2568/A Ton of Milk Bread

A Ton of Milk Bread
Date of Scene:	28 May 2025
Location:	Mamoru's Apartment
Synopsis:	Kazuo flops on a stressy groom whose bride is currently evil. CW: Cute.
Cast of Characters:	Mamoru Chiba, Kazuo Saitou
Tinyplot:	BMC: Wicked Ride
Tinyplot2:	Black Moon Clan

---

Mamoru Chiba has posed:
Mamoru is planted on one of the couches, which he's turned around to face the windows (casters are amazing), and he's physically fine-- it's been over three weeks since getting back from Nemesis. Three weeks of healing, three weeks of being clingy, three weeks of waiting for the girls to arrive back in this dimension...

Three weeks of flipflopping between masking his anxiety really well and not masking it at all.

The prince lets his hand drop to the floor holding his phone as if the thing were too, too heavy. It's well past the middle of the night and there's school tomorrow, so most sane people are in bed. Even most Shitennou are in bed. Which, Mamoru figures, is why none of them is getting mad at him in the group chat.

Kazuo Saitou has posed:
He's facing the windows. That doesn't guarantee he won't pick up on the tall, ghost-pale figure in deep-blue pajamas, padding silently on bare feet around to an end of the couch not currently occupied by Mamoru. After all. Mamoru, when he's paying attention, just knows these things.

And if he's not paying attention, well, he'll certainly notice when Kazuo drops onto the couch and Mamoru, sprawling across him in the same manner that Mamoru let his hand fall.

What's the worst that could happen? They're on the seventh floor. If Mamoru startle-henshins and throws him through the window, Kazuo will have whole seconds'" to transform and get his hover on.

(... okay, he might have to clean up blood from glass shards off the balcony.)

Mamoru Chiba has posed:
Facing and distracted by the windows, in fact. And not actively looking for Kazuo, or anyone, since he's in his living room and it's late and...

Flumph.

"Ngahk!" oofs the Mamoru in startlement and being landed on, but he doesn't startle-henshin at least. Instead, he lifts his hand and switches hands over Kazuo's head so he can put his phone on the back of the couch, where it's less likely to get stepped on.

And then his hands slide around Kazuo's waist, and he squeezes, then huffs out, "Heavy. A ton of feathers. A ton of milk bread. Kazuo she took her business card out of her cleavage after stretching."

Kazuo Saitou has posed:
"Milk bread," repeats Kazuo with amusement, and drapes the more accessible of his arms around Mamoru in turn. Head's tucked down against him for a moment, warm and close. "Of all of that," he muses, "the part I'm most surprised by is her having a business card."

Mamoru Chiba has posed:
"Yeah, milk bread. Sweet, thick, and fluffy. And yet, a ton of it still weighs a ton," Mamoru says a little smugly, breath light, heart beating fast. He runs his fingers through Kazuo's hair while Kazuo's head is tucked down, and he's silent for a moment, fingers trailing ghost-warmth against the other boy's skin.

Ghost-warmth and sunshine, love and hope and relief and fear and the sickness he feels over what he felt was wrong with Usagi. He shows it in his touch. "She's relatively safe," he finally says, "but she's allergic to Dark Energy. She's so sick. Worse than I was. I have no idea when she had the chance to make business cards but they're disturbing and cute at the same time. Like her right now."

Shows it in his touch: she felt bloated with power but sick, twisted, turbulent underneath the radiant joy she takes in being with their daughter, underneath the teasing, underneath and woven around and through her wanting Mamoru with them.

The card, he shows in Kazuo's head also: black with a big pink bunny head and a smaller silver bunny head, and on it is written

New Moon
Wicked Lady's Assistant Extraordinaire!
Call me, Mamoru~
xxx-xxx-xxxx

"I have to go with them," he says, and there's apology in it, and there's a flicker of the mulish obstinance Endymion always gets when his mind's set on something and he's just announcing it instead of asking if he should. "Without dark energy. If they won't let me go with them without it, I'll get a thing from Riventon that makes it look like I'm using it, maybe. Or I'll just cry a lot."

Kazuo Saitou has posed:
"I," Kazuo says with all the solemn dignity he can muster when cat-boneless and muffled against Mamoru's shirt, "am not fluffy."

Ghost-warmth meets love in turn, and a controlled trace of clinging - he barely let it out till Mamoru was whole, but the relief still manifests in stealing contact as often as he can manage it. And Usagi...

... he understands that sickness. And faith that the wrongness will be conquered, he knows, does not make the sickness less in the now.

(The imagined-memory of Usagi having been let at the giant chocolate delivery surfaces, a cartoon of her draped helplessly over a pile of cartons with swollen stomach and unusable hands, undone by her own glory in deliciousness.)

And then Mamoru says he has to come with them, and there's a flicker he feels in return, an instant chasm not of fear or despair or pain but of matter-of-fact pattern recognition: this is the time he won't come back.

The following flash of Kazuo's anger is self-directed, and he does the mental equivalent of hopping over the abyss and ignoring it away. "Demande's going to flatten you again if he gets the chance," Kazuo observes. "Which things do you want me to take out of your bedroom so Zoi can't set them on fire when he learns about this plan?"

Mamoru Chiba has posed:
"Wicked Lady won't let him near me," Mamoru says with perfect confidence, a confidence he tries to share through his touch, but his faith is so different from Kazuo's faith that it doesn't really help. "Neither will New Moon."

There's a hitch of his breath, and a roiling storm of emotion he's feeling about his Usagi, about his Chibiusa. "New Moon calls herself Wicked Lady's most prized possession, and Wicked Lady got incandescently furious that Demande broke her other favorite toy, when she found me in there."

His breath shudders a little in the exhale. "They both have so much power. They want me to be with them, but they aren't making me. And-- I do plan on going back and forth. I'm pretty sure they'll let me do whatever as long as I acknowledge Wicked Lady as the best and most important and prettiest and wisest and most flawless, which as far as daughters are concerned, she absolutely is."

His hand continues to card through Kazuo's silky hair, and now there's a kiss near his forehead, and now there's Mamoru shifting underneath Kazuo to get more comfortable. It may be Kazuo ignoring the abyss, but there's a helpless little note of apology anyway. "I can mitigate the damage they do. I can make sure they don't do anything they'll really and truly regret. I can keep trying to reach them. And I can make sure that they arrive at the moon wedding on time and face an amphitheatre's worth of mahoujin ready to make sure there are no vows under the influence of dark energy."

Kazuo Saitou has posed:
Mamoru's confidence is acceptable to a point. That point may have been somewhat weakened by other Clever Plans in the past, but resignation is generably an acceptable substitute.

(There is a flicker of mental image, of blue hair. Saphir works for Demande. Saphir is clever. Wicked Lady can only stop things she recognizes and notices...)

Not his decision. And his worries for Mamoru are far less than Mamoru's worries about Wicked Lady and New Moon. Possessions. Toys. Yes. Kazuo can't argue: they need him there.

It always comes down to that, doesn't it. An anchor to sanity, to hope, to connection and caring. It's not enough, not always. But it's a necessary element.

And then.

"... because of course. Why would mere villainy and darkness and destruction get in the way of everyone you know making Bridezilla jokes for the rest of your apparently very long natural lives."

Mamoru Chiba has posed:
Shifting again, Mamoru's other hand comes up to touch the side of Kazuo's face, then tuck silvery-white hair behind a pierced ear, and he just breathes for a moment, being present with Kazuo. His heartbeat has calmed to a steadier pace.

"That's the thing. I think-- I think it got Chibiusa first, and the memory in New Moon's mind was of Chibiusa's eyes glowing as Usagi accepted darkness from her. So if she gets Bridezilla comments, they'll only be a little fair."

And there's where there's another shuddering breath, and Mamoru ducks his head to half-hide his face against Kazuo's head. In there is a thought, Usagi never promised not to pick Dark Energy up. And it's not just dark energy. It's brainwashing. Because of course it is.

"You are also going to have a very long natural life. Kazuo, fuck, I'm so scared." It starts laughing and it ends shaking. "For them. For us. That thing on Nemesis is their power."

Kazuo Saitou has posed:
"That would make sense. Chibiusa was the one they scared away on purpose. The one they wanted to run. Whatever she ran into, it was waiting for her." Matter-of-fact, emotions uninvolved, just abstractly working out the sequence of events.

Until the Bridezilla is referenced again, and Kazuo pauses to start to smirk at Mamoru and make another joke - but there's that shuddering breath, and Mamoru ducks his head, and Kazuo brings his arms up around Mamoru's shoulders. Cradling. Giving him a place to hide, for a moment.

"That thing on Nemesis," he murmurs, "was what we were always going to have to fight. The Black Moon are just its pawns. If we dealt with them and not it, it'd just wait for us to leave it another opening." He exhales quietly. "We knew the black crystals were channeling something. Now we know what. We just have to figure out how to get at it."

Mamoru Chiba has posed:
He likes to hide. He needs to hide, sometimes, and Kazuo knows how to protect him when he's like that, and so does Usagi. At least Rashmi and Masato and several others are learning where Mamoru's points of overwhelm are, but that's only part of it, part of the need to get small and wedge himself someplace no one can get to him, climbing the walls on the inside of his own mind--

"Okay," and it's an exhalation, eyes closed. "How do we fight a planet?"

Kazuo Saitou has posed:
"Well," says Kazuo, softly, dryly. "Apparently we've already done it once. Or at least, the rest of us have."

Hematite.

Mamoru.

King Endymion, the Senshi of Hearth and Home.

Mamoru Chiba has posed:
... 'Dirt Boy' per Usagi, the name Mamoru's wryly and slowly embracing as both silly and defiant.

The edge of what Kazuo's getting at is obliviously stepped over because it sounds like a joke and there's the mental image, swift and brittle, of the sky burning. "I don't think half-eating a planet makes you a planet, it just makes you a jerk," he says dubiously, turning it over. He's growing more aware he's missed the point. The point has stuck in the wall next to his head.

Oh. That point.

Unsure of whether or not to blush, Mamoru blushes. And then he clears his throat. "Hm, teach me, sensei. Teach me the ways of the planet-fighting. But first teach me the ways of the planet-kissing?"