mission report for randomicicle
Mission report for randomicicle
Delivered by: m_nemonica
Title: The Dessicator
Groups/Pairings: KAT-TUN, implied Koki/Kame/Jin + bits of Junno; Ryo + Pi
Rating: PG
Warnings: introspection, weird humor, runners anonymous, negative product placement
Summary: It was a catabolic pathway for Koki, an escape from childhood obesity for Kame, and an excuse for Junno to take off his shirt.
Notes: To the lovely randomicicle! I tried to go for that different jobs, different lives sort of thing you described. and of course there's no better way to bring people together than 42 kilometers of tears and unimaginable pain. hahaa. thanks to O for the beta!
Small disclaimer:The farthest distance I've ever continuously run is about 23k, and therefore I cannot guarantee a 100% accuracy of the true endurance it takes to complete a full marathon. Please forgive this and any other running discrepancies. Oh and I am definitely not cool and creepy enough to be Johnny, but you knew that already. :)
THE DESSICATOR
The rain is on our lips,
We do not run for prize.
But the storm the water whips
And the wave howls to the skies.
01 - K
The pediatrician's office is bone-dry.
Well not really bone-dry, seeing that there's technically a dialysis bag full of blood drawn from the upper arm of somebody else's helpless screaming kid, but it's close enough and that doesn't make Kame's mother any less uncomfortable than before. The whole office is painted in a color that is slightly-white and slightly-puke, decor complete with cheesy posters of smiling children advertising PediaSure. A disconcerting shade of beige in the armchairs, a disconcerting sparkle in the silver instruments, no curtains no corners no windows (one door). But it didn't matter anyway, because Nishikido-sensei was good at making Kazuya squirm even without showing him the tongue depressors. And Kazuya regarded tongue depressors equivalent to the diabolic Dark Magistrate's Second Coming.
"Tell me about his diet," said the pediatrician, and Kame's mom thought to herself that his smile was either devilishly handsome or shit-eating or both, "Kamenashi-san, how has Kazuya-kun been eating?"
A pause.
"Not very well," she admitted, "he's been skipping his vegetables and bypassing the proteins entirely. Honestly I'm a bit at a loss--"
"Have not," Kame interrupted, "I'm growing up perfectly. I'm only point-eight percent off the body mass index of an average Japanese kid."
"Are you really," said Nishikido-sensei, and he made a note of it on his clipboard. Then he smiled again. Creepily.
Kame's mom wasn't satisfied. "Is there anything I can do about this, Nishikido-sensei? He's really not eating properly and I'm worried he's going to grow up with these bad eating habits."
"Well..."
"How many times do I have to say this," Kame said, "I don't need--"
"Nishikido-sensei!"
The pediatrician drew back, startled. "Um. Okay." He scribbled a few unintelligible words on a slip of paper. "Uh. Why don't we go with three-a-day servings of..."
( and it was the beginning of Kame's battle, with )
"...PediaSure?"
~
"Yeah. PediaSure."
"PediaSure? Nishikido, do they even sell this stuff in Japan?"
"That's why I'm calling you for it, Nino. A special order for a special kid with a special mother. It's a favor for me. PediaSure."
"Kids get addicted to this stuff pretty quickly, you know. It's like drinking straight-up sugar, seriously, and it's even more addictive than hayashi rice..."
"...Not funny."
"Okay."
"Just bill me."
"You got it, brother."
~
So it was all because of the stupid PediaSure. Three servings of it per day, eleven days a week, after every meal every vegetable every complaint every foul mood. The Pediasure plagued Kame's childhood like bad breath on Saturday morning. The PediaSure pooped the party. The PediaSure left him in the rain with no umbrella. The PediaSure was like an antisteroid that zapped his energy and consumed the actin in his bones, replacing muscle with lipid and good humor with vitriol. The PediaSure was syrupy and sugary and tasted syrupy and sugary. The PediaSure substituted for miso soup in the morning and milk during lunch, as well as any dream of a chilled can of orange juice from the vending machines after school and that was how the chain reaction occurred, Kame was sure of it; he grew pimples on his arms when he was twelve and he was itchy all the time and he was smelly and he sweated too much during gym class, so it was all because of the stupid PediaSure.
"It's good for you, Kame-chan," Jin would tease him, "You've just got to drink it all and then puke it back up. They're training you to be bulimic."
"Shut up," Kame grumbled, "If you were any skinnier I bet your mother would put you on it too."
"Dude, I am way too beautiful for PediaSure."
"Too freaky and ugly for it, more like."
And Jin made triple sure to forget about inviting Kame to his next ice cream rendez-vous.
~
( nine years old; "Oh yeah, we went to the same primary school. Jin pulled my hair on the first day of school because he thought I was a girl, and then he just stuck around and never learned to stop being a leech. He's sort of like that annoying thing with the blue hair from the Doctor Seuss books, you know? The one that keeps telling the Yooks and the Zooks to stop shooting each other from across the wall or the Onceler to stop polluting the ecosystem, and he's right, but the thing does it in such irritating rhymes that you just want to conk it in the head, you know? He's right, but at the same time he's such a moron that you want him to be wrong. That's Jin." )
02 - T
Sometimes people asked Junno why he would spend so much of his free time in his trainers.
Stripped down to a pair of running shorts and running socks and running shoes, t-shirt jammed into his waistband and water bottle in one hand and sports watch slicked with perspiration and ten miles to go feeling like he's the wind and having no need for a destination. It works like a song. Sun bright, trees shiny, dew on the grass, pedestrian streets empty and beautiful. Adrenalin pumping through the veins, muscles loose and heart pumping like clockwork and hair held back by a band that snagged when he took it off too quickly. Sometimes people asked Junno why he enjoyed dripping his sweat all over the streets. Sometimes they shook their head at him when they saw him coming down the road, looking like he'd flown down from the sky. Sometimes they just looked at him like he was just a little bit fucking crazy, and Junno would never know how to respond.
"I just like running," he'd shrug, and then he'd slip the shirt from his waistband and wipe his sweaty forehead, wrinkle his nose a little at the faint odor of B.O. and wonder whether or not he had gotten down to his last bottle of deodorant. "Running is good. It's good for my body."
He doesn't have the energy nor investment to offer up any sort of decent explanation. Running for him is like partying for Ke$ha, but how is he supposed to describe that to someone else? On a metaphysical level, it's purely cathartic, giving him time to think about how to solve things like his tax problems. On a molecular level, he's burning calories and keeping himself in shape. On a technical level, rounding loops around the neighborhood has done wonders to his sense of orientation, and after thirteen months he's got the entire residential area of Aoyama memorized in his head. Running gives him a good excuse to take off his shirt. Running also gives him the lovelier bit of a six-pack, and he's had a fair share of girls and boys in his bed, so why not show them a good time?
"What kind of stupid chauvinistic thinking is that," said Nishikido. "And you wonder why no one believes you when you tell them you're straight."
Junno laughed. It was a happy laugh. He'd just finished a run and he hadn't any time to change yet, but being around Nishikido was always more relaxing. "Ryo-chan, you should stop smiling like that when you're talking to me."
"Smiling like what? How am I smiling?"
"Oh, nothing."
"No seriously smiling like what?"
"...Smiling like you're about to eat a little kid."
"That's not how I smile. My smile is sexy. I show it to all the sexy moms who show up at the office."
"Oh god, really? Don't show it to me, that's gross. No wonder you're always losing customers to the other pediatricians."
"...Hey Taguchi, let's change the subject. Wanna hear my new training schedule for you?"
"Not particularly," said Junno. He took off his shirt and wiped the sweat off his face, and then he kissed Ryo on the mouth. Horrified, Ryo backed away from him and crashed into the beige-colored armchair.
"What the fuck was that for?"
"I needed to get rid of some adrenalin," Junno grinned. "Training schedule, you were saying?"
"R-Right. Let me pull out my notes."
"Excellent, Ryo-pyon. GREAT BALLS OF FIRE!"
(And everything, invariably, came back to running.)
03 - A
Sometimes Jin wondered about Kame.
They shared a cookie together during lunch on the first day of school. Actually Jin had eaten most of Kame's cookie, and later Kame confessed that it was all he had brought for lunch that day, but Kame had also pinched him really hard when he tried to pull Kame's hair. Then Kame drank a bottle of some weird milky juice. Jin tried it and thought it tasted a lot like strawberries, or whatever it is they use to make artificial strawberry flavoring. After the cookie, Jin felt a little guilty, but Kame punched him in the face the next day when he tried to mooch again, so they were pretty much equal in terms of petty vengeance. And then they walked home together after school.
Sometimes Jin wondered about Kame.
He did okay in school, but it was mostly Kame who got the good grades. He hated reality television shows and watched the Pink Princess like a religion every night at seven on Fuji TV. He ate carrots and not celery but he never turned orange, so he must not have eaten a lot of carrots. He didn't play many sports and he was always a little on the skinny side, not that Jin was bulky or anything; their difference in size only became significant if they were compared side by side. Jin was never really bothered by it, but Kame always seemed to be a little skittish whenever they talked about weight. He was always embarrassed about being tiny or something.
And he drank more of that strawberry stuff.
By the end of grade five, Kame had caught up to Jin; but he was getting fatter rather than taller. For some reason Jin couldn't understand, Kame found this to be incredibly discouraging. He didn't want to be fat. Being fat toed the borderline of an area of lifestyle that was, to Kame, inherently terrifying. He wouldn't tell Jin why. He wouldn't tell anybody why, so Jin could only assume that there were aliens who lived in Kame's house that fed him food for extraterrestrials.
Sometimes Jin really wondered about Kame.
They probably holed-up under Kame's bed during the day and came out during the evenings to stuff food down his throat. Or maybe the extraterrestrials had developed something to fatten humans up before they were taken up to outer space. And since Kame was so good at pleasing the teachers and presenting his parents with perfect scores on his algebra tests and throwing hissy fits at Jin, it only seemed natural that he would attract the interests of the aliens.
~
It was already June by the time Jin decided to ask Kame about it. They were in a park. Sitting on the grass. He doesn't really remember much about it now, but it was an evening away from cram school and he was eleven years old and a little sweaty from having spent the day in a stale classroom full of kids who didn't want to study trigonometry. It was dry and gross on the grass, and there was a blonde-haired freak who was running laps around the banks of the artificial lake.
"Look," said Jin, and he pointed at the blonde-haired kid. He was doing plank workouts with his shirt on the grass under his elbows. He looked about Jin's age, but his upper body was disproportionately shaped by muscle. It made Jin a little jealous. "What kind of idiot works out in this weather?"
Kame shrugged and pinched at the fat on his legs. He was wearing long jeans that covered his legs.
"Hey," said Jin, and he poked Kame in the shoulder. "You're not going to get taken away by aliens, are you?"
This was enough to garner a reaction. Kame turned his head. Blinked once, twice.
"Are you brain-damaged?"
Jin frowned. "Oh hey, there is no need for you to talk to me like that!"
"What, in this condescending tone? When you've just inferred that I could possibly face abduction by means of an intergalactical species? Uh OK so what kind of crazy are you?"
Jin crossed his arms over his chest. He had understood about 50 percent of that, but he wasn't about to admit it. "Yeah, no. Maybe."
"..."
"Just make sure you don't get taken away by the aliens!"
"Hey Jin, you can talk to the school counselors at any time, you know. They're always there."
"But I'm worried about you!" Jin blurted out. "You're fat, Kame-chan!"
He immediately regretted saying it, but Kame had spent his entire life sharpening his ears to criticism and he didn't miss a single syllable. "...So I'm fat."
"I-I mean! Not that it's a bad thing!"
"Thanks, Jin, I really needed you to tell me. A-And you're one to talk, really."
Kame was glaring at him, biting his bottom lip in a sort of pout. Jin wasn't sure if he was angry or sad or what. It was always hard trying to decipher the different emotions on Kame's face because they blended together so well that they just became a mash of bitter and angry disapproval. Yeah, that's exactly what it was. Only Jin was more scared of it than unsure. If Kame's emotions were a recipe, then he would be vomiting even before licking the bowl. Three cups of bitter salad, fifteen drops of angry vinaigrette, mozzarella shavings doused in resentment.
"A-Are you okay?"
"I'm fine."
"Are you sure?"
"I'm fine."
"It doesn't matter, you know. You're too bothered by it, Kame-chan. There's nothing wrong with being fat."
"Everything's wrong about it."
"But you'll be okay, right? I've heard all these bad things about people who try to get skinny too fast. And you're at a perfect size for a guy anyway. You should just avoid the aliens from now on!"
"W-What?"
"I mean," Jin hurried to correct himself, "I mean, you can come live at my house if you want! I don't think we have any spare futons left since my sister came back, so we might have to share a bed. Yeah, Kame-chan, we should have a sleepover!"
Kame didn't say anything. He took this as a bad sign, and dumped his head into Kame's lap.
"...Kameeeee. I'm sorryyyyy."
"..."
"...Hey, Jin. You like skinny girls, right?"
"Sure I do. The fat ones usually have really bad personalities. And skinny girls are usually prettier, if you know what I mean."
"That's what I thought," Kame cleared his throat. He was smiling really oddly from above, and he started patting Jin's head. His fingers threaded into Jin's hair. "Maybe I should find some skinny girls to hang around," he murmured. "Then you'll understand."
"What are you talking about?"
"You'll see."
Kame's fingers wound through his hair and it felt kind of weird at first, but nice too, like raindrops, and Jin was about to say so when he realized that it was actually raining, and that was when the blonde-boy from across the lake came around to talk.
(Three years later, Jin understood. But in a way it was kind of too late.)
04 - K
It took his mother five years to figure out something Kame had already discovered after two months of dealing with the PediaSure, but by then the protein drink had already begun to take on its slow and detrimental effect. The summer before entering junior high school, he was toeing a line that was so thin it had weedled down to a single thread. It was feeling like shit or bust. His memories of trying to convince himself that he wasn't becoming overweight were fuzzy, he couldn't remember details and he found himself defaulting onto homework and humid summer afternoons spent at cram school. It was likely supposed to be some sort of catharsis.
"You're fat, Kame-chan," Jin told him that one time.
"You're one to talk," he'd retorted, and he remembered feeling awful saying it.
"Doesn't matter. You're fat," said Jin. "And fat people always have such awful attitudes." He pinched Kame's cheek. It felt like a whole pound of fat was going to slop off his face at any moment.
( "114 pounds," the bathroom scale squeaked, and it was basically the end of the world. )
~
Hey Kame
I'm writing you a letter because I miss you so much!! I wanted to email you but I thought writing a letter would be cooler because I knew it would be and of course I'm right. Isn't this cooler? Now you get to read my shitty handwriting all the time and learn how to forge my signature. The chicks here seem to be all up on that.
So I met a pretty cool bro...we bonded because we were the only two Asian kids who aren't enrolled in the accelerated program at the high school. He smells like pee sometimes and his name is Yamashita but he keeps referring to himself as Nasubi. It's supposed to be some sort of inside joke between the two of us but it's only funny to him because he's just making fun of my dick. Which is not funny. Period. Dick jokes are lame.
Yeah OK I think this was a decently sized letter. What do you think? Write back soon!!
LOL
Jin
/
Dear Akanishi-kun,
That was honest to god the worst letter I have ever read. If you miss me so much, why don't you just move back to Tokyo?
The purportedly-dull contents of your letter have left me with nothing important to address. I hope you're eating properly and working hard at succeeding in your non-accelerated program. Who knows, perhaps you'll get bumped up! Haha, I'm actually laughing right now. But on the subject of laughter, you can tell Yamashita-kun that I appreciate his appetite for Jin-related humor.
Also what the heck is 'LOL' supposed to mean and are you even supposed to sign that at the bottom of a letter?
Please take care of yourself and don't smoke too much,
Kamenashi
/
KAME
WHY IS YOUR TONE SO FORMAL IT'S KIND OF SCARY JUST SO YOU KNOW. SERIOUSLY YOU SOUND LIKE YOU'RE 80. ACTUALLY WHEN WE WERE IN THE SAME CLASS I GOT SCARED OF YOU VERY OFTEN. YOU ARE SO WEIRD. MAYBE THAT WAS WHY I MOVED AWAY HAVE YOU EVER CONSIDERED THAT??
Anyway Nasubi says he wants to run the Boston Marathon when he's in college and I was sort of like 'dude are you shitting me why would you want to do that you're insane'. He's kind of a moron, when you think about it. Yesterday he tried to pick up a girl by offering her strinng cheese. Can you believe it, Kame? I found someone who's stupider than me. If you were here you'd call it a miracle too.
You kind of suck at interpretating shorthand. 'LOL' means 'LOTS OF LOVE'. Duh. Who didn't know that?
No love for you today (or the rest of the month),
Jin
/
Akanishi,
1. I'm seriously considering running a marathon, actually. (Remember Taguchi? He came back.)
2. This type of situation is usually not considered a 'miracle', but a 'travesty'.
3. Fuck off.
LOL
Kame
05 - KTUN
His conversation with Akanishi lost its bitter impact after chewing out the initial complaints, because Jin's dad found a new job in California two weeks later and Jin moved away to Los Angeles a week after their graduation from elementary school. It all happened so fast that Kame hadn't had much time to feel bitter about the loss of a comrade, and of course there were people to meet tests to take classes to ace he was young and everything soothed over fast with a few bottles of PediaSure. The ripples in the water went by fast and the sun was too bright and by that time, Jin was long gone.
Tanaka Koki sort of came into his life without warning. He didn't stick to Kame like Jin, nor did he try to become invisible like Ueda. He didn't trip into Kame's life like Nakamaru did, but he made a crazy amount of impact. He was driving trucks around at twelve years old, and it was funny just thinking about this skinny little kid behind the wheel of a semi. He came to school periodically, and usually just to copy Kame's notes. But he stuck around long enough to listen to Kame, and neither Ueda nor Nakamaru had the patience for that.
"Yeah, well, in my defense, Koki's kinda weird," Ueda said.
"You're a really nice person, Kamenashi-kun," said Nakamaru nervously. "S-Sometimes I'm not sure what I can say to you. You're just, so..."
"Normal?" Kame suggested.
"Yeah! Normal. No wait, I-I didn't mean it like that!"
"No, you're definitely not normal," Ueda murmured. "You must be a fairy. Because I can see you."
"That's gotta be the weirdest logic I've ever heard."
("No," Ueda shook his head. "I see fairies.")
~
So he seriously began to consider it when he was thirteen.
"I don't think you need to lose weight," said Tanaka. "You look perfectly fine to me."
"You're only saying that because you've never seen me stand next to Jin."
"...Who's Jin?"
"Oh yeah. You don't know him." He keeps forgetting.
Koki poked him in the back. "You were saying?"
"Akanishi Jin," Kame said quickly. He had moved on. "No one important. He was before your time."
"Why, what's with that voice?" said Koki, "Was he your boyfriend or something?"
"Wow, Tanaka, no. We were nine back then. Well he was actually eleven because he got held back one year, but still."
"So? You're only in high school, now. Did you have a crush on him then?"
"I-I don't like boys that way."
"Could've fooled me," said Koki, and then he leaned over Kame and suddenly his face was too close
*
( kiss was quiet and chapped and it tasted a little dry although he wasn't sure there was a real taste to it; most of it was lost in the shock of being kissed and he could feel fingers sliding around his arms somewhere but that was lost too because his skin was tingly and a million weird signals were firing off from his neurotransmitters and why was he thinking about neurotransmitters anyway shouldn't this be an appropriate time for a George Michael song? )
*
"...What the fuck Tanaka, that was my first kiss."
"Ow. What was that for?"
"You suck."
"And you didn't have to take out your frustration on my crotch."
"I did too."
...Then they sort of didn't talk about it again.
~
Ryo and Junno hung out at weekends at a karaoke bar. It started sometime in Junno's last year of high school, when he was doing a program at Ryo's clinic and Ryo had just broken up with a girlfriend who had been nine years older than him. At the time, Junno was organizing the patient files in the shelves and Ryo was taking jello shots in the back of the aisle. At the time, Junno was trying not to think about his parents and the movie he'd seen, where the catholic priest's son took panty shots. At the time, Ryo was trying too hard to think about the girlfriend he thought he'd loved.
So neither of them were very interested in singing or dancing or playing with frivolous tambourines at the karaoke bar; the attraction to the place was purely booze-related. They drank like vampires and measured their egos in meters and pretended that they were glamourous movie stars, because anything was possible at a karaoke bar, Ryo swears to god he even saw KimuTaku there once.
"You know," said Junno, "there's this kid who's in my running club at school."
Ryo snorted. "You still have a running club in college? Can you spell obsessed?"
"A different college than mine, but I tagged along because I knew somebody there. It's good for my health. Anyway, we're running a marathon."
"...Oh, joy. 42 kilometers of pain and tears."
"I thought you could recommend us a diet!"
"..."
"Please, Ryo-chan!"
"Hey Taguchi, you know I normally charge for this kind of thing."
"But you'll do it for me, right?"
"Why would I do it for you?"
"Kamenashi Kazuya is on the team."
Ryo raised his eyebrows. "No fucking way."
Junno grinned. "Way."
"The kid's kind of on the chunkier side."
"And who's to really blame for that? You're the one who prescribed him fifteen hundred liters of that Pediawhatever."
"That was a long time ago! I've changed, I swear I've changed!"
"And he's changed too. He lost a lot of weight. Kame's basically done everything short of appearing on Extreme Makeovers. Don't you feel the least bit guilty about this?"
"Are you trying to guilt trip me?"
"No. The Hippocratic Oath is trying to guilt trip you. And you banged his mom. Or did you forget that part?"
Oh, bother.
Ryo took another shot. Junno smiled and stayed dry for the rest of the night.
06 - CLUB
In his second year of college, Koki started up a running club. He worked really hard, spent three hours making a twelve-foot banner, ordered matching uniforms and spandex and dragged Kame into it without his consent. The first few meetings consisted of dessicated classrooms and a few giggly freshmen who wanted to find out whether or not Koki was gay. Probably as a result of several pictures of Kame running half-naked on the streets, the second meeting drew in another useless crowd. Ueda introduced himself wearing a stupid hat with a feather on it, and Nakamaru stumbled into the room while he was looking for crackers. Neither of them actually went to Koki's school. On the third meeting, a transfer student from Meiji showed up, but by then Koki was too irritated to bother with membership qualifications. The new guy introduced himself as Nasubi, an Eggplant-kun unrelated to the comedian who was quarantined under contract in 1998, but he had been an extra on the set of Atashinchi no Danshi, so perhaps that made him qualified for the name anyway.
"But you can call me Pi!" He was cheerful. "I spent a good deal of my childhood with white people, so ask me anything you want about Lindsay Lohan."
By then Koki was completely out of his depth, but he was unwilling to admit that he had no idea what Nasubi was talking about, so Kame entertained them for the rest of the hour. He told stories about running and about a creepy pediatrician who dated his mother for a while when Kame was nine, and then someone produced beer from a vending machine and they had a little party, the conversation turned to karaoke and KimuTaku and how you could tell the difference between an electronics salesperson and a terrorist, when the subject came up.
"I was going to run the Boston Marathon this year, but then I picked up that really sweet scholarship," Nasubi admitted, "It was a shame since I didn't really think anybody here would share my passion for running, you know? But then I met that guy named Taguchi. Junno or something."
A chill ran down Kame's spine. "J-Junno?"
"Oh wait, Taguchi," Koki said, and he lit up like a bulb, "Wasn't that the guy that Kame-chan dated for a while in freshman year? Ah, how it feels to be young and gay and in college."
"You're still in college," Ueda piped up.
Pi didn't wait to ask. "You knew Taguchi-kun? He was a total nutball. Brilliant running buddy, but full of so much bullshit."
"Oh god," Kame groaned. "Junno. He treated me like I was a stuffed animal half the time. It wasn't funny."
"It was so awesome," said Nakamaru, "He was totally in love with you, Kame-chan. Plus he was good at running."
"He was kind of like Jin, in that aspect," said Nasubi.
Kame froze. "Akanishi J-Jin?"
Pi turned around to face Kame, surprised. "Wait, you know him too?"
Koki interrupted then. "We're going to sign up for a marathon!"
07 - nasubi
( "Y-You..."
"M-Me?"
"You're that guy...Jin's friend."
"Me? Yeh, I knew a Jin."
"He wrote about you. He sent about a total of two letters." but I've kept them all this time and I wish I'd written back more but he moved somewhere else because the letters kept getting sent back and I oh my god
"Are you alright?" Koki shook him, hard. "You're paler than fucking Suzuki Sonoko." )
08 - T
Later, Koki confessed to creating a training montage of all of them, sneaky shots from hidden cameras over the course of three and a half months. Kame was the preeminent star of most of the slideshow, mostly as a means to attract freshmen to the club ("It's the best marketing tactic," Nasubi said, and he wiggled his eyebrows). They spent quality time with each other on ab workouts, ran twelve miles every day and slowly weaned each other off of heavy food. Slept for hours, drank seltzer water, picked out lucky t-shirts and scratched their balls while wearing stretchy spandex. Ueda convinced Junno and Maru to wax their legs one week before the race, and howls were heard in the dorms in the night. (Most of the campus was convinced that the running club was have a kinky orgy session.)
"This has to be illegal," said Kame.
"Not in Japan," said Koki, and he dodged the kick.
Pi took all of his pictures with a Polaroid that he carried around on a flimsy strap that swung around and around his neck while he ran. He managed to get in about 20 photos before he ran into a tree and smashed the thing to pieces. Ueda complained about getting his picture taken while they were running, but his complaints were put to rest when Nishikido-sensei showed up to give Junno and Kame the rest of their training schedule.
Kame saw him first, and he charged for Nishikido. "YOU!"
Ryo took one look at Kame and ran in the other direction.
Koki looked back and forth at Kame and Nishikido. His eyes were wide. "Him? You? Don't tell me you had a thing with the doctor, too, Kame!"
"Nah," Junno said cheerfully, "He only ruined Kame's childhood. Kame didn't fuck him. I fucked him, though."
Ryo had the grace to fall flat on his face.
~
And then it was race day.
*
( the thing about racing is you can't think too much about it, one mile goes by fast and then two miles are gone and you see your friend running ahead of you, so you speed up by a few seconds to catch up to him only then you're smelling flowers, but by the next ten miles you're tired of the flowers and realize that running's kind of tedious and your legs are starting to cramp up you try to drink a little water but Junno tells you to stop and then )
*
He collapsed during the last mile.
Koki froze, Nakamaru panicked. Ueda tried to scream, but he was out of breath. Pi caught up to them, looking sheepish for having spent too much time in the portable bathroom. Junno was about two hundred meters ahead, but he sensed something was wrong and turned back in a sprint. The five of them dragged Kame into a tent 1500 meters away from the finish line, where Kame tried to tell them to leave him alone and finish the race and stride to the end and feel the sun on their faces and get a good time but
"We're a team," said Junno.
"Yeah," Nasubi agreed.
"Fancy seeing you all here," said Nishikido, and he shot a painkiller into Kame's leg.
"..."
"What are you doing here?"
"I volunteered as a medic," Ryo explained. "Not because I was worried about any of you or anything," he added quickly.
"You're awful," Ueda sighed.
In another minute, Kame's grin was feral. "Take a bite of my heart tonight."
"What the hell," gasped Koki. "That is seriously the most disturbing thing I've ever heard you say."
"The meds are kicking in," Junno informed them all happily. "It's working, see? His pupils are all dilated and stuff. Like a teacher who can't control his pupils. Oh my god, get it?"
"Yeah okay we know, Junno."
Kame groaned again. "I wanna finish the fucking race. All of you stop it and let me go."
"Over my dead body," Koki said, "You are not going anywhere. You must have not juiced up properly. Did you have any EnergyGU on you?"
"I stopped believing in energy food after a certain pediatrician ruined my appetite."
"I'm sorry, bro," Nishikido muttered.
"Just let me go," said Kame.
"No."
"Just let me gooo...Alejandro."
"What the fuck is going on?" said Ueda.
"I told you!" Junno retorted. "Drugs! The meds are kicking in. They have kicks."
"We know, Junno."
"Then stop asking."
&
They took a 3-minute break, but Kame was back on his feet before anyone could stop him. It was a 1200-meter sprint. He could even do these on the track. He had wasted enough time already. Junno and Nasubi sprinted ahead, Ueda and Nakamaru fell back. The rest of the race went by in a blur of legs and feet and arms and flecks of sweat. The other runners in the race were already heading for the finish line. He could hear the thunder of a crowd, breath of the runners, all of them finishing silently. The sun disappeared. It was going to rain. Koki ran next to him and their pace fell into a disjointed rhythm. It was sloppy, but they were going to finish. He couldn't even feel his sweat anymore, but they were going to finish.
Beyond the rain clouds, he could see the finish line.
09 - *
The boy still hadn't put his shirt on. By this time his entire body was already emulsified in the salt of his own sweat, so the raindrops didn't seem to make a dent on his bare chest at all. There was this weird sort of glow about him, something that made his tread lighter and the air tighter and Kame's breath hitch in his throat. His shoes made small squelching noises; the rubber was beat up around the edges of his soles and they squeaked gently. He was smiling this really big smile and he was walking this really strange walk, talking to time while stretching out his toes like a dancer. Up close, he smelled faintly of grass and perspiration.
"Hey there," he said, and he waved and plopped down onto the wet grass next to Kame and Jin. He shook his head like a dog, and pellets of rain and sweat slipped off his back. He started stretching his calves. "You guys look lonely. I'm feeling like a lone lily."
Jin eyed him from his position in Kame's lap. "Is that supposed to be a pick-up line or something? Because it was kind of lame."
"Nah," the boy grinned, and he took off his trainers and showed them the bottom of one shoe. The hard backing of the sole was rubbed raw. "Right now, I'm sole-less. See? Couldn't run over a pick-up line to save my life. I've been running around too much, you see. I saw you from across the lake and I was already breathless."
He laughed at his own joke.
Kame dug his fingers into Jin's scalp and Jin yelped. "Nice to meet you. I'm Kamenashi."
"Oh hey," said Jin, "not gonna introduce me? So mean, Kame-chan."
"This looks like fun," said the boy, and he jammed a hand into Jin's hair, too. "I'm Taguchi Junnosuke! Just call me Junno. You should come running with me and my friend! His name's Tanaka and he's got a weird face, but you'll like him."
Kame smiled a little, unsure of himself. His fingers slipped out of Jin's hair. The world was quiet from the rain and the droplets ran down his face in little rivulets, carved careful paths in the grass and skipped across the banks of the lake. Jin mumbled something about land masses and aliens, but Kame kept his eyes on Junno.
"What's so good about running, anyway?"
Junno looked up at the sky. The air was musky and the future was in his face. He fingered the laces on his left shoe.
"You'll see."
~
The winds arise and strike it
And scatter it like sand,
And we run because we like it
Through the broad bright land.
-C. H. Sorley
>>
the end %
>>
Delivered by: m_nemonica
Title: The Dessicator
Groups/Pairings: KAT-TUN, implied Koki/Kame/Jin + bits of Junno; Ryo + Pi
Rating: PG
Warnings: introspection, weird humor, runners anonymous, negative product placement
Summary: It was a catabolic pathway for Koki, an escape from childhood obesity for Kame, and an excuse for Junno to take off his shirt.
Notes: To the lovely randomicicle! I tried to go for that different jobs, different lives sort of thing you described. and of course there's no better way to bring people together than 42 kilometers of tears and unimaginable pain. hahaa. thanks to O for the beta!
Small disclaimer:The farthest distance I've ever continuously run is about 23k, and therefore I cannot guarantee a 100% accuracy of the true endurance it takes to complete a full marathon. Please forgive this and any other running discrepancies. Oh and I am definitely not cool and creepy enough to be Johnny, but you knew that already. :)
THE DESSICATOR
The rain is on our lips,
We do not run for prize.
But the storm the water whips
And the wave howls to the skies.
01 - K
The pediatrician's office is bone-dry.
Well not really bone-dry, seeing that there's technically a dialysis bag full of blood drawn from the upper arm of somebody else's helpless screaming kid, but it's close enough and that doesn't make Kame's mother any less uncomfortable than before. The whole office is painted in a color that is slightly-white and slightly-puke, decor complete with cheesy posters of smiling children advertising PediaSure. A disconcerting shade of beige in the armchairs, a disconcerting sparkle in the silver instruments, no curtains no corners no windows (one door). But it didn't matter anyway, because Nishikido-sensei was good at making Kazuya squirm even without showing him the tongue depressors. And Kazuya regarded tongue depressors equivalent to the diabolic Dark Magistrate's Second Coming.
"Tell me about his diet," said the pediatrician, and Kame's mom thought to herself that his smile was either devilishly handsome or shit-eating or both, "Kamenashi-san, how has Kazuya-kun been eating?"
A pause.
"Not very well," she admitted, "he's been skipping his vegetables and bypassing the proteins entirely. Honestly I'm a bit at a loss--"
"Have not," Kame interrupted, "I'm growing up perfectly. I'm only point-eight percent off the body mass index of an average Japanese kid."
"Are you really," said Nishikido-sensei, and he made a note of it on his clipboard. Then he smiled again. Creepily.
Kame's mom wasn't satisfied. "Is there anything I can do about this, Nishikido-sensei? He's really not eating properly and I'm worried he's going to grow up with these bad eating habits."
"Well..."
"How many times do I have to say this," Kame said, "I don't need--"
"Nishikido-sensei!"
The pediatrician drew back, startled. "Um. Okay." He scribbled a few unintelligible words on a slip of paper. "Uh. Why don't we go with three-a-day servings of..."
( and it was the beginning of Kame's battle, with )
"...PediaSure?"
~
"Yeah. PediaSure."
"PediaSure? Nishikido, do they even sell this stuff in Japan?"
"That's why I'm calling you for it, Nino. A special order for a special kid with a special mother. It's a favor for me. PediaSure."
"Kids get addicted to this stuff pretty quickly, you know. It's like drinking straight-up sugar, seriously, and it's even more addictive than hayashi rice..."
"...Not funny."
"Okay."
"Just bill me."
"You got it, brother."
~
So it was all because of the stupid PediaSure. Three servings of it per day, eleven days a week, after every meal every vegetable every complaint every foul mood. The Pediasure plagued Kame's childhood like bad breath on Saturday morning. The PediaSure pooped the party. The PediaSure left him in the rain with no umbrella. The PediaSure was like an antisteroid that zapped his energy and consumed the actin in his bones, replacing muscle with lipid and good humor with vitriol. The PediaSure was syrupy and sugary and tasted syrupy and sugary. The PediaSure substituted for miso soup in the morning and milk during lunch, as well as any dream of a chilled can of orange juice from the vending machines after school and that was how the chain reaction occurred, Kame was sure of it; he grew pimples on his arms when he was twelve and he was itchy all the time and he was smelly and he sweated too much during gym class, so it was all because of the stupid PediaSure.
"It's good for you, Kame-chan," Jin would tease him, "You've just got to drink it all and then puke it back up. They're training you to be bulimic."
"Shut up," Kame grumbled, "If you were any skinnier I bet your mother would put you on it too."
"Dude, I am way too beautiful for PediaSure."
"Too freaky and ugly for it, more like."
And Jin made triple sure to forget about inviting Kame to his next ice cream rendez-vous.
~
( nine years old; "Oh yeah, we went to the same primary school. Jin pulled my hair on the first day of school because he thought I was a girl, and then he just stuck around and never learned to stop being a leech. He's sort of like that annoying thing with the blue hair from the Doctor Seuss books, you know? The one that keeps telling the Yooks and the Zooks to stop shooting each other from across the wall or the Onceler to stop polluting the ecosystem, and he's right, but the thing does it in such irritating rhymes that you just want to conk it in the head, you know? He's right, but at the same time he's such a moron that you want him to be wrong. That's Jin." )
02 - T
Sometimes people asked Junno why he would spend so much of his free time in his trainers.
Stripped down to a pair of running shorts and running socks and running shoes, t-shirt jammed into his waistband and water bottle in one hand and sports watch slicked with perspiration and ten miles to go feeling like he's the wind and having no need for a destination. It works like a song. Sun bright, trees shiny, dew on the grass, pedestrian streets empty and beautiful. Adrenalin pumping through the veins, muscles loose and heart pumping like clockwork and hair held back by a band that snagged when he took it off too quickly. Sometimes people asked Junno why he enjoyed dripping his sweat all over the streets. Sometimes they shook their head at him when they saw him coming down the road, looking like he'd flown down from the sky. Sometimes they just looked at him like he was just a little bit fucking crazy, and Junno would never know how to respond.
"I just like running," he'd shrug, and then he'd slip the shirt from his waistband and wipe his sweaty forehead, wrinkle his nose a little at the faint odor of B.O. and wonder whether or not he had gotten down to his last bottle of deodorant. "Running is good. It's good for my body."
He doesn't have the energy nor investment to offer up any sort of decent explanation. Running for him is like partying for Ke$ha, but how is he supposed to describe that to someone else? On a metaphysical level, it's purely cathartic, giving him time to think about how to solve things like his tax problems. On a molecular level, he's burning calories and keeping himself in shape. On a technical level, rounding loops around the neighborhood has done wonders to his sense of orientation, and after thirteen months he's got the entire residential area of Aoyama memorized in his head. Running gives him a good excuse to take off his shirt. Running also gives him the lovelier bit of a six-pack, and he's had a fair share of girls and boys in his bed, so why not show them a good time?
"What kind of stupid chauvinistic thinking is that," said Nishikido. "And you wonder why no one believes you when you tell them you're straight."
Junno laughed. It was a happy laugh. He'd just finished a run and he hadn't any time to change yet, but being around Nishikido was always more relaxing. "Ryo-chan, you should stop smiling like that when you're talking to me."
"Smiling like what? How am I smiling?"
"Oh, nothing."
"No seriously smiling like what?"
"...Smiling like you're about to eat a little kid."
"That's not how I smile. My smile is sexy. I show it to all the sexy moms who show up at the office."
"Oh god, really? Don't show it to me, that's gross. No wonder you're always losing customers to the other pediatricians."
"...Hey Taguchi, let's change the subject. Wanna hear my new training schedule for you?"
"Not particularly," said Junno. He took off his shirt and wiped the sweat off his face, and then he kissed Ryo on the mouth. Horrified, Ryo backed away from him and crashed into the beige-colored armchair.
"What the fuck was that for?"
"I needed to get rid of some adrenalin," Junno grinned. "Training schedule, you were saying?"
"R-Right. Let me pull out my notes."
"Excellent, Ryo-pyon. GREAT BALLS OF FIRE!"
(And everything, invariably, came back to running.)
03 - A
Sometimes Jin wondered about Kame.
They shared a cookie together during lunch on the first day of school. Actually Jin had eaten most of Kame's cookie, and later Kame confessed that it was all he had brought for lunch that day, but Kame had also pinched him really hard when he tried to pull Kame's hair. Then Kame drank a bottle of some weird milky juice. Jin tried it and thought it tasted a lot like strawberries, or whatever it is they use to make artificial strawberry flavoring. After the cookie, Jin felt a little guilty, but Kame punched him in the face the next day when he tried to mooch again, so they were pretty much equal in terms of petty vengeance. And then they walked home together after school.
Sometimes Jin wondered about Kame.
He did okay in school, but it was mostly Kame who got the good grades. He hated reality television shows and watched the Pink Princess like a religion every night at seven on Fuji TV. He ate carrots and not celery but he never turned orange, so he must not have eaten a lot of carrots. He didn't play many sports and he was always a little on the skinny side, not that Jin was bulky or anything; their difference in size only became significant if they were compared side by side. Jin was never really bothered by it, but Kame always seemed to be a little skittish whenever they talked about weight. He was always embarrassed about being tiny or something.
And he drank more of that strawberry stuff.
By the end of grade five, Kame had caught up to Jin; but he was getting fatter rather than taller. For some reason Jin couldn't understand, Kame found this to be incredibly discouraging. He didn't want to be fat. Being fat toed the borderline of an area of lifestyle that was, to Kame, inherently terrifying. He wouldn't tell Jin why. He wouldn't tell anybody why, so Jin could only assume that there were aliens who lived in Kame's house that fed him food for extraterrestrials.
Sometimes Jin really wondered about Kame.
They probably holed-up under Kame's bed during the day and came out during the evenings to stuff food down his throat. Or maybe the extraterrestrials had developed something to fatten humans up before they were taken up to outer space. And since Kame was so good at pleasing the teachers and presenting his parents with perfect scores on his algebra tests and throwing hissy fits at Jin, it only seemed natural that he would attract the interests of the aliens.
~
It was already June by the time Jin decided to ask Kame about it. They were in a park. Sitting on the grass. He doesn't really remember much about it now, but it was an evening away from cram school and he was eleven years old and a little sweaty from having spent the day in a stale classroom full of kids who didn't want to study trigonometry. It was dry and gross on the grass, and there was a blonde-haired freak who was running laps around the banks of the artificial lake.
"Look," said Jin, and he pointed at the blonde-haired kid. He was doing plank workouts with his shirt on the grass under his elbows. He looked about Jin's age, but his upper body was disproportionately shaped by muscle. It made Jin a little jealous. "What kind of idiot works out in this weather?"
Kame shrugged and pinched at the fat on his legs. He was wearing long jeans that covered his legs.
"Hey," said Jin, and he poked Kame in the shoulder. "You're not going to get taken away by aliens, are you?"
This was enough to garner a reaction. Kame turned his head. Blinked once, twice.
"Are you brain-damaged?"
Jin frowned. "Oh hey, there is no need for you to talk to me like that!"
"What, in this condescending tone? When you've just inferred that I could possibly face abduction by means of an intergalactical species? Uh OK so what kind of crazy are you?"
Jin crossed his arms over his chest. He had understood about 50 percent of that, but he wasn't about to admit it. "Yeah, no. Maybe."
"..."
"Just make sure you don't get taken away by the aliens!"
"Hey Jin, you can talk to the school counselors at any time, you know. They're always there."
"But I'm worried about you!" Jin blurted out. "You're fat, Kame-chan!"
He immediately regretted saying it, but Kame had spent his entire life sharpening his ears to criticism and he didn't miss a single syllable. "...So I'm fat."
"I-I mean! Not that it's a bad thing!"
"Thanks, Jin, I really needed you to tell me. A-And you're one to talk, really."
Kame was glaring at him, biting his bottom lip in a sort of pout. Jin wasn't sure if he was angry or sad or what. It was always hard trying to decipher the different emotions on Kame's face because they blended together so well that they just became a mash of bitter and angry disapproval. Yeah, that's exactly what it was. Only Jin was more scared of it than unsure. If Kame's emotions were a recipe, then he would be vomiting even before licking the bowl. Three cups of bitter salad, fifteen drops of angry vinaigrette, mozzarella shavings doused in resentment.
"A-Are you okay?"
"I'm fine."
"Are you sure?"
"I'm fine."
"It doesn't matter, you know. You're too bothered by it, Kame-chan. There's nothing wrong with being fat."
"Everything's wrong about it."
"But you'll be okay, right? I've heard all these bad things about people who try to get skinny too fast. And you're at a perfect size for a guy anyway. You should just avoid the aliens from now on!"
"W-What?"
"I mean," Jin hurried to correct himself, "I mean, you can come live at my house if you want! I don't think we have any spare futons left since my sister came back, so we might have to share a bed. Yeah, Kame-chan, we should have a sleepover!"
Kame didn't say anything. He took this as a bad sign, and dumped his head into Kame's lap.
"...Kameeeee. I'm sorryyyyy."
"..."
"...Hey, Jin. You like skinny girls, right?"
"Sure I do. The fat ones usually have really bad personalities. And skinny girls are usually prettier, if you know what I mean."
"That's what I thought," Kame cleared his throat. He was smiling really oddly from above, and he started patting Jin's head. His fingers threaded into Jin's hair. "Maybe I should find some skinny girls to hang around," he murmured. "Then you'll understand."
"What are you talking about?"
"You'll see."
Kame's fingers wound through his hair and it felt kind of weird at first, but nice too, like raindrops, and Jin was about to say so when he realized that it was actually raining, and that was when the blonde-boy from across the lake came around to talk.
(Three years later, Jin understood. But in a way it was kind of too late.)
04 - K
It took his mother five years to figure out something Kame had already discovered after two months of dealing with the PediaSure, but by then the protein drink had already begun to take on its slow and detrimental effect. The summer before entering junior high school, he was toeing a line that was so thin it had weedled down to a single thread. It was feeling like shit or bust. His memories of trying to convince himself that he wasn't becoming overweight were fuzzy, he couldn't remember details and he found himself defaulting onto homework and humid summer afternoons spent at cram school. It was likely supposed to be some sort of catharsis.
"You're fat, Kame-chan," Jin told him that one time.
"You're one to talk," he'd retorted, and he remembered feeling awful saying it.
"Doesn't matter. You're fat," said Jin. "And fat people always have such awful attitudes." He pinched Kame's cheek. It felt like a whole pound of fat was going to slop off his face at any moment.
( "114 pounds," the bathroom scale squeaked, and it was basically the end of the world. )
~
Hey Kame
I'm writing you a letter because I miss you so much!! I wanted to email you but I thought writing a letter would be cooler because I knew it would be and of course I'm right. Isn't this cooler? Now you get to read my shitty handwriting all the time and learn how to forge my signature. The chicks here seem to be all up on that.
So I met a pretty cool bro...we bonded because we were the only two Asian kids who aren't enrolled in the accelerated program at the high school. He smells like pee sometimes and his name is Yamashita but he keeps referring to himself as Nasubi. It's supposed to be some sort of inside joke between the two of us but it's only funny to him because he's just making fun of my dick. Which is not funny. Period. Dick jokes are lame.
Yeah OK I think this was a decently sized letter. What do you think? Write back soon!!
LOL
Jin
/
Dear Akanishi-kun,
That was honest to god the worst letter I have ever read. If you miss me so much, why don't you just move back to Tokyo?
The purportedly-dull contents of your letter have left me with nothing important to address. I hope you're eating properly and working hard at succeeding in your non-accelerated program. Who knows, perhaps you'll get bumped up! Haha, I'm actually laughing right now. But on the subject of laughter, you can tell Yamashita-kun that I appreciate his appetite for Jin-related humor.
Also what the heck is 'LOL' supposed to mean and are you even supposed to sign that at the bottom of a letter?
Please take care of yourself and don't smoke too much,
Kamenashi
/
KAME
WHY IS YOUR TONE SO FORMAL IT'S KIND OF SCARY JUST SO YOU KNOW. SERIOUSLY YOU SOUND LIKE YOU'RE 80. ACTUALLY WHEN WE WERE IN THE SAME CLASS I GOT SCARED OF YOU VERY OFTEN. YOU ARE SO WEIRD. MAYBE THAT WAS WHY I MOVED AWAY HAVE YOU EVER CONSIDERED THAT??
Anyway Nasubi says he wants to run the Boston Marathon when he's in college and I was sort of like 'dude are you shitting me why would you want to do that you're insane'. He's kind of a moron, when you think about it. Yesterday he tried to pick up a girl by offering her strinng cheese. Can you believe it, Kame? I found someone who's stupider than me. If you were here you'd call it a miracle too.
You kind of suck at interpretating shorthand. 'LOL' means 'LOTS OF LOVE'. Duh. Who didn't know that?
No love for you today (or the rest of the month),
Jin
/
Akanishi,
1. I'm seriously considering running a marathon, actually. (Remember Taguchi? He came back.)
2. This type of situation is usually not considered a 'miracle', but a 'travesty'.
3. Fuck off.
LOL
Kame
05 - KTUN
His conversation with Akanishi lost its bitter impact after chewing out the initial complaints, because Jin's dad found a new job in California two weeks later and Jin moved away to Los Angeles a week after their graduation from elementary school. It all happened so fast that Kame hadn't had much time to feel bitter about the loss of a comrade, and of course there were people to meet tests to take classes to ace he was young and everything soothed over fast with a few bottles of PediaSure. The ripples in the water went by fast and the sun was too bright and by that time, Jin was long gone.
Tanaka Koki sort of came into his life without warning. He didn't stick to Kame like Jin, nor did he try to become invisible like Ueda. He didn't trip into Kame's life like Nakamaru did, but he made a crazy amount of impact. He was driving trucks around at twelve years old, and it was funny just thinking about this skinny little kid behind the wheel of a semi. He came to school periodically, and usually just to copy Kame's notes. But he stuck around long enough to listen to Kame, and neither Ueda nor Nakamaru had the patience for that.
"Yeah, well, in my defense, Koki's kinda weird," Ueda said.
"You're a really nice person, Kamenashi-kun," said Nakamaru nervously. "S-Sometimes I'm not sure what I can say to you. You're just, so..."
"Normal?" Kame suggested.
"Yeah! Normal. No wait, I-I didn't mean it like that!"
"No, you're definitely not normal," Ueda murmured. "You must be a fairy. Because I can see you."
"That's gotta be the weirdest logic I've ever heard."
("No," Ueda shook his head. "I see fairies.")
~
So he seriously began to consider it when he was thirteen.
"I don't think you need to lose weight," said Tanaka. "You look perfectly fine to me."
"You're only saying that because you've never seen me stand next to Jin."
"...Who's Jin?"
"Oh yeah. You don't know him." He keeps forgetting.
Koki poked him in the back. "You were saying?"
"Akanishi Jin," Kame said quickly. He had moved on. "No one important. He was before your time."
"Why, what's with that voice?" said Koki, "Was he your boyfriend or something?"
"Wow, Tanaka, no. We were nine back then. Well he was actually eleven because he got held back one year, but still."
"So? You're only in high school, now. Did you have a crush on him then?"
"I-I don't like boys that way."
"Could've fooled me," said Koki, and then he leaned over Kame and suddenly his face was too close
*
( kiss was quiet and chapped and it tasted a little dry although he wasn't sure there was a real taste to it; most of it was lost in the shock of being kissed and he could feel fingers sliding around his arms somewhere but that was lost too because his skin was tingly and a million weird signals were firing off from his neurotransmitters and why was he thinking about neurotransmitters anyway shouldn't this be an appropriate time for a George Michael song? )
*
"...What the fuck Tanaka, that was my first kiss."
"Ow. What was that for?"
"You suck."
"And you didn't have to take out your frustration on my crotch."
"I did too."
...Then they sort of didn't talk about it again.
~
Ryo and Junno hung out at weekends at a karaoke bar. It started sometime in Junno's last year of high school, when he was doing a program at Ryo's clinic and Ryo had just broken up with a girlfriend who had been nine years older than him. At the time, Junno was organizing the patient files in the shelves and Ryo was taking jello shots in the back of the aisle. At the time, Junno was trying not to think about his parents and the movie he'd seen, where the catholic priest's son took panty shots. At the time, Ryo was trying too hard to think about the girlfriend he thought he'd loved.
So neither of them were very interested in singing or dancing or playing with frivolous tambourines at the karaoke bar; the attraction to the place was purely booze-related. They drank like vampires and measured their egos in meters and pretended that they were glamourous movie stars, because anything was possible at a karaoke bar, Ryo swears to god he even saw KimuTaku there once.
"You know," said Junno, "there's this kid who's in my running club at school."
Ryo snorted. "You still have a running club in college? Can you spell obsessed?"
"A different college than mine, but I tagged along because I knew somebody there. It's good for my health. Anyway, we're running a marathon."
"...Oh, joy. 42 kilometers of pain and tears."
"I thought you could recommend us a diet!"
"..."
"Please, Ryo-chan!"
"Hey Taguchi, you know I normally charge for this kind of thing."
"But you'll do it for me, right?"
"Why would I do it for you?"
"Kamenashi Kazuya is on the team."
Ryo raised his eyebrows. "No fucking way."
Junno grinned. "Way."
"The kid's kind of on the chunkier side."
"And who's to really blame for that? You're the one who prescribed him fifteen hundred liters of that Pediawhatever."
"That was a long time ago! I've changed, I swear I've changed!"
"And he's changed too. He lost a lot of weight. Kame's basically done everything short of appearing on Extreme Makeovers. Don't you feel the least bit guilty about this?"
"Are you trying to guilt trip me?"
"No. The Hippocratic Oath is trying to guilt trip you. And you banged his mom. Or did you forget that part?"
Oh, bother.
Ryo took another shot. Junno smiled and stayed dry for the rest of the night.
06 - CLUB
In his second year of college, Koki started up a running club. He worked really hard, spent three hours making a twelve-foot banner, ordered matching uniforms and spandex and dragged Kame into it without his consent. The first few meetings consisted of dessicated classrooms and a few giggly freshmen who wanted to find out whether or not Koki was gay. Probably as a result of several pictures of Kame running half-naked on the streets, the second meeting drew in another useless crowd. Ueda introduced himself wearing a stupid hat with a feather on it, and Nakamaru stumbled into the room while he was looking for crackers. Neither of them actually went to Koki's school. On the third meeting, a transfer student from Meiji showed up, but by then Koki was too irritated to bother with membership qualifications. The new guy introduced himself as Nasubi, an Eggplant-kun unrelated to the comedian who was quarantined under contract in 1998, but he had been an extra on the set of Atashinchi no Danshi, so perhaps that made him qualified for the name anyway.
"But you can call me Pi!" He was cheerful. "I spent a good deal of my childhood with white people, so ask me anything you want about Lindsay Lohan."
By then Koki was completely out of his depth, but he was unwilling to admit that he had no idea what Nasubi was talking about, so Kame entertained them for the rest of the hour. He told stories about running and about a creepy pediatrician who dated his mother for a while when Kame was nine, and then someone produced beer from a vending machine and they had a little party, the conversation turned to karaoke and KimuTaku and how you could tell the difference between an electronics salesperson and a terrorist, when the subject came up.
"I was going to run the Boston Marathon this year, but then I picked up that really sweet scholarship," Nasubi admitted, "It was a shame since I didn't really think anybody here would share my passion for running, you know? But then I met that guy named Taguchi. Junno or something."
A chill ran down Kame's spine. "J-Junno?"
"Oh wait, Taguchi," Koki said, and he lit up like a bulb, "Wasn't that the guy that Kame-chan dated for a while in freshman year? Ah, how it feels to be young and gay and in college."
"You're still in college," Ueda piped up.
Pi didn't wait to ask. "You knew Taguchi-kun? He was a total nutball. Brilliant running buddy, but full of so much bullshit."
"Oh god," Kame groaned. "Junno. He treated me like I was a stuffed animal half the time. It wasn't funny."
"It was so awesome," said Nakamaru, "He was totally in love with you, Kame-chan. Plus he was good at running."
"He was kind of like Jin, in that aspect," said Nasubi.
Kame froze. "Akanishi J-Jin?"
Pi turned around to face Kame, surprised. "Wait, you know him too?"
Koki interrupted then. "We're going to sign up for a marathon!"
07 - nasubi
( "Y-You..."
"M-Me?"
"You're that guy...Jin's friend."
"Me? Yeh, I knew a Jin."
"He wrote about you. He sent about a total of two letters." but I've kept them all this time and I wish I'd written back more but he moved somewhere else because the letters kept getting sent back and I oh my god
"Are you alright?" Koki shook him, hard. "You're paler than fucking Suzuki Sonoko." )
08 - T
Later, Koki confessed to creating a training montage of all of them, sneaky shots from hidden cameras over the course of three and a half months. Kame was the preeminent star of most of the slideshow, mostly as a means to attract freshmen to the club ("It's the best marketing tactic," Nasubi said, and he wiggled his eyebrows). They spent quality time with each other on ab workouts, ran twelve miles every day and slowly weaned each other off of heavy food. Slept for hours, drank seltzer water, picked out lucky t-shirts and scratched their balls while wearing stretchy spandex. Ueda convinced Junno and Maru to wax their legs one week before the race, and howls were heard in the dorms in the night. (Most of the campus was convinced that the running club was have a kinky orgy session.)
"This has to be illegal," said Kame.
"Not in Japan," said Koki, and he dodged the kick.
Pi took all of his pictures with a Polaroid that he carried around on a flimsy strap that swung around and around his neck while he ran. He managed to get in about 20 photos before he ran into a tree and smashed the thing to pieces. Ueda complained about getting his picture taken while they were running, but his complaints were put to rest when Nishikido-sensei showed up to give Junno and Kame the rest of their training schedule.
Kame saw him first, and he charged for Nishikido. "YOU!"
Ryo took one look at Kame and ran in the other direction.
Koki looked back and forth at Kame and Nishikido. His eyes were wide. "Him? You? Don't tell me you had a thing with the doctor, too, Kame!"
"Nah," Junno said cheerfully, "He only ruined Kame's childhood. Kame didn't fuck him. I fucked him, though."
Ryo had the grace to fall flat on his face.
~
And then it was race day.
*
( the thing about racing is you can't think too much about it, one mile goes by fast and then two miles are gone and you see your friend running ahead of you, so you speed up by a few seconds to catch up to him only then you're smelling flowers, but by the next ten miles you're tired of the flowers and realize that running's kind of tedious and your legs are starting to cramp up you try to drink a little water but Junno tells you to stop and then )
*
He collapsed during the last mile.
Koki froze, Nakamaru panicked. Ueda tried to scream, but he was out of breath. Pi caught up to them, looking sheepish for having spent too much time in the portable bathroom. Junno was about two hundred meters ahead, but he sensed something was wrong and turned back in a sprint. The five of them dragged Kame into a tent 1500 meters away from the finish line, where Kame tried to tell them to leave him alone and finish the race and stride to the end and feel the sun on their faces and get a good time but
"We're a team," said Junno.
"Yeah," Nasubi agreed.
"Fancy seeing you all here," said Nishikido, and he shot a painkiller into Kame's leg.
"..."
"What are you doing here?"
"I volunteered as a medic," Ryo explained. "Not because I was worried about any of you or anything," he added quickly.
"You're awful," Ueda sighed.
In another minute, Kame's grin was feral. "Take a bite of my heart tonight."
"What the hell," gasped Koki. "That is seriously the most disturbing thing I've ever heard you say."
"The meds are kicking in," Junno informed them all happily. "It's working, see? His pupils are all dilated and stuff. Like a teacher who can't control his pupils. Oh my god, get it?"
"Yeah okay we know, Junno."
Kame groaned again. "I wanna finish the fucking race. All of you stop it and let me go."
"Over my dead body," Koki said, "You are not going anywhere. You must have not juiced up properly. Did you have any EnergyGU on you?"
"I stopped believing in energy food after a certain pediatrician ruined my appetite."
"I'm sorry, bro," Nishikido muttered.
"Just let me go," said Kame.
"No."
"Just let me gooo...Alejandro."
"What the fuck is going on?" said Ueda.
"I told you!" Junno retorted. "Drugs! The meds are kicking in. They have kicks."
"We know, Junno."
"Then stop asking."
&
They took a 3-minute break, but Kame was back on his feet before anyone could stop him. It was a 1200-meter sprint. He could even do these on the track. He had wasted enough time already. Junno and Nasubi sprinted ahead, Ueda and Nakamaru fell back. The rest of the race went by in a blur of legs and feet and arms and flecks of sweat. The other runners in the race were already heading for the finish line. He could hear the thunder of a crowd, breath of the runners, all of them finishing silently. The sun disappeared. It was going to rain. Koki ran next to him and their pace fell into a disjointed rhythm. It was sloppy, but they were going to finish. He couldn't even feel his sweat anymore, but they were going to finish.
Beyond the rain clouds, he could see the finish line.
09 - *
The boy still hadn't put his shirt on. By this time his entire body was already emulsified in the salt of his own sweat, so the raindrops didn't seem to make a dent on his bare chest at all. There was this weird sort of glow about him, something that made his tread lighter and the air tighter and Kame's breath hitch in his throat. His shoes made small squelching noises; the rubber was beat up around the edges of his soles and they squeaked gently. He was smiling this really big smile and he was walking this really strange walk, talking to time while stretching out his toes like a dancer. Up close, he smelled faintly of grass and perspiration.
"Hey there," he said, and he waved and plopped down onto the wet grass next to Kame and Jin. He shook his head like a dog, and pellets of rain and sweat slipped off his back. He started stretching his calves. "You guys look lonely. I'm feeling like a lone lily."
Jin eyed him from his position in Kame's lap. "Is that supposed to be a pick-up line or something? Because it was kind of lame."
"Nah," the boy grinned, and he took off his trainers and showed them the bottom of one shoe. The hard backing of the sole was rubbed raw. "Right now, I'm sole-less. See? Couldn't run over a pick-up line to save my life. I've been running around too much, you see. I saw you from across the lake and I was already breathless."
He laughed at his own joke.
Kame dug his fingers into Jin's scalp and Jin yelped. "Nice to meet you. I'm Kamenashi."
"Oh hey," said Jin, "not gonna introduce me? So mean, Kame-chan."
"This looks like fun," said the boy, and he jammed a hand into Jin's hair, too. "I'm Taguchi Junnosuke! Just call me Junno. You should come running with me and my friend! His name's Tanaka and he's got a weird face, but you'll like him."
Kame smiled a little, unsure of himself. His fingers slipped out of Jin's hair. The world was quiet from the rain and the droplets ran down his face in little rivulets, carved careful paths in the grass and skipped across the banks of the lake. Jin mumbled something about land masses and aliens, but Kame kept his eyes on Junno.
"What's so good about running, anyway?"
Junno looked up at the sky. The air was musky and the future was in his face. He fingered the laces on his left shoe.
"You'll see."
~
The winds arise and strike it
And scatter it like sand,
And we run because we like it
Through the broad bright land.
-C. H. Sorley
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the end %
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