FIC: "I Believe You Liar" 6/7

[soundczechfic]

Jin loves the other stuff. It’s nothing like the porn Jin saw. Kame is funny and gentle and keeps pausing to ask Jin if he wants to stop, which is kind of annoying but also really cute. His fears about his inexperience are apparently unfounded, or at least, Kame certainly seems to enjoy himself. A few times, he halts impatiently to offer instruction, but that isn’t as humiliating as Jin had anticipated. It’s kind of comfortingly familiar, really. If there is anything Jin is accustomed to, it is taking barked orders from Kamenashi. Sheepishly, Jin has to admit that it kind of turns him on. Admit to himself, that is. He’d rather die than admit it to Kame.

When they drift off to sleep, Kame is so reassuringly solid that Jin doesn’t have to worry about crushing him to death when he rests his head on his shoulder and wraps his arm around his waist, and he’s already seen Kame without make up, so he doesn’t have to worry about waking up and seeing a total stranger in his bed, which has happened with girls a few times.

Kame’s alarm sounds at 5am, and Jin groans unhappily, crawling on top of him and holding him down when he tries to push the blankets back and climb out of bed.

“You can’t just violate me and then leave me all alone,” he whines. “Blow it off. Whatever it is.”

“I was the one that was violated,” Kame reminds him, but his protests subside when Jin presses his mouth to the bare stretch of neck behind his ear and bites, softly, and he ends up blowing off almost a whole morning of meetings to lie in bed with Jin and fool around.

“You’re so irresponsible,” Jin teases at about 8am. He’s lying with his back to Kame’s chest and their legs tangled together, more like forks than spoons.

“Yeah, well,” Kame says, twisting his fingers through Jin’s. “I’m not going to make a habit of it. It’s a special occasion.”

“They’re all gonna think you’re hungover,” Jin says. Kame had told his manager that he’d eaten something that turned his stomach, but no doubt word is out about the halloween party. On his own, Kame would get the benefit of the doubt, but with Jin…

Kame snorts. “‘Cause you’re such a bad influence on me.”

“Yeah,” Jin agrees happily, digging his chin into Kame’s shoulder until he squirms and tries to elbow him away.

“Cut it out,” Kame snaps. “You’re so annoying.”

When Jin doesn’t stop, he threatens, “I’ll touch your collarbone,” and Jin subsides, nuzzling into his neck instead. Kame stretches and relaxes against him, all sweet and complacent again. Jin squeezes his hand. They lie in silence for a while, and Jin nearly falls asleep; Kame is so warm and comfy that it makes him feel like he might never be able to bring himself to move again.

After a while, Kame brings Jin’s fist to his lips and kisses it, asking, “Why did you choose me?”

“Huh?” Jin murmurs drowsily. “When?”

Kame talks against Jin’s knuckles. “When we were kids,” he says. “At the auditions.” He turns Jin’s hand over and presses a kiss to the inside of his wrist. “You could have talked to the kid sitting between us, but you talked to me instead.”

Jin tries to remember; it’s so long ago now and half the time he doesn’t remember what happened last week, let alone more than ten years ago. “I don’t remember any other kid,” he says.

Kame snorts. “Typical.”

“I remember you, though,” Jin says, pulling his hand free and tugging on Kame’s shoulder until he turns over and they are lying face to face. He pulls the blankets up over Kame’s bare shoulder, because he looks cold. “You were such a dork.”

“Shut up,” Kame says. “I was a late bloomer.”

“You had that stupid hair, and your face was all mixed up like someone put you together wrong and you ended up with too much eyebrow and nowhere near enough eye.”

“Shut up,” Kame says more forcefully, pinching Jin’s side painfully. “Forget I asked.”

Jin continues as if he hadn’t spoken. “And we were all supposed to write our name on a list, but everyone was fighting too much, and management just stood around watching.” In retrospect, that was probably part of the audition, but that hadn’t occurred to Jin at the time, he’d fought as hard for the pen as the rest of them. “And then all of a sudden you started bossing everyone around and making us line up all orderly and shit. You made everyone listen to you even though you were this dweeby little loser.”

Kame claws him viciously on the hip and Jin yelps.

“I thought that was pretty cool,” Jin says, and the claws at Jin’s side turn gentle and soothing.

“I don’t really remember that part,” Kame admits. He’s blushing a little, as if retroactively embarrassed for the little dictator with his spiky hair and lame zippered sweatpants.

“When you had us all queuing up you didn’t even go to the front to get the best spot,” Jin says. “And I thought maybe you had some super smart strategy so I went in the middle too.”

“I didn’t want to go first,” Kame says, apparently remembering that with greater clarity. “I didn’t even really know what we were doing there.”

“I thought, ‘that kid’s going places’,” Jin says, and Kame starts laughing.

“You were the only one who thought so,” he says, eyes sparkling, and Jin has never been so glad that he’d been the one, back then, to see what everyone else hadn’t, because it led him here, to this moment. To these arms.

“Well, I was right,” he says, “Who’s the dumbass now?”

“It’s still you,” Kame says, and swallows Jin’s outrage in a kiss.

—

Kame can’t stop smiling, even though he knows it is starting to freak everyone out. He’s been bouncing around all afternoon making a nuisance of himself, humming and giggling and generally being a pain in the ass.

Over their lunch break, he jiggles at Ueda’s side, rambling inconsequentially and eating all of the fries that Ueda rejects because of their saturated fat content. Ueda keeps staring at him as if he’s never seen him before, or at least not in a very long time.

“What is wrong with you?” he says finally, pulling his fries away irritably as if he’s going to eat them just to spite Kame.

“Nothing,” Kame says, grinning widely. “I’m just really happy to be here with the members.”

Ueda stares. “You’re being really gross.” He cringes when Kame wraps an arm around him and leans his chin on his shoulder, making kissy faces in the general vicinity of his face.

“I’m just so glad we’re friends,” Kame says, laughing with pleasure when Ueda pushes his chair out and storms off, passing Koki, who is returning from the studio floor where he has been posing for his solo shots under a blanket of falling polystyrene snow. Christmas shots already, even though it is barely November. He sits in Ueda’s vacated chair and immediately starts eating the abandoned bowl of fries.

“Ho, ho, ho,” Kame calls as he reaches out and starts pulling stray pieces of polystyrene from Koki’s white-blond hair.

“Someone’s in a good mood,” Koki says suspiciously, mouth full of food.

“Merry Christmas,” Kame responds, leaning heavily on Koki’s shoulder. He knows he’s being an obnoxious, irritating brat, but it’s been a long time since he felt this happy and he feels manic and irrepressible. He can barely keep in the giggles that are bubbling in his chest. He must look like a crazy person.

Koki watches him for a while, considering, and then he claps his arm around Kame in return and bursts into a loud, jolly rendition of Jingle Bells. Kame’s giggles burst free and he joins in, the two of them singing every Christmas carol they know, booming and happy and off-key.

—

“Does your family know about you?” Jin asks very late one night, when they are playing poker on Kame’s living room floor in their t-shirts and sweats. Kame is winning because he always wins when he’s in a good mood, and he’s always in a good mood lately. “Like. The gay stuff.”

“Yeah,” Kame says, shuffling the cards one-handed. The cards all have terrible, ugly photos of Yamapi on the back. Pi gave them to him for Christmas a few years ago. He said he found them in an idol store in Harajuku and bought a dozen decks.

“Do they know about me?” Jin asks.

Kame considers this. “No,” he says finally. “Not really.”

Jin gathers his cards up and holds them against his chest. Pi’s shiny printed face gazes back at Kame between Jin’s fingers. “What does that mean?”

Kame gets his own cards into order, remembering back to that horrible, nervewracking time when he’d made a kind of spur-of-the-moment announcement at a rare family dinner. “I told them because I was dating this guy and I thought it could be kind of serious,” he says, feeling a little thrilled when Jin makes a pissy little face at that. “And Koji was just like, ‘When did you break up with Akanishi?’”

“Are you serious?” Jin says.

“I tried to tell them that it wasn’t like that but they didn’t believe me,” Kame says. “And the more I denied it the less they believed me.”

Jin groans and buries his face in his knee. “Great, so your parents think, what, I broke your heart and then ran off to America?”

“Just my brothers,” Kame says. “You knocked up a teenager and fled to America and I hooked up with a detective on the rebound.”

“Oh, god,” Jin says, looking a bit green.

“My mother just kept sort of hinting that I should give you a second chance,” Kame says. “I don’t know what she thinks happened, exactly. Just that I apparently dumped you.”

He still remembers his mother carefully broaching the subject after he’d broken up with Tadayoshi, the detective. Jin was not long back from America the first time, and his mother must have seen them on the news, smiling and looking happy.

“Maybe he’s grown up a bit,” she kept saying.

Kame’s father’s thoughts on the subject are a total mystery. He prefers not to discuss Kame’s boyfriends directly under any circumstances. Kame would probably be more upset about that, but his father barely wants to discuss any of his brother’s love lives either, so it’s really not so bad. Especially when Kame considers how things had gone for some of his friends who had come out to family. Or all the friends who don’t feel like they can at all. His father even lets him bring guys to family events and stuff. He just refers to them as “Kazuya’s friends”. It makes it awkward when he brings someone who really is just a friend. Like Uchi.

The only direct comment he has ever made on the subject is that he doesn’t like Hitoshi, because he thinks he’s a pathetic weakling. “He’s not strong enough for you,” he kept telling Kame, drunkenly one night after they’d been fishing with his brothers all day. “You need someone with a bit of backbone.”

Kame wonders what he’d think of Jin.

Jin is still looking miserable, so Kame casts his cards aside and crawls across the divide until he can sit next to Jin, their backs pressed against the sofa. Kame can feel it whenever Jin moves.

“Don’t worry about it,” Kame says. “I’ll explain the situation. If it ever comes to that.”

Jin nods, but then he makes a face and stares down at the cards in his face.

“I’ve been thinking about telling my mother about us,” he says. “Eventually, I mean. Not yet.”

Kame threads his fingers through Jin’s and holds on.

—

Jin does want to tell his mother, but there’s still so much about them that he doesn’t understand either, and he thinks he should have answers to those questions for when she inevitably asks them.

One night, he’s sitting on Kame’s kitchen bench, slippered feet kicking against the cupboards in a way that makes Kame scowl at him irritably. Kame is on the other side of the kitchen grating cheese for their pasta, facing away from Jin. Jin’s eyes linger on the knot that holds his apron firm around his hips.

“I don’t think I’m into any other guys,” he muses aloud.

“Huh?” Kame asks, pausing in his task. He turns around and leans on the bench, dusting cheese off his hands. After a minute, he crosses to the sink and scrubs them clean.

“I don’t think I’m gay,” Jin says. “I’m just into you.”

Kame snorts.

“What?” Jin asks.

“You might not be gay, but I sincerely doubt that I’m the only guy you could be into,” Kame says. He crosses the floor and stands between Jin’s legs, hands on his thighs.

“I think you are,” Jin says. “I mean, you’re practically a girl, so maybe you just don’t count.”

“I’m not a girl,” Kame says crossly. He leans into Jin and speaks close to his ear. “Close your eyes,” he murmurs, and Jin does. He puts his hands on Kame’s shoulders, feeling the strength of the muscle there.

“You’re at a club,” Kame says, his voice low and husky and intimate, only audible because his mouth is so close that Jin can feel his breath moving the hair around his ears.

“What are you doing?” Jin interrupts.

“You’re at a club,” Kame repeats insistently, and Jin shivers and falls quiet. “It’s packed full and you’re dancing, it’s your favourite song.”

Jin loves Kame’s voice when he talks like this, like Jin is the only person that ever needs to hear him. The sound of it makes him shiver and he slides his hands down Kame’s arms and hooks them around his elbows.

“You feel someone watching you, but at first you can’t find them, because everyone is watching you.” Kame’s hand on his thigh moves up and settles on his hip, fingernails scratching at his skin through the thin t-shirt he is wearing. Jin can see the club, feel the moist air crowded with breath. He shifts on the bench, feeling the dull thud of his heart pick up. “Then you see him, across the floor. Suddenly, it’s like you’re the only two people in the room.” He nuzzles the side of Jin’s face and Jin’s hand tightens around his elbow reflexively. “He’s got gorgeous blond hair, and he’s so tall and lean that it seems like his legs go forever. And he just stares at you, and all you can think about is letting him take you home.”

“Kame,” Jin whines impatiently, wanting him to hurry up and do something.

“He comes closer through the crowd, because you just stand there waiting for him, watching the way he moves, his muscles and the smile that is just for you.” Kame’s hand leaves his hip and tangles in his hair. “And he gets to you and slides his hand around your hips, in front of everyone, and he leans in to whisper to you…”

Kame presses kisses beneath Jin’s ear and Jin feels hot and cold all over, and his arm slides around Kame’s back and holds them more firmly together.

“He says…” Kame says, lips dragging against the shell of Jin’s ear.

“What?” Jin says.

“Ireguchi deguchi Taguchi desu~” Kame sings, Taguchi’s demented face exploding into the hot little fantasy, and Jin almost falls off the bench in his flailing horror. He’s panting, half from the leftover arousal and half from abject panic.

“Kame!” he splutters, adrift with misery and betrayal. He holds his hands against his chest defensively, as if he has been physically wounded.

Kame punches him, hard, in the thigh. “Don’t think about other guys, douchebag,” he says, and goes back to grating his cheese.

—

In late November, Johnny calls Kame in for an after hours meeting. Kame tries not to think about it, but he’s preoccupied by it all day, when he’s supposed to be learning the choreography for their new song. He’s afraid he knows too well what Johnny wants to talk about.

Johnny looks tired when he walks in. He’s on the phone, so he doesn’t greet Kame, just gestures for him to sit opposite. He hands him a manila folder with his own name scrawled across the top in red marker. Kame stares down at it and somehow knows what will be in it without even having to look.

When he does, it’s not as bad as he had imagined. It’s just Jin and Kame outside his apartment building, each carrying a cotton bag full of groceries. The images are without context. They could be anywhere. They could almost be anyone, if not for a few shots where you can see slivers of their faces under beanies and dark glasses.

There’s only one photo that is potentially dangerous, really, and even that isn’t that bad. They were standing outside the building because there was something wrong with the intercom, Kame remembers. They’d been waiting for ages and Jin reached out to grab Kame’s wrist and look at his watch. That’s not what it looks like in the photo, though. It looks like they’re holding hands. Their intimacy is laid bare.

His head starts to ache.

Johnny hangs up the phone and before he can even say hello, Kame blurts, “I won’t stop.”

Johnny blinks, but doesn’t seem as surprised as Kame is himself. He has a moment to feel ashamed of his own selfishness; what the hell would happen to the others, if Kame was thrown out of the jimusho? If Kame was outed in the press?

“Kazuya,” Johnny scolds after a minute.

“Don’t ask me to,” Kame repeats. “I won’t.”

He has never been this rude to Johnny before and it makes his stomach churn nervously, but he can’t help it. Every time he opens his mouth to rephrase more diplomatically, the same words, the same blunt refusal, threatens to pour out. He chokes it down, hands making fists on his knees.

“I can’t,” he manages finally. “I can’t, this time.” His leg trembles and he tries to force it still with a hand flat on his thigh. “You’re the one that asked me to start seeing him,” he reminds Johnny childishly.

Johnny sighs and takes the manila folder back. “I’m not asking you to stop,” he says finally. “I’m just asking you to be more careful.” He shakes the folder in his hand. “You know better than this, Kazuya.”

Kame’s heart rate slows and he can breathe again, and his calm, businesslike manners kick back in just in time for him to say, “I understand, sir.”

“You can go,” Johnny says, dropping the folder into a filing cabinet full of rows and rows of identical cream folders. “Make sure that idiot behaves himself.”

“Yes sir,” Kame says, rising. He crosses to the doorway and pauses. “I’m sorry for my outburst.”

“It’s okay, kid.” He’s writing something in his big diary and not looking at Kame. “You do what you have to do.”

“Yeah,” Kame says.

“Get out of here,” Johnny growls. For a moment, Kame feels so grateful to him that he almost crosses the floor and hugs him.

“Goodnight, Gramps,” he murmurs instead, and slips out of the office and into the silent halls of the jimusho, down to the car and back to his apartment where Jin is waiting for him.

—

Against his better judgment, Kame tells Jin about the meeting. Jin doesn’t really seem to care that their relationship might be splashed all over the tabloids (“It’ll be the best thing they’ve had to say about me in a while,” he’d said sheepishly) but he’s angry that Johnny was meddling in their lives, again, and Kame had only just barely been able to talk him out of going into the office and kicking up a fuss about it.

A week or two later, Kame is sitting in the Potato office when he sees the mock ups for the December issue lying on a typesetter’s desk. Jin’s moody face pouts up at him from the page. Kame scans the interview.

Lately I stay at Kamenashi’s condo a lot… There are always a lot of people in my house. Kamenashi’s place is like a girl’s, it’s always clean, and he has good food. Basically, I’m a freeloader [laughs]… Should I be paying rent?

A few years ago, Kame would have been explosive with rage and anxiety, but now, he just laughs. He asks Jin about it that night.

“Hiding in plain sight,” Jin says, making kind of retarded karate chop gestures. “This is the way of the ninja.”

Kame laughs and calls him a retard, but it isn’t a bad strategy, really. A few weeks later, when he’s sitting through a painfully awkward interview on Hanamaru Cafe, they ask him what his plans for Christmas are.

“I’ve got a date with Akanishi Jin,” he says, giggling at the host’s theatrically shocked intake of breath.

—

On the nights that Kame works late, Jin goes clubbing without him. If Kame finishes early enough, he sometimes swings by and picks him up. He idles his car in the alley behind the club, reading the news on his phone. Jin always takes forever to come out and is full of apologies as he tumbles into the passenger seat, pink-cheeked and a bit red-eyed, but never falling down drunk or anything. He always twists a bit in his seat to face Kame, seatbelt stretched awkwardly around his body.

Sometimes, Kame wonders if Jin chats up girls when he’s not around. Probably not, he thinks with a small measure of confidence. He’s pretty sure they are exclusive, but can’t quite bring himself to broach the subject in case Jin’s answer disappoints him. He’d been serious when he told Jin he wasn’t in a hurry. Even if Jin were messing around with girls, Kame’s not all that worried. He will be the last man standing.

One night, Jin makes him drive out of the city, up to their lookout. “If we go home, you’ll just go to sleep, and I’m wide awake,” he complains.

Kame has an early call the next day, but he does it anyway. His afternoon is free; he can catch a nap between planning for Going in the morning and the important dinner party he is supposed to attend at night. He has survived on far less sleep.

Jin is very merry, but he is not drunk. He seems pleased at Kame’s compliance and doesn’t try to change the stereo from the Joan Baez album Kame had been listening to earlier, though he must be dying to. At first, he chatters about his day, but as they ease through the crowded outer suburbs and into the relative darkness of the country, he drifts off to sleep with his hand on Kame’s thigh.

Kame rolls his eyes and lets him sleep until they reach their destination.

“I only closed my eyes for a minute,” Jin says sheepishly when he wakes, wiping the drool from his cheek.

“That’s funny, because you snored for forty minutes,” Kame says, opening his door and stepping out into the freezing night air. He wanders over to the platform overlooking the sprawling city lights and lights a cigarette, his first of the week. When Jin joins him at the rail he takes it out of Kame’s hand and smokes most of it on his own.

They get cans of coffee from the vending machine and a blanket from the trunk and open the roof of Kame’s convertible. They push the seats back as far as they will go and lie side by side, divided by the centre console, staring up at the night sky. It’s so cold. There is nobody around for miles, not even other couples looking for privacy.

Kame starts to get really sleepy and he wishes Jin hadn’t been drinking earlier, so he could make him drive home. He rolls onto his side and finds Jin staring at him, eyes dark and considering.

“Why don’t you ever call me by a pet name?” Jin asks out of nowhere.

Kame blinks. There’s no reason, really. Contrary to his image, he’s not really a goopy pet names kind of guy, particularly with his boyfriends. They come naturally when he’s flirting as part of his job. In his private life, not so much.

Jin, on the other hand, is all about the stupid pet names. Kame’s not sure if he’s aware that he slips up sometimes and calls Kame ‘baby’ in bed; probably not, and Kame’s not about to tell him, because he kind of likes it. As long as it stays in the bedroom.

“I don’t know,” Kame says. “No reason. What do you want me to call you?”

Jin shrugs.

“Jin-jin?” Kame asks, snickering when Jin makes a face. “Boo-boo?”

“You’re so shit,” Jin whines, burying his face in his arm.

“Akkun?” Kame says. He reaches out and takes Jin’s hand and clutches it to his chest. “Oppa~?”

“Seriously, fuck off,” Jin says, pulling his hand out of Kame’s reach and burying it under his own body. He buries his face in the side of his car seat, visibly embarrassed. “You’re like the worst girlfriend I’ve ever had.”

Kame pulls a face, and Jin lifts his head. “What?”

“Sorry,” Kame says, laughter quivering beneath his inquisitive voice, “Were you under the impression that I’m the girl?”

Jin squawks and tries to kick Kame in the shin, but his foot painfully hits the gearshift instead, and Kame’s laughter bubbles out. “I hate you,” Jin says.

“Relax, honey,” Kame says, half making fun of him and half trying, in his way, to fulfil Jin’s wishes. It feels weird and he’ll probably never do it again. “We’re both dudes.”

For a minute, Kame wonders if that thought will freak Jin out, but it doesn’t seem to. He just huffs and lets Kame worm his way under his torso to take hold of the hand trapped underneath.

They drive back into the city at daybreak, stopping at a McDonalds drive thru for breakfast. Between them, they eat four sausage and egg McMuffins and five hash browns. Kame drives them back to his place. He only has time to shower and drink a Red Bull before he has to leave for work.

He leaves Jin sleeping on his sofa, all wrapped up in the fleecy Tokyo Giants blanket that lives on the armchair.

When he’s leaving the Going offices, he gets an email from Jin.

ur the worst gurlfriend but u r a pretty good boyfriend i guess, it says. will u b home soon?

Kame goes home without answering and finds Jin asleep on the couch again, empty bowl of cereal on the floor at his side. The TV is on some channel Kame didn’t even know he had, playing an episode of Oprah about two little girls in Tennessee who started a charity for their friend with leukaemia. Kame crawls onto the couch beneath the blanket and watches the episode, sniffling a bit at their hopeful little faces.

He falls asleep before the end of the episode, slumping warm and exhausted into Jin’s side. He’s late for his dinner party.

—

On a Wednesday morning, Pi comes over to Jin’s place to play PS3 and complain about his schedule. Jin’s schedule is nowhere near as packed as Pi’s, for the most part, but he’d still had to shuffle some things around to be here when Pi was free. The editor at Myojo is probably pissed at him, but Jin doesn’t care. This sort of stuff is worth it to him. Sometimes it seems like it would be easy to let Pi drift away, the way most of his old friends have, but Jin will hold on to him with bloodied stumps for fingernails, muscles straining, screaming his name. Even if they only see each other a few times a year. He doesn’t know who he is if Pi isn’t his best friend. One of his best friends. Pi and that retard Josh and the guy he’s been secretly sleeping with. Jin’s life is complicated.

“So what’s going on with Kame?” Pi asks, mid-lap in their game of Gran Turismo. Jin’s Lamborghini careens off the track and crashes into a wall, bursting into flames. Pi cheers as his Ferrari crosses the finish line.

“What do you mean?” Jin affects nonchalance, shaking out his wrist where it has cramped up during the game.

“I ran into him the other day and he was all cheerful, it was really obnoxious,” Pi says. He picks up his juice and swigs from it as the game runs through his championship montage. “Is he getting laid?”

Jin makes an involuntary sound, and Pi’s head turns. Jin wants to mash his hand into Pi’s nose to stop him from seeing.

“Why is your face all red?” he asks dumbly.

“It’s not,” Jin says, though he is well aware that it is. He can feel the heat of his cheeks even without touching them with his fingers.

“Oh my god,” Pi says.

Jin doesn’t say anything. He can’t. He doesn’t know if he was ready to tell Pi this, but he can’t bring himself to deny it, either. Not to Pi.

“Is something…” It seems like he’s somehow not sure how to say it, though Jin can see in his eyes that he is absolutely certain that he is correct. “Going on… between you and Kame?”

Jin steels himself, resolute. “We’re seeing how it goes,” he says casually, as if this isn’t the first time he’s come out to anyone who actually counts. As if it’s no big deal. Pi claps his hand over his mouth, and Jin’s confidence falters. “Have you got a problem with that?” he challenges.

Pi shakes his head and puts his hands on Jin’s shoulders. “I’m so happy,” he says, with exaggerated sincerity. “You finally found a nice girl.”

Jin shrugs off his grasp, overcome by equal parts irritation and relief. “I’m gonna tell him you said that,” he threatens.

“Go ahead,” Pi says, picking up his controller and starting a new game. “Tell him I give this beautiful union my heartfelt blessing.”

This is why, no matter what, Jin will always make time for Pi.

—

They have their first big fight in January. It’s not a little big fight, either, it’s a really huge, epic fight, the kind that leaves Jin sitting alone and miserable in his car in the parking lot of a suburban McDonalds at 3am, eating multiple Quarter Pounders and wondering if everything might be over between them.

Kame had been in a snappy mood all evening. He’s been so busy lately that they’ve barely seen each other for a few hours every week, and most of that is spent sleeping. KAT-TUN have begun planning for their annual spring/summer tour, which is due to start in late April. Jin gets the feeling they’ve been arguing about the plans, but that isn’t unusual for them. That’s one of the things he misses most about being in a group, really. Having someone around to tell him when his ideas are awesome and when they’re just fucking retarded.

Kame leaves the big binder full of notes from their planning meeting on his bedside table while he’s showering. Jin gets bored waiting for him and starts leafing through it, at first with idle interest and then with a red pen scribbling notes in the margins. Most of them are just helpful technical suggestions about where everyone should stand and queries about why the fuck they’re leaving Real Face until the second act. In the margin beside the notes about Kame’s solo – in which he’ll be dressed as some kind of bizarre space cowboy – he writes you’re so lame with a little heart so that Kame doesn’t get all pissy about it. It’s a thick binder but he skims more than half of it. Kame is in the shower for a really long time.

He finally emerges in a cloud of steam, skin flushed blotchy and red from the hot water. He’s wearing a pair of loose pyjama pants that Jin has never seen before and is roughly towelling his hair dry. It’s getting really long but Jin won’t let him cut it. He pauses in the doorway for a minute, watching Jin on the bed.

“What are you doing?” he asks.

“Oh,” Jin says, freezing with the red pen clutched in his fist. “I was just looking.”

Kame crosses to his side and touches the edge of the book, reading Jin’s note aloud. “‘This is a stupid song, do Signal instead.’” He scowls and closes the binder, withdrawing it from Jin’s hands. “You know, when you left the group, I’m pretty sure you forfeited your right to an opinion on the setlist.”

He’s trying to make his voice light and unaffected, but it’s a tone Jin has heard before, though not in a long time. His old friend Rampage-kun. Jin shrinks in on himself, ready for explosion.

“I was just trying to help,” he says, rolling over and tugging on Kame’s wrist. Sometimes he can be coaxed out of a bad mood, if you get him right at the moment. If Jin makes the right joke at the right moment, Kame will laugh instead of snapping, and everything will be ok.

“Well, don’t.” Kame yanks his wrist out of Jin’s grasp and crosses to the dresser, leaving the binder there. His towel is spread over his shoulders like a cape.

“I still care about what happens to KAT-TUN,” Jin ventures after a moment. “I still want you guys to be the best.”

Kame scoffs without humour. “Maybe you should have thought about that before you walked out.”

Nausea slams through Jin and he cries, “That’s not fair!”

From there, things sort of escalated out of control, and later, Jin cannot remember exactly what was said, except that every word from Kame’s bitchy, bitter little lips had landed like a physical blow until Jin had stormed out of the apartment because he was honestly worried they might kill each other. He’d only intended to drive around the block and then go back, but he’d ended up driving to the suburb where they both grew up, parking in the McDonalds and just sitting there for an hour.

He’d told Kame, months ago, that they should talk about all this then. It would have been so much easier then. They could have resolved it or not resolved it and Jin would have been fine. Now, the idea of Kame sitting at home seething at him makes him feel sick with misery.

Leaving KAT-TUN had not been part of Jin’s plan. Not really. No-one really seems to believe him when he says that, but it is true. He’d thought he’d go off and do his solo stuff and then come back, same as always. Like Pi does, or Koichi, or just about everybody that isn’t Jin. Every now and then he’d fantasised about the idea of leaving them and never having to sing stupid Real Face again, but it had never actually seemed like an actual possibility. In their own messed up way, KAT-TUN are a family. Sometimes you hate your family and you don’t want to go to their stupid, boring parties, but you always do. Because you have to. Because that’s just how it is.

The reality of being kicked out had been devastating. With the benefit of time, Jin can admit that the old man had done what was best for all of them, but at the time, it felt like he’d been thrown out of a plane without a parachute, and there were lions circling in the savannah below. And the plane was about to crash into a cliff with all his oldest friends inside.

Tonight, Kame had accused him of not even caring enough to let them know that he’d officially left the band, a claim that had sliced deep, because that isn’t how it went down at all, and Jin had thought Kame knew him well enough to know that. That nothing happened the way he wanted it to.

The old man had called him in and told him he’d made the decision and Jin had spent about five hours in his office arguing about it, just going round and round and round the same territory, always turning out the same way. At midnight, Johnny had said, “It’s over, kid. You have two days to tell them.”

Jin had tried to call his bluff. He’d refused to tell them, thinking that if he just held out long enough, one of his voicemails might actually make a difference and Johnny would change his mind. After two days, though, Johnny had finally answered his phone. He’d listened to Jin for a minute, and then he’d said, “It’s America and your solo work, or KAT-TUN. That’s it. Make your choice.”

Jin had been unable to reply. At that point, he hadn’t even known why he would want to stay in KAT-TUN, just that suddenly, he did. Desperately. Just not enough to give up all the other things that are suddenly in his grasp. Kame would make the sacrifice, Jin knows. Pi probably would too. Jin just wasn’t built that way.

“I thought so,” Johnny said.

“This is BULLSHIT,” Jin exploded.

“Careful,” Johnny said. “You’re not too old to be suspended.”

The next day, Jin had turned on his television and seen KAT-TUN standing in a miserable, bewildered little line, admitting with exaggerated laughter that they hadn’t even known he was back in the country, let alone talked to him. Then he’d crawled into bed and slept for three days, dreaming of a version of Peacefuldays that is only K T T U N.

In retrospect, Jin should probably have talked to Kame about all this earlier. He’d known, deep down, that there was no way some part of Kame wasn’t stewing about the whole thing, even if it was a small part of him buried deep down inside. Even when they weren’t really friends, they had still been brothers at arms, and Jin isn’t sure that he could be nearly so understanding if the situation had been reversed. He tries to imagine stepping out on stage and singing Real Face without Kame and something inside him shrivels and dies. It’s always easier to be the one that leaves than the one who is left behind.

He shoves what is left of his final quarter pounder back in the bag and scrubs his face with his hands. He wonders if Kame is still mad, still prowling his apartment like an angry panther, tail flicking and teeth bared. He wonders if Kame is done with him.

When he’s halfway home, he gets an email from Kame.

Come home, it says. I’m sorry I lost it.

Jin nearly sobs with relief. When he walks in Kame is waiting on the couch with a glass of wine, all wrapped up in a fluffy cardigan, looking washed out and exhausted.

Jin hesitates in the doorway; he wants to cross to Kame and hug him and make everything okay between them again, but he can’t lie, either. “Me leaving was the right thing to do,” he says. “I wish it didn’t have to hurt you, but–“

“Jin,” Kame says, drained and scratchy-voiced. “Stop.”

“But–“ Jin starts, but Kame cuts him off.

“Seriously, stop,” Kame says. His limbs are spread bonelessly, as if he just can’t move anymore. “I know.”

Jin exhales in a rush and sits next to him, not touching him but close enough to feel the heat of his body.

“It’s just harder now,” Kame says after a while. “It was easier when you weren’t really talking to me anyway. Not to miss you.” He looks ashamed of himself. “I don’t want to sing Real Face with stupid Nakamaru.” He’s looking at nothing, into the darkness of the kitchen. “I sound better with you.”

“We can sing together,” Jin promises, wrapping his arm around Kame’s shoulders. He crawls closer until he hangs off him like a gigantic monkey.

“Whatever,” Kame says, as if it is nothing and he has not just had a very loud and longwinded bitchfit over it. He buries his face in Jin’s neck. “I’m tired.”

They go to bed and he’s asleep before Jin has even covered them with the blankets. When Jin wakes at 6am, he is already gone, but there’s an email waiting on his phone: I’m proud of you.

—

Ever since they became friends again, Jin has been leaving playlists on Kame’s iPod. When the first one appeared way back in June, Kame was on the shinkansen and he stared at it in confusion, wondering what the hell hot joints was and how it got on his iPod without his knowledge. Then he’d opened it and found a long list of Lil Wayne and Snoop Dogg songs and its origin had become clear. When he emailed Jin about it, Jin had replied, gotta expand ur horizons. i deleted like 5gb of crap, too. who needs that much elton john shit?

Now, whenever he heads out of town for work, he finds a new playlist. At first it had all been gangsta rap that Kame knew was about drive by shootings and evading the cops without even bothering to find translations for the lyrics. After they started hooking up, though, the tones turned rosier, love and sex and happiness creeping in amongst the violence. Kame likes these playlists best. Sometimes, when he has to stay overnight in hotels in Sendai or Fukuoka or wherever the hell he is, he listens to them while he falls asleep, wondering what Jin is doing back in Tokyo. If he’s in a club somewhere dancing to this song and thinking of Kame.

When he particularly likes a song, he’ll call Jin and make him translate the lyrics. Jin says he could just google them, but Kame likes it best hearing what Jin thinks they mean. He doesn’t really care what Kanye West meant when he wrote Lost in the World. He just wants to know why Jin listened to it and thought of him. It embarrasses Jin, but that just makes it better. He makes Jin talk even when he can hear the blush manifested in his voice, when he has to stutter and stammer over his words.

He is never more certain that Jin loves him than he is in those moments.

—

Jin goes with Kame to Kobe when he has to cover the Orix Buffaloes. He wanders around on his own while Kame is working, and then they spend a night at a nearby onsen. It is the longest break Kame has had from work in forever, and he’s selfishly glad he convinced Jin to accompany him. They lie around in the onsen for hours, then retire to their room, where the staff have already laid out futons. Kame laughs when he sees that they have been set up on opposite sides of the room.

“Guess they don’t have any suspicions about our relationship being inappropriate,” he says, sitting on his bed. When Jin sits on his, there is about five metres between them. When they were kids, KAT-TUN used to have to share a room this size between all six of them. They often barely slept because Jin wouldn’t shut up.

“This is to protect me from your advances,” Jin says, fastening the belt more securely around his yukata. “They can probably tell you’re a pervert.”

“I guess I better keep my hands to myself, then,” Kame says, folding his hands beneath his head and stretching out on his back. He closes his eyes and listens to the trickling water outside, the muffled sound of laughter from down the hall. He’s not surprised when he feels his sheets rustle and the weight of Jin’s body settling against him, thighs either side of his hips. He slides one hand around Jin’s bare calf.

“Shh,” Jin murmurs, as if Kame is making a lot of noise. “The walls are thin.”

“You’re the noisy one,” Kame says grumpily, but props himself up on his elbows to more comfortably return Jin’s kiss. His brain tries to remind him of Johnny’s demand for him to be more careful, but he is honestly at the point where he could care less. He spent so long worrying about the sky falling that he has started to think, fuck it, let it fall if it wants. It never does.

They make love in near silence, eyes open and mouths closed. There’s something funny about it and the hardest part is silencing their laughter, but then Jin opens his mouth on Kame’s belly button and that gets easier. He just has to concentrate on breathing. When they first started sleeping together, Kame had been well aware that Jin’s pliant obedience would only last as long as it took for him to find his feet and then he would be as bossy and domineering as ever, and he has not been disappointed. Jin holds him down with one reassuring hand on his stomach, murmuring in pleasure at Kame’s acquiescence. Jin isn’t always in charge, but Kame enjoys it when he is. He presses his gratitude out in kisses on Jin’s shoulder.

Jin falls asleep in Kame’s futon, their limbs all tangled in white cotton sheets. They wake to the sound of activity in the halls outside. Jin tries to coax Kame back to sleep, but Kame wants to visit more of the city before they leave, maybe take Jin to the amazing restaurant he’d visited the last time he was here. He showers alone and when he comes back Jin has elaborately messed up the untouched futon. It looks more like a restless child slept in it than a grown man. The pillow is inexplicably in the middle of the mattress, but the beans show a perfect head-shaped imprint.

“Rough night?” Kame asks. The futon they actually slept in looks pristine in comparison.

“I had nightmares,” Jin replies, kissing Kame’s temple on his way to the shower.

They spend the day wandering around Kobe, not really doing much. Kame takes about a billion photos, more of Jin’s hair blowing messy in the freezing wind than of the city itself. The restaurant he’d wanted to visit isn’t there anymore, so they end up eating at a ramen stand by the water, warming ice cold hands on steaming bowls of soup. It’s a good day. It almost feels like they’re just a normal couple, except for the way that people automatically get out their cell phones and take photos or write messages to their friends as they pass.

They take the last shinkansen back to Tokyo, sharing a carriage with a lot of tired looking middle-aged salarymen who could care less who they are, if they even recognise them. Jin disappears to the smoking carriage once or twice, rolling his eyes when Kame lectures him about cutting back.

Kame bought a stack of magazines at the station and he makes his way through them slowly, playing music through one ear of his headphones. Jin plays Bejewelled on his phone for most of the trip, slumped against Kame’s shoulder like a bored child. He keeps asking Kame where they are and poking through his numerous shopping bags, accusing him of trying to buy omiyage for everyone he has ever met and eating the shrimp senbei that are supposed to be for Nakamaru.

The magazines are mostly boring, but Kame finds the new love of his life in a women’s lifestyle magazine. He elbows Jin to show him the house cat that looks like a lion, all sandy, golden fur and blazing mane exploding around its face. It is some fancy new designer breed, genetically engineered the old fashioned way. It costs almost two million yen. It’s the cutest thing he’s ever seen.

“I need one,” he tells Jin, who keeps staring at it, face blank.

“Do you even like cats?” he asks after a minute. It seems like he wants to say more, but doesn’t.

“I love all animals,” Kame says.

Jin frowns. “What about Ran and Jelly?”

“They’ll be fine,” Kame assures him. He has visions of all three of them napping together and having adorable little battles like the cats and dogs on YouTube. Ran will be like a mother to little Aslan.

“You’re like barely at home to look after it,” Jin ventures.

Kame frowns. “Cats aren’t so needy.”

“It’s two million yen, Kamenashi.” Jin is scowling down at Kame’s adorable baby like it is some kind of hideous monster.

“It’s only money,” Kame says. He doesn’t know why Jin is being so weird. “Why are you being all grinchy?”

Jin huffs and Kame takes out his phone to jot down the name of the breeder listed in the article.

Kame doesn’t understand why, after such an idyllic trip, Jin turns into a stranger upon their return. Jin kisses him goodbye in the car and goes back to his own apartment, and Kame doesn’t hear from him for two days.

—

05:45: Good morning We’re doing a shoot at Disney today
10:00: A little kid just threw up in Nakamaru’s lap it was awesome
10:05: They gave Nakamaru new pants to wear they’re covered in little Disney characters everyone made fun of him but I kind of like them…
12:24: Are you still asleep? Fucking lazy, Akanishi They made us leave Disney already
14:17: Nakamaru said I could have the Disney pants They’re kind of tight tho lol
18:37: Are you coming over tonight? I’m gonna make omurice I’m getting off early-ish.
21:16: I guess not.
23:27: Is something wrong? I tried to call…
01:07: Goodnight
04:32: It’s so eaaaaaaaaarrrrrlllllllyyyyyyyyyy
10:09: I just saw your brother on tv
13:25: Seriously, what the fuck is going on?
19:19: Did you lose your phone again?
22:10:

03:19 josh found my phone down the back of the couch lol sorry i wanna see ur disney pants

—

The email wakes Kame when it comes. He stares down at it, feeling uneasy. No way Jin could go 48 hours without compulsively checking his email, even if he had to do it on his computer instead of his phone. Or his iPad. Or his iPod Touch. Or his old iPhone 3GS, which he discarded the second iPhone4 came out. Or the bedazzled Blackberry Kame has seen in his glovebox. Out of everyone Kame knows, Jin is the least capable of cutting himself off from technology.

Kame scrubs his face anxiously and leans over to the dresser, where Jin left Kame’s laptop the last time he was over. Kame himself hasn’t used it in a good month and it takes him a minute to remember the password. Jin set a scrolling slideshow of himself “looking awesome” as the desktop and Kame stares at his stupid, beautiful face as Firefox starts up, until it disappears behind the blank white expanse of the Google homepage. Apprehensively, he loads Facebook, exhaling sharply, annoyed with himself, when he realises he had been holding his break.

It doesn’t take long to find what he was looking for, less then five hours ago, on Josh’s stupid status update with a bunch of photos of delicious looking food.

Big Jim Redmond likes this.

Kame scowls and scrolls down the page, stomach tying itself up in knots as he reads his feed and sees the stupid cowboy Jin uses as an alias over and over down the page. Big Jim Redmond is bored. Big Jim Redmond likes PLAYAS GON PLAY. Big Jim Redmond is now friends with Nakayama Takeshi. Big Jim Redmond likes John Thompson’s profile picture.

Kame rests his chin in his palm and stares at the screen despondently, wondering what the fuck is going on. Things had been so good between them, other than that one stupid fight that neither of them has mentioned since. Staring at the evidence that Jin has just been avoiding him and unable to think of a single reason why, he feels miserable.

Angrily, he types a name into the search box and becomes a fan. He goes to sleep feeling a little thrill of vicious satisfaction that he wishes he had outgrown.

Caoimhe Gonzalez likes Saito Naoki.

—

Jin almost explodes when he sees it. It takes him a good thirty seconds for his brain to make the connection that Kame has obviously realised Jin has been avoiding him and has not bought his story about losing his phone at all. Before that he feels overcome with jealousy and betrayal, and he leaves a comment on Kame’s wall that says, saito sucks.

Kame replies an hour later with an encyclopaedic account of Saito’s baseball prowess, a glowing list of his stats stretching back to high school. Plus, he is a snappy dresser, it says at the end.

he has a stupid face, Jin says. A few hours later, Josh likes Jin’s comment, but Kame never replies, and Jin starts to wonder if he’s done irreparable damage to their relationship, which isn’t what he wanted at all.

At 9pm, though, Kame emails him and says, Are we still going out tonight? and even though it isn’t followed by any of the stupid hearts and kisses that would usually punctuate Kame’s first messages of the day, it makes Jin feel better to know that Kame hasn’t written him off completely and has not yet made plans to meet stupid Saito Naoki in a Kabukicho love hotel.

yeah, Jin replies. see you then .

—

Jin is still weird when Kame shows up at the club. He’s trying to pretend he isn’t but Kame knows him so well that he can’t miss the slight hesitation before his friendly hug hello and the way that he squeezes himself onto the sofa between Josh and Ryo even though he and Kame could have just shared the red leather love seat that is usually Jin’s favourite spot in the whole venue. Ryo looks at Kame over his beer and Kame just shrugs, because he honestly doesn’t get it either. Ryo sighs and leaves the overcrowded couch, slumping at Kame’s side. Kame spends all night staring at Jin, who spends all night conspicuously not looking at him. After an hour of horrible awkwardness, Kame departs for the dance floor, where Kusano corrals him into a circle of enthusiastically terrible dancing. Kame does the robot for a crowd of appreciative drunks, then lets Kusano teach him some kind of elaborate barn dance he must have learned in America. It’s good to have his mind taken off Jin’s weirdness, until Jin touches his arm out nowhere and says in his ear, “I’m out of here.”

Kame nods and follows him off the floor. He grabs Jin’s elbow. “Just let me get my coat,” he says, nodding towards the cloak room.

Jin frowns, looking young and frustrated and trapped. “You should stick around,” he says. “I’ve got an early call.”

Kame’s heart plummets and he has to stop himself from throwing a tantrum here, because there are so many people around. Who cares if Jin has an early call? He certainly doesn’t usually, he shows up for work on two hours of sleep all the time. It’s not even like they even have to do anything. They could just sleep, like normal, and then Kame could get up when Jin did and make him coffee and they could talk, a bit, before Jin went to work. He could see Jin off at the door in his dressing gown like a housewife. Jin usually likes that.

Kame does not usually think of himself as the clingy type. Usually, Jin could go a week without seeing him, if he needed, two weeks, three weeks, maybe even a month. But he can’t stand the thought that Jin doesn’t even want to see him. That they could go home together right now if Jin wanted, but he doesn’t, and won’t tell Kame why.

“Fine,” he says, turning to storm off. Jin catches his sleeve and pulls him back for a one armed hug that just makes Kame feel worse.

“I’ll see you soon,” Jin promises, hand clasped around the back of Kame’s neck. His finger strokes the bare skin behind his ear. Then he leaves, and Kame wonders if he is being dumped.

Part Seven

Comments

[katmillia.livejournal.com]

Ueda stares. “You’re being really gross.” He cringes when Kame wraps an arm around him and leans his chin on his shoulder, making kissy faces in the general vicinity of his face.

“I’m just so glad we’re friends,” Kame says, laughing with pleasure when Ueda pushes his chair out and storms off
ILU UEDA

Taguchi’s demented face exploding into the hot little fantasy, and Jin almost falls off the bench in his flailing horror.
dying dying dying dying

When he emailed Jin about it, Jin had replied, gotta expand ur horizons. i deleted like 5gb of crap, too. who needs that much elton john shit?
I know you are going to hurt me and I know it's coming so I keep finding things like this and just dying.

THE WHOLE TEXT MESSAGE THING. FACEBOOK AGAIN. YOU ARE DOING EVERYTHING I LOVE AND IT'S KILLING MEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEE OH MY GOD MUST FINISH THIS WHY ARE YOU DOING THIS ILUSFM ♥

[singlehappiness.livejournal.com]

Jin continues as if he hadn’t spoken. “And we were all supposed to write our name on a list, but everyone was fighting too much, and management just stood around watching.” In retrospect, that was probably part of the audition, but that hadn’t occurred to Jin at the time, he’d fought as hard for the pen as the rest of them. “And then all of a sudden you started bossing everyone around and making us line up all orderly and shit. You made everyone listen to you even though you were this dweeby little loser.”

Kame claws him viciously on the hip and Jin yelps.

“I thought that was pretty cool,” Jin says, and the claws at Jin’s side turn gentle and soothing.

SO HAPPY. YOU MAKE ME SO HAPPY.

The cards all have terrible, ugly photos of Yamapi on the back. Pi gave them to him for Christmas a few years ago. He said he found them in an idol store in Harajuku and bought a dozen decks.

I am dying. He would. Totally would.

“I told them because I was dating this guy and I thought it could be kind of serious,” he says, feeling a little thrilled when Jin makes a pissy little face at that. “And Koji was just like, ‘When did you break up with Akanishi?’”

KAME'S FAMILY SJDLKJFLSKDJL

“Ireguchi deguchi Taguchi desu~” Kame sings, Taguchi’s demented face exploding into the hot little fantasy, and Jin almost falls off the bench in his flailing horror. He’s panting, half from the leftover arousal and half from abject panic.

KAME'S S SIDE. How is this so perfect jskljdljs

Angrily, he types a name into the search box and becomes a fan. He goes to sleep feeling a little thrill of vicious satisfaction that he wishes he had outgrown.

Caoimhe Gonzalez likes Saito Naoki.

I can't stop laughing

why is Jin being a douche. I feel like this should be problematic but sjkdljlsjla HAPPY ENDING RIGHT. I'M HOLDING OUT FOR ONE.

[metinykame.livejournal.com]

what's happening to you jin? feel bad
about kame, always picking up the pieces.
hope, he goes to naoki for revenge...
hehehe