time in six days, a man wasn't looking at her either in terror, lust or misplaced arrogance.
"I'm going on a mission," he said abruptly.
Yori nodded, wondering why he'd told her this.
He then proceeded to jump out of her window.
A few moments later, Ikanago-san's voice yelled, "You broke my pelvis!"
Yori stumbled to the window and saw Sasori holding the box of chocolates Ikanago-san had been trying to give her like a weapon of mass destruction.
He broke a man's pelvis with a box of chocolates.
For the first time in a long time, Yori laughed.
Sasori was irritated. He didn't know why he'd told Female he was going on a mission. It had just seemed like the thing to do. She'd probably wonder why no one was stealing her cushions anymore.
That wasn't why Sasori was irritated.
For one, didn't this idiot know Female wasn't interested?
There are retards, and then there's this, Sasori thought, deciding to rectify the stupidity via the only medically-approved treatment: physical violence.
"You broke my pelvis!"squealed the thing.
Sasori gave him a bored look. "I wasn't aware that I'd given you the impression I cared."
Suddenly, he heard tinkling laughter, and for some inexplicable reason, his heart started beating faster.
His eyes immediately knew where to look even before his brain had processed the need to look, and there was Female, a wide innocent smile on her face and crinkled blue eyes looking at him with refreshing mirth.
She then blushed a bright red and quickly looked away.
Sasori was facing a mental dilemma. This had never happened before, and he was feeling conflicted. Should he simply kill her?
A faction of his mind wanted to go back to her room, although what he would do after that was up for debate.
Another part of his mind wanted to go on a killing spree.
A third was working out how he could use the potency of that laugh on the battlefield.
Another carefully stored that memory away for sweetening dreams.
The largest part was blaring flashing red sirens and calling for an abort mission, because why was his brain malfunctioning?!
Sasori decided, instead of thinking about the reasoning behind his sudden irrationality, that he would do whatever the fuck he pleased.
Because he was Akasuna no Sasori.
He went to the Suna gates, mind already made up to incorporate her smile into his Female puppet's mechanics.
If it made him irrational, he could only imagine what it would do to his victims.
And then there was a very tiny voice in him that he hadn't listened to since his parents had died, a voice he'd thought had died a long time ago.
I want to make her laugh again.
Yori suddenly, inexplicably, seemed to find the power to face the day again.
A tiny curl of warmth coiled in the pit of her stomach every time she remembered that the most sociopathic puppeteer in the history of Suna had broken someone's pelvis.
For me.
She killed that thought with a machete. She wasn't that delusional.
It was a nice thought though…
*squints at chapter* Was that…was that romantic development guys?!
Thoughts on the chapter? Like, seriously, I didn't think this was all that funny, but hey, I tried! Review and let me know? Please?
Also, Sasori's character. Can we just establish that his first thought was that he should kill her instead of dealing with the feelings she was evoking?
And then he didn't? I don't know about you, but that's LOVE. Yes. Shh.
And Yori's actually fairly okay with violence. She just can't dish any out, because consequences are a thing to her. I hope I did justice to their characters! Komushi coming up next to muck everything up! Teehee.