Work Text:
“Love Machine is in my phone!”
Kazuma paused in his typing, letting King Kazuma fall into a ready stance awaiting his next command, and reached up to adjust the headphones he wore. He didn’t have any music playing, so they didn’t interfere with him hearing Kenji’s voice. Wearing them was a habit more than anything when Kenji was around. The usually introverted, focused math genius had a habit of talking to himself when he thought no one was listening.
Glancing back over his shoulder, he found Kenji typing furiously at his phone with both thumbs. He was breathing through gritted teeth, eyes narrowed. He still failed to be anything approaching intimidating.
“This is the third phone, and it’s brand new. Is my OZ account infected?” Kenji muttered.
Even after the original ‘Love Machine’ was taken care of, there were more than a few hackers that liked to affix the name to their work. Most of the so-named viruses were shoddy failures, but of course there were rumors that some fragment of the original was still around causing mischief. Kazuma didn’t take those entirely seriously.
“Um, Kazuma?” Kenji looked up, catching Kazuma eyeing him but not seeming to mind. “If you get any mail from my number, please don’t open it.”
“What makes you think it’s Love Machine?” Kazuma finally asked, not rising to join in Kenji’s fluster.
“It’s locked in my old infected avatar and everything.” Kenji moved to one side, tilting the phone to show him a familiarly malevolent, mouse-eared figure. (Privately, Kazuma had been disturbed at first to think that shark-toothed thing was the avatar Kenji chose. Kenji insisted it hadn’t looked like that before, but the round little squirrel suited him much better.)
“Good thing I’ve only put in three numbers so far,” Kenji continued “But it keeps messing with my pictures, and. . .” he trailed off. He’d hit the menu item for his phone’s gallery when he mentioned it, perhaps by unthinking habit, but the first thing that popped up was not what Kazuma might have expected.
Kazuma couldn’t recall ever seeing quite that expression on his own face before. He was smiling, but not the pose-hold-don’t-blink smile of a conscious portrait. Opposite him in the picture, Kenji was laughing with that good-natured, sheepish smile Kazuma had come to know very well. He could practically call up a picture of that smile in his head, yet he was never tired of seeing it. The whole picture was at an low, awkwardly tilted angle.
“I took that by accident. I was trying to hang up and hit the camera,” Kenji explained all in a rush. “I should delete-”
“I’ll fix it,” Kazuma offered. His voice cracked and tried to drop an octave when he said it, leaving him gulping as if he could swallow his own voice. If Kenji said anything, Kazuma was never speaking to him again, ever.
“The picture?” Kenji had the wonderful tact to keeping looking embarrassed.
“Give me your phone, and I’ll fix it.”
He didn’t care if it was the original Love Machine that was digitally harassing Kenji. Kazuma would put a stop to it.
And. . . maybe he would copy that picture before it could be deleted.