a/n: no this isn't yaoi, sorry

everything mentioned belongs to Square Enix/Jupiter

Joshua Kiryu didn't allow his flawless smug demeanour to be rumpled by much. He'd given up numerous things since ascending to Composer-hood and subsequently a higher plane of existence, such as frustration, genuine anger, confusion, legitimate enjoyment, and chocolate, for it went straight to His godly thighs. But there was one thing that pissed Joshua off to no end. It ripped holes in the fabric of incorrigible insufferability that swathed Joshua Kiryu's psyche; it pressed all of the buttons in his brain, including the large dangerously-red one lodged in the frontal lobe that was labelled "EMERGENCY GODLY PRIDE SHUTOFF".

That thing was crabs.

Crabs! Ugh, Joshua hated the damn things. He unapologetically despised every single crab ever to exist. He'd been known to sic Heavenly Jesus Beams on the inhabitants of Okinawa Beach, when paying a fellow Composer there a visit. Gads, if the way those things skittered around with their pincers, lying in wait for an ankle to terrorise didn't set the raggedy boy off like a goddamned bonfire, nothing would.

The hatred actually stemmed from some deeply-rooted Freudian excuses, freshly-baked in the oven of Joshua's mortal days. He remembered them well, even though they were ages ago. Even as a mortal, Joshua Kiryu had been just as popular with crazy depraved teenage girls who rampantly fetishised same-sex couples of the male persuasion as he was as a supreme ruler of a Japanese shopping district. The rosy days he spent with his harem of disillusioned classmates, murdering emo kids and mathematicians and going on long spiels about Uwada Dogen, were wacky and charming, suitable for that of a slice-of-life anime. And as any good slice-of-life anime does, Joshua's mortal life happened to have a few beach episodes.

Oh, Lord, the beach episodes.

They'd seemed like a good idea at first. The short-lived Joshua Kiryu had always had somewhat of a thing for psychoanalysis, and although he himself was actually asexual and didn't find himself experiencing any aesthetic or sexual attraction to others, the change of atmosphere whenever the time arose to strip half-naked and splash around in salt water piqued the young fluff-head's interest. So naturally, Joshua would begin the first step of the social experiment, whenever June or July rolled around- "I hear train tickets are discounted for large groups recently" or "beach volleyball is meant to be popular nowadays, apparently" or some other lame-ass excuse, and it would begin. The girls would agonise over a few days about what bikini to wear or would a one-piece be better and ooo what would Joshy like, and Joshua would turn up at the train station in his usual dusty gray oversized bowling shirt, a pair of dorky sandals and the same black-n-purple pair of swimming trunks found in the skip at the back of Lapin Angelique. (They were in the skip because the marketing department had discovered most goths didn't like swimming or stripping off in general; mostly because the tanning ruined the illusion of corpsehood. What really was there to do? Princess K had thrown a fit at the suggestion of a bargain bin in her bunny realm, goodness me.) Train rides would ensue, filled with giggling and chattering on behalf of the girls, who innocently wondered what kind of musculature Joshua was rocking on his slender bishonen frame. Joshua actually didn't work out at all, and didn't sport rock-hard abs, or guns. Well, actually, he did have guns; two of them, and one of them was for emotionally crippling former partners and forcing them to take the weight of an entire city onto his bony shoulders. But they were actual guns, not just a metaphor for muscles, and alas Joshua remained a skinny, sickly waif, and the bowling shirt stayed on.

The concern was not in the bowling shirt. What really gave the beach episodes their nightmarish qualities were the crabs.

The beach seemed an anti-climax at first. Joshua didn't know how to swim, so he mostly just remained safely on a deck chair, shielding his pasty skin from the sun's evil rays, and occasionally chatted up a girl or two with philosophical psycho-babble to keep things interesting. It is at this point that I would like to mention that Joshua's "harem" was wholly comprised of a lesbian squadron. They felt about as much attraction to him as he did to them. He was just the safest male to be around, given that he had no interest in asking them to perform bizarre sexual favours. Well, actually, he did, but they didn't know that. They simply mistook him for a heterosexual and decided to humor him, when actually he had mistook them for heterosexuals and decided to humor them, which quickly spiralled into an entire complex paradigm of bait-and-switches.

Soon, however, the terrors of the very first Beach Episode extended beyond its existence as an entirely unrequited activity. Soon, the crabs arose from their hiding spots.

At first it was one tiny scuttler on Joshua's pinky finger, which he had regarded with flippant disrespect- "get off, you flagrant little bugger, I'm trying not to burn here"- and it had been thrown into the distant sea. But more came, and they came in swarms. Joshua would have been lucky for a ditzy little nip on the finger at that point. Droves and droves of crustaceans coming towards him, and he wasn't about to start running- he'd had the pleasure of reminding Neku Sakuraba on Day 2, Week 2 that he didn't do the whole sweating thing, thank you very much. In hindsight, Sakuraba's begrudging acceptance of that little trait had been a miracle of kindness compared to the act of downright brutality the crabs took Joshua with once they got to him from the deck chair. They nipped, and they pinched, and they sawed, and they whacked, and they bit- did crabs even have teeth?- and they just downright made life hell for the poor prettyboy. He was so upset about it, too. Mr Hanekoma never heard the end of that story.

But even Composer-hood hadn't saved Joshua from the crabs.

They were back again, in Noise forms with cool swirly tattoos and beady yellow eyes, in the goddamn Reaper's Game, no less. The Reaper's Game was something Joshua himself oversaw- how the hell did they find their way in? They must have cut a gaping hole in the Composer's ethereal glowing subconscious to leak their way into the Game's infrastructure. Damned things!

It seemed like a nice way of seeking revenge at first. Joshua could dial E for Erasure on the little bastards; dropping cars and telephone booths and street signs on them telekinetically, but he had to admit, it frustrated him so that it wouldn't wipe them out at first hit, and Neku had to mess around with psychs in another zone to help him kill them. Nevertheless, Joshua did take delight in it. "Rest in peace~" indeed.

Of course, the petit prince could never be happy and content for long.

Sho Minamimoto was a pest, but he was also a genius, albeit a maniacal, twisted genius. It was just enough that Minamimoto could locate the leakage in the Composer's mental state, and that leakage manifested itself in the form of the Carcinopunk.

The Carcinopunk was every single one of the mortal Joshua's nightmares, condensed into one physical form of Soul bound to a pin somewhere. Since his first encounter with the damned things, he was looking forward to crushing their fragile exoskeletons beneath another bus shelter, but it was not so. These exoskeletons were not fragile, they were made of metal- some kind of whack ultradimensional Taboo titanium, no doubt. Joshua remembered bitterly closing his eyes after getting a 9- above 5 on the little High-N-Low game, scoring him a decent Fusion star for his efforts- and waiting for the impact of gooey static-meat oozing beneath the damn thing's shell, sending it straight on the one-way system to Hell as usual, but instead there was a resounding metallic CLANG, the word "BLOCK!" had appeared in outlined lettering on a metaphysical lettering known as the Game Screen, and the Carcinopunk, almighty pain in the ass, lived. Well, not lived, but continued to exist. Consequently, it continued to torment the poor Kiryu.

Imagine Joshua's delight when the gloves could come off a little more.

It wasn't exactly delight at the time, per se, mostly because he'd just had to nuke a Taboo rhino to avoid his own untimely demise, but once he'd realised what he could do now that he could levitate and fire Jesus Beams at the unfortunates down below, maniacal laughter was heard.

The next Taboo Noise battle- well, confrontation, as poor Nekky was only trying to scour the minds of innocent Shibuyans for juicy gossip and ended up getting whisked away into another dimension by Andy Biersack's previously unheard-of animal adoption center, again. This time, Joshua was prepared, however. He took a look into those pixellated beady eyes, and thought, justice.

He had sprang into flight with the grace of an angel, if Napoleon Dynamite had somehow died and went to Heaven and achieved levitation in the process. He'd prepared his orange flip phone- man alive, a flip phone? How overdue is this game for a sequel, anyway?- and while Neku was off in the other zone blasting frogs with saccharine such things as Cutie Beams and Octo Squeezes and Demon's Hatred, Joshua had taken the opportunity to discard his position of condescending reserved all-knowing teammate to unleash the wrath of the Composer upon those sinners. Make your way through the combo map, Joshy, that's right, go for the 0, only thing less than 1- now destroy.

He had focused his godly furore onto one Carcinopunk specifically, making sure to grind the damn thing into Shibuya space dust, and surely enough it was merciful enough to comply to his demands, with a satisfying ropey squeal of pain and a fuzz of static. From the perspective of the game player, it was difficult to see Joshua's expression in detail amidst pixels and a mop of French-gray hair, but a smirk of pure unadulterated victory had made its way onto the dead god's face.

But he had not taken into account the crabs on the other side.

He remembered their existence specifically after some kind of spherical tattooed flying chainsaw had flung itself mercilessly into his wiry abdomen and proceeded to beat the hell out of him, wearing down on Joshua's side of the HP meter like nobody's business.

It was heralded with possibly the weakest, most submissive noise to be emitted by a single entity since the invention of fanfiction- "whaaauuUUUuughhhaaiitt?".

No more Fusion stars were to be earned in that battle, oh no- half the time Joshua was lucky to get a quarter of the way across the combo map and its merciless blank squares that yielded no numerals. It was only after Neku's apparent successes in the other zone regarding a sequence of "uppercutting those mo'fos" with whatever the hell those J of the M pins were called that Joshua could proceed with his partner into yet another reduction.

Joshua had tried to keep it subtle. "Neku," he had called across zones in his usual inclined nasal tones, "do you need a break?"

Sakuraba wasn't in one of his good moods that day. Alas, there was no "break".

Everyone who knew the man had heard Sanae Hanekoma's various speeches about "enjoying the moment" and "trusting your partner"- apparently, that was the reason for the shared HP meter. Neku had trusted his partner too much vis-a-vis not getting his ass kicked by a load of crabs, and it was only by the frantic beeping sounds and sudden loss of stamina did Neku realise that.

They were greeted with Erasure, and a Game Over screen.

"How could you, Neku?"