Intro snippet for this end of Act 2, now with Extra Recap Power. Well, okay, not that much recap, but if it's a new act, it's sort of the expected thing to do.
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An eyelid twitched.
A body unconsciously shifted out of the way.
Even with drawn blinds, the coverage isn't perfect, and stray rays of sunlight stabbed through into the darkened bedroom, first playing over the sheets, then over skin, until finally reaching the face.
Its sleeping owner shifted again, only to find that getting away from one caused her to move right into the path of another.
Stilling for a moment, the figure then threw an arm to cover its eyes.
Nothing.
With a disgruntled noise, Ten'ou Haruka decided she wasn't going to get back to sleep anytime soon, and sat up, shoving the sheets to one side, then swinging her legs out of bed.
With a momentary wince, she stood, and any confusion whether the craziness of several days past had been real or not was removed.
Moving to Azabu had seemed like such a good idea at the time, too. Finding her own place that she actually liked the look of, getting out of a house that stood empty most of the time anyway. Punctuated by her first victory in an actual, official race.
Which was when things proceeded to go decidedly pear-shaped.
Oh, she'd heard of the so called Music Disease on the news, but it had seemed like more of a publicity stunt than anything else ... before it happened to her.
That she was out celebrating with her race crew and had gotten a bit on the tipsy side before that was just the icing on the cake. Not to mention the morning after. Or the night after that.
She hadn't as much as dated a guy in years, nevermind sleeping with one. Not that what she could remember of the later parts of that night was a terribly traumatic experience, her tastes simply didn't run that way.
She frowned in thought for a moment.
No, they still didn't seem to run that way.
Pulling on a loose tee and boxers, she stepped out of her bedroom and shuffled towards the kitchenette, where she put the kettle on and meandered bathroom-wards.
She frowned at herself in the mirror, before removing the t-shirt. She wasn't that much of a stranger to scrapes and bruises, but seeing only a few days ago she'd been in a worse state than that one time she'd wiped out her bike, she was recovering surprisingly quickly. The pulled muscles barely twinged anymore, and most of what the bandages and band-aids were covering had already healed up significantly.
Not that she was complaining about that. Or about the fact that, on the one or two times she'd tried to work the stiffness out of her arms and legs, she'd suddenly discovered herself doing what appeared to be fencing drills.
It was vaguely unsettling though.
She inspected her bandages, and went about her morning abolutions.
A few minutes later a much refreshed Haruka stepped back into the kitchenette, taking the whistling kettle off the stove and going about making some coffee.
The smell of fresh brew rising from the mug in her hands, she leaned back against the kitchen counter and cast a glance back into the living room, where a shapeless lump consisting mostly of her spare bedding lay immobile on the L-shaped couch.
Alright, she admitted to herself. No matter how awkward some topics still were, it was sort of nice, not being on her own for once.
It certainly beat the boredom of even the most challenging routine.
At the very least, this ... Zoisite? Or whatever he was calling himself at any given moment ... was easy on the eyes. And the way he could go from almost outright lechery to at least acting like a gentleman ...
She honestly hadn't cared about much outside of getting the youma blood and bits off her, being too exhausted to raise any sort of genuine objection when he'd drawn the bath for her and all but manhandled her into it and out of her ruined clothes. The next she knew, she was being wrapped up in her favorite bathrobe and carried to bed.
Hell, she'd even gotten breakfast in bed the next morning ... not that she'd been able to actually get out of bed that morning, what with her muscles protesting severely enough that she knew trying to get up was a bad, bad idea. It was a good thing she'd tested out of her grade early in the year, mostly because she'd wanted to give racing competitively a serious try, and that there were not practices or team meetings planned for the next few weeks.
Of course, that brief bit of pampering was offset by the fact that the day after _that_, when she'd felt up to moving, and every day since, the guy had been sleeping well into the day and seemed to consider mornings as beginning at 12 noon.
Then again, she wasn't sure how she'd have reacted if he'd actually tried to pamper her more during her, admittedly rapid, recovery. No, scratch that. She wasn't some fragile flower. A brief moment of indulgence wasn't too bad, but she likely would have started throwing things at him if he'd tried to do more than that.
So, maybe this wasn't all that bad a situation to be in ...
"SWEET BABY BUDDHA ON A UNICYCLE, DON'T TOUCH THAT FISHCAKE!"
She choked on her coffee, sputtering, as her houseguest shot from horizontal into vertical in an instant, finger outstretched towards the doors to the balcony.
He blinked, then lowered his hand and looked around, wrapping the sheets around his waist into something like a makeshift toga, then blinked again ...
"That was ... what the heck was I dreaming about again?"
And then there were moments like this.
Several minutes, and paper towels used to mop up the coffee spillage, later Haruka watched bemusedly as a sheet-toga clad man rifled through what was, only upon closer inspection, recognizable as having once been a leather jacket.
Well, it was still a leather jacket, technically ...
In much the same way that a sheet of paper is still, technically, a sheet of paper after being run through a shredder.
A pair of wallets, in barely better repair, their contents still miraculously intact, was produced as a result of the investigation. She looked on as her houseguest rifled through those, interrupted by frequent sips from his own mug of caffeinated go-juice.
"Yes?" He asked, looking up.
"What, have you suddenly decided to start paying me rent?" Haruka asked.
"If you want," the onetime Dark General shrugged. "I was thinking more along the lines of getting some actual clothes to wear ... or I could just keep walking around in this," he jerked his thumb at the savaged jacket. "I've never really been into ... what do you call it ... grunge?"
She considered. She took a sip of her coffee. She smiled evilly.
"So ... shopping trip?"
"Yes, shopping trip ..." he replied, then looked up again, and noticed the look she was wearing. "And why do I think this means something else for me than it does for you?"
"Because you're learning?"
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