AN: My New Years contribution as well as my first K fanfic. Hope you enjoy!

Summary:

The Special Operations Unit of Scepter 4. Courageous. Fit. Powerful. The elite. And yet all members, when faced with a tower of purple gunk were reduced to near tears. It truly was a sight to see. It was easy to keep a straight face.

Warning: Language.

It was easy to keep a straight face.

School your features. School your emotions. School everything. Keep a finger on every thread of control you have, and manipulate it. Manipulation is key in a world of vice and roguery, false truths and virgin corruption and the one who holds such a key is king. Second to no one. Equal to no one. Friend to no one.

And he will always be king.

He will always be king for every second of every minute of every day. 365 days. 525,600 minutes. 31,536,000 seconds. Always a king. Never able to lift his veil of lies from his face and be a human. Never be himself. Reisi Munakata. He couldn't breathe as himself, for himself. Instead he breathed for his subordinates. He breathed for the people but didn't breathe for himself. He wasn't people, after all. He was a vessel of power. Not sentient. An object. Empty. How pitiful.

Much like the happenings of the office party he was attending.

The Special Operations Unit of Scepter 4. Courageous. Fit. Powerful. The elite. And yet all members, when faced with a tower of purple gunk were reduced to near tears. It truly was a sight to see.

Akiyama, Himori. Benzai, Yūjirō. Kamo, Ryūhō. Dōmyōji, Andy. Enomoto, Tatsuya. Fuse, Daiki. Gotō, Ren. Hidaka, Akira. Fushimi, Suruhiko.

Scepter 4's finest, handpicked by the King himself, these people are the only ones that the King entrusts his life to and they, in turn, trust their King with their own. He held a great respect for these men. However, his respect was being sorely tried.

All were deathly pale as they faced humanity's greatest foe. Red bean paste.

Benzai's hand gripped his sword with shaking hands as he swallowed the desire to cut his share of red bean paste where it stood, face almost manic with pure unadulterated fear where before it could be trusted on to be the only calm face in the room. His brown hair dishevelled and his coat sleeve lined with snot and tears as he furiously wiped the fluid from his face.

Kamo was in a state of unwavering fury, his eyes were alight with a determined fire as if the plate in front of him had insulted his great ancestors. Munakata was sure he could hear the man accuse the food's mere existence as an 'act of high treason against fine cuisine' and if he found out, in the morning, a series of well thought out, meticulously calculated diagrams that illustrated the death of one blonde haired Lieutenant scratched out on the table, then the Captain said not a word. Although he would have to consider the man's worth as a strategist. The plans were very, very good.

Dōmyōji's usually easy going and child-like nature was replaced by a sincerity that seemed to radiate a promise of bad things to come, and, if Munakata was speaking honestly, the thought caused him to feel slightly uneasy. He chanted over and over 'snuff out the unclean, the unwanted, the unnecessary' for the remainder of the night while glaring daggers at the pile of purple gunk. He woke in solitary confinement the next day with an emergency psychiatrist sat next to his bed. If he ever heard the words 'and how do you feel about that?' one more time, well, then the rope he carried with him ever since could finally be put to good use.

Enomoto was not to be found at the table whatsoever, instead he sat by himself in one corner practising what Munakata assumed was some kind of devil worship as he offered the blood a virgin (Munakata did not want to know where he obtained such a thing) to a rather sinister looking idol. He was promptly evacuated from the room and found himself in a church with a priest who informed of his impending exorcism. Enomoto would later deny the scream ("I did not scream like a girl, Hidaka!") that left his mouth.

Tatsuya Fuse, clearly being the one with the most sense in his clan, had disposed of the red bean paste, the question now became how to rid his coat pocket of the arguably toxic substance without touching the abhorrent stuff. Clearly not the most sensible in the clan then.

Gotō and Hidaka. Munakata didn't even want to think about what they were doing shovelling the delicacy into every nook and cranny of the inside of the Lieutenant's clothes. The next morning, Munakata made sure to be passing the girls dormitories the exact moment when Miss Awashima found herself to be wearing her favourite food. Gotō and Hidaka had also spent a suspiciously long amount of time searching for one of Gotō's prized possessions in the corridor leading to the women's dormitories where they claimed to have dropped it.

That left Fushimi and Akiyama.

Fushimi refused to touch it. He would have to chop his arm off if even one tiny bit of the flesh on his hands touched the thing. He was dead serious.

He was just finished glaring a hole into the Lieutenant's back, who was asking if anyone wanted second helpings, before shovelling the spawn of Satan onto their already full plates regardless, when he registered the clatter of a spoon to his left. The Blue King, in all his pristine perfect glory was sitting with his mouth hung wide open, sweat on his brow and glasses falling off his nose, staring in shock at the horror sat next to him.

At first Fushimi wondered exactly what he had done to shock the Commander before very quickly becoming annoyed at Munakata's vacant expression. Following the King's eye line, he counted four seconds when his heart had stopped beating. Then the world threatened to darken as he began to feel faint.

Himori Akiyama. Was. Eating. The. Shit. And fucking smiling!

He had cleaned his plate of red bean paste entirely and was now on his second helping. And he was still fucking smiling.

Both the Commander and Fushimi's eyebrows twitched.

Only one thought circulated through their brains.

He must really want to get laid.

Fushimi's version had a few more choice words, and Munakata's version was a lot less vulgar being rather poetic instead, granted.

The Lieutenant was too busy mooning over the messy haired individual to notice the horrified faces of her colleagues but the sound of the spoon clattering against the floor soon brought her back from her reverie.

"Captain? Are you alright?" She looked down at her superior's plate, "You haven't eaten anything, are you sure you're alright?"

As he gulped down his fourth spoon of the vile food, all the while internally cursing every single human being that produced such a food with such a mouth that even Suoh Mikoto would wince, Reisi Munakata was proud to say, he kept a straight face.

The next morning, Awashima was unfortunately, once again, ignorant of the torture she put her men through.

Akiyama, it seemed had achieved his goal, as he entered work the next morning with a shit-eating grin on his face as Fushimi would so eloquently put it, but it still remains unclear by whom.

And Fushimi could never see Akiyama in the same way since that night but still found the young man to be the least annoying imbecile in the Special Operations Unit so was still seen with him more than with anyone else. And his attitude towards Awashima worsened a considerable degree.

Munakata, on the other hand, needed a drink, and a smoke. Kusanagi was very understanding when he learned the reason as to why Munakata was drunk out of his mind on Bar Homra's doorstep at eleven in the night and simply offered a comforting pat on the back. Munakata smiled and let the bartender know that Seri said hello. At Yata's temper, Munakata informed him of Fushimi's well-being. And so he was left to sober up under the watchful eye of Homra's number two and the perceptive eye of their King.

What a great way, Munakata thought idly, as he stood outside Bar Homra as the clocks hit twelve and the sounds of HOMRA's cheers were drowned out by the exploding fireworks, painting the night sky in brilliant glittering colours, to start the New Year. He was also briefly relieved by the fact that Suoh would never be able to see him in such a state, after all, you can't keep a straight face for everyone.