#59: fic: if this is your first night at fight club
Title: if this is your first night at fight club
Characters: Kato Shigeaki, Nishikido Ryo, Yamapi, NEWS
Rating: R for violence, language and implied sex
Summary: Fight Club AU. People are always asking Shige if he knows Nishikido Ryo.
Word Count: 3000
Warnings: Violence and anarchy. SPOILERS FOR Fight Club. MASSIVE SPOILERS.
A/N: I started writing this after watching Yamapi promote Ashita no Joe. And proceeded to fail spectacularly at following the plot bunny down the correct rabbit hole, because Yamapi is... Marla. Even though the whole point was Yamapi being in Fight Club. What. :/
It starts with Ryo and a briefcase full of soap.
No, it doesn’t.
It starts with the two of them standing outside the bar. With Ryo turning to Shige and saying, “Hit me.”
No. Back up.
It starts with the insomnia.
The main point is Ryo. Ryo on the plane, with his shark’s grin and the careless, unsettlingly gorgeous way in which he leans over Shige, one hand braced against the overhead compartment.
He shouldn’t be attractive. The garish paisley shirt he is wearing clashes horribly with his tan. His smile is too wide; it makes the corners of his eyes crinkle downwards. Everything about him - angles, lines, words - strikes Shige as too sharp, too vivid.
“I’m Nishikido Ryo,” he says, and hands Shige his card.
At that very moment, thousands of kilometres below, Shige’s apartment is engulfed in a furious explosion.
“Hit me,” Ryo repeats. “I want you to hit me.”
Shige does.
There is a split-second lag between the point when Shige’s fist impacts the side of Ryo’s head and when the pain begins to bloom across Shige’s knuckles.
“Fuck,” Shige hisses, clutching at his hand.
“Fuck,” says Ryo, stumbling off to one side, groaning in pain and furious delight.
He is laughing and laughing and Shige has no chance to even try to apologise because Ryo is lurching forward to slug Shige in the gut -
It hurts like nothing else Shige has ever felt before. He can’t breathe, doubled over in pain. It hurts, but at least Shige can feel it.
Finally, fucking, feel it.
When Shige can finally uncurl himself and stand up straight, Ryo is there, ready and grinning.
Shige lunges at him.
No. Back up again.
It starts with Yamapi.
“You don’t have breast cancer,” says Shige. He is angry, so angry, and Yamapi is just looking at him with those dark, unreadable eyes. Cigarette smoke curls around the both of them.
“Neither do you,” says Yamapi.
He has a point.
“We’ll split the week,” says Shige wearily. Once Yamapi started turning up at Shige’s support groups, Shige can’t cry, can’t get his fix and get to sleep. “I don’t want to see you. Let’s split up the week, okay?”
Yamapi shrugs. “Whatever,” he says, picking at the name sticker haphazardly slapped on the front of his shirt. Hello, my name is Pi.
“You’ll take lymphoma, and tuberculosis-”
“You should take tuberculosis,” says Yamapi. He waves his cigarette to illustrate his point.
“Fine,” says Shige.
“I’ll take the parasites, too,” Yamapi continues.
“Do we have a deal?” Shige asks. Because these support groups are his. They are the only way he can get any sleep now and does Yamapi know how hard it is, going without?
But Yamapi isn’t listening; he’s meandering across the road, cars stopping abruptly for him left and right. Drivers are yelling at him and honking their horns and Yamapi doesn’t. Fucking. Care.
Yamapi reaches the other side and spins round neatly to look at Shige, who is still teetering on the pavement, afraid step out onto the path of oncoming traffic. Yamapi’s lips are curved into something that looks suspiciously like a smile.
“It’s a deal,” says Yamapi.
Shige should be doing something with his life, he knows. He should be talking to the insurance company about his flat. He should be looking for a new one.
What Shige does, instead, is remain in Ryo’s decrepit shit-hole of a house, going through the motions of being at work and sitting through meetings. What Shige does is bide his time until Wednesday nights.
They are different men, on Wednesday nights.
Ryo surveys the group standing before him.
“The first rule of Fight Club is,” he says, “you do not talk about Fight Club.”
Ryo has already stripped down to just his trousers, and his torso is grimy and glistening with sweat. Shige remembers landing more than a few solid blows on him over the past month, and it shows. But while Shige is cut and puffy and broken, Ryo wears his bruises like they’re fucking Armani.
“The second rule of Fight Club is,” Ryo continues. His tone is one of delight, wild and vicious. “You DO NOT talk about Fight Club.”
“Where have you been the last eight weeks?” Yamapi’s voice is tinny over the telephone line.
“Pi?” Shige asks.
“You haven’t been going for any support groups,” says Yamapi. “I know, because I’ve been attending yours.”
“I’ve found a new one,” says Shige. “It’s for men only.”
“I’m a man,” Yamapi points out, in that bland, matter-of-fact tone he has.
“Well,” says Shige. He glances down the corridor at Ryo, who is doing handstand push-ups in his ratty dressing gown. “I can’t really talk about it.”
“Okay,” says Yamapi.
“Is that all?” asks Shige, a little too quickly to be polite. Shige finds that he doesn’t care.
“I feel like sitting in the sauna room of a public bath,” says Yamapi. “And then after that I’ll hang around the massage chairs and drink some milk.”
“Why are you telling me this?” asks Shige.
“I like milk,” says Yamapi. “Milk makes me happy.”
Yamapi sounds like he’s going to continue on this tangent for a while. Shige considers whether he should just leave the receiver sitting on top of the phone and wander off.
Then he glances round at Ryo again (triple clap push-ups, now) and decides against it.
“Get to the point,” he tells Yamapi. “Or I’m hanging up.”
“Want to come to a bathhouse with me? I know a good one.”
Shige thinks about the bruises blooming across his stomach and back, his fight-hardened lines of muscle, his missing teeth. He hasn’t cleaned the blood off his shirt. Then he thinks of Yamapi, unfathomable and absent and clearly slightly mad. He wonders what Yamapi’s appraising gaze would feel like.
“No,” says Shige.
“Okay,” says Yamapi.
The nurse glances apprehensively at Shige’s split lip and black eyes before turning her gaze to his dislocated shoulder.
“He fell down some stairs,” says Ryo, from where he’s leaning against the wall, smoking a cigarette.
The nurse ignores him, clearly unimpressed.
“I fell down some stairs,” Shige repeats.
“You won’t believe what I dreamt last night-” Shige begins as he enters the kitchen. He stops on his tracks.
Yamapi is standing at the sink, drinking some orange juice directly from the carton.
“Want some?” he asks, holding out the carton. He looks rumpled and bruised, but not from fighting. The look he gives Shige is oddly charged and far too familiar.
“What are you doing here?” asks Shige.
Yamapi blinks.
“What the hell are you doing here?” Shige repeats.
A look of genuine confusion crosses Yamapi’s face. Genuine confusion, and something like hurt.
“Fuck you,” says Yamapi, slowly and quietly. He sets down the juice carton on the kitchen table before striding out. The door slams shut behind him.
Ryo chooses this moment to amble in, cocky and sex-tousled, sweatpants hanging dangerously low on his hips.
He grins when he sees Shige. “So the phone was ringing, and I-”
“Not interested,” says Shige flatly.
Shige already knows the story without Ryo having to spell it out.
“We need to take it up a notch,” Ryo says.
“What do you mean?” asks Shige.
Ryo doesn’t answer.
The next evening, Ryo gives out homework assignments. Pick a fight with someone on the street. Lose.
The next month, Shige’s distributing beers to a bunch of guys in their living room while they watch a news report. They’ve painted a smiley face onto the side of a building. It has flaming windows for eyes.
“You don’t tell me anything,” says Shige later, to Ryo.
“I’ll be out of your way in a minute,” says Yamapi, entering the kitchen.
“I didn’t say anything,” Shige replies. Yamapi and Ryo have somehow mastered the art of never being in the same room at the same time. Apart from when they’re fucking.
Shige clears his throat. “You don’t have to leave.”
Yamapi pauses in the middle of pouring himself a glass of water. The look he gives Shige is fragile, almost. Startlingly so.
It’s not a good look on him. Shige is strangely drawn by that.
For one rash moment Shige wants to ask Yamapi why he does this, why they both do this. Why they have both latched on to Ryo; let themselves get caught up in his irresistible orbit.
Then he sees Ryo in the corridor, out of the corner of his eye. Don’t mention me. I don’t like it when people mention me. Shige remembers promising thrice.
“Have you still been going to your groups?” Shige asks instead.
Yamapi doesn’t smile. “Do you care?”
“Do not fuck with us,” Ryo tells the police commissioner, meaning every word.
Koyama reaches down to the commissioner’s crotch and cuts something with his knife. It makes the commissioner jump, his scream muffled under the electrical tape stretched across his mouth.
Massu smiles, and holds up a severed rubber band.
Shige has a scar the shape of Ryo’s lips seared into the back of his left hand. This is a mark left from chemical burn, all blinding pain and desolation. Ryo’s way of branding him, perhaps. You’re one step closer to hitting bottom.
But it is not towards Shige that Ryo turns his congratulatory gaze.
Ryo looks past Shige and beams instead at Tegoshi, who nods and smiles back, pretty as anything.
Wednesday night. Shige and Tegoshi circle each other slowly while the crowd around them cheers.
There is poison in Shige’s veins; a burn in his chest and behind his eyes like so much rage untrammelled. Tegoshi only manages one cursory jab with his fist before Shige is on him, on top of him, raining blows to his face in quick succession.
He is dimly aware of the men surrounding them slowly going silent; of the broken, blood-gurgling sounds Tegoshi is making. His fists hurt. His head might explode.
Shige stands up. Turns and walks away. The crowd parts for him.
“Fight’s over,” Ryo calls out to the others. “Get him to the fucking hospital.”
Ryo gives Shige a searching look. Maybe he finds some sort of answer in Shige’s expression. Shige himself feels nothing but numbness.
It is Ryo who amasses all the men. It is Ryo who gives what they do a name. Ryo sets all of this in motion and all Shige can do is watch it happen. He watches Ryo build an army of space monkeys, gaunt and hungry-looking, ready to do Ryo’s bidding.
Shige watches, and watches, and one day Ryo is gone.
“Where’s Ryo?” Shige asks. He’s standing in what used to be the basement but now appears to be some sort of makeshift command centre. The walls are covered in maps and folders, but nobody will give him a straight explanation.
Tegoshi glances up. It hurts to look at him. “The first rule of Project--”
“Right,” says Shige. Before he turns away, though, he glimpses the lye-burned scar on the back of Tegoshi’s hand. Something acidic roils up in his gut.
“Who are all these people?” asks Yamapi, glancing in confusion at the men in the front yard.
Shige shrugs. Takes a long drag on his cigarette.
“Can I come in?” Yamapi asks. There is a sort of heated anticipation in his face that makes Shige wish for a second that Yamapi wasn’t Ryo’s.
Then he thinks of Ryo, and tastes something bitter again.
“He’s not here,” says Shige.
“What?” asks Yamapi.
“He’s not here,” Shige repeats venomously, more for his own benefit than anything else. “Ryo’s not here anymore. He’s gone away.”
A man dies, that night. He gets shot, and bleeds to death on the long metal counter of the kitchen, surrounded by Ryo’s men.
Shige decides to look for Ryo.
Ryo is the one who finds Shige, not the other way around. Wherever Shige goes, he discovers that Ryo has been there already.
Ryo is there in the way members of other fight clubs look at Shige. He is there in the lies Shige hears whenever he asks about Ryo. He is there in the myths people tell Shige about Ryo. The legend that is Nishikido Ryo both precedes and follows Shige as he travels.
“Welcome back,” says a bartender in Osaka. He is wearing a neck brace, and his name tag says Yokoyama. His face is a mass of bruises.
“You know me?” asks Shige.
“Is that a test?” asks Yokoyama.
Shige just looks at him.
“You were here last Thursday night, asking us how security was,” says Yokoyama.
“Who do you think I am?” asks Shige. He is standing stock still but his heart is pounding in his ears.
The man standing beside Yokoyama, the one who introduced himself as Ohkura, places his hand on top of the counter. The kiss scar has been burned into the back of his hand.
“You’re the one who did this to me,” says Ohkura. “You’re Nishikido Ryo.”
“Have we ever had sex?” Shige demands, the moment Yamapi answers the phone.
“What kind of stupid question is that?” asks Yamapi.
“Because the answer is yes or because the answer is no?” asks Shige.
“Is this some sort of a trick-”
“Just answer the question!” Shige shouts.
“You love me, you hate me. You fuck me, then snub me,” Yamapi tells him. “You’re really fucking deranged, you know that, Ryo?”
Something goes cold in Shige’s chest. “What did you just say?”
“There’s something wrong with you,” says Yamapi. “There’s something wrong with everyone but when it comes to you there’s really something wrong-”
“Say my name,” says Shige.
“What?” Yamapi snaps.
“What’s my name?” asks Shige. “Say my name!”
“Nishikido Ryo.”
Ryo is the one who finds Shige, not the other way around.
“You broke your promise,” he tells Shige. He’s sitting on the chair opposite Shige’s bed. Shige can still hear Yamapi saying hello? Hello? over on the other end.
Shige hangs up. He turns to Ryo. “Why do people think I’m you?”
“Why did you talk to him about me?” asks Ryo. He’s tan, Shige notices, more so than before. He looks good, like he’s been working out.
“Answer my question, Ryo.”
“Sit,” says Ryo.
“Why do people think I’m you?”
“I think you know.”
“No, I don’t,” says Shige.
Ryo shrugs. “People think that you’re me, because you and I happen to share the same body.”
Shige balks at this, says “What?” like he cannot believe it. But his mind is going into overdrive.
Now he remembers - he remembers what it felt like to hit himself in the face, outside the bar. He remembers standing in the basement, stating, wild and vicious, the first and second rules of Fight Club. He remembers the fever dream that was fucking Yamapi.
“Pi-” Shige begins.
“We need to do something about him,” says Ryo. “He knows too much.”
Shige attempts to stand, to do something to stop Ryo, but as he begins to move, something in him goes out like a light.
When he wakes up, it’s already the next morning. He arrives back at the house to find it completely empty.
“Just get on the bus,” says Shige.
“Why?” asks Yamapi.
“You’re not safe,” Shige tells him. “Please.”
“Okay,” says Yamapi. “But there’s something I’ve wanted to do for a while.”
“What is it?” asks Shige.
Yamapi clenches his hand into a fist and punches Shige so hard that he stumbles to the ground. It shouldn’t hurt as much as it does.
“You are the worst thing that ever happened to me,” says Yamapi, after he climbs onto the bus.
It is only after the doors hiss shut and the bus has pulled away that Shige turns around to look. There are men on that bus - his men. They rise from their seats as Yamapi heads down the aisle.
Shige begins to sprint.
It ends with this: with Ryo holding a gun to Shige’s mouth, with the foundations of ten buildings in the city wrapped with blasting gelatine and set to blow.
“Any last words?” Ryo asks.
No. It ends with this: with Shige holding a gun to Shige’s mouth, with Ryo eyeing him, transfixed.
“Why would you do that?” Ryo asks, incredulous. “Why would you put a gun to your mouth?”
“Not my mouth,” says Shige. “Our mouth.”
Ryo smiles. It’s his shark’s smile; effortlessly charming, entirely Shige’s. “Where are you going with this?” he asks, voice dangerous.
“Ryo,” says Shige.
“What?” asks Ryo.
Shige cocks the hammer of the gun. “My eyes are open.”
He pulls the trigger.
It ends with this: with unbearable pain, with blood and smoke pouring out of Shige’s mouth. With Ryo falling to the ground, shock still written on his face.
No. Fast forward.
It ends with Yamapi.
“You’ve been shot,” says Yamapi.
Thanks for stating the obvious, Shige thinks. “Yes,” he says instead, because it hurts him to speak.
Yamapi is still trying to dab away some of the blood with some paper napkins. His eyes are frantic; worried. Shige thinks he could get used to this.
“Who did this to you?”
“I did, I think,” Shige replies, with some effort. “But I’ll be fine.”
Out in the city, a massive explosion happens, causing the glass walls of the building they are in to rattle violently. As Shige and Yamapi turn to look, another building implodes upon itself. And then another, and another.
“I’m sorry,” says Shige, glancing over to Yamapi, who looks both enthralled and fearful at the same time.
“You met me at a very strange time in my life.”
End
-----
Further note: ...I wrote this at a very strange time in my life. Apologies that this does not live up to the source material at all. And for the minimal involvement of the rest of NEWS. I didn't want to write Koyama getting beat on ;__;
(Kind of sneakily posting this next to a happy!fic because this is one of the darker things I've written, recently.)
Characters: Kato Shigeaki, Nishikido Ryo, Yamapi, NEWS
Rating: R for violence, language and implied sex
Summary: Fight Club AU. People are always asking Shige if he knows Nishikido Ryo.
Word Count: 3000
Warnings: Violence and anarchy. SPOILERS FOR Fight Club. MASSIVE SPOILERS.
A/N: I started writing this after watching Yamapi promote Ashita no Joe. And proceeded to fail spectacularly at following the plot bunny down the correct rabbit hole, because Yamapi is... Marla. Even though the whole point was Yamapi being in Fight Club. What. :/
It starts with Ryo and a briefcase full of soap.
No, it doesn’t.
It starts with the two of them standing outside the bar. With Ryo turning to Shige and saying, “Hit me.”
No. Back up.
It starts with the insomnia.
The main point is Ryo. Ryo on the plane, with his shark’s grin and the careless, unsettlingly gorgeous way in which he leans over Shige, one hand braced against the overhead compartment.
He shouldn’t be attractive. The garish paisley shirt he is wearing clashes horribly with his tan. His smile is too wide; it makes the corners of his eyes crinkle downwards. Everything about him - angles, lines, words - strikes Shige as too sharp, too vivid.
“I’m Nishikido Ryo,” he says, and hands Shige his card.
At that very moment, thousands of kilometres below, Shige’s apartment is engulfed in a furious explosion.
“Hit me,” Ryo repeats. “I want you to hit me.”
Shige does.
There is a split-second lag between the point when Shige’s fist impacts the side of Ryo’s head and when the pain begins to bloom across Shige’s knuckles.
“Fuck,” Shige hisses, clutching at his hand.
“Fuck,” says Ryo, stumbling off to one side, groaning in pain and furious delight.
He is laughing and laughing and Shige has no chance to even try to apologise because Ryo is lurching forward to slug Shige in the gut -
It hurts like nothing else Shige has ever felt before. He can’t breathe, doubled over in pain. It hurts, but at least Shige can feel it.
Finally, fucking, feel it.
When Shige can finally uncurl himself and stand up straight, Ryo is there, ready and grinning.
Shige lunges at him.
No. Back up again.
It starts with Yamapi.
“You don’t have breast cancer,” says Shige. He is angry, so angry, and Yamapi is just looking at him with those dark, unreadable eyes. Cigarette smoke curls around the both of them.
“Neither do you,” says Yamapi.
He has a point.
“We’ll split the week,” says Shige wearily. Once Yamapi started turning up at Shige’s support groups, Shige can’t cry, can’t get his fix and get to sleep. “I don’t want to see you. Let’s split up the week, okay?”
Yamapi shrugs. “Whatever,” he says, picking at the name sticker haphazardly slapped on the front of his shirt. Hello, my name is Pi.
“You’ll take lymphoma, and tuberculosis-”
“You should take tuberculosis,” says Yamapi. He waves his cigarette to illustrate his point.
“Fine,” says Shige.
“I’ll take the parasites, too,” Yamapi continues.
“Do we have a deal?” Shige asks. Because these support groups are his. They are the only way he can get any sleep now and does Yamapi know how hard it is, going without?
But Yamapi isn’t listening; he’s meandering across the road, cars stopping abruptly for him left and right. Drivers are yelling at him and honking their horns and Yamapi doesn’t. Fucking. Care.
Yamapi reaches the other side and spins round neatly to look at Shige, who is still teetering on the pavement, afraid step out onto the path of oncoming traffic. Yamapi’s lips are curved into something that looks suspiciously like a smile.
“It’s a deal,” says Yamapi.
Shige should be doing something with his life, he knows. He should be talking to the insurance company about his flat. He should be looking for a new one.
What Shige does, instead, is remain in Ryo’s decrepit shit-hole of a house, going through the motions of being at work and sitting through meetings. What Shige does is bide his time until Wednesday nights.
They are different men, on Wednesday nights.
Ryo surveys the group standing before him.
“The first rule of Fight Club is,” he says, “you do not talk about Fight Club.”
Ryo has already stripped down to just his trousers, and his torso is grimy and glistening with sweat. Shige remembers landing more than a few solid blows on him over the past month, and it shows. But while Shige is cut and puffy and broken, Ryo wears his bruises like they’re fucking Armani.
“The second rule of Fight Club is,” Ryo continues. His tone is one of delight, wild and vicious. “You DO NOT talk about Fight Club.”
“Where have you been the last eight weeks?” Yamapi’s voice is tinny over the telephone line.
“Pi?” Shige asks.
“You haven’t been going for any support groups,” says Yamapi. “I know, because I’ve been attending yours.”
“I’ve found a new one,” says Shige. “It’s for men only.”
“I’m a man,” Yamapi points out, in that bland, matter-of-fact tone he has.
“Well,” says Shige. He glances down the corridor at Ryo, who is doing handstand push-ups in his ratty dressing gown. “I can’t really talk about it.”
“Okay,” says Yamapi.
“Is that all?” asks Shige, a little too quickly to be polite. Shige finds that he doesn’t care.
“I feel like sitting in the sauna room of a public bath,” says Yamapi. “And then after that I’ll hang around the massage chairs and drink some milk.”
“Why are you telling me this?” asks Shige.
“I like milk,” says Yamapi. “Milk makes me happy.”
Yamapi sounds like he’s going to continue on this tangent for a while. Shige considers whether he should just leave the receiver sitting on top of the phone and wander off.
Then he glances round at Ryo again (triple clap push-ups, now) and decides against it.
“Get to the point,” he tells Yamapi. “Or I’m hanging up.”
“Want to come to a bathhouse with me? I know a good one.”
Shige thinks about the bruises blooming across his stomach and back, his fight-hardened lines of muscle, his missing teeth. He hasn’t cleaned the blood off his shirt. Then he thinks of Yamapi, unfathomable and absent and clearly slightly mad. He wonders what Yamapi’s appraising gaze would feel like.
“No,” says Shige.
“Okay,” says Yamapi.
The nurse glances apprehensively at Shige’s split lip and black eyes before turning her gaze to his dislocated shoulder.
“He fell down some stairs,” says Ryo, from where he’s leaning against the wall, smoking a cigarette.
The nurse ignores him, clearly unimpressed.
“I fell down some stairs,” Shige repeats.
“You won’t believe what I dreamt last night-” Shige begins as he enters the kitchen. He stops on his tracks.
Yamapi is standing at the sink, drinking some orange juice directly from the carton.
“Want some?” he asks, holding out the carton. He looks rumpled and bruised, but not from fighting. The look he gives Shige is oddly charged and far too familiar.
“What are you doing here?” asks Shige.
Yamapi blinks.
“What the hell are you doing here?” Shige repeats.
A look of genuine confusion crosses Yamapi’s face. Genuine confusion, and something like hurt.
“Fuck you,” says Yamapi, slowly and quietly. He sets down the juice carton on the kitchen table before striding out. The door slams shut behind him.
Ryo chooses this moment to amble in, cocky and sex-tousled, sweatpants hanging dangerously low on his hips.
He grins when he sees Shige. “So the phone was ringing, and I-”
“Not interested,” says Shige flatly.
Shige already knows the story without Ryo having to spell it out.
“We need to take it up a notch,” Ryo says.
“What do you mean?” asks Shige.
Ryo doesn’t answer.
The next evening, Ryo gives out homework assignments. Pick a fight with someone on the street. Lose.
The next month, Shige’s distributing beers to a bunch of guys in their living room while they watch a news report. They’ve painted a smiley face onto the side of a building. It has flaming windows for eyes.
“You don’t tell me anything,” says Shige later, to Ryo.
“I’ll be out of your way in a minute,” says Yamapi, entering the kitchen.
“I didn’t say anything,” Shige replies. Yamapi and Ryo have somehow mastered the art of never being in the same room at the same time. Apart from when they’re fucking.
Shige clears his throat. “You don’t have to leave.”
Yamapi pauses in the middle of pouring himself a glass of water. The look he gives Shige is fragile, almost. Startlingly so.
It’s not a good look on him. Shige is strangely drawn by that.
For one rash moment Shige wants to ask Yamapi why he does this, why they both do this. Why they have both latched on to Ryo; let themselves get caught up in his irresistible orbit.
Then he sees Ryo in the corridor, out of the corner of his eye. Don’t mention me. I don’t like it when people mention me. Shige remembers promising thrice.
“Have you still been going to your groups?” Shige asks instead.
Yamapi doesn’t smile. “Do you care?”
“Do not fuck with us,” Ryo tells the police commissioner, meaning every word.
Koyama reaches down to the commissioner’s crotch and cuts something with his knife. It makes the commissioner jump, his scream muffled under the electrical tape stretched across his mouth.
Massu smiles, and holds up a severed rubber band.
Shige has a scar the shape of Ryo’s lips seared into the back of his left hand. This is a mark left from chemical burn, all blinding pain and desolation. Ryo’s way of branding him, perhaps. You’re one step closer to hitting bottom.
But it is not towards Shige that Ryo turns his congratulatory gaze.
Ryo looks past Shige and beams instead at Tegoshi, who nods and smiles back, pretty as anything.
Wednesday night. Shige and Tegoshi circle each other slowly while the crowd around them cheers.
There is poison in Shige’s veins; a burn in his chest and behind his eyes like so much rage untrammelled. Tegoshi only manages one cursory jab with his fist before Shige is on him, on top of him, raining blows to his face in quick succession.
He is dimly aware of the men surrounding them slowly going silent; of the broken, blood-gurgling sounds Tegoshi is making. His fists hurt. His head might explode.
Shige stands up. Turns and walks away. The crowd parts for him.
“Fight’s over,” Ryo calls out to the others. “Get him to the fucking hospital.”
Ryo gives Shige a searching look. Maybe he finds some sort of answer in Shige’s expression. Shige himself feels nothing but numbness.
It is Ryo who amasses all the men. It is Ryo who gives what they do a name. Ryo sets all of this in motion and all Shige can do is watch it happen. He watches Ryo build an army of space monkeys, gaunt and hungry-looking, ready to do Ryo’s bidding.
Shige watches, and watches, and one day Ryo is gone.
“Where’s Ryo?” Shige asks. He’s standing in what used to be the basement but now appears to be some sort of makeshift command centre. The walls are covered in maps and folders, but nobody will give him a straight explanation.
Tegoshi glances up. It hurts to look at him. “The first rule of Project--”
“Right,” says Shige. Before he turns away, though, he glimpses the lye-burned scar on the back of Tegoshi’s hand. Something acidic roils up in his gut.
“Who are all these people?” asks Yamapi, glancing in confusion at the men in the front yard.
Shige shrugs. Takes a long drag on his cigarette.
“Can I come in?” Yamapi asks. There is a sort of heated anticipation in his face that makes Shige wish for a second that Yamapi wasn’t Ryo’s.
Then he thinks of Ryo, and tastes something bitter again.
“He’s not here,” says Shige.
“What?” asks Yamapi.
“He’s not here,” Shige repeats venomously, more for his own benefit than anything else. “Ryo’s not here anymore. He’s gone away.”
A man dies, that night. He gets shot, and bleeds to death on the long metal counter of the kitchen, surrounded by Ryo’s men.
Shige decides to look for Ryo.
Ryo is the one who finds Shige, not the other way around. Wherever Shige goes, he discovers that Ryo has been there already.
Ryo is there in the way members of other fight clubs look at Shige. He is there in the lies Shige hears whenever he asks about Ryo. He is there in the myths people tell Shige about Ryo. The legend that is Nishikido Ryo both precedes and follows Shige as he travels.
“Welcome back,” says a bartender in Osaka. He is wearing a neck brace, and his name tag says Yokoyama. His face is a mass of bruises.
“You know me?” asks Shige.
“Is that a test?” asks Yokoyama.
Shige just looks at him.
“You were here last Thursday night, asking us how security was,” says Yokoyama.
“Who do you think I am?” asks Shige. He is standing stock still but his heart is pounding in his ears.
The man standing beside Yokoyama, the one who introduced himself as Ohkura, places his hand on top of the counter. The kiss scar has been burned into the back of his hand.
“You’re the one who did this to me,” says Ohkura. “You’re Nishikido Ryo.”
“Have we ever had sex?” Shige demands, the moment Yamapi answers the phone.
“What kind of stupid question is that?” asks Yamapi.
“Because the answer is yes or because the answer is no?” asks Shige.
“Is this some sort of a trick-”
“Just answer the question!” Shige shouts.
“You love me, you hate me. You fuck me, then snub me,” Yamapi tells him. “You’re really fucking deranged, you know that, Ryo?”
Something goes cold in Shige’s chest. “What did you just say?”
“There’s something wrong with you,” says Yamapi. “There’s something wrong with everyone but when it comes to you there’s really something wrong-”
“Say my name,” says Shige.
“What?” Yamapi snaps.
“What’s my name?” asks Shige. “Say my name!”
“Nishikido Ryo.”
Ryo is the one who finds Shige, not the other way around.
“You broke your promise,” he tells Shige. He’s sitting on the chair opposite Shige’s bed. Shige can still hear Yamapi saying hello? Hello? over on the other end.
Shige hangs up. He turns to Ryo. “Why do people think I’m you?”
“Why did you talk to him about me?” asks Ryo. He’s tan, Shige notices, more so than before. He looks good, like he’s been working out.
“Answer my question, Ryo.”
“Sit,” says Ryo.
“Why do people think I’m you?”
“I think you know.”
“No, I don’t,” says Shige.
Ryo shrugs. “People think that you’re me, because you and I happen to share the same body.”
Shige balks at this, says “What?” like he cannot believe it. But his mind is going into overdrive.
Now he remembers - he remembers what it felt like to hit himself in the face, outside the bar. He remembers standing in the basement, stating, wild and vicious, the first and second rules of Fight Club. He remembers the fever dream that was fucking Yamapi.
“Pi-” Shige begins.
“We need to do something about him,” says Ryo. “He knows too much.”
Shige attempts to stand, to do something to stop Ryo, but as he begins to move, something in him goes out like a light.
When he wakes up, it’s already the next morning. He arrives back at the house to find it completely empty.
“Just get on the bus,” says Shige.
“Why?” asks Yamapi.
“You’re not safe,” Shige tells him. “Please.”
“Okay,” says Yamapi. “But there’s something I’ve wanted to do for a while.”
“What is it?” asks Shige.
Yamapi clenches his hand into a fist and punches Shige so hard that he stumbles to the ground. It shouldn’t hurt as much as it does.
“You are the worst thing that ever happened to me,” says Yamapi, after he climbs onto the bus.
It is only after the doors hiss shut and the bus has pulled away that Shige turns around to look. There are men on that bus - his men. They rise from their seats as Yamapi heads down the aisle.
Shige begins to sprint.
It ends with this: with Ryo holding a gun to Shige’s mouth, with the foundations of ten buildings in the city wrapped with blasting gelatine and set to blow.
“Any last words?” Ryo asks.
No. It ends with this: with Shige holding a gun to Shige’s mouth, with Ryo eyeing him, transfixed.
“Why would you do that?” Ryo asks, incredulous. “Why would you put a gun to your mouth?”
“Not my mouth,” says Shige. “Our mouth.”
Ryo smiles. It’s his shark’s smile; effortlessly charming, entirely Shige’s. “Where are you going with this?” he asks, voice dangerous.
“Ryo,” says Shige.
“What?” asks Ryo.
Shige cocks the hammer of the gun. “My eyes are open.”
He pulls the trigger.
It ends with this: with unbearable pain, with blood and smoke pouring out of Shige’s mouth. With Ryo falling to the ground, shock still written on his face.
No. Fast forward.
It ends with Yamapi.
“You’ve been shot,” says Yamapi.
Thanks for stating the obvious, Shige thinks. “Yes,” he says instead, because it hurts him to speak.
Yamapi is still trying to dab away some of the blood with some paper napkins. His eyes are frantic; worried. Shige thinks he could get used to this.
“Who did this to you?”
“I did, I think,” Shige replies, with some effort. “But I’ll be fine.”
Out in the city, a massive explosion happens, causing the glass walls of the building they are in to rattle violently. As Shige and Yamapi turn to look, another building implodes upon itself. And then another, and another.
“I’m sorry,” says Shige, glancing over to Yamapi, who looks both enthralled and fearful at the same time.
“You met me at a very strange time in my life.”
End
-----
Further note: ...I wrote this at a very strange time in my life. Apologies that this does not live up to the source material at all. And for the minimal involvement of the rest of NEWS. I didn't want to write Koyama getting beat on ;__;
(Kind of sneakily posting this next to a happy!fic because this is one of the darker things I've written, recently.)