Chapter Text
Karamatsu had miscalculated, and now he was in quite the dire situation.
He couldn’t even remember now what it was he had said to Ichimatsu that had drawn such anger from his brother. Actually, if he were recounting the incident as a story to someone else, he would have had to admit that that was a bit misleading. Ichimatsu hadn’t been any angrier than he usually was towards Karamatsu. Perhaps he hadn’t said anything out of line at all. Perhaps he had just had the bad luck of crossing Ichimatsu’s path when the latter was bored.
The result was the same regardless: Ichimatsu had smacked Karamatsu’s beloved sunglasses out of his hand and ground them against the floor with the heel of his foot.
Well. That, too, was inaccurate to a degree. Karamatsu did adore his sunglasses, but it was just the slightest exaggeration to call them beloved, much in the same way that you wouldn’t call a tube of chapstick beloved even if you somehow managed to hang on to it for more than a month. He knew that his sunglasses were very likely to be broken sooner or later, be it by Ichimatsu’s ruthlessness or due to his own mistakes, and so he kept a few pairs on hand for just such unfortunate occasions.
But Karamatsu had miscalculated. He’d given his gracious apology, cleaned up the pieces, and then returned to their shared bedroom to retrieve a fresh pair of sunglasses from the dresser only to find that there were none there. Certain that there had to be another pair hidden somewhere, he had rifled through the drawers, through the closet, through the attic, even under the floor. He’d discovered a number of his brothers’ porn stashes, but his search for sunglasses was sadly fruitless.
Under ordinary circumstances, this wouldn’t have been a significant problem, but today he had chosen to wear his perfect fashion. The absence of sunglasses upon his beautiful face meant that his meticulously cultivated style was…
…incomplete.
Such were the worries that plagued Karamatsu Matsuno. He knew they were trivial, but in taking them seriously, he was enabled to feel as though he were living seriously. He could choke down his fears and doubts and insecurities and smooth them over with pleasant frivolities, just like the rest of his brothers did.
Were he recounting his thoughts as a story to someone else, he would have to pause and apologize for suddenly changing the tone. How uncharacteristically morose!
Anyway, Karamatsu was better at solving fashion crises than he was at telling stories—no matter how much Todomatsu might argue to the contrary. And the situation at hand, desperate though it was, was easily resolved. The nearby 100-yen store was his go-to destination for replacing broken sunglasses, and he had pocket money to spare for a few pairs. Sure, the cashiers there sometimes raised their eyebrows at him when he was paying, but he liked to think that they were just wondering how they could become as dashingly good-looking as him.
(All right, Karamatsu, that may be just a little over the top.)
Karamatsu passed through the shop’s glass doors to the sound of the chime that announced a new customer and to the welcoming call of an employee who was in all likelihood probably responding more to the chime than to the customer himself. He proceeded into the depths of the store, passing various aisles lined with snacks and stationery and other odds and ends. Enter a store, walk straight to the sunglasses, grab several, pay, leave. If he thought about it too much, Karamatsu might arrive at the conclusion that he was a bit of a weirdo. It was a good thing he wasn’t the thinking type, or he might have started to feel a bit self-conscious.
But man did his face feel excruciatingly naked all of a sudden.
“Excuse me, sir?”
Karamatsu wasn’t exactly a ‘sir.’ How many ‘sirs’ do you know who wear leather jackets with a skull motif? This was certainly the reason he didn’t respond to the voice—not at all because he was accustomed to receiving so little respect from his peers that the very idea of being called ‘sir’ was foreign to him. Why, that would just be sad.
“E-Excuse me!”
This time the voice was a little harder to assume to be directed to someone else, for it came paired with a light tap on his elbow. Karamatsu paused and turned, and he immediately identified another valid reason why the call had initially failed to garner his attention.
It came from a girl.
(My god, you desperate virgin. She’s just an employee.)
She was, in fact, an employee, as evidenced by the black polo shirt tucked into her black pants. It was a bit gloomy for a uniform, but it stood out clearly against the bright and friendly packaging of the store’s products. Her hair was black as well, as was common for people of Japanese heritage, and its length just barely brushed the collar of her shirt.
So you’ve finally come, my Karamatsu Girl.
He stopped himself from saying the words out loud. It wasn’t the same if he didn’t have the sunglasses. His unparalleled suaveness would be diminished to a point at which it would then be easily paralleled. She would just think he was a regular creep. Hell, she would probably think he was a creep anyway, but at least he would be a unique and memorable creep.
…How many seconds had passed, exactly, since she had called to him? Creep levels were on the rise.
Karamatsu cleared his throat. “Yes?”
The girl employee tented her fingers and averted her gaze. Karamatsu wondered if his skull-shaped belt buckle was intimidating. That was sort of the kind of look he was going for, after all, with a bad boy sort of twist.
“Do… Do you need help finding anything?”
He just couldn’t help himself.
“I’m afraid I may need help finding my way out of the labyrinth that is your beautiful gaze.” He flicked his fingertips through his fringe and posed. A moment later, he dared to crack one eye just enough to gauge the young woman’s response. She stared with wide eyes, her hands clamped together as if compelled to hold on to something. The poor girl looked positively shell-shocked. Karamatsu cleared his throat once more.
“I-I’m sorry, I—”
And then she laughed. It was a soft, warm sound that lasted no more than an instant, but its effects lingered in her eyes. “I bet you say that to everyone, don’t you?” she accused.
Bingo.
“N-No, I— I don’t know what came over me. I’m sorry.” And then he laughed, but it was the most awkward, stilted sound that he had ever had the misfortune of enduring. He really shouldn’t have done that without having his sunglasses on. “Uh. I actually know where to find what I’m looking for. Thank you, though.”
“Oh! Of course. Sorry to bother you. Please take your time!” She bowed at the waist and turned, fleeing out of sight. Or it seemed to Karamatsu like she was fleeing, at least. He wasn’t sure if she was overwhelmed by how cool he was or if she…
Well.
There was definitely no other reason she would want to get away from him quickly, right? Actually, if he thought about this rationally, she probably just had other things to do. You know, what with the whole ‘employee’ thing and all.
Karamatsu combed his fingers through the hair at the back of his neck and exhaled. So. Sunglasses. He continued through the store until he reached the right aisle, the right shelf, the right slot, and then he pulled three pairs of dark shades with loosely triangular lenses from the tray. He paused for a moment of consideration and then picked up a fourth. He’d purchased three the last time he stocked up, so that clearly wasn’t enough. He could ferret the fourth pair away somewhere as an emergency ration, in case these sad events ever came to pass once more. He could practically feel the hot coals on his back as Choromatsu raked him over them for wasting his money on emergency sunglasses of all things, but it was important. It was at least as important as all that Nyaa-chan merchandise that Choromatsu liked to get duplicates of—one to use, one to store, and sometimes, depending on what the item was, one to display in its packaging.
(Even though he never actually displayed them for fear that they would be damaged or dirtied in the chaos that was everyday life in the Matsuno household.)
Four pairs of sunglasses were a bit unwieldy, and Karamatsu wound up wearing one of them to avoid the risk of dropping any of them. If he were recounting the decision as a story to someone else, they might have asked him why he didn’t just use two hands. It’s a good thing that wasn’t the case, because Karamatsu would only have been able to cough out an aloof ‘heh!’ and then change the subject.
He headed back towards the front of the store, destined for the registers. It was a shame that shy employee from before didn’t approach him now; now that his perfect fashion was whole once more, he was unstoppable. Unflappable. An immobile pillar brimming with love for himself and others. Just what was it about seeing the world tinted slightly darker than usual that cast that beautiful magic called self-confidence over him?
Karamatsu stepped up to the register and, through some fortuitous twist of fate, found it manned by the same young woman who had offered him assistance earlier. Heh! He wouldn’t be defeated this time! He wasn’t exactly sure when it had turned into a contest—or even what the contest was for—but the sentiment was firm in his heart nonetheless. He hooked the toe of one shoe around the ankle of the other, dropped his elbow against the counter, and expertly lowered the shades on the bridge of his nose to reveal his dazzling, sensuous gaze. Karamatsu himself could barely resist his own charms. He flipped swiftly through his mental catalogue of winning one-liners for just the perfect phrase to capture her heart and prove to the both of them that he was anything but a fumbling, bumbling loser incapable of polite conversation with the average human female.
But before he could open his mouth to pronounce the first syllable, the employee spoke, her voice small and tremulous but filled with conviction, “Those sunglasses look really cool with your outfit.”
The other three pairs clattered noisily against the counter as Karamatsu’s grasp on them went limp. His mouth remained slightly open, but every single word he had learned since the day he was born had abruptly evacuated his head in the form of the steam that was surely pouring off of his hot face. And that was hot as in temperature, not as in sexiness—although Karamatsu would probably argue that the two aren’t mutually exclusive.
A wreath of flowers bloomed around the girl’s exquisitely average visage. Tiny cutouts of Rococo-era cherubs descended haltingly from the upper limits of his vision. The whole world went pink as Cupid’s barbed arrow burrowed its way deeply into his stylish and sensitive heart.
Karamatsu Matsuno fell in love. (lol)