Title: Modern Warfare
Universe: Eyeshiel 21
Theme/Topic: Mamori owning? Ish?
Rating: PG-13 for Hiruma's mouth.
Character/Pairing/s: HirumaxMamori (mentions other Devilbats)
Spoilers/Warnings: Spoilers through the end of the series.
Word Count: 4,435
Summary: Hiruma is like a bomb and Mamori is like an EOD technician.
Dedication: originally for whisperbird (aesthetically) and the 2010 yuletide exchange!
A/N: I haven't written straight-up ES21 in what feels like forever, so we shall see how this goes!
Disclaimer: No harm or infringement intended.

Interacting with Hiruma Yoichi—on any level— is a lot like being told to defuse a very complicated, very volatile ticking time bomb.

In the middle of a jungle.

That's an active warzone.

Blindfolded.

While your leg is on fire.

With those kinds of odds stacked against you, the whole idea of surviving an ordeal that is Hiruma in nature really just seems hopeless. Most of the time, people think about working—and surviving—under conditions like that and give up at the mere notion of it. They sit back, close their eyes, make peace with their creator, and quietly wait to die.

Dealing with Hiruma generally makes people feel a lot like that.

But when you think about it, defusing a bomb blindfolded in the middle of the jungle while bullets whiz past your head and your leg is rapidly being consumed by fire is difficult, sure, but not impossible. Not entirely.

These are the things Mamori has since learned about all of the above:

The thing about bombs is that the methodology behind defusing one will not change while you're doing it. It doesn't matter whether you're in Paris or Vietnam or Madison Square Garden during a Knicks game when you're working with it, once you figure out the specific rules of your particular explosive device, you'll also discover that the mechanics it is governed by can—and will— only work in an absolute and ultimately logical manner within those rules. From there, you can gather that there are a set number of steps governed by the particular set of rules that bomb operates under that will have to be performed calmly and rationally before you can fully disarm the device. This method of defusing the bomb, no matter what happens thereafter, is already decided for you beforehand. What is up to you is whether or not you figure out the rules in time and keep the bomb from exploding.

The thing about navigating jungles is that you just have to get to know the terrain before jumping in. Doing your homework is key.

As for warzones, blindfolds, and burning legs, when you think about it, you can classify them all as nothing more than distractions. Big distractions, granted, but distractions nonetheless. Your ultimate goal is to disarm the bomb, not to pay attention to the fact that you can't see or that people are shooting at you or even that part of you is on fire. With practice, distractions simply become all the types of things you can learn how to ignore, go around, put out, tune out, or in some cases, forcibly roll right over.

Mamori has had a lot of time to practice with the particular bomb that is Hiruma. As such she is fairly decent—she thinks—at getting the job done; she knows the terrain well enough, doesn't easily get sidetracked by distractions, and usually manages to disarm whatever traps he's set for her—and others— so that everyone involved can get out of the building, or the jungle, or the whatever Hiruma is doing, relatively unscathed.

She wonders if she should be worried about the fact that after all this time, Hiruma only makes more sense to her.

Mamori's career as Hiruma's personal bomb squad begins like this:

A few weeks into their third year at Deimon, Okita Yuusuke-kun, Mamori's current partner on the Disciplinary Committee, asks her if she would like to go have dinner and maybe karaoke with him after school one afternoon. Mamori loves karaoke but says that she can't; she has her duties as the football team's Manager to take care of directly after the Disciplinary Committee meeting. There is tape to watch, she explains, and charts to draw up, and various tells, strategies, and signals that she has to correctly decipher so that when Sena and the others play their scrimmage tomorrow, they will be well-versed in the style of play employed by their opponents. Okita-kun's eyes glaze over somewhere in the middle of an explanation about key offensive sequences, and once Mamori is done talking, he only offers a sheepish, slightly weirded-out smile and says, "Well, maybe during the off-season, then."

Mamori absently agrees without thinking about it, already trying to remember whether or not that blitz play call had been Assistant Coach headrub, Head Coach sleeve pull, Manager feigned-yawn, or if it had been the same as what Hiruma's notes from last year had said: Manager tying shoe, Head Coach cap pull, Assistant Coach hacking cough. Hiruma insists that this team is too stupid to change their signals; Mamori thinks that if they're stupid, then it's highly possible they might have simplified their signals to help the line run their plays more smoothly. She and Hiruma had argued about it before homeroom the other day and everyone had given them weird looks until Hiruma threatened to shoot them all.

Proposal for a date effectively forgotten, Okita-kun wordlessly goes back to filing papers with a wistful look in his eyes and slumped shoulders, while Mamori is too distracted by the burning drive to crack St. Agnes High's coaching code to notice. Okita-kun's invitation for dinner and karaoke is subsequently dismissed from her mind.

The following morning, Mamori discovers that Okita-kun had quite suddenly won an interview with a top private school in America and that he had been quickly and quietly flown out of the country at the school's expense the night before. It is a mysterious but incredible chance for him and she wishes him the best, even though she never ends up getting a response from him when she sends him a text message congratulating him on winning such an honor. The Deimon principal is so pleased with the whole affair that he sets up a commemorative wall of Okita-kun in the hallway to help encourage other top students to shoot for the stars.

Really, the only weird thing about it that she notices is, afterwards, in the football club's locker room, when Hiruma deigns to look up from whatever it is he's doing on his laptop, he grins at her and says, "I heard about Okita. I sure hope his English is good."

It is not something she would ever think warranted his particular attention as it has nothing to do with football or his machinations for eventual world domination, so for a moment, his saying this surprises her. She wants to ask him why he cares either way, but before she can, he grins at her and says, "So did you figure out that blitz sequence yet or what, Shitty Manager?"

The look on his face when he says it annoys her enough that she grabs the playbook and the video tape right away, wordlessly plopping down in a seat next to him at the table. She tells him to give her five minutes and she'll have it sorted. He pops his gum, tells her she has three, and the two of them spend the next few hours just like that, watching St. Agnes's last five games of the previous season on film. Mamori makes detailed notes while Hiruma makes snide comments.

Personally, Mamori doesn't think very much about Okita-kun anymore after that, not until a very long time later, once all the rules of defusing this particular bomb finally click into place. To be fair, the first incident had been really well-disguised.

But before that moment of realization comes there is Koizumi-kun from her literature class who she is absolutely certain is going to ask her out towards the end of the first term—they spend a week working on a project together for English and she notices how he kind of gives her these goofy, adoring smiles whenever he thinks she's not looking (but which she can catch the reflection of in the library windows if she angles herself just right). The afternoon before they have their presentation, Koizumi-kun walks her to the football clubhouse and shyly says, "Tomorrow, after our presentation, there's something I want to ask you, okay?"

She smiles back, nods, and says, "That's fine," feeling maidenly and shoujo-manga heroine-y all at once as they part ways so she can join Hiruma in the club house for a football club financial meeting.

However, on the morning of their project presentation, Koizumi-kun mysteriously falls ill, sends her an apologetic text, and for some reason, has to fly to Europe for the treatment of a rare genetic disease that she has never heard of.

She texts Koizumi-kun a worried response and asks him for his address so she can get the class to send him a get well soon card, but he must already be on the plane when she sends the message because he never responds to her text. She gives the presentation alone that day, feeling kind of down, and doesn't hear from Koizumi-kun (ever) again.

That afternoon, when she asks Hiruma if he's ever heard of a disease that suddenly fills a person's body with a bunch of holes without warning, he simply snorts at her and says everyone knows about that particular disease. That is, unless they're a complete moron. She glares at him, he throws her a stopwatch, and they head from the club room to the field so that they can time all of the new recruits' 100-meter dashes.

Later, she will feel supremely stupid for not detecting the pattern earlier, but as it is, it isn't until the incident with Nagano-san, during a Devilbats fundraiser that summer, when everything really falls into place. Suzuna and Mamori don their cheerleading outfits to sell baked goods outside of Doburoku-sensei's intense conditioning camp for the upcoming season; it is there that Mamori meets Nagano-san, a college freshman who has travelled halfway across the country just to see Eyeshield 21 at practice. Mamori finds out that Nagano-san is also a runningback; he is tall and sleek and enthusiastic, and he even buys five of Mamori's vanilla cupcakes (the devil's food ones are already sold out) when he hears that the team needs new uniforms. They end up talking again after practice is done, when he helps her box up the rest of the unsold cupcakes for the team to snack on and picks up the folding table to carry back to the storage shed for her. She fancies that she might have a bit of a crush on him at that point; he's handsome and smart and kind, and when he smiles he has a dimple on either cheek that makes him look like a Jerry's idol.

As they move to part ways he says that he learned a lot from watching Sena's lateral shuffle today, promises he'll be back for more cupcakes tomorrow, and asks her to save one of the devil's food ones for him in particular. On his way back to his car, he pauses to glance over his shoulder and tell her she looks good in red and black.

She's in such a good mood when she gets back to the clubhouse afterwards that she doesn't notice Hiruma's more-than-usual smugness when she finds him hunched over his computer, cackling to himself. She simply assumes that the former quarterback cum assistant coach is apparently taking delight in whatever weaknesses he'd perceived on the field during training today, and is developing some sort of demonic conditioning regimen to help correct those weaknesses in the players for tomorrow.

"Did you make any goddamned money, Shitty Manager?" he asks her, once he finishes whatever he's typing and glances up at her from his laptop screen.

She puts the remaining cupcakes on the table in front of him cheerfully. "Sales were very good today," she chirps, refusing to be put out by his ridiculous monikers.

His grin only broadens, glinting sharp and dangerous as he pushes the box of cupcakes back towards her. "Don't make any runningbacks fat," he warns cryptically, before going back to his computer.

She really has no idea what that's supposed to mean because no matter how many cupcakes Sena eats it seems like he can never gain a kilo. But then again, Hiruma is really stupidly serious about off-season conditioning no matter who is involved. She mentally shrugs and goes to the back of the clubhouse to change out of the cheerleading uniform so that the two of them can spend the rest of the afternoon strategizing about the first game of the season, even though it's still a few months away. It pays to be thorough, after all, and she really likes that she's almost as good as he is now, when it comes to figuring out patterns and developing counters.

When she gets back from changing, she notices that two of the cupcakes are gone, though Hiruma doesn't have a word to say about them either way.

The next day she sees Nagano-san again in the bleachers, looking intently at the field and sweating in a strange way that makes her wonder if he's feeling well. When she waves at him he manages a tentative, scared-looking finger wiggle in her direction before he quickly faces forward again, back down on the field. That's a little weird, but she doesn't think anything of it until Hiruma takes the field for Doburoku-sensei and the report of a semi-automatic rifle suddenly splits the air. Then Nagano-san actually ducks under the bleachers, hands over his head and entire body shaking.

Frowning, Mamori puts down the cupcake tray she is marching through the audience and goes to the section of bleachers Nagano-san is hiding underneath. "Nagano-san," she whispers when she sees him, making him yelp, "Is everything okay?"

"I'm not supposed to talk to you," Nagano-san bleats, before catching himself and cringing back into the shadows even further. "I wasn't supposed to say that. Oh man, he's going to get me deported to Sudan and I'll never play for the Bucks."

Mamori gives him a strange look. "I see," she answers, then straightens up and goes back to her cupcake tray. It is on her way back to the bake sale stand that everything suddenly starts to slide into place.

She is almost angry—almost—except that she's too busy trying to figure out what the rules to this game are, and what the endgame is (anger, she has found, is a lot like having your leg on fire; it's a distraction that Hiruma wants you to focus on so that you don't know what his actual point is). She, unfortunately, knows better by now. With Hiruma you have to push everything else aside and just think.

And the more she thinks about it, the more the picture in her head begins to form a much clearer image of what she is dealing with here.

By the time she gets back to the stand she's already noticed the beginnings of a pattern.

All of the guys she might potentially like end up deported, or, in Nagano-san's case, get threatened with deportation. She frowns for a moment and wonders why he seems to be the exception; Okita-kun and Koizumi-kun (and now that she thinks about it, that one guy in her cram school class that borrowed a pencil from her last week and forgot to give it back) all disappeared well within 24-hours of asking her for something.

Eventually, she realizes the anomaly surrounding Nagano-san might have something to do with the fact that he is another football player. As low as Hiruma can go with blackmail and threats and general creepiness, he has a personal rule of never messing with another team's player availability, especially when one of those players is so dead set on becoming a better athlete that he's willing to travel great distances just to learn. Hiruma has his own personal—if slightly twisted—code of honor, as it is.

So Nagano-san's continued presence in Japan (for now) aside, the general pattern is that when a boy asks her something, that boy gets shipped out of the country.

This presents a dilemma.

On the one hand, Japan is losing many upstanding young men because of her. Not only that, they are the kinds of boys she would have liked to date, because she has always wanted a nice high school romance in that whole springtime of youth, romantic way that all girls her age secretly dream about sometimes, when they think no one is looking. In that vein, she thinks that she should go yell at Hiruma for interfering, because that's three now (she's not counting the kid from cram school because she doesn't even remember his name). By rights she should be furious to know that Okita-kun probably doesn't know English all that well and that the only threat of a hole-opening disease Koizumi-kun has ever experienced involved an AK nozzle shoved under his chin.

On the other hand, Hiruma speaks a very complicated, but simultaneously very direct sort of language. He is a man of action, and so when he desires something, he will do whatever it takes to get what he wants. What then, is it that he wants to gain from doing this? This particular line of thought makes Mamori's stomach twist in a strange way while making her head hurt all at the same time, so for the time being, she skims over it in only the vaguest ways and concentrates instead, on the hard facts.

Plainly put, the situation is this:

There is a bomb that sends exceptional young Japanese men abroad against their will.

The terrain is apparently Mamori, which, thankfully, she knows well enough.

The distractions include her irritation at Hiruma, the fact that she probably has to call all of those boys' parents to apologize to them, and an as-yet unnamed phenomenon that is causing her stomach to feel tight and her head to hurt.

She comforts herself with the knowledge that at least with the parameters all set as they are, she can go about figuring out how to disarm the situation accordingly without having to do much more research on the matter.

She spends the rest of the afternoon thinking about her counter-strategy. Suzuna, ever sharp, smiles at Mamori and says, "Mamo-nee's cheeks are pink."

After that Mamori sends Suzuna into the stands with a box of cupcakes so that she can sell directly to the audience. Mamori also inadvertently ends up eating the devil's food cupcake she had been saving especially for Nagano-kun.

As the afternoon drags on, Mamori comforts herself with the fact that she knows the rules now. As long as she knows the rules, this means that she can come up with her own plan on how to deal with this. But before she can start strategizing for herself, she needs to set up her own particular parameters, ones that carefully lie within the border of the ones Hiruma has already set up.

Before long, she has jotted down a list of goals that are as follows:

Make Hiruma stop deporting the boys she wants to date.

Figure out what Hiruma's endgame is.

Make the aforementioned distractions go away.

All she has to do is find a solution that takes care of all her goals, remains inside the constraints already established, and do it all before Nagano-kun gets sent to Sudan.

Simple.

She goes home that night and thinks.

She thinks over dinner while her mother flutters at her from across the table, twittering brightly about how Mamori has the sort of look on her face that means there's finally a boy in her life (while her father hears that and plainly doesn't like it or the idea of boys in general).

She thinks about it while she does her homework as well, but luckily physics is as simple as putting one foot in front of the other for her and so she doesn't have much trouble finishing anyway.

She thinks about it while watching the film from today's practice. When she sees Hiruma on the camera as he walks onto the field to a round of cheers from some of his more psychotic admirers, the ones who saw him on TV during last year's Christmas Bowl and are scared of him but kind of like that they're scared of him at the same time. "Hiruma-san!" they scream, and wave flags and signs with his name on them that make his eyebrows twitch. Mamori's eyebrows twitch too, and then Hiruma fires his rifle into the sky on the screen, sending Sena and the other players sprinting down the field (and sending Nagano-san cowering behind the fangirls in the corner of the frame). The fangirls swoon and wave their handmade signs some more, while shouting, "Hiruma-san is so cool!" or worse, "Marry me, Hiruma-san!"

Hiruma looks like he wants to shoot them. He probably will one day, Mamori thinks, but only when there isn't a camera there to collect any evidence. He knows better than that and Mamori knows that he knows better than that.

The fangirls continue swooning after him in the background of the footage, and Mamori almost smirks a little at the slight irritation she can see just under the surface of his expression as he is forced to ignore them because he knows that they're the types of fans that only get even more encouraged if he pays them any mind, no matter how sinister.

For a moment, Mamori thinks it would be some sort of hilarious justice if he ended up with a girl like that, one who just doesn't understand him at all.

After all, Hiruma is the kind of person who can't abide by girls too dumb to realize they should be wary of him, especially those who think all of his movements are designed to look cool without realizing that everythinghe does is actually a carefully calculated portion of a greater equation that will lead to a predetermined, specifically desired outcome which Hiruma has been working towards since the very first moment he decided to move—or act— in the first place.

That's just how he's always been.

And that—abruptly— is when Mamori finally gets everything.

She sighs and flips the television off.

Mamori arrives for morning practice with fresh towels and hand-washed water bottles filled with filtered water for the team. Hiruma is already in the club house working when she arrives and for a moment she wonders if he ever even left last night. He's in a fresh T-shirt though, so she supposes that he did in fact go home; he sits in front of the simulation board with his computer, his hands occasionally moving the little chessmen pieces atop the model field on the table in front of him whenever he comes up with a particularly brilliant play.

Mamori decisively plops the towels and clean water bottles down on the table right on top of the model field. Some of the chessmen go scattering.

He doesn't react to the disruption visibly, though she is surprised when he suddenly snaps his computer closed and puts it aside so that he can lean back in his seat to regard her carefully. "Something you want to say, Shit-for Manager?" he asks, and is clearly sizing her up.

She faces him evenly. "You're not sending Nagano-san to Sudan," are the first words out of her mouth, because if she doesn't get that out of the way now, their ensuing argument will probably make her forget about the poor guy. Then, even if they end up resolving everything else, she'll find out three months from now that the guy is running from lions on the African plains instead of from linebackers on a college football field.

Hiruma just snorts and brushes the towels off of his simulation board with one deft movement. "Of course not. He's going to the Ivory Coast."

She glares. "So every time a nice boy talks to me you're going to have him deported?"

"The Japanese government has people deported. I have no power over any of that, I'm just a third-year highschooler," Hiruma says, and flashes a grin. "And if they're being deported, maybe they're not as nice as you think they are."

Mamori crosses her arms and sees through it all despite his shark-like grin and his carefree address; the endgame, the logic, the motivation, and the inevitable conclusion are all right there in front of her. She also knows the way she's going to finish this is almost like playing right into his hands except it doesn't quite feel that way at the same time. One, because she's either going to make him deeply regret this or eventually turn him into less of an emotional retard, and two, because there's a small thrill racing up and down her spine right now, one that makes her think that she might be just as screwed up in the head as Hiruma is, only much better at hiding it.

"You'll have to buy me dinner once in a while," she tells him, because of course the only logical conclusion to the rules Hiruma set forth on who gets to take her out is that he isn't very likely to try and deport himself. "Or take me on a walk to somewhere nice that doesn't involve guns or shooting or threatening or blackmailing anyone. I don't like action movies and dessert is mandatory. Call me by name and not Shitty Manager or Shit-for Manager or Fucking Manager. Deal?"

He continues to just look at her as she finishes, almost like he hadn't heard a word she'd just said. Absolute silence reigns for a good five minutes in the club room.

Then, as calm as ever, Hiruma finally points towards the storage closet, where the muddy tackle dummies sit, all in need of a good scrubbing after the pounding they received during yesterday's practice. "Don't you have something better to do than nag, Fucking Anezaki?" he asks, deliberately.

She blinks.

Then snorts and wordlessly gets to work.

She might be smiling a little.

A week later, when Nagano-san's picture is in one of the national newspapers talking about the Bucks' upcoming breakout season, Mamori takes the fact that he is not anywhere near the continent of Africa as an official sign that she and Hiruma are dating now.

And so far, it's been about as easy as defusing a bomb in the middle of a war-torn jungle blindfolded, with her leg on fire, and one hand tied behind her back.

Or, at least in Mamori's world, what one would call a piece of cake.

END