Title: Pest Control

Author: badly-knitted

Characters: Dee, Ryo.

Rating: G

Setting: After Vol. 7.

Summary: Dee walks into Ryo's apartment one day and finds his partner behaving rather strangely.

Written For: The dw100 prompt 'Live And Let Live'

Word Count: 629

Disclaimer: I don't own FAKE, or the characters. They belong to the wonderful Sanami Matoh.

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Ryo was a 'live and let live' kind of guy; under normal circumstances, he wouldn't even kill spiders, despite the fact that they creeped him out. He always carefully caught them and put them outside, so when Dee caught his partner one day rampaging through his apartment brandishing a rolled up newspaper, he was a little taken aback.

The place looked like a hurricane had passed through, with cushions strewn across the floor, and half the books fallen off the shelves. Ryo himself was flushed, sweaty, and visibly furious; he didn't spare Dee so much as a passing glance as he stormed past in hot pursuit of… something.

"Hey, babe. What's up?" Dee quickly stepped back out of the way to avoid being trampled underfoot.

Ryo still didn't glance his way, just breathlessly snapped out, "Wasp!" and continued on his way.

Dee's confusion showed on his face, not that Ryo noticed. "I thought you said wasps didn't bother you?"

"They don't…" Ryo sped past in the opposite direction, then… "Gotcha!" With a triumphant cry, he flattened the offending wasp where it had landed on the arm of the sofa, whacking it several more times for good measure. "Die, damn you!"

"Uh, Ryo? I think you can stop hittin' it now, I'm pretty sure it's dead."

"Good." Ryo halted his frenzied attack and stood there glaring at the corpse, panting. After a moment, he delicately plucked the squashed wasp up by one wing, stalked into the bathroom, and flushed it down the toilet.

"So, you wanna tell me what that was all about?" Dee asked mildly when Ryo returned to the living room. "That looked pretty extreme for someone who's not bothered by wasps."

Stooping, Ryo picked up a couple of cushions and slumped onto the sofa with them, worn out from chasing the wasp. "All I wanted to do was air out the apartment a bit," he sighed. "I opened the window and was doing a bit of spring cleaning when that wasp flew in, probably looking for a good place to build a nest, so I caught it in a glass like I always do, and put it out my bedroom window. But it must have just flown around the building and come right back in, because when I came out of my bedroom, there it was, buzzing around the room." He ran a frustrated hand through his hair. "So I caught it and put it out again, but it wouldn't stay out, it just kept coming back, over and over, and somewhere around the sixth or seventh time I kind of lost my temper with it." He looked mournfully up at Dee. "But now I feel bad for killing it. I should've just closed the window so it couldn't get back in."

Joining his lover on the sofa, Dee draped one arm around him and pressed a kiss into his dishevelled hair. "If it's any consolation, I'd have lost my temper and killed the damn wasp way before you did. If it was too stupid to give up and go elsewhere, it deserved to get flattened."

Ryo half shrugged. "Maybe…"

"Not maybe; definitely."

Ryo took in the chaos surrounding him, all the things he'd shoved out of the way while trying to get at the infuriatingly persistent wasp, and groaned. "So much for spring cleaning; the place is in a worse mess now than it was when I started."

"But on the bright side, you won't need to call in an exterminator to clear out a wasp nest," Dee pointed out. "C'mon, I'll give you a hand tidying up." He stood and pulled his lover to his feet.

"Thanks, Dee."

"Don't mention it; it's the least I can do for the valiant slayer of wasps," Dee teased.

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The End