fic for kizuna_exchange
Title: Fallen
Author: adistantsun
Pairing: Akame
Word count: ~2,500 words
Rating: PG-13
Genre/Warnings: Past fic. Romance. A touch of angst, boys kissing.
Notes: For everyone who helped to make K_X 2011 such a phenomenal success! :D This is a sequel of sorts to another fic of mine, Fall (and a stand-alone extract from a much longer fic that I'm working on ;D)
Summary: September, 2007. The morning after his painful DreamBoys fall, Kame wakes up.
FALLEN
September, 2007
The pain brings him up out of sleep. A fire's been lit along the line of his backbone and it burns fiercely. Kame is used to waking up in pain. He pushes his body hard and it pushes back. But this is beyond muscles pulled and joints stiff, this pain is intense, a flag of genuine injury. He opens his eyes, tries to remember.
The ceiling of his apartment is white, plastered and painted. The roof of the Imperial Garden Theatre was difficult to make out with the stage lights shining straight in his eyes. The ropes gave around him. The tension holding him up was suddenly no longer there. He remembers falling. He doesn't remember hitting the stage, but it's the only logical conclusion. He remembers gritting his teeth to keep the cries of pain in his chest when they moved him, because his mic was still on.
This isn't the first back injury Kame's had. It likely won't be the last. He has painkillers in the kitchen - good ones, from America. They cushion the world around him, fill it with warm water that soaks every ache and stiffness from his body. He spent most of the last tour on them, when his knee gave out.
Careful, Kame rolls onto his side. Even that small movement sends gunshots of pain through his back. The walk to the kitchen will be a walk through six of the seven layers of hell.
He braces himself for the incendiary that will be sitting up, then blinks, and looks. Beside his futon, in easy reach, are two orange capsules and a glass of water. He remembers.
Jin.
Jin with his bare feet hanging off the end of Kame's couch when he came home. Jin opening the microwave to the smell of katsudon. Jin catching him, helping him, holding him, holding out two orange capsules from a bottle posted from LA.
Jin easing him down onto the soft cotton sheets and laying two soft kisses against his temple as he drifted off to sleep.
Kame puts both pills on his tongue and drinks the entire glass.
In the bathroom, he can hear the shower running.
Kame cracks another egg against the edge of the counter and drops it into the pan. He's walking on a cloud. The fire in his back is no more than a glowing coal; he's strapped an ice pack to the darkest patch of bruising.
Fried eggs, fish, coffee. It's a lean breakfast, but with what little there is here, it's the best Kame can do; when he's eating two meals a day in a dressing room, there's no point in groceries. He stacks the eggshells one inside the next and tosses them in the trash. Jin asked him once why eggshells always fit perfectly inside each other, no matter which order they're stacked in. They'd been filming Gokusen at the time, Jin'd had the remnants of a split lip, the fault of an Ara High extra's over-enthusiasm. Jin'd wanted eggs because "they don't hurt going down". He remembers rolling his eyes and sliding two more sunny sides straight from the pan to Jin's plate. Their goodbye kiss had been more gentle that morning.
Kame knows the bathroom door is unlocked. Once upon two-and-a-half years ago, he would have killed the burners, shed the rumpled and ripe clothes he'd slept in - (ever mindful of the line in the sand, Jin hadn't tried to get him out of them) - and pushed open the door. Jin's shoulders are wider than when he was twenty, but his waist is still narrow and his hips still flare just enough to fit perfectly in Kame's cupped hands. Kame can still remember what water tastes like when it's beaded in the small of Jin's back. And Kame remembers Kyoko-san, who's supposed to be his girlfriend.
Beside him, the percolator is spewing steam. Kame leans over and breathes it in and stays where he is.
"You won't fucking believe what Taguchi's done with his hair, it looks like the spill from a solar flare," Jin says around a mouthful of fish. He ducks his head and picks a delicate, near-invisible bone off his tongue.
Kame smiles against the rim of his coffee cup. He'd spent a hundred mornings this way, sitting across the table, watching Jin pick his way around a salted horse mackerel. It should be awkward. After all they've put each other through, it should be tense and uncomfortable. But it's not. And that in itself is the strangest thing of all.
"I didn't know solar flares could spill."
"I don't know, maybe they don't, but if they did, it'd look like Taguchi's head. Yoko was digging 'round for sunglasses every time he came on-set yesterday." The memory pulls a quick smirk across Jin's mouth, before it's gone, replaced with another morsel of white flesh eased off the bone. Jin's a surprisingly delicate eater, when the mood takes him.
"How is he? Yoko, I mean. I can't remember the last time I saw him."
"Same as always, trying to hide the fact he's really a demon dressed up. Pass us the pot would you?" Jin says and reaches a hand out for the coffee pot. Kame wonders how many times Jin said the same thing in LA, and what exactly he was asking for.
"Here," Kame says, relinquishing the handle. "Tell Yoko I said hi?"
And Jin looks up from filling his mug, just for a moment. His face is shuttered, which is telling in itself: thoughts are playing out in his head that he doesn't want Kame to see. He'd never been much good at it in the past, but maybe in LA he'd had time to sit in front of a mirror and erase every betraying twitch and dimple. Kame finds it both unnerving and in a way oddly charming, being left in the dark by a face he could once read as clear as the weather from a look at the sky. Jin's on the verge of something - saying, finding, realising - but Kame's not sure what.
A moment passes, then another. Finally, Jin consigns himself to a nod.
"Okay." Then, his own cup full, he gestures across the table with the pot. "You want more?"
Jin has filming this morning. Halfway through his coffee, he spares a glance at the clock through his overlong fringe. It tells Kame everything he needs to know.
This new Jin rarely gives a toss if he's late for recording or a group photoshoot or anything else that's fixed simply by a change of batting order. But when a project rests entirely on his shoulders, the rules change. When he's invested, Jin's the first to arrive and among the last to leave. When he's invested, Jin gives all of himself and holds nothing back. That, Kame understands better than anyone else. He still feels loss of it sometimes.
"Done?" Kame asks. He holds the coffee cup against his chin, some small shield between himself and Jin and every confused remnant of feeling he has for the man.
"Yeah," Jin says and lays his chopsticks down parallel across his plate, littered with fish bones. Then pushes out his chair and gathers up the rest of the tableware, carefully, more carefully than Kame's ever seen him, and moves toward the kitchen. Kame watches the cotton of his Rolling Stones t-shirt stretch and fold across his back and wonders how many plates Jin's broken in the years that he's lived alone.
Like a good host, when Jin grabs his bag, says "I should..." and tilts his head toward the door, Kame stands up and follows. A hundred words caught in his throat, he watches Jin toe on his Vans.
Jin hitches his bag higher on his shoulder and then he looks up. There are civilities in his mouth, but in his eyes Kame can see memories. The same ones are clouding his brain in the same way. In this instant they're teenagers, standing in a white wall-papered genkan, Jin's boots a jumble with Kame's designer knock-offs, the mirror at the end of the narrow hallway reflecting their bird limbs and shocks of chanpatsu and orange hair.
Jin's fringe is in his eyes. Kame can't stop his hand from reaching; he brushes it out of the way.
"Itterasshai," Kame murmurs, as he has so many times before. Have a good one. Once, for them, it also meant, come back to me soon. That time is long past, but Kame still feels it fresh in his blood, like iron or muscle memory. The impulse to reach out and hold on. To partake.
"Ittekimasu," Jin says automatically, but he doesn't move away. He doesn't turn, or reach for the door handle, or smile lightly as he would if they were the friends they pretend to be, if every enzyme and molecule in their bodies weren't craving to touch.
Jin breathes out. It's shaky, and like the catch of a spark or the moment of give that brings the whole wall down, they reach.
Kame will never be able to say who moved first, only that he closed his eyes alone and opened them in Jin's arms. Warmth is seeping through him to the marrow deep in his bones. He breathes in, fills his lungs with the smell of them, coffee and grilled salt, pine soap and slept-in clothes and skin, feels Jin do the same with his nose pressed in Kame's hair. Kame's hands are full of worn cotton t-shirt and it takes a concerted effort to uncurl his fingers; he wants to feel the way Jin's moving under his hands, to remind himself of everything he never really forgot.
Long moments pass before he can bear to lift his head away, to put even that small amount of distance between them to look Jin in the eye. The shutters are wide open, he can see emotions tumbling over each other across Jin's face and he can't remember the last time he saw something so perfect. Something that felt so much like home.
Jin's breathing is ragged. It shudders from him when Kame runs the fingers of one hand up over his neck and the line of his jaw, up, to comb through his hair and gently cradle his head. Jin leans into the touch as he might lean toward a patch of sunlight coming through an open window, and Kame in that split second never wants to move again. He feels Jin pulling him closer and their foreheads touch.
"Last night," Kame says, his voice liquid in the centimetres of air between them. "You kissed me, twice. Right here." He brushes a thumb over the soft skin at Jin's temple. "Do it again?"
A brief moment's hesitation. Jin's eyes are uncertain, asking permission, as if he doesn't trust the words he's hearing. So many years and so much wreckage left by the wayside, but somehow it always comes back to this: a question and a hairsbreadth of space between them.
"Please?" Kame murmurs, and that's all it takes to tip the balance. He feels the heat of Jin's breath against his skin just a moment before Jin's lips are there, wet from multiple nervous licks, soft and slow brushing over his temple.
Once, and then Jin's moving and all the air eases from Kame's chest when Jin lays a kiss to the corner of his eye. He can't help it, Kame guides with the hand still twined in Jin's hair, catches Jin's mouth with his own and the world outside the door melts away, because Jin is kissing him good morning, ittekimasu, and farewell, and the past is falling away because this hasn't changed, and the way Jin's lips part so readily under his and the way Kame's heart is smashing against his ribs all point to the fact they're not as done with each other as Kame's spent the last god knows how long convincing himself.
There are no split lips or accidental bruises between them now, but the kiss is gentle, a tentative reopening of the space they used to occupy. There you are, it's saying, with the surest of movements and the soft sweep of his tongue against Jin's. I thought I'd lost you forever.
It's Jin who pulls back first, palm spread wide over the place where Kame's heart is trying to claw its way out of his chest.
"I can't," Jin says, his voice full of unravelling threads, trying to get himself under control. "I can't go through all this again." And there's no conviction in his words at all. He's trying to convince them both.
Kame closes his eyes and forces himself to remember every cold shoulder Jin's turned on him, every cruel jibe that's been casually tossed his way. He forces himself to remember why they don't work.
"...okay," Kame breathes into the air between them. When Jin's lips move to speak, Kame lays two fingers over them. "Just-- leave it that."
Because he knows, despite everything -- despite work, his career, his reputation, despite Kyoko-san, despite the fact he loves her and wonders if he's not falling in love with her -- in spite of it all, if Jin opened his mouth and said 'Let's disappear, right now, someplace where no one cares and no one'll find us and just be us, again, together,' Kame knows he won't have the strength to say no.
Under his fingers, he feels Jin nod.
Just this. A slip, nothing more. Nostalgia, for old times' sake, whatever, it doesn't mean anything. They can keep on with their tentative truce, patching up the cracks wherever they show, and they'll make it work, for the sake of the band.
"Ittekimasu," Jin says against Kame's fingers, then lets his hands drop. He steps back and reaches for the door knob.
Kame doesn't reply, except in his heart.
~
Two days later, they're filming a PV in another abandoned warehouse, somewhere in the decaying docklands between Tokyo and Kawasaki. Jin's late again -- promotional commitments, Yanagi-san had said -- and when he finally walks on-set, Kame has to bite back a smile at the way he's fidgeting unhappily with his fuzzy black-and-white striped sweater.
"Hey," Kame says when the man all but collapses into the chair beside him. Subtlety has never been one of Jin's strong suits.
"Hey," Jin says back. There's a tiny hint of colour rising in his cheeks, but he smiles nonetheless, and maybe their truce isn't quite so tentative as it had been...
Out of the corner of his eye, Kame sees, like the edge of a skinning knife, Ueda grin and hold out a palm. Nakamaru grumbles as he reaches for his coin purse.
~
A week later, at a half-past midday, Kame is inspecting his wires and harness for the third time when he hears his phone begin to vibrate. The screen shines a psychotropic blue inside his bag. A message, from Yoko.
The man has only one thing to say:
Akakame lives?!??!
:Db :Db :Db
Author: adistantsun
Pairing: Akame
Word count: ~2,500 words
Rating: PG-13
Genre/Warnings: Past fic. Romance. A touch of angst, boys kissing.
Notes: For everyone who helped to make K_X 2011 such a phenomenal success! :D This is a sequel of sorts to another fic of mine, Fall (and a stand-alone extract from a much longer fic that I'm working on ;D)
Summary: September, 2007. The morning after his painful DreamBoys fall, Kame wakes up.
FALLEN
September, 2007
The pain brings him up out of sleep. A fire's been lit along the line of his backbone and it burns fiercely. Kame is used to waking up in pain. He pushes his body hard and it pushes back. But this is beyond muscles pulled and joints stiff, this pain is intense, a flag of genuine injury. He opens his eyes, tries to remember.
The ceiling of his apartment is white, plastered and painted. The roof of the Imperial Garden Theatre was difficult to make out with the stage lights shining straight in his eyes. The ropes gave around him. The tension holding him up was suddenly no longer there. He remembers falling. He doesn't remember hitting the stage, but it's the only logical conclusion. He remembers gritting his teeth to keep the cries of pain in his chest when they moved him, because his mic was still on.
This isn't the first back injury Kame's had. It likely won't be the last. He has painkillers in the kitchen - good ones, from America. They cushion the world around him, fill it with warm water that soaks every ache and stiffness from his body. He spent most of the last tour on them, when his knee gave out.
Careful, Kame rolls onto his side. Even that small movement sends gunshots of pain through his back. The walk to the kitchen will be a walk through six of the seven layers of hell.
He braces himself for the incendiary that will be sitting up, then blinks, and looks. Beside his futon, in easy reach, are two orange capsules and a glass of water. He remembers.
Jin.
Jin with his bare feet hanging off the end of Kame's couch when he came home. Jin opening the microwave to the smell of katsudon. Jin catching him, helping him, holding him, holding out two orange capsules from a bottle posted from LA.
Jin easing him down onto the soft cotton sheets and laying two soft kisses against his temple as he drifted off to sleep.
Kame puts both pills on his tongue and drinks the entire glass.
In the bathroom, he can hear the shower running.
Kame cracks another egg against the edge of the counter and drops it into the pan. He's walking on a cloud. The fire in his back is no more than a glowing coal; he's strapped an ice pack to the darkest patch of bruising.
Fried eggs, fish, coffee. It's a lean breakfast, but with what little there is here, it's the best Kame can do; when he's eating two meals a day in a dressing room, there's no point in groceries. He stacks the eggshells one inside the next and tosses them in the trash. Jin asked him once why eggshells always fit perfectly inside each other, no matter which order they're stacked in. They'd been filming Gokusen at the time, Jin'd had the remnants of a split lip, the fault of an Ara High extra's over-enthusiasm. Jin'd wanted eggs because "they don't hurt going down". He remembers rolling his eyes and sliding two more sunny sides straight from the pan to Jin's plate. Their goodbye kiss had been more gentle that morning.
Kame knows the bathroom door is unlocked. Once upon two-and-a-half years ago, he would have killed the burners, shed the rumpled and ripe clothes he'd slept in - (ever mindful of the line in the sand, Jin hadn't tried to get him out of them) - and pushed open the door. Jin's shoulders are wider than when he was twenty, but his waist is still narrow and his hips still flare just enough to fit perfectly in Kame's cupped hands. Kame can still remember what water tastes like when it's beaded in the small of Jin's back. And Kame remembers Kyoko-san, who's supposed to be his girlfriend.
Beside him, the percolator is spewing steam. Kame leans over and breathes it in and stays where he is.
"You won't fucking believe what Taguchi's done with his hair, it looks like the spill from a solar flare," Jin says around a mouthful of fish. He ducks his head and picks a delicate, near-invisible bone off his tongue.
Kame smiles against the rim of his coffee cup. He'd spent a hundred mornings this way, sitting across the table, watching Jin pick his way around a salted horse mackerel. It should be awkward. After all they've put each other through, it should be tense and uncomfortable. But it's not. And that in itself is the strangest thing of all.
"I didn't know solar flares could spill."
"I don't know, maybe they don't, but if they did, it'd look like Taguchi's head. Yoko was digging 'round for sunglasses every time he came on-set yesterday." The memory pulls a quick smirk across Jin's mouth, before it's gone, replaced with another morsel of white flesh eased off the bone. Jin's a surprisingly delicate eater, when the mood takes him.
"How is he? Yoko, I mean. I can't remember the last time I saw him."
"Same as always, trying to hide the fact he's really a demon dressed up. Pass us the pot would you?" Jin says and reaches a hand out for the coffee pot. Kame wonders how many times Jin said the same thing in LA, and what exactly he was asking for.
"Here," Kame says, relinquishing the handle. "Tell Yoko I said hi?"
And Jin looks up from filling his mug, just for a moment. His face is shuttered, which is telling in itself: thoughts are playing out in his head that he doesn't want Kame to see. He'd never been much good at it in the past, but maybe in LA he'd had time to sit in front of a mirror and erase every betraying twitch and dimple. Kame finds it both unnerving and in a way oddly charming, being left in the dark by a face he could once read as clear as the weather from a look at the sky. Jin's on the verge of something - saying, finding, realising - but Kame's not sure what.
A moment passes, then another. Finally, Jin consigns himself to a nod.
"Okay." Then, his own cup full, he gestures across the table with the pot. "You want more?"
Jin has filming this morning. Halfway through his coffee, he spares a glance at the clock through his overlong fringe. It tells Kame everything he needs to know.
This new Jin rarely gives a toss if he's late for recording or a group photoshoot or anything else that's fixed simply by a change of batting order. But when a project rests entirely on his shoulders, the rules change. When he's invested, Jin's the first to arrive and among the last to leave. When he's invested, Jin gives all of himself and holds nothing back. That, Kame understands better than anyone else. He still feels loss of it sometimes.
"Done?" Kame asks. He holds the coffee cup against his chin, some small shield between himself and Jin and every confused remnant of feeling he has for the man.
"Yeah," Jin says and lays his chopsticks down parallel across his plate, littered with fish bones. Then pushes out his chair and gathers up the rest of the tableware, carefully, more carefully than Kame's ever seen him, and moves toward the kitchen. Kame watches the cotton of his Rolling Stones t-shirt stretch and fold across his back and wonders how many plates Jin's broken in the years that he's lived alone.
Like a good host, when Jin grabs his bag, says "I should..." and tilts his head toward the door, Kame stands up and follows. A hundred words caught in his throat, he watches Jin toe on his Vans.
Jin hitches his bag higher on his shoulder and then he looks up. There are civilities in his mouth, but in his eyes Kame can see memories. The same ones are clouding his brain in the same way. In this instant they're teenagers, standing in a white wall-papered genkan, Jin's boots a jumble with Kame's designer knock-offs, the mirror at the end of the narrow hallway reflecting their bird limbs and shocks of chanpatsu and orange hair.
Jin's fringe is in his eyes. Kame can't stop his hand from reaching; he brushes it out of the way.
"Itterasshai," Kame murmurs, as he has so many times before. Have a good one. Once, for them, it also meant, come back to me soon. That time is long past, but Kame still feels it fresh in his blood, like iron or muscle memory. The impulse to reach out and hold on. To partake.
"Ittekimasu," Jin says automatically, but he doesn't move away. He doesn't turn, or reach for the door handle, or smile lightly as he would if they were the friends they pretend to be, if every enzyme and molecule in their bodies weren't craving to touch.
Jin breathes out. It's shaky, and like the catch of a spark or the moment of give that brings the whole wall down, they reach.
Kame will never be able to say who moved first, only that he closed his eyes alone and opened them in Jin's arms. Warmth is seeping through him to the marrow deep in his bones. He breathes in, fills his lungs with the smell of them, coffee and grilled salt, pine soap and slept-in clothes and skin, feels Jin do the same with his nose pressed in Kame's hair. Kame's hands are full of worn cotton t-shirt and it takes a concerted effort to uncurl his fingers; he wants to feel the way Jin's moving under his hands, to remind himself of everything he never really forgot.
Long moments pass before he can bear to lift his head away, to put even that small amount of distance between them to look Jin in the eye. The shutters are wide open, he can see emotions tumbling over each other across Jin's face and he can't remember the last time he saw something so perfect. Something that felt so much like home.
Jin's breathing is ragged. It shudders from him when Kame runs the fingers of one hand up over his neck and the line of his jaw, up, to comb through his hair and gently cradle his head. Jin leans into the touch as he might lean toward a patch of sunlight coming through an open window, and Kame in that split second never wants to move again. He feels Jin pulling him closer and their foreheads touch.
"Last night," Kame says, his voice liquid in the centimetres of air between them. "You kissed me, twice. Right here." He brushes a thumb over the soft skin at Jin's temple. "Do it again?"
A brief moment's hesitation. Jin's eyes are uncertain, asking permission, as if he doesn't trust the words he's hearing. So many years and so much wreckage left by the wayside, but somehow it always comes back to this: a question and a hairsbreadth of space between them.
"Please?" Kame murmurs, and that's all it takes to tip the balance. He feels the heat of Jin's breath against his skin just a moment before Jin's lips are there, wet from multiple nervous licks, soft and slow brushing over his temple.
Once, and then Jin's moving and all the air eases from Kame's chest when Jin lays a kiss to the corner of his eye. He can't help it, Kame guides with the hand still twined in Jin's hair, catches Jin's mouth with his own and the world outside the door melts away, because Jin is kissing him good morning, ittekimasu, and farewell, and the past is falling away because this hasn't changed, and the way Jin's lips part so readily under his and the way Kame's heart is smashing against his ribs all point to the fact they're not as done with each other as Kame's spent the last god knows how long convincing himself.
There are no split lips or accidental bruises between them now, but the kiss is gentle, a tentative reopening of the space they used to occupy. There you are, it's saying, with the surest of movements and the soft sweep of his tongue against Jin's. I thought I'd lost you forever.
It's Jin who pulls back first, palm spread wide over the place where Kame's heart is trying to claw its way out of his chest.
"I can't," Jin says, his voice full of unravelling threads, trying to get himself under control. "I can't go through all this again." And there's no conviction in his words at all. He's trying to convince them both.
Kame closes his eyes and forces himself to remember every cold shoulder Jin's turned on him, every cruel jibe that's been casually tossed his way. He forces himself to remember why they don't work.
"...okay," Kame breathes into the air between them. When Jin's lips move to speak, Kame lays two fingers over them. "Just-- leave it that."
Because he knows, despite everything -- despite work, his career, his reputation, despite Kyoko-san, despite the fact he loves her and wonders if he's not falling in love with her -- in spite of it all, if Jin opened his mouth and said 'Let's disappear, right now, someplace where no one cares and no one'll find us and just be us, again, together,' Kame knows he won't have the strength to say no.
Under his fingers, he feels Jin nod.
Just this. A slip, nothing more. Nostalgia, for old times' sake, whatever, it doesn't mean anything. They can keep on with their tentative truce, patching up the cracks wherever they show, and they'll make it work, for the sake of the band.
"Ittekimasu," Jin says against Kame's fingers, then lets his hands drop. He steps back and reaches for the door knob.
Kame doesn't reply, except in his heart.
~
Two days later, they're filming a PV in another abandoned warehouse, somewhere in the decaying docklands between Tokyo and Kawasaki. Jin's late again -- promotional commitments, Yanagi-san had said -- and when he finally walks on-set, Kame has to bite back a smile at the way he's fidgeting unhappily with his fuzzy black-and-white striped sweater.
"Hey," Kame says when the man all but collapses into the chair beside him. Subtlety has never been one of Jin's strong suits.
"Hey," Jin says back. There's a tiny hint of colour rising in his cheeks, but he smiles nonetheless, and maybe their truce isn't quite so tentative as it had been...
Out of the corner of his eye, Kame sees, like the edge of a skinning knife, Ueda grin and hold out a palm. Nakamaru grumbles as he reaches for his coin purse.
~
A week later, at a half-past midday, Kame is inspecting his wires and harness for the third time when he hears his phone begin to vibrate. The screen shines a psychotropic blue inside his bag. A message, from Yoko.
The man has only one thing to say:
Akakame lives?!??!
:Db :Db :Db