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Mikomichaaaaan~
Kimi wa Petto request is done. Hope you like, and if not, erm, maybe there's "Tramps Like Us" manga to get into?
Set in the middle of episode seven...
Sumire Iwaya felt like crawling into a dark, cold hole and never coming out. She was beyond exhausted, as her search led her up and through Ikeburo, Shibuya, and downtown Tokyo but for all the places she searched she came up empty handed. It was frustrating to be so helpless. Despite the chaos of her fast track career there was a system of research and leads that eventually meant you turned your project in on the deadline. Except Momo running away wasn’t something that had a date or time; in fact, she could only remember flashes of what caused him to run from her. The bite of his teeth on her lip, promises shunted by the wayside, the scent of alcohol on her boyfriend as her mind warned her that Momo was waiting close by.
Ever since she found him in that box things were just becoming too confusing to keep track of. Not that it was his fault really. She punched out her manager before she found him, her headaches started long before that, but all the same, it was his fault she was out looking for him. He could get hurt, or hungry, and who else would feed a ragtag pet like that?
At the mere idea of feeding Momo her stomach growled. She had been out looking for him all evening to the point where even her best friend, Yuri, had called it quits.
“Don’t worry about that brat,” she said in parting. “I’m sure he’ll come back. Just go home and wait for him like last time.”
The only problem with that is that Iwaya didn’t know for sure if he was coming back this time.
The sudden recollection made her sink to her knees. She had searched everywhere. The dance places, the comic shops, the arcades, even those cheap motels that made Yuri run into bathrooms to clean herself after they left. Iwaya had gotten so desperate she ended up just calling out to him on the street, looking for the familiar mop of black hair and his young face. Yuri had to restrain her from looking in every box, regardless of size. Things had gotten that desperate. She had gotten that desperate.
If Iwaya didn’t know better she’d think she was crying. But it couldn’t be tears. It was probably just the start of rain. A sudden downpour like the night she found him in the cardboard box. Figures her life would throw random occurrences at her just when she was finding something stable. It must have been some cosmic joke for—
“Ach, risse! Eine merkwürdige dame in der bedrängnis!”
Iwaya’s head shot up to find a young boy with tousled blond hair standing over her. Her first impression was that he was an American tourist trying to get a rise out of her, but running over the words again she knew they were nothing like English. The boy himself did not look entirely foreign, despite his brown eyes, blond hair and odd fashion sense. If anything, there was uncanny familiarity. That knowing smile spread across his face was something she’d only seen on Momo.
Which meant she couldn’t just walk off and leave it alone.
“Sprechen sie Japaner? Englisch?” Iwaya stood and brushed herself off, fumbling with the few phrases she picked up from the foreign columnists. Hatsumi-sempai was the only one who took an interest in teaching her, and anyone else wouldn’t think twice of an elite like her showing them up, so they didn’t bother. “Spanischen möglicherweise?”
She winced inwardly. Hatsumi-sempai didn’t speak Spanish. He was fluent in Portuguese. He lived in Brazil. What a stupid mistake for a girlfriend to make...
“Uwah~! You’re really smart if you know all those languages,” the boy said in perfect Japanese. He continued to smile, oblivious to Iwaya’s neurotic dialogue and her mouth agape.
“If you knew Japanese why didn’t you just say so?”
“Because I was talking to myself. You interrupted me,” he responded a matter of factly.
Iwaya felt herself at a loss. She tightened her jaw and looked away. “That’s weird.”
“You were doing it too, calling ‘Momo! Momo! Momo!’ all the time. Maa, but it’s okay. I don’t think it’s weird at all. Ehehehehe~”
“I was looking for my pet!” Iwaya cried. The passerby turned in interest at her outburst, and Iwaya tried to keep her composure...no matter how much she wanted to curl into a ball and just wish it all away.
The boy put on an appropriate sympathetic face, “Really? That’s horrible. Eh, I know! I know! I’ll help you look!”
“No, that’s not nec—And why the hell were you following me?” Iwaya demanded. She hoped she kept the petulant whine out of her voice.
“Momo is my little sister’s name,” the youth replied, rocking on his feet with the confidence as if that answer satisfied everything.
“That doesn’t explain why you’re following me.”
“I wasn’t really, honest!” he cried, “I was just on my way back home when you started crying and I thought, ‘Oh no! There’s a princess in trouble! It would be really mean of me to leave when a princess is sad!’ Especially if she lost her pet, because—” he stuck out his chest “—I am reaaaaaaaaaaaaally good at finding lost animals. Especially since my cousin gets lost all the time.”
“It’s different,” Iwaya said, feeling very hypocritical.
It didn’t fluster the boy, as he continued grinning at her like nothing was wrong. He did a little skip that ended in a bow, showing off his half-curtsey. “Momiji Souma, at your service~!”
It was enough to make Iwaya want to reach out and rub his hair. The mere impulse confused her, where Momo had worn her down to expecting affection this Momiji just leapt in and acted in the same strange manner, except that there were differences. He was a lot like Momo, but he wasn’t Momo.
Iwaya shook the thoughts from her mind, focusing on being cool and impassive. “It’s not safe to give your name out so easily. Look, how do you know I’m not some child molester trying to kidnap you?
He giggled. “Child molesters don’t cry in the middle of a busy walkway.”
Iwaya’s elite business sense had no response for that. Indeed, she was stumbling blind in conversations like these. At least before she only had to worry about Momo, and she never worried about him misunderstanding her.
Suddenly Momiji’s expression became older and he whispered, “Did you know that rabbits can sense whether or not they’ll be able to have babies? And if they think they can’t handle them they absorb them back in? It’s true. Ha~ri told me so. Well, I have a sense like that too. I know when someone reaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaally wants something, not just when they’re saying it.” And all of a sudden the seriousness was gone and back up was a smile that looked as if it had never left. Like Momo, swallowing down cold omelets as if they were the best food he ever ate. “That’s why I know you really miss Momo! So I want to help because Momo’s are the best things in the world! Especially in spring~!”
“You’re getting the words confused again,” Iwaya sighed.
“Wai~! But both are really good, right? Right? I bet you love peaches only a liiiiiiiiiittle bit less than your pet. Ne, ne, what’s Momo anyway?”
‘A human boy,’ she almost let slip. Iwaya tried not to show how embarrassed she was at the moment, managing to control it so her mouth ticked up into an unsure smile. “Really, I’m fine. He only responds to me anyway.”
“He?” Momiji echoed, incredulous. “But Momo is such a pretty name for a girl!”
Iwaya tried not to scream in frustration. “It was the name of my first dog, I—”
“Oh, so it’s a dog right?” Momiji interrupted yet again. “I love dogs. They’re really neat and playful, and good writers! But Ha~ri won’t let me keep one in the house. Ist grausam!”
“Writers? Wait...” Iwaya tried to get him to slow down, but already Momiji was tugging on her hand, pulling her from the stores and to the subway. As if on automatic she fell into step behind him, but the absolute insanity of the situation caused her to stop and tug away from him.
Momiji spun around, still dancing even as she drew away. “Eh? Why did you let go?”
“This...this is crazy. You can’t possibly know where Momo is, you don’t know anything about him! You don’t know anything about me!” Iwaya cried.
For a second it looked as if he might cry, but Momiji tilted his head and stated simply, “I know Momo is a human.”
“...what?”
“Momo,” Momiji said, “is a human. That’s why you were looking in the manga stores and the dance hall across the street. They don’t let dogs in there, so you had to be looking for him as a person who likes dance halls and manga. Besides, you don’t act like you lost a dog.”
“How...” Iwaya’s voice was hoarse, “how would you know?”
“I tooold you I’m really good at finding things. Ehehehehe!”
“You just said he was a dog before,” she tried to protest, floundering in the wake of his ability to act like Momo, and using her newfound weakness against her.
“Right, right!” Momiji declared triumphantly. “And the look on your face after that proved that it wasn’t a dog. I’m a good detective aren’t I? Narrowing down suspects until there’s only one truth to teach a dog new tricks!”
Iwaya sighed. “That made no sense.”
“Why do you keep a human, huh? Ne, are you allergic to fur?”
“No! No, it’s not that. It just...happened.” She couldn’t believe she was confessing to this middle schooler on the outskirts of a busy downtown area. “You wouldn’t understand.”
He said nothing, merely sticking his tongue out as a petulant retort. “I think Momo must really like you to go through all this.”
Unbidden, the image of Momo’s lips on hers came to mind. Just as quickly, Iwaya put it out of her memories. “He needed a place to stay. Momo—he’d just get into trouble on his own. I found him like that. He needs someone to take care of him and feed him.” Her voice dropped a little, fading into the sounds of the city. “He needs me.”
“Aaaaaah~” Momiji breathed with the same sing-song voice as Momo, “But that’s not really the point.”
“What?”
Iwaya glared at him, accusations getting caught up in her throat. He shouldn’t speak like he knew her just because he guessed right a few times. He shouldn’t act so familiar. After mulling them over they sounded too much like how she chastised Momo and shoved him away. Everything led up to this moment, and Iwaya knew deep down something caused him to run. Beneath his shaggy hair, she never noticed that he may have looked back at her. Maybe it was from defiance, or sadness, or eyes that simply react when a raw nerve has been scraped open, but he withdrew like an animal sensing ill portends.
“He ran away,” Momiji continued, pacing along the cracks of the sidewalk for dramatic effect. “But you’re the one looking for him.”
Iwaya looked at the placement of his feet. His balance was flawless.
“Because I’m worried about him,” Iwaya said once again, this time failing at keeping herself from sounding petulant.
“D’ you know that dogs and other pets stay sometimes even when they know they’re not wanted? An owner could kick a dog in the ribs each day and send them away and they would still wag their tail if the owner came back for them.” Momiji coughed, a strange phlegmy sound that sounded like a sob. He smiled and turned back to Iwaya, “And sometimes humans do that too, but they don’t like to be obvious about it and they’re happy they don’t have tails. They like to wait and hide and see if that person would just hold out their hand and say ‘Let’s go home, ne?’ before they let themselves smile, because that’s like wagging a tail. It means ‘I’m happy to see you.’”
Iwaya was considered a cold woman. She had been given the nickname of Noh-mask. Her boyfriend often whispered that he wished he could make her feel at ease while she worried about letting go of his hand. Only Momo made her feel silly, where she could watch pro wrestling or sleep in ratty t-shirts and he could see. He didn’t mind when she slurred her words and got tipsy, he never complained when she changed her mind. Momo just smiled at her. He always smiled at her.
Like Momiji was smiling now.
So Iwaya wanted to reach out and hold Momiji like she did Momo, she wanted to run her hand through his tousled blond hair and cry and have Momiji smile as he did. But it wasn’t the same. It wasn’t Momo and despite how irrationally she wanted to do so, Momiji was not a pet. He wasn’t an animal, or a boy who allowed himself to become so. He was not the one she allowed to slip into her personal space, and because of that fact alone she stayed her hand.
However Momiji knew that there was an urge to do so, and he acknowledged it.
“Maaaaaaaa~ I always thought it would be better to be a pet sometimes. You have people who feed you, bathe you, and play with you. They take care of you and all they expect in return is affection. Then they get so happy when you’re happy that they hug you...That’s the best part of all.”
“He’s always jumping on me,” she muttered. ‘He wanted to kiss me.’
“That’s why I can’t be a pet.” Momiji responded knowingly. “That, and I’m still a person most of the time. Ehehehe! But Hari wonders about me!”
Iwaya wondered about his choice of words, but she was preoccupied. “What do you mean by that?”
The boy didn’t answer. He simply leaped ahead of her and spun back, tassels and pomes of his outfit swaying around him. “Even if Momo was a dog he wouldn’t be a dog. We think differently. We learn to be disappointed and hide things. Even if every time you’re really happy and all you felt was dog fur when you hugged him he’d still speak to you, ne? Speaking is almost as good as hugging!”
Iwaya remembered when Momo instituted a silent protest. Even when she tried to avoid speaking to him, thinking that giving him the same silent treatment would be punishment enough, it didn’t work. She needed to know he would talk to her because he understood. He was the only one who understood. She needed to have him respond. It just wasn’t normal otherwise.
Of course, nothing was normal in her life anymore.
Momiji had started singing something nonsensical, half German and half Japanese. His words thrown around carelessly, singing, “Momiji and spring Momo sing ‘der kaninchen und hund.’ I’ll dig the hidey hole and you’ll give me der mond~”
Iwaya didn’t want to try and piece the words together. Momo’s absence had started the buzzing of a headache that Momiji could only exacerbate, sending it rushing forward and backward in tides.
Then just as soon as he started he stopped. Momiji craned his head upwards, where a near full moon hung in the sky. “I’ll tell you a biiiiiiig secret. You wanna know? Really?” Even though she couldn’t see his face, Iwaya knew he was smiling. “I bet you anything at all in the whole wide world Momo is waiting for you back home. He might not wait at the doorstep, but he’s there. In a dark spot where he can look for you. He wants to see if you’d come back for him. He’s staring through a doorway or a corner and hoping you won’t abandon him.”
Her journalist instincts said nothing. It made sense, almost an eerie sort of rationale that led her around the streets looking for a boy and thinking him a pet. The part of her that was detached from social conventions, that thrived on emotion and unreasonable urges, told her that the boy knew far more than he let on. But sources were to be protected...animals that smile or wag their tails too much were supposed to be protected. She wondered idly if it was because she thought of them inferior, or if they were just too sweet to assign rank to them, that they deserved freedom from judgment.
She knew that because of this Momiji Souma probably knew exactly what was going on in Momo’s head more than she did with all her weeks of living with him piled up on each other like centimeters in height. And when they all added up to tower over her she knew it didn’t mean much at all.
What mattered was Momo greeting her when she came home, and making the house feel a few degrees warmer. Because she was running herself ragged and refusing to go home because she couldn’t stand the thought of not having him there, smiling at her.
“I think then,” Iwaya nodded slowly, “that I should go back and tell him how long I was searching for him.”
“Whaaaaaaaaa! What a happy ending!” Momiji cried, not a trace of doubt on his features as he spun and exalted. “And thus Prince Momiji saved the day with the help of his special spider-sense! Dog-sense! Sensible sense!”
‘Sensible is the last thing I’d describe this as,’ Iwaya thought to herself.
Momiji stop twirling and grabbed her hands again, pumping up and down with the space of his bouncing. “Viel Glueck! I think Momo-tatchi are lu~cky! Once I tell Touru-kun about my good deed I’ll get a hug for sure.”
“So this is all about getting hugs?” Iwaya said dryly.
“Or treats, or someone saying ‘Whaaaaa~ Momiji-kun, you were so wonderful!’ but mostly hugs.” Momiji practically beamed at the thought. “Ne, ne, if I ever decide I want to be a pet can I live with you for a bit? I promise I’ll ask Hari first! I’ll bring Momo peach candy! Oh pleeeeeeeeease?”
Iwaya had exhausted herself looking appropriately shocked, so she simply said, “You don’t even know my name, much less where I live.”
“Oh, oh! I knew you were very smart!” Momiji crowed, “What’s your name?”
She didn’t know why she was still talking, but the urgency to get back to Momo and Momiji’s constant barrage of good-intentioned rambling made her tongue loosen. “Sumire Iwaya.”
“Sumire~” Momiji called out, “that’s such a pretty name. Almost as pretty as Momo!”
“It’s not—I have to go now,” Iwaya said, in the most serious and heavy tone she could muster. “Momo is waiting, like you said.”
God, his optimism was infectious.
“Oh, right, right! I have to get home too, or else Hari will be mad at me again and he won’t let me have dessert. I hope you give Momo sweets, because if I was Momo I’d want sweets. Hari sure knows how to get me home when he wants to, but I gotta go. See you later~!”
And like that he was bounding off again, his bright baby blue jumper flapping behind him. Iwaya wondered if Momo had relatives that were half-German with the same kind of fashion sense. Good thing he didn’t ask for her address. It was hard enough dealing with one pet.
“Sumire-chaaaaaaaan, I hope you like rabbits!” Momiji called out across the distance.
Iwaya sighed. If she weren’t so exhausted and distressed over getting to Momo in time she would have wondered what he meant.
Momiji brings out the fangirl language. I went through a liter of orange soda and too much chocolate to count to get into the tone. Hope the crack crossover went well?
Next up, Prism's geekslash. Oh how ever can I make the DC universe bend to homoerotic subtext?
Set in the middle of episode seven...
Sumire Iwaya felt like crawling into a dark, cold hole and never coming out. She was beyond exhausted, as her search led her up and through Ikeburo, Shibuya, and downtown Tokyo but for all the places she searched she came up empty handed. It was frustrating to be so helpless. Despite the chaos of her fast track career there was a system of research and leads that eventually meant you turned your project in on the deadline. Except Momo running away wasn’t something that had a date or time; in fact, she could only remember flashes of what caused him to run from her. The bite of his teeth on her lip, promises shunted by the wayside, the scent of alcohol on her boyfriend as her mind warned her that Momo was waiting close by.
Ever since she found him in that box things were just becoming too confusing to keep track of. Not that it was his fault really. She punched out her manager before she found him, her headaches started long before that, but all the same, it was his fault she was out looking for him. He could get hurt, or hungry, and who else would feed a ragtag pet like that?
At the mere idea of feeding Momo her stomach growled. She had been out looking for him all evening to the point where even her best friend, Yuri, had called it quits.
“Don’t worry about that brat,” she said in parting. “I’m sure he’ll come back. Just go home and wait for him like last time.”
The only problem with that is that Iwaya didn’t know for sure if he was coming back this time.
The sudden recollection made her sink to her knees. She had searched everywhere. The dance places, the comic shops, the arcades, even those cheap motels that made Yuri run into bathrooms to clean herself after they left. Iwaya had gotten so desperate she ended up just calling out to him on the street, looking for the familiar mop of black hair and his young face. Yuri had to restrain her from looking in every box, regardless of size. Things had gotten that desperate. She had gotten that desperate.
If Iwaya didn’t know better she’d think she was crying. But it couldn’t be tears. It was probably just the start of rain. A sudden downpour like the night she found him in the cardboard box. Figures her life would throw random occurrences at her just when she was finding something stable. It must have been some cosmic joke for—
“Ach, risse! Eine merkwürdige dame in der bedrängnis!”
Iwaya’s head shot up to find a young boy with tousled blond hair standing over her. Her first impression was that he was an American tourist trying to get a rise out of her, but running over the words again she knew they were nothing like English. The boy himself did not look entirely foreign, despite his brown eyes, blond hair and odd fashion sense. If anything, there was uncanny familiarity. That knowing smile spread across his face was something she’d only seen on Momo.
Which meant she couldn’t just walk off and leave it alone.
“Sprechen sie Japaner? Englisch?” Iwaya stood and brushed herself off, fumbling with the few phrases she picked up from the foreign columnists. Hatsumi-sempai was the only one who took an interest in teaching her, and anyone else wouldn’t think twice of an elite like her showing them up, so they didn’t bother. “Spanischen möglicherweise?”
She winced inwardly. Hatsumi-sempai didn’t speak Spanish. He was fluent in Portuguese. He lived in Brazil. What a stupid mistake for a girlfriend to make...
“Uwah~! You’re really smart if you know all those languages,” the boy said in perfect Japanese. He continued to smile, oblivious to Iwaya’s neurotic dialogue and her mouth agape.
“If you knew Japanese why didn’t you just say so?”
“Because I was talking to myself. You interrupted me,” he responded a matter of factly.
Iwaya felt herself at a loss. She tightened her jaw and looked away. “That’s weird.”
“You were doing it too, calling ‘Momo! Momo! Momo!’ all the time. Maa, but it’s okay. I don’t think it’s weird at all. Ehehehehe~”
“I was looking for my pet!” Iwaya cried. The passerby turned in interest at her outburst, and Iwaya tried to keep her composure...no matter how much she wanted to curl into a ball and just wish it all away.
The boy put on an appropriate sympathetic face, “Really? That’s horrible. Eh, I know! I know! I’ll help you look!”
“No, that’s not nec—And why the hell were you following me?” Iwaya demanded. She hoped she kept the petulant whine out of her voice.
“Momo is my little sister’s name,” the youth replied, rocking on his feet with the confidence as if that answer satisfied everything.
“That doesn’t explain why you’re following me.”
“I wasn’t really, honest!” he cried, “I was just on my way back home when you started crying and I thought, ‘Oh no! There’s a princess in trouble! It would be really mean of me to leave when a princess is sad!’ Especially if she lost her pet, because—” he stuck out his chest “—I am reaaaaaaaaaaaaally good at finding lost animals. Especially since my cousin gets lost all the time.”
“It’s different,” Iwaya said, feeling very hypocritical.
It didn’t fluster the boy, as he continued grinning at her like nothing was wrong. He did a little skip that ended in a bow, showing off his half-curtsey. “Momiji Souma, at your service~!”
It was enough to make Iwaya want to reach out and rub his hair. The mere impulse confused her, where Momo had worn her down to expecting affection this Momiji just leapt in and acted in the same strange manner, except that there were differences. He was a lot like Momo, but he wasn’t Momo.
Iwaya shook the thoughts from her mind, focusing on being cool and impassive. “It’s not safe to give your name out so easily. Look, how do you know I’m not some child molester trying to kidnap you?
He giggled. “Child molesters don’t cry in the middle of a busy walkway.”
Iwaya’s elite business sense had no response for that. Indeed, she was stumbling blind in conversations like these. At least before she only had to worry about Momo, and she never worried about him misunderstanding her.
Suddenly Momiji’s expression became older and he whispered, “Did you know that rabbits can sense whether or not they’ll be able to have babies? And if they think they can’t handle them they absorb them back in? It’s true. Ha~ri told me so. Well, I have a sense like that too. I know when someone reaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaally wants something, not just when they’re saying it.” And all of a sudden the seriousness was gone and back up was a smile that looked as if it had never left. Like Momo, swallowing down cold omelets as if they were the best food he ever ate. “That’s why I know you really miss Momo! So I want to help because Momo’s are the best things in the world! Especially in spring~!”
“You’re getting the words confused again,” Iwaya sighed.
“Wai~! But both are really good, right? Right? I bet you love peaches only a liiiiiiiiiittle bit less than your pet. Ne, ne, what’s Momo anyway?”
‘A human boy,’ she almost let slip. Iwaya tried not to show how embarrassed she was at the moment, managing to control it so her mouth ticked up into an unsure smile. “Really, I’m fine. He only responds to me anyway.”
“He?” Momiji echoed, incredulous. “But Momo is such a pretty name for a girl!”
Iwaya tried not to scream in frustration. “It was the name of my first dog, I—”
“Oh, so it’s a dog right?” Momiji interrupted yet again. “I love dogs. They’re really neat and playful, and good writers! But Ha~ri won’t let me keep one in the house. Ist grausam!”
“Writers? Wait...” Iwaya tried to get him to slow down, but already Momiji was tugging on her hand, pulling her from the stores and to the subway. As if on automatic she fell into step behind him, but the absolute insanity of the situation caused her to stop and tug away from him.
Momiji spun around, still dancing even as she drew away. “Eh? Why did you let go?”
“This...this is crazy. You can’t possibly know where Momo is, you don’t know anything about him! You don’t know anything about me!” Iwaya cried.
For a second it looked as if he might cry, but Momiji tilted his head and stated simply, “I know Momo is a human.”
“...what?”
“Momo,” Momiji said, “is a human. That’s why you were looking in the manga stores and the dance hall across the street. They don’t let dogs in there, so you had to be looking for him as a person who likes dance halls and manga. Besides, you don’t act like you lost a dog.”
“How...” Iwaya’s voice was hoarse, “how would you know?”
“I tooold you I’m really good at finding things. Ehehehehe!”
“You just said he was a dog before,” she tried to protest, floundering in the wake of his ability to act like Momo, and using her newfound weakness against her.
“Right, right!” Momiji declared triumphantly. “And the look on your face after that proved that it wasn’t a dog. I’m a good detective aren’t I? Narrowing down suspects until there’s only one truth to teach a dog new tricks!”
Iwaya sighed. “That made no sense.”
“Why do you keep a human, huh? Ne, are you allergic to fur?”
“No! No, it’s not that. It just...happened.” She couldn’t believe she was confessing to this middle schooler on the outskirts of a busy downtown area. “You wouldn’t understand.”
He said nothing, merely sticking his tongue out as a petulant retort. “I think Momo must really like you to go through all this.”
Unbidden, the image of Momo’s lips on hers came to mind. Just as quickly, Iwaya put it out of her memories. “He needed a place to stay. Momo—he’d just get into trouble on his own. I found him like that. He needs someone to take care of him and feed him.” Her voice dropped a little, fading into the sounds of the city. “He needs me.”
“Aaaaaah~” Momiji breathed with the same sing-song voice as Momo, “But that’s not really the point.”
“What?”
Iwaya glared at him, accusations getting caught up in her throat. He shouldn’t speak like he knew her just because he guessed right a few times. He shouldn’t act so familiar. After mulling them over they sounded too much like how she chastised Momo and shoved him away. Everything led up to this moment, and Iwaya knew deep down something caused him to run. Beneath his shaggy hair, she never noticed that he may have looked back at her. Maybe it was from defiance, or sadness, or eyes that simply react when a raw nerve has been scraped open, but he withdrew like an animal sensing ill portends.
“He ran away,” Momiji continued, pacing along the cracks of the sidewalk for dramatic effect. “But you’re the one looking for him.”
Iwaya looked at the placement of his feet. His balance was flawless.
“Because I’m worried about him,” Iwaya said once again, this time failing at keeping herself from sounding petulant.
“D’ you know that dogs and other pets stay sometimes even when they know they’re not wanted? An owner could kick a dog in the ribs each day and send them away and they would still wag their tail if the owner came back for them.” Momiji coughed, a strange phlegmy sound that sounded like a sob. He smiled and turned back to Iwaya, “And sometimes humans do that too, but they don’t like to be obvious about it and they’re happy they don’t have tails. They like to wait and hide and see if that person would just hold out their hand and say ‘Let’s go home, ne?’ before they let themselves smile, because that’s like wagging a tail. It means ‘I’m happy to see you.’”
Iwaya was considered a cold woman. She had been given the nickname of Noh-mask. Her boyfriend often whispered that he wished he could make her feel at ease while she worried about letting go of his hand. Only Momo made her feel silly, where she could watch pro wrestling or sleep in ratty t-shirts and he could see. He didn’t mind when she slurred her words and got tipsy, he never complained when she changed her mind. Momo just smiled at her. He always smiled at her.
Like Momiji was smiling now.
So Iwaya wanted to reach out and hold Momiji like she did Momo, she wanted to run her hand through his tousled blond hair and cry and have Momiji smile as he did. But it wasn’t the same. It wasn’t Momo and despite how irrationally she wanted to do so, Momiji was not a pet. He wasn’t an animal, or a boy who allowed himself to become so. He was not the one she allowed to slip into her personal space, and because of that fact alone she stayed her hand.
However Momiji knew that there was an urge to do so, and he acknowledged it.
“Maaaaaaaa~ I always thought it would be better to be a pet sometimes. You have people who feed you, bathe you, and play with you. They take care of you and all they expect in return is affection. Then they get so happy when you’re happy that they hug you...That’s the best part of all.”
“He’s always jumping on me,” she muttered. ‘He wanted to kiss me.’
“That’s why I can’t be a pet.” Momiji responded knowingly. “That, and I’m still a person most of the time. Ehehehe! But Hari wonders about me!”
Iwaya wondered about his choice of words, but she was preoccupied. “What do you mean by that?”
The boy didn’t answer. He simply leaped ahead of her and spun back, tassels and pomes of his outfit swaying around him. “Even if Momo was a dog he wouldn’t be a dog. We think differently. We learn to be disappointed and hide things. Even if every time you’re really happy and all you felt was dog fur when you hugged him he’d still speak to you, ne? Speaking is almost as good as hugging!”
Iwaya remembered when Momo instituted a silent protest. Even when she tried to avoid speaking to him, thinking that giving him the same silent treatment would be punishment enough, it didn’t work. She needed to know he would talk to her because he understood. He was the only one who understood. She needed to have him respond. It just wasn’t normal otherwise.
Of course, nothing was normal in her life anymore.
Momiji had started singing something nonsensical, half German and half Japanese. His words thrown around carelessly, singing, “Momiji and spring Momo sing ‘der kaninchen und hund.’ I’ll dig the hidey hole and you’ll give me der mond~”
Iwaya didn’t want to try and piece the words together. Momo’s absence had started the buzzing of a headache that Momiji could only exacerbate, sending it rushing forward and backward in tides.
Then just as soon as he started he stopped. Momiji craned his head upwards, where a near full moon hung in the sky. “I’ll tell you a biiiiiiig secret. You wanna know? Really?” Even though she couldn’t see his face, Iwaya knew he was smiling. “I bet you anything at all in the whole wide world Momo is waiting for you back home. He might not wait at the doorstep, but he’s there. In a dark spot where he can look for you. He wants to see if you’d come back for him. He’s staring through a doorway or a corner and hoping you won’t abandon him.”
Her journalist instincts said nothing. It made sense, almost an eerie sort of rationale that led her around the streets looking for a boy and thinking him a pet. The part of her that was detached from social conventions, that thrived on emotion and unreasonable urges, told her that the boy knew far more than he let on. But sources were to be protected...animals that smile or wag their tails too much were supposed to be protected. She wondered idly if it was because she thought of them inferior, or if they were just too sweet to assign rank to them, that they deserved freedom from judgment.
She knew that because of this Momiji Souma probably knew exactly what was going on in Momo’s head more than she did with all her weeks of living with him piled up on each other like centimeters in height. And when they all added up to tower over her she knew it didn’t mean much at all.
What mattered was Momo greeting her when she came home, and making the house feel a few degrees warmer. Because she was running herself ragged and refusing to go home because she couldn’t stand the thought of not having him there, smiling at her.
“I think then,” Iwaya nodded slowly, “that I should go back and tell him how long I was searching for him.”
“Whaaaaaaaaa! What a happy ending!” Momiji cried, not a trace of doubt on his features as he spun and exalted. “And thus Prince Momiji saved the day with the help of his special spider-sense! Dog-sense! Sensible sense!”
‘Sensible is the last thing I’d describe this as,’ Iwaya thought to herself.
Momiji stop twirling and grabbed her hands again, pumping up and down with the space of his bouncing. “Viel Glueck! I think Momo-tatchi are lu~cky! Once I tell Touru-kun about my good deed I’ll get a hug for sure.”
“So this is all about getting hugs?” Iwaya said dryly.
“Or treats, or someone saying ‘Whaaaaa~ Momiji-kun, you were so wonderful!’ but mostly hugs.” Momiji practically beamed at the thought. “Ne, ne, if I ever decide I want to be a pet can I live with you for a bit? I promise I’ll ask Hari first! I’ll bring Momo peach candy! Oh pleeeeeeeeease?”
Iwaya had exhausted herself looking appropriately shocked, so she simply said, “You don’t even know my name, much less where I live.”
“Oh, oh! I knew you were very smart!” Momiji crowed, “What’s your name?”
She didn’t know why she was still talking, but the urgency to get back to Momo and Momiji’s constant barrage of good-intentioned rambling made her tongue loosen. “Sumire Iwaya.”
“Sumire~” Momiji called out, “that’s such a pretty name. Almost as pretty as Momo!”
“It’s not—I have to go now,” Iwaya said, in the most serious and heavy tone she could muster. “Momo is waiting, like you said.”
God, his optimism was infectious.
“Oh, right, right! I have to get home too, or else Hari will be mad at me again and he won’t let me have dessert. I hope you give Momo sweets, because if I was Momo I’d want sweets. Hari sure knows how to get me home when he wants to, but I gotta go. See you later~!”
And like that he was bounding off again, his bright baby blue jumper flapping behind him. Iwaya wondered if Momo had relatives that were half-German with the same kind of fashion sense. Good thing he didn’t ask for her address. It was hard enough dealing with one pet.
“Sumire-chaaaaaaaan, I hope you like rabbits!” Momiji called out across the distance.
Iwaya sighed. If she weren’t so exhausted and distressed over getting to Momo in time she would have wondered what he meant.
Momiji brings out the fangirl language. I went through a liter of orange soda and too much chocolate to count to get into the tone. Hope the crack crossover went well?
Next up, Prism's geekslash. Oh how ever can I make the DC universe bend to homoerotic subtext?
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LOVE
YOU
!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
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Heh, but I'm glad you liked.
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Sumire meeting Momiji...so utterly cute! Though I bet Sumire would really freak out if she finds out that Momoji can turn into a rabbit. She already thinks that her situation with Momo is weird enough. :3 I absolutely adore this crossover. ^_^ You got Momoji down really well. (adds to memories)
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.. me.. want .. MORE kimi wa petto fanfics :3
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Then I went looking for fanfic and I'm glad I found yours.
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