[Fanfic, 100% Orange Juice] Fear Response

Series: 100% Orange Juice
Length: 1234 words
Genre: Comedy
BD: This was not where I expected this to go.

Arthur was not, by any means, a small man. If you took his ears into account – and it would be unwise for your continued wellbeing not to – he stood at almost seven foot. The bits of him that were not ears (which were surprisingly soft and delicate) were invariably made of tight, wirey muscle, the kind that back alley brawlers aspired to and chefs would discard as being too manly to cook.

As such, there wasn't too much that he was scared of. Certainly, there was Aru, but Aru seemed to inspire the same vague, existential dread in almost everybody she encountered. The girl always felt like she was judging you, and that her judgement had some pretty hefty weight attached to it. She also would occasionally go out at night and come back, bruised, swollen and scarred, with the excuse that she had had a sudden urge to go and fight bears. Arthur wasn't an idiot. He was fairly sure that she wasn't fighting bears, but he was also fairly sure that whatever fights she got into she won, and by a very wide margin at that.

He discovered his second fear on a peaceful Thursday afternoon, when a young man burst into the Rbit room sweating profusely and yelling. Arthur peered at him over the top of his sunglasses; the boy was wearing a school uniform, but not one that Arthur recognised.

“Where?! I saw him come in here!” the boy shouted.

Arthur put down the glass he had been polishing. He sometimes forgot he didn't work in a bar, and spent two to three hours polishing the same glass with a rag. It soothed his thirst for justice, in ways he could not even begin to fathom. “Oi, oi. Quit yelling in my shop. Now tell me what you want.”

The boy looked Arthur up and down; the rabbit saw the boy's eyes go to his feet, up to his face, his feet again, and then to the tips of his ears. Arthur grinned, and forsook his traditional slouch to stand up straight, a practice known in the world of shady business as 'looming'. Arthur was very good at looming, and was rewarded by the boy tensing his entire body at once.

Despite that, his voice was cool and languid when he spoke. “I saw a boy dressed in girl's clothes come in here. Where is he?”

“A boy?” Arthur snorted. “Listen. You and me might be the only males ever to have set foot in this shop. We have an exclusive clientèle. And trust me, kid – I don't think you're it. If you're looking for boys dressed as girls, look somewhere else.”

The boy's eyebrows narrowed. He had fine features – maybe a little too fine. But his shoulders, now that Arthur looked at them, were surprisingly broad, and his steps were a little heavier than they should be for a guy his height. The looked Arthur square in the eye, a defiant set to his jaw. The ceiling fan whirred overhead, pitifully straining against the humid summer air.

“That boy,” the young man said, touching his palm to his chest, “is my most precious person. If I have to fight you to get to him, then so be it.”

It was traditional, at this point, for there to be a moment of silence in which the challenge was allowed to resonate. Arthur was not particularly interested in tradition, and burst out laughing immediately. “Heh. That's somethin' else, kid. I don't know anything about this boy you're looking for, but I can see you're too dumb to listen to your seniors.”

“And I can see you're too ignorant to give up the game. This is why unrefined men like you make me sick. You have no respect for the finer feelings of a man's soul,” the boy spat.

Arthur felt his jaw grinding, and he took two very firm, deliberate steps towards his opponent. “You're real brave to come in here and talk to me about a man's soul, boy. Lucky for you, I got a little sympathy left for idiots too dumb to back down. Come over here. I'll teach you how men settle things.”

He made a show of turning his back to the boy, and set down a stool on either side of the shop counter. They were good stools. He had once hit a man in the head with one and the stool very resoundingly won, to cheers from the audience. It went on to become champion of inanimate objects MMA for two consecutive years.

“We'll settle this with an arm wrestle. If you win, I'll help you look for this precious person of yours. If I win, you're going home.”

“And if I refuse?” the boy asked archly.

“Then you're a coward, and you're going home in an ambulance,” Arthur said, putting his elbow on the counter. “Your choice, kid.”

“Tch. Fine. But I won't hold back for a brute like you.”

With that, the boy did something that Arthur wasn't expecting: he started to quickly unbutton his shirt. The motions were practised, efficient. With one final flourish he tossed it to the floor, revealing a body packed with a surprising amount of muscle, glistening with sweat from his earlier running. He looked Arthur in the eye, and smiled wanly. “Having second thoughts?”

Arthur groaned. “Kid... this is gettin' weird. I don't know if you did that to throw me or what, but it ain't gonna make your arm work any better.”

“What? Don't you have the confidence to do something like this? I thought you were a bigger man than that,” the boy taunted.

It was bait. Arthur knew it was bait. Rabbits knew bait when they saw it. But with all the testosterone and talk about men's souls, he wasn't about to let some skinny punk have anything over him. “I can't believe I'm doin' this. But men meet on a level playing field,” he said, undoing his collar.

That was why, when she came home from a lovely lunch and strode into the shop from the back entrance, Aru found two very sweaty, half-naked men holding hands and grunting profusely. But Aru, although rather a smaller rabbit than Arthur, was quite used to weird occurrences. She turned to QP, who had dropped her bag of shopping to the floor in absolute open-mouthed astonishment, and said, in the lowest voice she could muster, “Maybe we ought to come back later. A lot later. Maybe we could stay at your house...?”

Aru's lowest voice, however, was not low enough. The violet-haired boy glanced at her. He glanced at QP. His face did an interesting manoeuvre where it rearranged all its features twice before settling into the delighted expression a crocodile wears when something swims towards its jaws. He said one accusing, breathless word.

“Kyupita.”

Aru looked at QP. QP looked at Aru. Arthur looked at his opponent, who had ceased paying attention and had his hand smashed violently against the counter.

“Aru? I'm really, really sorry,” QP said, putting her shopping on the counter. Then, in a voice that was shaking perhaps a little too much to be called 'calm', she said something else.

“Hyper Mode.”

As the growing swell of luminous bullets overtook him and began shredding the structure of the shop, Arthur – at long last – found something he thought worthy of being feared.