Rules Were Made to be Broken

‣ scene 13 [browari code]

Kiyotaka couldn't stand sitting in the waiting room by himself. He snuck his way into the garage area, where his poor car was was suspended on some kind of metal brace. Mondo was underneath of it, his back lying flat on one of those scooter things. Kiyotaka didn't know what they were called.

Akane, the woman they'd been talking about earlier, was standing by the side of the car with her hands on her hips and appeared to be bossing Mondo around. She was, anyway, until she spotted Kiyotaka in the distance. She caught his eye, and then she grinned and gave him a wink before shouting something at Mondo and jogging across the garage. She grabbed a brown paper bag from a nearby table on her way.

It was impossible to hear what she was saying until she was close to him. His car was not the only one being worked on, and the noise of the tools and running engines was a low roar. Everyone else seemed used to it. Kiyotaka supposed that made sense. When he'd first started his job at the IT company, he'd thought that the constant sound of clicking keyboards would drive him insane, but he now paid it little to no mind.

Akane ushered him away from the dangerous equipment. For a moment, he thought she was intending to drag him back into the waiting room, but she paused at the wall and slid down it until she was sitting on the floor. She patted the space beside her. Kiyotaka would normally protest, because he was sure the floor was dirty and would stain the seat of his pants with dust, but he felt he had little choice here.

As soon as they were both seated, Akane leaned in and spoke just loud enough to be heard over the machinery.

"So. Lil' Taka. How've you been since I last saw ya? Not runnin' into any more traffic, I hope?"

Kiyotaka's face reddened quickly enough that the color could have rivaled that of his own eyes. Akane laughed. She didn't waste any time in getting to what she wanted, at least. Maybe that was a good thing? At least she was honest.

"I-I haven't been doing any more of that, no. ...Did I really run directly into traffic? As in the path of an oncoming car?"

Akane nodded. She opened up her bag and retrieved a glass bottle of root beer, taking a long swig of it before speaking. 

"You sure as hell did. I've never seen Mon run so fast."

"He ran?" Kiyotaka didn't comment on the fact that she addressed the man as Mon. It somehow sounded like a girl's name.

"Well, of course he did! We were just talkin' about birds or somethin', and then he spotted ya out by the road and took off. He thought you were tryin' to kill yourself. Spent a good ten minutes tryin' to talk ya out of it before he realized you were just bein' drunk and stupid." She snickered, and Kiyotaka felt the blood drain from his face, absolutely mortified. "That little lady who was with ya felt awful. She'd left with the rest of your group, but came back 'cuz she was worried about ya just in time to see Mon draggin' ya back into the bar."

Kiyotaka thought over everything she had said. Once again, she'd divulged a random detail that piqued his interest more than it should have— they were talking about birds? At a sports bar?

"...Oowada... thought that I was suicidal."

Akane nodded. She stopped smiling for just a second.

"I mean, you were pretty bummed about somethin'. Mon babysat ya and sent that girl away while I played some pool. ...You guys talked for, like, hours. N' you could hardly even sit up, so you were just glued to his side."

She stopped talking long enough to laugh at his expense. Kiyotaka knew she was telling the truth about that detail, considering the angle of the only image he'd successfully recalled. But what the hell had they talked about for hours? Mondo was always lecturing him about stress and his terrible job, so it must have been something along those lines. Kiyotaka really must have drunkenly rambled about how much he hated his job to some stranger. And in that time, he'd even confessed how much he wanted to get a cat and that he liked to be called Taka... How undignified.