Work Text:
Denji sweats bullets. Root beer oozes into the mat, knocked off the table in a brawl for the goddamn remote.
Well, they’re fucked.
“Shame on you!” Power hisses, also sweating bullets and pointing a finger at him, of fucking course. “How could you do such a thing?!”
“Don’t even try it, you asshole!” He jabs a finger right back at her, stabbing her shoulder. It’s like gasoline on a goddamn fire; they come to blows again on the spot.
Then Power’s eyes go wide. She lets the coaster raised over his head drop to the floor.
“I have an ingenious idea.”
It’s saturday. Aki’s still out on some errand.
“Will…that be everything?” the konbini cashier asks, staring at their cart. Denji and Power nod. “...That will be eighteen-hundred yen.”
Denji forks over a two thousand yen note, which Aki thinks is hidden behind the coffee tin in the kitchen cupboard.
They ignore suspicious looks from the cashier on their way out.
When they make it back to the apartment, they’ve got a few hours, tops, until Aki gets back. They get to work.
They stand in the living room, sleeves rolled up, after almost two hours of labor.
Two pairs of scissors, a used-up roll of duct tape, and empty tubes of seven different kinds of glue are strewn across the floor. Denji wipes a streak of sweat off his forehead.
“Powy,” He murmurs, staring at their handiwork. “You might be a fuckin’ genius.”
Power rubs under her nose pridefully.
“I’m home,” Aki says as he steps through the doorway, followed by: “What the fuck is that smell?”
“Whatever do you mean?” Power asks.
“I don’t smell anything, man,” Denji says.
“—Jesus Christ. What is that smell?”
“Perhaps you should rest?” Power suggests. “It seems exhaustion is clouding your judgment.”
Aki stares.
He slips off his shoes, stalks over and shoves the two of them apart where they’re sitting on the tatami. As he picks up a corner of said tatami—which they tore up, flipped over, and glued back down—it falls apart.
And all hell breaks loose.
“It was his fault!” Power immediately shrieks.
“Liar! That’s bullshit! She’s lying!”
“He started it!”
“How," Aki starts to reach for his hair, "how in the fuck did you even—” his face twitches, then goes completely lax as he drops his arms and says: “I’m going to kill you both.”
“What’s the big deal anyway?!” Denji challenges. “You can barely tell the difference!”
“Yeah!” Power pumps her fist. “We were even so generous as to fix it! Show us more gratitude!”
Aki looks at her, then Denji, then the tatami. He grabs a cigarette from his pocket, and steps onto the balcony, shutting the door behind him.
Someone’s coming over to ‘fix’ their work in three days. In the meantime, Aki makes them scrub off the dried glue under threat of a cooking strike.
They're on their hands and knees, working away at the floor.
“Dammit.” Denji scrubs harder. “Told you we should’ve used paint.”