[Arashi] [Cyberpunk!AU] Open Your Eyes (3)
[Title] Open Your Eyes (3)
[Author] honooko
[Rating] PG13 for now
[Notes] Just so we're clear, any pairing is really fair game here. Seriously.
Sho came by The Place again the next day, greeting Jun like an old friend and sitting down at the bar with a huge, friendly grin. Jun blinked at him, and set down the glass he’d been drying calmly.
“What,” Jun asked seriously. “Are you doing here?”
“Well, I thought we had to make plans,” Sho said, wilting a bit. “Right?”
“Not here,” Jun replied shortly. “That’d be stupid. You can’t be seen around us.”
“Oh,” said Sho, sinking down on his stool. “What about the kid?”
“Kid?”
“Yeah, with the dots on his face? The one who’s going to… do it?” Sho said, gesturing over one eyebrow.
“Nino is two months older than I am, so I hardly would call him a ‘kid’. Brat, sure,” Jun shrugged, hiding an amused smile. Nino didn’t appreciate being mistaken for a much younger boy, and had a tendency to swear colorfully when it happened.
“Fine then,” Sho corrected himself. “When do I get to talk to him?”
“Probably tonight,” Jun said, shrugging again. “Depending on what he’s got in mind.”
“So I should come back tonight?”
“No,” Jun said, grinning. “You should stay home tonight. Nino will come to you.”
“He doesn’t know where I live,” Sho said.
“I’m quite sure he does,” Jun replied.
~
Jun closed the bar just after dark; the people who visit wouldn’t stay long after that anyway. Not when the Force patrolled the streets on the edges of the City Limits looking for someone careless enough to be caught. Sticking the keys into his front chest pocket, Jun was quick in darting down the tunnel to their underground home. The Force didn’t know about the tunnels for the most part, but that didn’t make them particularly safe.
He kicked off his shoes inside the door; Aiba insisted that shoes were not allowed in the home. Lamps set into the walls gave off pools of slightly warm, yellow light, every gap between them dark. Nino’s skates were still against the wall; he hadn’t left yet. Jun walked to Nino’s room, the door open and inviting. Leaning against the doorframe, he took in the sight of Nino seated cross-legged in his bed, shirt long gone with his back to the door, and an ancient mp3 player dismantled in a tray in his lap.
Nino had the device connected to a small notebook sized computer display, and his fingers skimmed across the keyboard almost too fast to actually be seen typing. The glow from the screen cast his hunched torso in a strange blue light, and Jun could tell by the way he kept murmuring to himself that he’d been engrossed in it for a while.
Approaching on silent steps, Jun came up behind Nino, pressing his fingertips against the bare skin at the nape of Nino’s neck. Jumping, Nino leaned his head back, and Jun moved his fingers to Nino’s shoulder, standing close behind him with his legs against Nino’s back.
“You look busy,” he commented softly, and Nino laughed. He leaned back into Jun, only then realizing how tense he’d gotten from bending over for so long.
“There’s stuff still on here, you know,” Nino explained, gesturing at the mp3 player. “Trapped on the drive, there’s music.”
“So you’re liberating it?”
“I’m trying,” Nino said, with a grin, rolling his head and wincing at a crack from his neck. “Wouldn’t it be cool, to hear music? I want whatever’s on here. I want it.”
“A noble cause,” Jun commented dryly. “But you’re expected elsewhere tonight.”
Nino pulled a face, but let Jun pull him off the bed anyway. He stretched, loosening his body from the hours of detail work, Jun’s hand never leaving his shoulder. Noticing, Nino glanced at it before meeting Jun’s eyes. Smirking, he dropped a kiss on Jun’s fingers before pulling away and grabbing a shirt.
“Sakurai Sho,” Nino said as he tugged the t-shirt over his head and reaching for his vest. “Rich, and well-positioned in the Ment. Scholar, officially, although apparently he’s got quite a rebellious side no doubt inherited from his late father.”
“Family business is hardly related,” Jun commented, not bothering to turn away as Nino changed into his ‘work pants’.
“His father was put under house arrest by the Ment and marked as a highly dangerous individual,” Nino said. “The exact reason wasn’t specified in writing that I could find, but I can make a guess.”
“Books full of illegal knowledge?”
“Better,” Nino said with a grin. “He taught his son.”
~
Ohno was exhausted. Work had been long and hard; they’d tracked and arrested an elderly couple who were speaking the old language. He gave them credit; they didn’t fight at all, only swore colorfully at the officers as they were carted away, still in the language they were being arrested for.
Once home in his own unit, Ohno had changed quickly. He hated his uniform to the point of keeping it in a box near the door when he didn’t have to be wearing it; out of sight, out of mind. Wandering into his living room, he sat down in front of a board he’d been working with. A bowl on the floor contained various pigments and liquids to add, rebuilding his homemade paint collection.
His thoughts strayed to the boy on skates that had probably saved him. He had a little trouble pushing away his irritation at the loss of all those paints, but he recognized rationally that without the boy’s help, he wouldn’t have escaped. Not to mention that the boy had seen his painting, however briefly.
That was the thing that excited Ohno the most, really. The idea that he was reminding the world, however slowly, what color meant. What expression and art and feeling used to mean. Why these things shouldn’t, couldn’t be extinguished. If even one person saw his work and was able to consider it, even for just a moment, then he’d gotten his message across.
He didn’t have enough paints to be going out again for a while, but he knew he’d go out again.
After so long, Ohno didn’t even think to stop.
~
Nino scaled the wall of Sho’s enormous home with relatively little trouble. A simple smoke bomb had distracted the guards long enough for him to scurry up the concrete and over. The laser beam across the top hadn’t even slowed him down; a pair of mirrors placed in the center, and the signal didn’t even know it had been interrupted.
That was the problem with people these days, Nino thought. They didn’t think simply enough anymore. Nino believed in keeping things easy.
Once in the yard, he had three choices. He could break through the front door (with the biggest alarm, most sensitive locks, and highest chance of being seen), or he could try the back door (still with an alarm, more locks, and while less guarded, still watched).
Or he could just go in the sliding glass porch door on the second floor.
With Aiba’s skates, he had no trouble rolling right up the side of the house and hopping onto the balcony. He noticed it lead not into a sitting room, but rather a large bedroom. The lock was a snap to break into; a musical key, of all things, and programmed to a nursery rhyme from a time before the Ment.
How cute, Nino thought as he entered the house. Sakurai sets tomorrow’s clothes out on a chair.
Speaking of Sho, Nino found him as he left the bedroom and directly into a sitting room. The scholar was absorbed in a book that looked to weigh a good ten pounds, resting on a couch with his brows knit in concentration. Sitting on a table behind Sho, Nino let his legs swing.
“For a book that big,” Nino commented blithely. “There better be a lot of explosions.”
Sho jumped off the couch with a yelp, whirling around to face Nino. He pointed, mouth opening as though he was going to shout, only to close again with a snap. His accusing finger drooped somewhat as he attempted to find words.
“No explosions?” Nino asked. “Well, kiss scenes then. That works too, I guess.”
“You… but the doors… and the fence,” Sho said, attempting to rationalize Nino’s presence without rendering his entire security system pointless.
“Your porch locks to the tune of that Hina Matsuri song,” Nino chirped. “Charming, really.”
“…You know the song?” Sho asked sheepishly.
“I can use chopsticks too, but don’t tell anyone,” Nino drawled, hopping off the table and rolling up to Sho. “That doesn’t really explain why you know it, though.”
“Ah, well. I… studied music, for a while,” Sho shrugged. Nino grinned crookedly at him.
“You mean your father used to sing them for you when you were small,” Nino corrected.
“My father was tone-deaf. If anybody was singing, it was my mother,” Sho said, giving Nino a grin of his own.
It wasn’t long before Nino had kicked off his skates, settling cross-legged on Sho’s couch as they talked. Sho explained that the Ment had been paying closer attention to him lately, no doubt in part because the things Sho knew were located in books that weren’t supposed to exist any longer.
“I have the last remaining copies of over 300 books,” Sho explained, low and urgent. “If I get caught with these, they’ll be destroyed.”
“And you’ll be arrested,” Nino added.
“At this point, that’s hardly my main concern,” Sho responded. “If I die, yes, a lot of information dies with me. But as long as the books exist, there’s always someone else to read them and learn, right? As long as it’s written down, it can continue to teach.”
After agreeing on a priority list of which books to remove first, Sho helped Nino memorize the titles. A physical plan was too risky; an order that only existed in their minds was far wiser. Sho was impressed with Nino’s ability to retain detailed information, and Nino in turn found himself appreciating Sho’s efficiency. Not to mention that Sho had genuinely good reasons for needing the job done; it wasn’t a game to him.
It was the safety of the past being carried on to the present.
“I’ll start sometimes next week,” Nino said as he stood to leave.
“When?” Sho asked, but Nino shook his head.
“It’s better if you don’t know. I won’t tell you when I’m coming, and you won’t see me. If you do, then something has probably gone very wrong,” Nino said.
Sho nodded his understanding, but Nino didn’t miss the resigned expression that drifted across his face.
~
Nino arrived home shortly before dawn. As soon as he entered his bedroom, he saw Aiba sprawled across his bed. There was a smear of grease across one of Aiba’s cheeks, and two of his fingers were bandaged. Climbing onto the bed, he flopped down next to Aiba just as Jun entered. The youngest joined them on the bed, spooning against Aiba’s back and fussing with the blanket pulled across them all.
“What’d he do?” Nino murmured into the dark, his eyelids already drooping.
“Burned them,” Jun explained, already knowing Nino was referring to Aiba’s injuries. “He was welding and the torch spluttered. It’s not too bad, but they did blister some.”
“No gloves?”
“Burned through them,” Jun said. “He actually was being careful.”
Nino snorted, rubbing at Aiba’s cheek with the corner of the blanket. Aiba wasn’t stupid; he knew the dangers of everything he did. It was just that sometimes he cut corners in his excitement, or stopped paying attention to the right things. Jun and Nino both worried about him, but neither tried to stop him. Just like Jun had his bar and Nino had his jobs, Aiba’s inventions were his way of forgetting the outside world was broken.
Aiba murmured in his sleep, shifting, and Jun curled an arm over his waist at the same time as Nino dropped a kiss on Aiba’s forehead. Drawn into his warmth, they drifted off to sleep curled together in a comforting mess of limbs.
Chapter 4.
[Author] honooko
[Rating] PG13 for now
[Notes] Just so we're clear, any pairing is really fair game here. Seriously.
Sho came by The Place again the next day, greeting Jun like an old friend and sitting down at the bar with a huge, friendly grin. Jun blinked at him, and set down the glass he’d been drying calmly.
“What,” Jun asked seriously. “Are you doing here?”
“Well, I thought we had to make plans,” Sho said, wilting a bit. “Right?”
“Not here,” Jun replied shortly. “That’d be stupid. You can’t be seen around us.”
“Oh,” said Sho, sinking down on his stool. “What about the kid?”
“Kid?”
“Yeah, with the dots on his face? The one who’s going to… do it?” Sho said, gesturing over one eyebrow.
“Nino is two months older than I am, so I hardly would call him a ‘kid’. Brat, sure,” Jun shrugged, hiding an amused smile. Nino didn’t appreciate being mistaken for a much younger boy, and had a tendency to swear colorfully when it happened.
“Fine then,” Sho corrected himself. “When do I get to talk to him?”
“Probably tonight,” Jun said, shrugging again. “Depending on what he’s got in mind.”
“So I should come back tonight?”
“No,” Jun said, grinning. “You should stay home tonight. Nino will come to you.”
“He doesn’t know where I live,” Sho said.
“I’m quite sure he does,” Jun replied.
~
Jun closed the bar just after dark; the people who visit wouldn’t stay long after that anyway. Not when the Force patrolled the streets on the edges of the City Limits looking for someone careless enough to be caught. Sticking the keys into his front chest pocket, Jun was quick in darting down the tunnel to their underground home. The Force didn’t know about the tunnels for the most part, but that didn’t make them particularly safe.
He kicked off his shoes inside the door; Aiba insisted that shoes were not allowed in the home. Lamps set into the walls gave off pools of slightly warm, yellow light, every gap between them dark. Nino’s skates were still against the wall; he hadn’t left yet. Jun walked to Nino’s room, the door open and inviting. Leaning against the doorframe, he took in the sight of Nino seated cross-legged in his bed, shirt long gone with his back to the door, and an ancient mp3 player dismantled in a tray in his lap.
Nino had the device connected to a small notebook sized computer display, and his fingers skimmed across the keyboard almost too fast to actually be seen typing. The glow from the screen cast his hunched torso in a strange blue light, and Jun could tell by the way he kept murmuring to himself that he’d been engrossed in it for a while.
Approaching on silent steps, Jun came up behind Nino, pressing his fingertips against the bare skin at the nape of Nino’s neck. Jumping, Nino leaned his head back, and Jun moved his fingers to Nino’s shoulder, standing close behind him with his legs against Nino’s back.
“You look busy,” he commented softly, and Nino laughed. He leaned back into Jun, only then realizing how tense he’d gotten from bending over for so long.
“There’s stuff still on here, you know,” Nino explained, gesturing at the mp3 player. “Trapped on the drive, there’s music.”
“So you’re liberating it?”
“I’m trying,” Nino said, with a grin, rolling his head and wincing at a crack from his neck. “Wouldn’t it be cool, to hear music? I want whatever’s on here. I want it.”
“A noble cause,” Jun commented dryly. “But you’re expected elsewhere tonight.”
Nino pulled a face, but let Jun pull him off the bed anyway. He stretched, loosening his body from the hours of detail work, Jun’s hand never leaving his shoulder. Noticing, Nino glanced at it before meeting Jun’s eyes. Smirking, he dropped a kiss on Jun’s fingers before pulling away and grabbing a shirt.
“Sakurai Sho,” Nino said as he tugged the t-shirt over his head and reaching for his vest. “Rich, and well-positioned in the Ment. Scholar, officially, although apparently he’s got quite a rebellious side no doubt inherited from his late father.”
“Family business is hardly related,” Jun commented, not bothering to turn away as Nino changed into his ‘work pants’.
“His father was put under house arrest by the Ment and marked as a highly dangerous individual,” Nino said. “The exact reason wasn’t specified in writing that I could find, but I can make a guess.”
“Books full of illegal knowledge?”
“Better,” Nino said with a grin. “He taught his son.”
~
Ohno was exhausted. Work had been long and hard; they’d tracked and arrested an elderly couple who were speaking the old language. He gave them credit; they didn’t fight at all, only swore colorfully at the officers as they were carted away, still in the language they were being arrested for.
Once home in his own unit, Ohno had changed quickly. He hated his uniform to the point of keeping it in a box near the door when he didn’t have to be wearing it; out of sight, out of mind. Wandering into his living room, he sat down in front of a board he’d been working with. A bowl on the floor contained various pigments and liquids to add, rebuilding his homemade paint collection.
His thoughts strayed to the boy on skates that had probably saved him. He had a little trouble pushing away his irritation at the loss of all those paints, but he recognized rationally that without the boy’s help, he wouldn’t have escaped. Not to mention that the boy had seen his painting, however briefly.
That was the thing that excited Ohno the most, really. The idea that he was reminding the world, however slowly, what color meant. What expression and art and feeling used to mean. Why these things shouldn’t, couldn’t be extinguished. If even one person saw his work and was able to consider it, even for just a moment, then he’d gotten his message across.
He didn’t have enough paints to be going out again for a while, but he knew he’d go out again.
After so long, Ohno didn’t even think to stop.
~
Nino scaled the wall of Sho’s enormous home with relatively little trouble. A simple smoke bomb had distracted the guards long enough for him to scurry up the concrete and over. The laser beam across the top hadn’t even slowed him down; a pair of mirrors placed in the center, and the signal didn’t even know it had been interrupted.
That was the problem with people these days, Nino thought. They didn’t think simply enough anymore. Nino believed in keeping things easy.
Once in the yard, he had three choices. He could break through the front door (with the biggest alarm, most sensitive locks, and highest chance of being seen), or he could try the back door (still with an alarm, more locks, and while less guarded, still watched).
Or he could just go in the sliding glass porch door on the second floor.
With Aiba’s skates, he had no trouble rolling right up the side of the house and hopping onto the balcony. He noticed it lead not into a sitting room, but rather a large bedroom. The lock was a snap to break into; a musical key, of all things, and programmed to a nursery rhyme from a time before the Ment.
How cute, Nino thought as he entered the house. Sakurai sets tomorrow’s clothes out on a chair.
Speaking of Sho, Nino found him as he left the bedroom and directly into a sitting room. The scholar was absorbed in a book that looked to weigh a good ten pounds, resting on a couch with his brows knit in concentration. Sitting on a table behind Sho, Nino let his legs swing.
“For a book that big,” Nino commented blithely. “There better be a lot of explosions.”
Sho jumped off the couch with a yelp, whirling around to face Nino. He pointed, mouth opening as though he was going to shout, only to close again with a snap. His accusing finger drooped somewhat as he attempted to find words.
“No explosions?” Nino asked. “Well, kiss scenes then. That works too, I guess.”
“You… but the doors… and the fence,” Sho said, attempting to rationalize Nino’s presence without rendering his entire security system pointless.
“Your porch locks to the tune of that Hina Matsuri song,” Nino chirped. “Charming, really.”
“…You know the song?” Sho asked sheepishly.
“I can use chopsticks too, but don’t tell anyone,” Nino drawled, hopping off the table and rolling up to Sho. “That doesn’t really explain why you know it, though.”
“Ah, well. I… studied music, for a while,” Sho shrugged. Nino grinned crookedly at him.
“You mean your father used to sing them for you when you were small,” Nino corrected.
“My father was tone-deaf. If anybody was singing, it was my mother,” Sho said, giving Nino a grin of his own.
It wasn’t long before Nino had kicked off his skates, settling cross-legged on Sho’s couch as they talked. Sho explained that the Ment had been paying closer attention to him lately, no doubt in part because the things Sho knew were located in books that weren’t supposed to exist any longer.
“I have the last remaining copies of over 300 books,” Sho explained, low and urgent. “If I get caught with these, they’ll be destroyed.”
“And you’ll be arrested,” Nino added.
“At this point, that’s hardly my main concern,” Sho responded. “If I die, yes, a lot of information dies with me. But as long as the books exist, there’s always someone else to read them and learn, right? As long as it’s written down, it can continue to teach.”
After agreeing on a priority list of which books to remove first, Sho helped Nino memorize the titles. A physical plan was too risky; an order that only existed in their minds was far wiser. Sho was impressed with Nino’s ability to retain detailed information, and Nino in turn found himself appreciating Sho’s efficiency. Not to mention that Sho had genuinely good reasons for needing the job done; it wasn’t a game to him.
It was the safety of the past being carried on to the present.
“I’ll start sometimes next week,” Nino said as he stood to leave.
“When?” Sho asked, but Nino shook his head.
“It’s better if you don’t know. I won’t tell you when I’m coming, and you won’t see me. If you do, then something has probably gone very wrong,” Nino said.
Sho nodded his understanding, but Nino didn’t miss the resigned expression that drifted across his face.
~
Nino arrived home shortly before dawn. As soon as he entered his bedroom, he saw Aiba sprawled across his bed. There was a smear of grease across one of Aiba’s cheeks, and two of his fingers were bandaged. Climbing onto the bed, he flopped down next to Aiba just as Jun entered. The youngest joined them on the bed, spooning against Aiba’s back and fussing with the blanket pulled across them all.
“What’d he do?” Nino murmured into the dark, his eyelids already drooping.
“Burned them,” Jun explained, already knowing Nino was referring to Aiba’s injuries. “He was welding and the torch spluttered. It’s not too bad, but they did blister some.”
“No gloves?”
“Burned through them,” Jun said. “He actually was being careful.”
Nino snorted, rubbing at Aiba’s cheek with the corner of the blanket. Aiba wasn’t stupid; he knew the dangers of everything he did. It was just that sometimes he cut corners in his excitement, or stopped paying attention to the right things. Jun and Nino both worried about him, but neither tried to stop him. Just like Jun had his bar and Nino had his jobs, Aiba’s inventions were his way of forgetting the outside world was broken.
Aiba murmured in his sleep, shifting, and Jun curled an arm over his waist at the same time as Nino dropped a kiss on Aiba’s forehead. Drawn into his warmth, they drifted off to sleep curled together in a comforting mess of limbs.
Chapter 4.