[Fic]: Myu Chronicles, Chapter 8
This chapter is all pretty much MorixDaiki sooo... *crossposts*
Title: The Myu Chronicles - Book One: The Dancing Lion, the Warlock, and the Wardrobe
Author: KY
Genre: pnish/TeniMyu/Narnia crossover
Characters/pairings: TutixNagayan, MorixDaiki, KazukixShirota, SaitoxAoyagi, KenKenxDate, various others, pnish, original cast, new cast
Rating: PG for now, some swearing
Word Count: 6,442
Summary: *pnish*, the chosen humans destined to become Kings of Narnia and do battle against the White Warlock and the minions of his ice palace, must return peace and eternal summer to this mythical world.
Previous chapters are archived here.
A/N: We'll ignore the fact that this took me like five months to write XD;;
* * *
As Daiki lay stunned and in pain on the hallway floor he realized that his collision with Eiji had literally knocked off his feet. His shoulder throbbed where it had connected with the hard linoleum, his whole arm to tingling ominously from his elbow down to his fingertips, and his hip and lower back were both smarting from the impact. It took a few seconds for him to regain the breath that he been knocked out of him, and he was finally able to register that he was being held and shaken, not too gently mind, and that someone was calling his name.
“Daiki-chan? Daiki! Crap say something, are you okay?”
“Eiji?” Daiki asked, blinking and feeling dazed that he’d somehow ended up on his back with Eiji kneeling beside him.
“Come’re,” Eiji commanded gently, and Daiki felt the hands on him tug on his shoulders to pull him into a sitting position.
Daiki allowed himself up to be helped and used his good hand to push himself off the floor, and together he and Eiji rose to their feet, the hallway suddenly wider and brighter than Daiki remembered. He wavered slightly, blinking and pressing a hand to his forehead as the blood rush in his ears began to fade, and felt the hands on his shoulders relax slightly but remain in place.
“Are you hurt, Eiji?” Daiki asked as he let his hand fall. He could recall now just how hard he’d slammed into the other man to send himself flying toward the floor.
“I’m fine,” Eiji said, though there was a winded hitch to his voice. “Nothing but my pride wounded for not being able to dodge that. Are you okay?”
Daiki nodded, but moved his good hand to rub gingerly at the upper part of his right arm, which still stung from the impact. “I’m fine, I just banged my arm a little. I think I landed on it.”
Eiji’s hand on Daiki’s right shoulder moved away from the injury. “Can you move it?”
“I think so.” Daiki gave his arm a brief, circular swing, bending the elbow and clenching his hand into a fist at the end. He winced from the pain but was relieved that it felt like nothing more than a mild sprain, at best probably a simple bruise.
Daiki gave a sheepish smile to the other man. “It’s fine, just a little bump.”
“A little bump?” Eiji repeated incredulously. “You could have really hurt yourself. What the hell were you thinking?”
“It’s all Tsuchiya’s fault!” Daiki protested immediately.
“So you thought it’d be a good idea to go running through the hallways like little kids, right?” Eiji snapped back.
Daiki frowned and pulled his other arm out from under Eiji’s hand, which felt more restrictive than supportive at that point. “He’s the one who started running first. He keeps leaving his things out and acting irresponsible so I wanted to talk to him. I didn’t think-”
“No, you didn’t think,” Eiji cut in, his own frown in place. “You’re supposed to be setting a good example. How does it look to everyone to see the Leader of our group running around and yelling and being in danger of getting seriously hurt? What if you’d really hurt yourself? You would have been unable to be in the performance with that kind of injury. You know better than that, Daiki!”
“I would’ve caught him if you hadn’t gotten in the way!” Daiki shouted back, his cheeks warming with anger and shame.
Eiji blinked and Daiki saw his friend’s eyes narrow coldly. “Grow up, Daiki.”
Then Eiji turned on his heel and stalked back into the room he’d come out of before, leaving Daiki alone in the hallway with his arm aching more than it had a few seconds earlier. Daiki’s first impulse was to go after Eiji and demand an explanation, or an apology, or remind him who exactly was the leader of their group and thus perfectly entitled to run through the halls if he pleased. But he knew Eiji was right, that he was thinking and acting childishly, and Eiji’s chill tone rung around inside his head and left his face feeling hot with embarrassment but his stomach cold with remorse. The rebuke had stung maybe more than Daiki wanted to admit, and he didn’t feel like looking for a repeat any time soon.
Clutching his arm just under the sore spot of his injury, Daiki continued down the hall in the direction Tuti had fled earlier, a few spots still dancing just out of the edge of his vision. He wondered if he’d actually hit his head in the fall too, but it was entirely possible the headache he was experiencing now was only a result of the spat he and Eiji had just had in the middle of the hallway. Wasn’t that in itself rather childish too? Two grown men yelling at each other over stupid things? Daiki thought so, but the counter-argument felt hollow when he didn’t have anyone to point it out to but himself.
And Eiji was one to talk about setting an example when he was the one who had been behaving so weird all this time. Daiki was supposed to be able to trust his second-in-command to not treat him like a troublemaking brat, right? Yet it felt like all Eiji was doing lately was just that, making up excuses not to spend time together, yelling at Daiki over things that weren’t even his fault, or things that were but in the past never would have been as big of a deal as Eiji was making them now, and overall just being this total stranger that Daiki felt like he didn’t even know anymore. He’d thought for weeks that it was all in his head, that they were just busy and he was overreacting or reading too deeply. But even Wasshi had noticed, and that he’d been concerned with Eiji’s behavior too made it feel like every little fear Daiki had entertained over the past month was suddenly real. Could everything really be Daiki’s fault?
Daiki didn’t think so, reasonably, even though the thought hurt and made him worry and think up reasons for what he could have done or said to make Eiji upset with him. He wasn’t acting differently with anyone else in the group, just him, which made it all the more clear that Daiki was at the center of his friend’s recent withdrawal. But if Eiji wouldn’t even talk to him except to yell at him and call him childish, what was Daiki supposed to do? Wasshi had told him to wait, that Eiji would tell him when he was ready, but Daiki was starting to get sick of the mistreatment. He was their leader. Didn’t that count for something?
Daiki followed the left turn down the hallway Tuti had taken but saw no sign of the other actor as he paced the corridor. There were open and closed doors on either side and though there was a good chance that Tuti was long gone into another area of the theater by now, Daiki still took a moment to peer into each room and open every door in the hope of catching the other man hiding. He was nearly to the end of the hall and approaching another intersection when one of the doors he’d looked into a few seconds earlier, the door to the prop room, creaked open on stiff hinges.
Daiki turned around and let out a low sigh when Tuti himself stepped into the hallway, the man scratching his head casually while one hand rested on the door handle. Daiki approached the other actor, wishing he was angrier than the low level of frustration he was feeling at the moment, and Tuti turned at the sound of his footsteps.
“Daiki!” Tuti called out cheerfully.
Daiki was brought up short and stared in confusion at the other man. Tuti was smiling broadly as he closed the door to the room, his stance completely relaxed and his eyes on Daiki all the while. The easy demeanor seemed completely out of place considering what had transpired only a few minutes earlier, and the abrupt change made Daiki wonder if he’d in fact hit his head on the floor after all.
“Daiki? What’s wrong?” Tuti asked as he approached, his smile shifting from cheerful to vaguely amused at the dumbstruck look that was probably plastered all over Daiki’s face.
“You were hiding in the prop room,” Daiki accused, and though it was unnecessary to say since he’d just seen Tuti walk out of there, it was all his mind could readily latch on to at the moment.
Tuti let out a short laugh. “Ah ha, yeah, uh… is it… oh crap, you were just chasing me around, right?”
The uncertainty in the question made Daiki frown abruptly as his thoughts were snapped into place. “Stop playing games. You know perfectly well what just happened and you’re not getting away this time. You’re being far too irresponsible, Tsuchiya. One of these days you’re going to create a mess that can’t be cleaned up after you and we’re going to be the ones paying for it.”
Tuti’s smile fell considerably and this time he did look apologetic as he ran his fingers through his hair. “Ah, right. I’m sorry about that. That was pretty stupid of me, huh.”
“Tsuchiya, you can’t just keep apologizing every time,” Daiki reprimanded, though his anger had cooled somewhat under Tuti’s genuine look of remorse. “I keep telling you the same stuff over and over, every performance, and you just find new ways to be irresponsible that are basically the same things as before. You can’t keep doing this. I can’t be picking up after you all the time. If we want to be professionals, we should start acting like ones, right?”
To Daiki’s surprise, Tuti nodded in reply, his expression unusually thoughtful. “You’re right, Daiki. You know me, I don’t think, I just do. That’s not a very responsible way to act, is it?”
Daiki sighed aloud with relief. “It’s something we have to work on. Let’s just be a little more careful in the future, okay?”
“Yes, Leader-san,” Tuti said with a grin, and the unexpected use of his title made Daiki smile for what felt like the first time that day.
“I already moved your jacket back to the costume rack for you, so let’s go work on the script like we were supposed to be doing ten minutes ago,” Daiki said, stepping past Tuti to lead them in the opposite direction down the hallway.
“Ten minutes?” Tuti said faintly.
He didn’t repeat the question when Daiki turned to look back at him inquisitively, just smiled faintly, and Daiki gave a mental shrug. Tuti was Tuti, even if he was suddenly being more cooperative about learning responsibility and not running away in the other direction. Unexpected outbursts were nothing new, though Tuti did remain unusually quiet as they retraced their steps and found the room Daiki had left Wasshi alone in a few minutes earlier.
Wasshi looked up with a relieved smile as they stepped through the open door. “Ah, you found him!”
“Caught, shackled, and returned to my cell,” Tuti said with a good-humored laugh.
“Not without a few bumps along the way,” Daiki grumbled, rubbing the top of his arm.
“You hurt yourself?” Wasshi asked, shuffling the papers in front of him into a neater pile.
Daiki shook his head dismissively and took his seat next to the other man while Tuti pulled out the chair across from them with a scrape of plastic feet across the smooth floor. Their scripts were already on the table where they’d been left from that morning, and Daiki could easily make out Tuti’s pen scratched cover page in front of the chair opposite his own. Not that they didn’t all have their fair share of doodles and notes along the margins of the script packets, but Tuti by far won out for giving the impression of being the most bored while he’d had the pages open. Daiki was amazed the guy could read any of his lines by that point since little of what resembled the original text actually remained.
Daiki picked up his clipped stack of pages and flipped through to about the middle. “Second act,” he announced, and more paper shuffling began as the other two men followed suit. “The three of us have a scene together and there’s stuff we’ve been having trouble on over and over again, which tells me that something here isn’t working. I want to go over a few lines, try out a few new things, see if we need to cut out whole parts or if we can work with what we’ve got with a few minor alterations. This scene isn’t cutting into our time but every little bit helps, so if you spot something you think can go, just speak up. Ready?”
Daiki made eye contact with the other two members at the table and was relieved to see the unconditional looks of trust and obedience staring back at him. Granted, Tuti’s mouth was cocked in a half-smirk, and Wasshi looked a little intimidated by the work ahead, but Daiki could see the compliance in their eyes and their belief in him that he would know what to do and what to fix as they moved along. It was like having one weight lifted off his shoulders to be replaced by another, one that didn’t feel quite so cumbersome and depressing, but rather like the mantle of responsibility that Daiki enjoyed feeling there. Here Daiki could do his job right and in turn earn appreciation for his efforts, and for now that was enough.
* * *
“Tsuchiya, you’re not paying attention!” Daiki snapped for what felt like at least the fifth time since they’d begun reading through the scene.
He had no idea what was wrong with the man today. He seemed to be all over the place, intensely concentrated one moment and then gazing off into nowhere with the weirdest smile on his face the next. To top it off, Tuti also seemed to have completely forgotten whole segments of his part, which in the past was the sort of pit-trap that Daiki alone had only ever repeatedly fallen into. He knew Tuti was amazing at memorizing his lines and usually had whole pages committed to memory before anyone else, so what was going on?
“I am, I am,” Tuti lied quickly, his hands diving for his scattered pages of script, which only managed to further disorganize them.
“You’re getting them on my side,” Daiki said irritably as he pushed back some of the papers encroaching upon his corner of the table.
Wasshi shifted beside him while Tuti rearranged up his pages and Daiki turned to see his friend’s head bent over his own booklet, one hand scratching absently at a spot behind his ear. Wasshi had probably noticed Tuti’s weird behavior too but was opting not to say anything that would bring it to light. Either he didn’t think it was a big deal, or he felt it’d be better off for Daiki to deal with it and leave him out of whatever lecture was forthcoming. Sometimes Wasshi could be extraordinarily perceptive, but it was only on the rare occasion that he followed through on it or allowed himself to interfere personally in their lives. They all had their own ways of reading and understanding each other and their various moods, and their own ways of dealing with it. Wasshi, despite his powers of intuition, also happened to be the least confrontational of the bunch, which was both good and bad, Daiki supposed.
At the moment Daiki wasn’t in the mood to argue with Tuti, so he simply glared at the other actor until the paper shuffling stopped and Tuti grinned apologetically. “Right, let’s take it from your line, again. Wasshi, this time just leave out the first sentence when you respond to Tsuchiya and see how that feels.”
“How about I make a sound instead?” Wasshi suggested, making a few pencil marks in the margin of his script.
“That could work, try that. It does feel pointless for the character to actually voice his affirmative when he’s more the type to do a head nod or a grunt. Okay, Tsuchiya it’s your cue.”
The reading went fine for all of the first minute until Tuti suddenly came to a stop, his extended pause drawing the attention of Wasshi and Daiki as they looked up from their pages to find Tuti staring down at his sheet, brows furrowed and lips drawn into a frown.
Daiki sighed. “What’s wrong? Why’d you stop?”
Tuti laughed a little and scratched his jaw in embarrassment. “I just… I guess I forgot what came next for a second there. Sorry.”
“You forgot?” Daiki echoed, blinking at the man across from him. “It’s right in front of you and you read it perfectly fine this morning!”
“I know, it just feels like it’s been awhile since I last looked at the page,” Tuti explained awkwardly.
Daiki was tempted to snap back a reminder about the promise of trying to be more responsible that Tuti had made earlier, but had a feeling that being yelled at would be the least helpful thing to Tuti right now. “Do you need to take a break?” Daiki asked instead.
“Sure!” Tuti agreed immediately, sweeping his messy pile of pages away with one hand. He pulled out his cigarettes and lighter with more haste than Daiki would have thought necessary and lit up with a deep drag on his first cigarette. “Ah, god, I’ve needed one of these for awhile.”
“I thought you went on a smoke break after lunch?” Wasshi asked while Daiki dug around inside his own bag for a cigarette.
“I did?” There was a pause and when Daiki looked up Tuti had another funny look on his face. It cleared in the next moment when he laughed. “Oh right. Yeah, no, I just walked around for a bit.”
Daiki finally managed to produce a cigarette and lighter, both of which had seen more use over the past month than he cared to admit, especially when he was trying to kick the habit under his own conviction and Eiji’s guidance, both which had become things of the past as of late. He winced from the lingering pain in his arm as he brought the stick and lighter up to his mouth, and used his good hand to return the lighter to his bag on the floor once finished with it. He was surprised by how much his arm still ached even now, but only certain movements seemed to exacerbate the discomfort and overall it didn’t seem like anything a few painkillers overnight wouldn’t take care of. The last thing he needed to do was see a doctor and show up at rehearsals tomorrow with his arm in a sling. Eiji would never let him hear the end of it then.
“Hey, you guys,” Tuti said suddenly, drawing Daiki and Wasshi’s attention across the table to their friend. Tuti’s enthusiasm for his cigarette seemed to have waned slightly, as the item was dangling between his fingers and his attention seemed focused somewhere above the table and their heads. “Do you ever wonder about… I dunno, weird things?”
“Like…?” Daiki prompted, wondering where this turn in conversation was headed. With Tuti, you never knew.
“Like the kind of stuff you hear a lot as a kid, fairytales and ghost stories and urban legends and stuff. Where do you think they come from? Like, who decided that there could be monsters under your bed? Or that if you didn’t hold your breath going past a graveyard a ghost will come after you?”
“I think they’re probably really old stories,” Wasshi offered thoughtfully. “People always have a legend about a river being inhabited by a god, or about a certain forest that’s haunted, and even if no one’s seen anything for years the stories still get passed down and get changed and exaggerated along the way.”
“Yes yes,” Tuti agreed eagerly. “But where do they come from? Say the guy who told the story in the first place, was there any reason for it? Did he see something he couldn’t explain and was just trying to make sense of it, or did something actually happen and he wanted to tell other people about it because it was too amazing to keep bottled up inside?”
“It sounds like they’d just want to get attention,” Daiki remarked, taking a short drag on his cigarette. “Back then people believed anything they couldn’t explain, and they didn’t have science so a lot of things didn’t make sense. Whether or not the story was true, people would believe it and spread it around.”
“What about these days? If someone had a story that couldn’t be explained by science, wouldn’t that be worth looking into?”
“Without evidence?” Daiki replied skeptically, tapping a pile of ash into the small dish at the end of the table.
“People would probably be more scared than open-minded,” Wasshi said with consideration. “If science can’t explain it, they usually think you’re crazy.”
Tuti sighed and slouched back in his chair. “That’s true, huh.”
Daiki finished off his cigarette and squashed the butt into the nearby ashtray. He noticed that Tuti still hadn’t touched his beyond the first few puffs and now the thing was smoking and in danger of dripping ash on the floor, which was further piquing his curiosity about the odd behavior of the other man. “So what’s with this all of a sudden?”
Tuti ran a hand over his face and shrugged, but wouldn’t look at Daiki or Wasshi. “Nothing, just got a lot on my mind I guess.”
“You’ve been acting kind of weird since yesterday,” Wasshi said, his tone concerned, which was probably the reason why Tuti only sighed and didn’t snap back a biting retort.
That sigh told Daiki plenty anyway. Tuti really did have something on his mind, something big enough to make him forget his lines and make a cigarette burn away worthlessly in his hand and make him act as if he’d completely forgotten that Daiki had been hell bent on obtaining his blood only a half hour earlier. He’d even been hiding in the prop room, which had started Tuti’s weird mood the other day too, and now that Daiki thought about it the room had been empty when he’d stuck his head in there the first time, which meant that…
“You were in the wardrobe again,” Daiki said with a glare of accusation. By the sudden jerk of Tuti’s entire body and the wild, guilty flash in his eyes, there was no mistaking this to be the source, or at least part of the problem going on lately with Tuti.
“You were?” Wasshi asked in surprise.
“Why are you so obsessed with that thing?” Daiki demanded when Tuti began fiddling with his fingers restlessly.
“Ha, you wouldn’t believe me,” Tuti retorted. He attempted a jeering chuckle that came out sounding rather strained instead, and Daiki didn’t miss that one of his hands had fallen to rub against his knee in agitation.
“Why don't you try us and then maybe we can get back to actually doing the work we’re supposed to be doing?”
Tuti was quiet for a moment and then shook his head with another laugh. “Tempting, but… you guys wouldn't believe me.”
“You know we’ll listen to anything,” Wasshi encouraged when Tuti ignored them by mashing his cigarette in the ashtray next to Daiki’s.
Daiki wanted to snort. Tuti was probably blowing up something into a bigger deal than it really was, though he had to admit that at this point it simply couldn’t be laughed off when it was affecting the other man’s work performance. “We’ll listen, I promise,” Daiki agreed. “And if you want we won’t say anything until you’re done and then we’ll talk about it, okay?”
Tuti looked encouraged by this show of willingness to hear him out. “Yeah? Well… you guys have to really promise not to say anything, or laugh, or tell me I’m lying, because I’m not. I wouldn’t-- I couldn’t make up something like this, no matter how hard I tried. And you have to listen until the end. Deal?”
“Sure,” Daiki replied immediately. At this point he’d grown pretty curious to hear what had worked Tuti up into such a state. He hadn’t sworn them to secrecy, so it wasn’t a personal matter, and Tuti’s talk earlier of ghost stories was starting to shape a vague idea in Daiki’s mind about what this might entail. Did Tuti think he was being haunted by a ghost?
Wasshi offered his agreement as well and Tuti straightened up in his chair, putting his elbows on the table and leaning forward with a conspirator’s air as he drew their attention toward him. “Well… I know this going to sound crazy… but that wardrobe isn’t really a wardrobe. It’s like a door, or a portal, and it can take you to another world…”
* * *
Daiki ran through the halls and knew he was in danger of being caught and reprimanded by Eiji, but right now he couldn’t care because Eiji was exactly the person he needed to talk to. They had a huge crisis on their hands and frankly Daiki wasn’t sure if *pnish* was going to be able to survive if things didn’t get fixed, and soon.
Tsuchiya Yuuichi was insane.
Daiki didn’t need a doctor to diagnose his friend. He was pretty sure that after hearing the story he and Wasshi had just listened to any professional would be of the same opinion, and that was that Tuti had clearly suffered a mental breakdown somewhere over the last few days and now they needed to find a replacement for his part in the play, or at least get their fourth member cured before the curtain came up.
After Tuti had told his story to them, at length, with more conviction and description than Daiki might have ever given the guy credit for being to come up with in the twisted corridors of his mind, Daiki had been unable to do anything but mutter out an excuse and bolt from the room. No doubt Wasshi was in there right now trying to act like the voice of reason and calmly get Tuti to deny the elaborate story he’d just told. Daiki might have been doing the same if he’d been thinking clearly, but the look in Tuti’s eyes… the passionate surety he’d gained as he’d spun out his story, the utter sincerity in his tone… those couldn’t be faked. Daiki had known Tuti for enough time to tell fact from fiction, to read where there was a joke lurking under the surface. This time there had been none.
Tuti was completely and totally obsessed with his fabrication.
And when he’d been talking about that… that faun? Whatever that was, by the name of Nagayama Takashi, if Daiki didn’t know better he’d say his friend was smitten. The little smiles, the way his voice had softened, the far away look in his eyes, the way he’d actually blushed! But worse than becoming infatuated with person that only existed in his own head he’d also cooked up an elaborate story about that person’s past, stories about magic and giants and winter and hours spent inside of a cave… it was too much for Daiki to take, and Tuti had been adamant about every word. And when had he claimed that all of this had taken place? In the span of a few minutes for the rest of them! Minutes!
Daiki wasn’t sure what had the potential to upset him more at this point. That their last member had become schizophrenic, or that Tuti had developed a vivid imagination when it was too late to put it to use in some way for the benefit of the group.
Daiki’s loud stomping finally took him past the entrance to the staging area for the theater and he came to an abrupt stop when he caught Eiji peering out into the hallway from beside one of the folding tables.
“Eiji!” Daiki exclaimed, darting into the back area.
“Daiki?” Eiji asked, taking in the sight of Daiki looking winded and flushed. “What’s going on?”
“It’s terrible!” Daiki blurted out, fisting his hands at his sides and trying to ignore the way it made the muscles in his arm ache from the motion.
“Did something happen?” Eiji asked, starting to look a little worried.
Daiki took a deep breath. “It’s Tsuchiya. He’s gone insane. I… I don’t know what to do. We’ve got to do something. It’s going to ruin everything!”
Eiji’s expression turned puzzled. “What are you talking about?”
“Tsuchiya, I found him in the prop room again and now he’s making up this whole, crazy story and talking about talking animals and missing time and I really, really think there’s something wrong with him. He’s probably gone insane!”
“Wait, wait. What? Daiki, you’re not making any sense.”
“It’s that wardrobe!” Daiki growled in frustration. “Ever since we got it Tuti’s been acting strange and now he’s making up stories and I just had to sit through an hour of his insane babble. I think he needs to see a doctor, we’ve got to cure him in time for the show, there’s no way we can make changes now and no one else can play his part. Do you think I should call Besshi and have him come in to cover for him? And maybe… maybe we can move things back if it’s really bad… my god I hope they don’t lock him up. Don’t they lock people up when they’re insane? What if-”
“Daiki!” Eiji interrupted curtly. “I don’t get what you’re saying at all. Yuuichi’s telling some story? What’s the big deal about that? He’s probably just joking around. I can’t believe you’re falling for it so easily.”
“It’s not a story! He really believes it, he just told me and Wasshi everything and we promised to believe him at the start but, but there’s no way it could be true! He’s making up this whole imaginary world with imaginary people and places and it’s all in his own head and he really, really believes he’s telling the truth. We’ve got to do something about it, what if he’s not safe anymore? What if he’s really insane?”
Eiji sighed and put a hand to his head. “Daiki. Stop. You’re overreacting. Just tell me what he said.”
Daiki frowned and crossed his arms angrily, feeling the sting this caused at his shoulder but doing his best to ignore the pain. “Fine. I’ll tell you. Tsuchiya thinks there’s another world inside that wardrobe we bought for the set.”
“He what?” Eiji said, blinking.
“He said there’s another world inside the wardrobe he’s been to two times already. Been there for hours, and he says that every time he’s come back only a few minutes or a few seconds have passed for us, but he claims it’s completely true. He says that’s a magical world with snow everywhere and has warlocks and talking trees and weird… goat creatures that can talk, and giants and an entire country that’s been stuck in winter for the last hundred years or something. He thinks he’s been there and talked to this Nagayama guy seen and heard all this stuff about this place, Naria or something.”
“Nagayama?” Eiji repeated thoughtfully. “Don’t we have someone in the staff named that?”
“I don’t know!” Daiki exclaimed, throwing up his hands. “That’s not the point! Tsuchiya’s gone insane and we have to do something about it.”
Eiji suddenly let out a short, loud laugh. “Aw man, he got you good.”
Daiki felt the air catch in his lungs, his whole body going rigid with stunned shock. “W-what?”
“He’s pulling your leg, Daiki. I can’t believe you fell for it.” Eiji laughed again, wrapping an arm around his middle as he chuckled. “You’re so gullible, you should know better than to trust Tsuchiya.”
Daiki took a halting step backward. His heart was hammering at twice the normal speed and it felt like the floor had been pulled out from under him. Eiji had known the whole time? Had they both been playing the joke on him? “You… and… why?” Daiki asked faintly.
“What? He knows you’ll believe anything, Daiki. Really, you give him too much credit. I can’t believe you ran all the way here just to tell me that. He’s probably back there laughing at your expense right now. Seriously, it’s your own fault for being so gullible. I’ve gotta organize the rest of these light gels right now anyway, and stop running through the halls okay? I heard you coming earlier and it’s not safe.”
Eiji returned his attention to the table and Daiki slowly turned and left the room without another word. There was a dark shadow around the edge of his eyesight and his chest hurt like he’d just been hit especially hard with a fist, which metaphorically speaking wasn’t all that far from the truth after what Eiji had just revealed to him. A joke? A joke played on him? How could they? How could Tsuchiya do that? How could Eiji just stand there and laugh at him when he’d known about it all along and let Daiki get that worked up and worried about it?
How could they hurt him this much?
Daiki realized he was on the verge of crying when he felt the familiar pang in his chest, and he drew in a deep breath in an effort to stem the wave of emotion washing over him. He’d never felt this betrayed and humiliated before, not even back when they’d first started out as a group and things had been rocky between them because he was so new at being the Leader and no one had known if they could trust him to do the job well. Even back then no one had treated him like this, with so little respect and amusement at the expense of his emotions. When had things changed so badly? Was it because of this production or had he been losing his hold on the group for a while and simply hadn’t noticed? Was it because of Eiji? Did Eiji not see him fit to be leader anymore? Did everyone feel that way?
As Daiki’s dragging steps took him slowly down the corridor, the last person he expected to see walk ahead of him through an intersecting hallway was Tuti himself, who disappeared to the left just as Daiki looked up and spotted him. Daiki stopped walking for a moment, something cold and hurt and bitter filling up the void in his chest that had been left by Eiji’s dismissive laughter. There was no way he was going to let Tuti get away with this without hearing a few angry words from Daiki first, and maybe in the process they’d finally get to the heart of the problem and find out just what the *pnish* members really thought of their useless leader.
Daiki took off with long strides in the direction Tuti had headed off in but found himself faced with nothing but empty hallways in either direction he looked. However a door slamming shut in one direction caught his ear and he headed towards it, turning down another adjacent hallway and coming upon a familiar section of flooring and closed doors. With narrow, angry eyes, Daiki took in the prop room door and knew with a gut-twisting certainty that Tuti was hiding in there right now, hiding and probably in wait for Daiki to come in there after him so he could laugh at his expense just like Eiji had.
With a frustrated growl Daiki threw the door open, only to find the room empty save for the haphazard piles of boxes stacked against the walls and the solitary wardrobe at the back of the room, which stood with one of the doors open about a finger’s width between it and the other door.
“Tsuchiya!” Daiki bellowed, stepping inside the narrow room. There was no answer, nothing save his own voice reverberating back at him, and Daiki found himself glaring suspiciously at the open wardrobe.
In two steps Daiki reached the wooden doors and pulled both of them open wide, hoping to catch the other actor off guard and expose his hiding place. But a row of dark coats were the only things staring back at him, and they disappeared into the back of the wardrobe and a well of darkness that even the light inside the small room had a problem penetrating behind. It went against Daiki’s better judgment, but if Tuti was going to play stupid games then he was going to march in there and drag the man out by his ear if he needed to.
Daiki stepped boldly into the wardrobe, shoving his way through the wall of coats and reaching blindly for the body of the other actor. His hands kept encountering empty space so he stepped in deeper, pushing his shoulders through the second row of coats and feeling the soft fur of the first row brush against his back. It was incredibly dark in the wardrobe so he let his hands continue waving around as he shuffled forward step by step.
“Tsuchiya, stop hiding and get out here right now,” Daiki commanded with a low growl.
A light shape moved in front of his eyes and he lunged forward, hoping to land a lucky blow or grab a fistful of Tuti’s clothing. But instead his hand plunged into something incredibly cold and bristly, and he stumbled forward from the surprise, feeling shapes catch on his clothing as he felt his shoulders and torso smacked by whatever it has he’d run into. A few more steps forward suddenly found him blinking and shivering from the intense cold all around him, and his eyes watered from the shock of going from total darkness to the light that blazed down from a mid-winter sky.
Daiki could only stand rigid and still with shock, his arms wrapped around his middle as white ghosts of breath escaped past his rapidly chilling lips. Tsuchiya had been telling the truth all along.
Title: The Myu Chronicles - Book One: The Dancing Lion, the Warlock, and the Wardrobe
Author: KY
Genre: pnish/TeniMyu/Narnia crossover
Characters/pairings: TutixNagayan, MorixDaiki, KazukixShirota, SaitoxAoyagi, KenKenxDate, various others, pnish, original cast, new cast
Rating: PG for now, some swearing
Word Count: 6,442
Summary: *pnish*, the chosen humans destined to become Kings of Narnia and do battle against the White Warlock and the minions of his ice palace, must return peace and eternal summer to this mythical world.
Previous chapters are archived here.
A/N: We'll ignore the fact that this took me like five months to write XD;;
* * *
As Daiki lay stunned and in pain on the hallway floor he realized that his collision with Eiji had literally knocked off his feet. His shoulder throbbed where it had connected with the hard linoleum, his whole arm to tingling ominously from his elbow down to his fingertips, and his hip and lower back were both smarting from the impact. It took a few seconds for him to regain the breath that he been knocked out of him, and he was finally able to register that he was being held and shaken, not too gently mind, and that someone was calling his name.
“Daiki-chan? Daiki! Crap say something, are you okay?”
“Eiji?” Daiki asked, blinking and feeling dazed that he’d somehow ended up on his back with Eiji kneeling beside him.
“Come’re,” Eiji commanded gently, and Daiki felt the hands on him tug on his shoulders to pull him into a sitting position.
Daiki allowed himself up to be helped and used his good hand to push himself off the floor, and together he and Eiji rose to their feet, the hallway suddenly wider and brighter than Daiki remembered. He wavered slightly, blinking and pressing a hand to his forehead as the blood rush in his ears began to fade, and felt the hands on his shoulders relax slightly but remain in place.
“Are you hurt, Eiji?” Daiki asked as he let his hand fall. He could recall now just how hard he’d slammed into the other man to send himself flying toward the floor.
“I’m fine,” Eiji said, though there was a winded hitch to his voice. “Nothing but my pride wounded for not being able to dodge that. Are you okay?”
Daiki nodded, but moved his good hand to rub gingerly at the upper part of his right arm, which still stung from the impact. “I’m fine, I just banged my arm a little. I think I landed on it.”
Eiji’s hand on Daiki’s right shoulder moved away from the injury. “Can you move it?”
“I think so.” Daiki gave his arm a brief, circular swing, bending the elbow and clenching his hand into a fist at the end. He winced from the pain but was relieved that it felt like nothing more than a mild sprain, at best probably a simple bruise.
Daiki gave a sheepish smile to the other man. “It’s fine, just a little bump.”
“A little bump?” Eiji repeated incredulously. “You could have really hurt yourself. What the hell were you thinking?”
“It’s all Tsuchiya’s fault!” Daiki protested immediately.
“So you thought it’d be a good idea to go running through the hallways like little kids, right?” Eiji snapped back.
Daiki frowned and pulled his other arm out from under Eiji’s hand, which felt more restrictive than supportive at that point. “He’s the one who started running first. He keeps leaving his things out and acting irresponsible so I wanted to talk to him. I didn’t think-”
“No, you didn’t think,” Eiji cut in, his own frown in place. “You’re supposed to be setting a good example. How does it look to everyone to see the Leader of our group running around and yelling and being in danger of getting seriously hurt? What if you’d really hurt yourself? You would have been unable to be in the performance with that kind of injury. You know better than that, Daiki!”
“I would’ve caught him if you hadn’t gotten in the way!” Daiki shouted back, his cheeks warming with anger and shame.
Eiji blinked and Daiki saw his friend’s eyes narrow coldly. “Grow up, Daiki.”
Then Eiji turned on his heel and stalked back into the room he’d come out of before, leaving Daiki alone in the hallway with his arm aching more than it had a few seconds earlier. Daiki’s first impulse was to go after Eiji and demand an explanation, or an apology, or remind him who exactly was the leader of their group and thus perfectly entitled to run through the halls if he pleased. But he knew Eiji was right, that he was thinking and acting childishly, and Eiji’s chill tone rung around inside his head and left his face feeling hot with embarrassment but his stomach cold with remorse. The rebuke had stung maybe more than Daiki wanted to admit, and he didn’t feel like looking for a repeat any time soon.
Clutching his arm just under the sore spot of his injury, Daiki continued down the hall in the direction Tuti had fled earlier, a few spots still dancing just out of the edge of his vision. He wondered if he’d actually hit his head in the fall too, but it was entirely possible the headache he was experiencing now was only a result of the spat he and Eiji had just had in the middle of the hallway. Wasn’t that in itself rather childish too? Two grown men yelling at each other over stupid things? Daiki thought so, but the counter-argument felt hollow when he didn’t have anyone to point it out to but himself.
And Eiji was one to talk about setting an example when he was the one who had been behaving so weird all this time. Daiki was supposed to be able to trust his second-in-command to not treat him like a troublemaking brat, right? Yet it felt like all Eiji was doing lately was just that, making up excuses not to spend time together, yelling at Daiki over things that weren’t even his fault, or things that were but in the past never would have been as big of a deal as Eiji was making them now, and overall just being this total stranger that Daiki felt like he didn’t even know anymore. He’d thought for weeks that it was all in his head, that they were just busy and he was overreacting or reading too deeply. But even Wasshi had noticed, and that he’d been concerned with Eiji’s behavior too made it feel like every little fear Daiki had entertained over the past month was suddenly real. Could everything really be Daiki’s fault?
Daiki didn’t think so, reasonably, even though the thought hurt and made him worry and think up reasons for what he could have done or said to make Eiji upset with him. He wasn’t acting differently with anyone else in the group, just him, which made it all the more clear that Daiki was at the center of his friend’s recent withdrawal. But if Eiji wouldn’t even talk to him except to yell at him and call him childish, what was Daiki supposed to do? Wasshi had told him to wait, that Eiji would tell him when he was ready, but Daiki was starting to get sick of the mistreatment. He was their leader. Didn’t that count for something?
Daiki followed the left turn down the hallway Tuti had taken but saw no sign of the other actor as he paced the corridor. There were open and closed doors on either side and though there was a good chance that Tuti was long gone into another area of the theater by now, Daiki still took a moment to peer into each room and open every door in the hope of catching the other man hiding. He was nearly to the end of the hall and approaching another intersection when one of the doors he’d looked into a few seconds earlier, the door to the prop room, creaked open on stiff hinges.
Daiki turned around and let out a low sigh when Tuti himself stepped into the hallway, the man scratching his head casually while one hand rested on the door handle. Daiki approached the other actor, wishing he was angrier than the low level of frustration he was feeling at the moment, and Tuti turned at the sound of his footsteps.
“Daiki!” Tuti called out cheerfully.
Daiki was brought up short and stared in confusion at the other man. Tuti was smiling broadly as he closed the door to the room, his stance completely relaxed and his eyes on Daiki all the while. The easy demeanor seemed completely out of place considering what had transpired only a few minutes earlier, and the abrupt change made Daiki wonder if he’d in fact hit his head on the floor after all.
“Daiki? What’s wrong?” Tuti asked as he approached, his smile shifting from cheerful to vaguely amused at the dumbstruck look that was probably plastered all over Daiki’s face.
“You were hiding in the prop room,” Daiki accused, and though it was unnecessary to say since he’d just seen Tuti walk out of there, it was all his mind could readily latch on to at the moment.
Tuti let out a short laugh. “Ah ha, yeah, uh… is it… oh crap, you were just chasing me around, right?”
The uncertainty in the question made Daiki frown abruptly as his thoughts were snapped into place. “Stop playing games. You know perfectly well what just happened and you’re not getting away this time. You’re being far too irresponsible, Tsuchiya. One of these days you’re going to create a mess that can’t be cleaned up after you and we’re going to be the ones paying for it.”
Tuti’s smile fell considerably and this time he did look apologetic as he ran his fingers through his hair. “Ah, right. I’m sorry about that. That was pretty stupid of me, huh.”
“Tsuchiya, you can’t just keep apologizing every time,” Daiki reprimanded, though his anger had cooled somewhat under Tuti’s genuine look of remorse. “I keep telling you the same stuff over and over, every performance, and you just find new ways to be irresponsible that are basically the same things as before. You can’t keep doing this. I can’t be picking up after you all the time. If we want to be professionals, we should start acting like ones, right?”
To Daiki’s surprise, Tuti nodded in reply, his expression unusually thoughtful. “You’re right, Daiki. You know me, I don’t think, I just do. That’s not a very responsible way to act, is it?”
Daiki sighed aloud with relief. “It’s something we have to work on. Let’s just be a little more careful in the future, okay?”
“Yes, Leader-san,” Tuti said with a grin, and the unexpected use of his title made Daiki smile for what felt like the first time that day.
“I already moved your jacket back to the costume rack for you, so let’s go work on the script like we were supposed to be doing ten minutes ago,” Daiki said, stepping past Tuti to lead them in the opposite direction down the hallway.
“Ten minutes?” Tuti said faintly.
He didn’t repeat the question when Daiki turned to look back at him inquisitively, just smiled faintly, and Daiki gave a mental shrug. Tuti was Tuti, even if he was suddenly being more cooperative about learning responsibility and not running away in the other direction. Unexpected outbursts were nothing new, though Tuti did remain unusually quiet as they retraced their steps and found the room Daiki had left Wasshi alone in a few minutes earlier.
Wasshi looked up with a relieved smile as they stepped through the open door. “Ah, you found him!”
“Caught, shackled, and returned to my cell,” Tuti said with a good-humored laugh.
“Not without a few bumps along the way,” Daiki grumbled, rubbing the top of his arm.
“You hurt yourself?” Wasshi asked, shuffling the papers in front of him into a neater pile.
Daiki shook his head dismissively and took his seat next to the other man while Tuti pulled out the chair across from them with a scrape of plastic feet across the smooth floor. Their scripts were already on the table where they’d been left from that morning, and Daiki could easily make out Tuti’s pen scratched cover page in front of the chair opposite his own. Not that they didn’t all have their fair share of doodles and notes along the margins of the script packets, but Tuti by far won out for giving the impression of being the most bored while he’d had the pages open. Daiki was amazed the guy could read any of his lines by that point since little of what resembled the original text actually remained.
Daiki picked up his clipped stack of pages and flipped through to about the middle. “Second act,” he announced, and more paper shuffling began as the other two men followed suit. “The three of us have a scene together and there’s stuff we’ve been having trouble on over and over again, which tells me that something here isn’t working. I want to go over a few lines, try out a few new things, see if we need to cut out whole parts or if we can work with what we’ve got with a few minor alterations. This scene isn’t cutting into our time but every little bit helps, so if you spot something you think can go, just speak up. Ready?”
Daiki made eye contact with the other two members at the table and was relieved to see the unconditional looks of trust and obedience staring back at him. Granted, Tuti’s mouth was cocked in a half-smirk, and Wasshi looked a little intimidated by the work ahead, but Daiki could see the compliance in their eyes and their belief in him that he would know what to do and what to fix as they moved along. It was like having one weight lifted off his shoulders to be replaced by another, one that didn’t feel quite so cumbersome and depressing, but rather like the mantle of responsibility that Daiki enjoyed feeling there. Here Daiki could do his job right and in turn earn appreciation for his efforts, and for now that was enough.
* * *
“Tsuchiya, you’re not paying attention!” Daiki snapped for what felt like at least the fifth time since they’d begun reading through the scene.
He had no idea what was wrong with the man today. He seemed to be all over the place, intensely concentrated one moment and then gazing off into nowhere with the weirdest smile on his face the next. To top it off, Tuti also seemed to have completely forgotten whole segments of his part, which in the past was the sort of pit-trap that Daiki alone had only ever repeatedly fallen into. He knew Tuti was amazing at memorizing his lines and usually had whole pages committed to memory before anyone else, so what was going on?
“I am, I am,” Tuti lied quickly, his hands diving for his scattered pages of script, which only managed to further disorganize them.
“You’re getting them on my side,” Daiki said irritably as he pushed back some of the papers encroaching upon his corner of the table.
Wasshi shifted beside him while Tuti rearranged up his pages and Daiki turned to see his friend’s head bent over his own booklet, one hand scratching absently at a spot behind his ear. Wasshi had probably noticed Tuti’s weird behavior too but was opting not to say anything that would bring it to light. Either he didn’t think it was a big deal, or he felt it’d be better off for Daiki to deal with it and leave him out of whatever lecture was forthcoming. Sometimes Wasshi could be extraordinarily perceptive, but it was only on the rare occasion that he followed through on it or allowed himself to interfere personally in their lives. They all had their own ways of reading and understanding each other and their various moods, and their own ways of dealing with it. Wasshi, despite his powers of intuition, also happened to be the least confrontational of the bunch, which was both good and bad, Daiki supposed.
At the moment Daiki wasn’t in the mood to argue with Tuti, so he simply glared at the other actor until the paper shuffling stopped and Tuti grinned apologetically. “Right, let’s take it from your line, again. Wasshi, this time just leave out the first sentence when you respond to Tsuchiya and see how that feels.”
“How about I make a sound instead?” Wasshi suggested, making a few pencil marks in the margin of his script.
“That could work, try that. It does feel pointless for the character to actually voice his affirmative when he’s more the type to do a head nod or a grunt. Okay, Tsuchiya it’s your cue.”
The reading went fine for all of the first minute until Tuti suddenly came to a stop, his extended pause drawing the attention of Wasshi and Daiki as they looked up from their pages to find Tuti staring down at his sheet, brows furrowed and lips drawn into a frown.
Daiki sighed. “What’s wrong? Why’d you stop?”
Tuti laughed a little and scratched his jaw in embarrassment. “I just… I guess I forgot what came next for a second there. Sorry.”
“You forgot?” Daiki echoed, blinking at the man across from him. “It’s right in front of you and you read it perfectly fine this morning!”
“I know, it just feels like it’s been awhile since I last looked at the page,” Tuti explained awkwardly.
Daiki was tempted to snap back a reminder about the promise of trying to be more responsible that Tuti had made earlier, but had a feeling that being yelled at would be the least helpful thing to Tuti right now. “Do you need to take a break?” Daiki asked instead.
“Sure!” Tuti agreed immediately, sweeping his messy pile of pages away with one hand. He pulled out his cigarettes and lighter with more haste than Daiki would have thought necessary and lit up with a deep drag on his first cigarette. “Ah, god, I’ve needed one of these for awhile.”
“I thought you went on a smoke break after lunch?” Wasshi asked while Daiki dug around inside his own bag for a cigarette.
“I did?” There was a pause and when Daiki looked up Tuti had another funny look on his face. It cleared in the next moment when he laughed. “Oh right. Yeah, no, I just walked around for a bit.”
Daiki finally managed to produce a cigarette and lighter, both of which had seen more use over the past month than he cared to admit, especially when he was trying to kick the habit under his own conviction and Eiji’s guidance, both which had become things of the past as of late. He winced from the lingering pain in his arm as he brought the stick and lighter up to his mouth, and used his good hand to return the lighter to his bag on the floor once finished with it. He was surprised by how much his arm still ached even now, but only certain movements seemed to exacerbate the discomfort and overall it didn’t seem like anything a few painkillers overnight wouldn’t take care of. The last thing he needed to do was see a doctor and show up at rehearsals tomorrow with his arm in a sling. Eiji would never let him hear the end of it then.
“Hey, you guys,” Tuti said suddenly, drawing Daiki and Wasshi’s attention across the table to their friend. Tuti’s enthusiasm for his cigarette seemed to have waned slightly, as the item was dangling between his fingers and his attention seemed focused somewhere above the table and their heads. “Do you ever wonder about… I dunno, weird things?”
“Like…?” Daiki prompted, wondering where this turn in conversation was headed. With Tuti, you never knew.
“Like the kind of stuff you hear a lot as a kid, fairytales and ghost stories and urban legends and stuff. Where do you think they come from? Like, who decided that there could be monsters under your bed? Or that if you didn’t hold your breath going past a graveyard a ghost will come after you?”
“I think they’re probably really old stories,” Wasshi offered thoughtfully. “People always have a legend about a river being inhabited by a god, or about a certain forest that’s haunted, and even if no one’s seen anything for years the stories still get passed down and get changed and exaggerated along the way.”
“Yes yes,” Tuti agreed eagerly. “But where do they come from? Say the guy who told the story in the first place, was there any reason for it? Did he see something he couldn’t explain and was just trying to make sense of it, or did something actually happen and he wanted to tell other people about it because it was too amazing to keep bottled up inside?”
“It sounds like they’d just want to get attention,” Daiki remarked, taking a short drag on his cigarette. “Back then people believed anything they couldn’t explain, and they didn’t have science so a lot of things didn’t make sense. Whether or not the story was true, people would believe it and spread it around.”
“What about these days? If someone had a story that couldn’t be explained by science, wouldn’t that be worth looking into?”
“Without evidence?” Daiki replied skeptically, tapping a pile of ash into the small dish at the end of the table.
“People would probably be more scared than open-minded,” Wasshi said with consideration. “If science can’t explain it, they usually think you’re crazy.”
Tuti sighed and slouched back in his chair. “That’s true, huh.”
Daiki finished off his cigarette and squashed the butt into the nearby ashtray. He noticed that Tuti still hadn’t touched his beyond the first few puffs and now the thing was smoking and in danger of dripping ash on the floor, which was further piquing his curiosity about the odd behavior of the other man. “So what’s with this all of a sudden?”
Tuti ran a hand over his face and shrugged, but wouldn’t look at Daiki or Wasshi. “Nothing, just got a lot on my mind I guess.”
“You’ve been acting kind of weird since yesterday,” Wasshi said, his tone concerned, which was probably the reason why Tuti only sighed and didn’t snap back a biting retort.
That sigh told Daiki plenty anyway. Tuti really did have something on his mind, something big enough to make him forget his lines and make a cigarette burn away worthlessly in his hand and make him act as if he’d completely forgotten that Daiki had been hell bent on obtaining his blood only a half hour earlier. He’d even been hiding in the prop room, which had started Tuti’s weird mood the other day too, and now that Daiki thought about it the room had been empty when he’d stuck his head in there the first time, which meant that…
“You were in the wardrobe again,” Daiki said with a glare of accusation. By the sudden jerk of Tuti’s entire body and the wild, guilty flash in his eyes, there was no mistaking this to be the source, or at least part of the problem going on lately with Tuti.
“You were?” Wasshi asked in surprise.
“Why are you so obsessed with that thing?” Daiki demanded when Tuti began fiddling with his fingers restlessly.
“Ha, you wouldn’t believe me,” Tuti retorted. He attempted a jeering chuckle that came out sounding rather strained instead, and Daiki didn’t miss that one of his hands had fallen to rub against his knee in agitation.
“Why don't you try us and then maybe we can get back to actually doing the work we’re supposed to be doing?”
Tuti was quiet for a moment and then shook his head with another laugh. “Tempting, but… you guys wouldn't believe me.”
“You know we’ll listen to anything,” Wasshi encouraged when Tuti ignored them by mashing his cigarette in the ashtray next to Daiki’s.
Daiki wanted to snort. Tuti was probably blowing up something into a bigger deal than it really was, though he had to admit that at this point it simply couldn’t be laughed off when it was affecting the other man’s work performance. “We’ll listen, I promise,” Daiki agreed. “And if you want we won’t say anything until you’re done and then we’ll talk about it, okay?”
Tuti looked encouraged by this show of willingness to hear him out. “Yeah? Well… you guys have to really promise not to say anything, or laugh, or tell me I’m lying, because I’m not. I wouldn’t-- I couldn’t make up something like this, no matter how hard I tried. And you have to listen until the end. Deal?”
“Sure,” Daiki replied immediately. At this point he’d grown pretty curious to hear what had worked Tuti up into such a state. He hadn’t sworn them to secrecy, so it wasn’t a personal matter, and Tuti’s talk earlier of ghost stories was starting to shape a vague idea in Daiki’s mind about what this might entail. Did Tuti think he was being haunted by a ghost?
Wasshi offered his agreement as well and Tuti straightened up in his chair, putting his elbows on the table and leaning forward with a conspirator’s air as he drew their attention toward him. “Well… I know this going to sound crazy… but that wardrobe isn’t really a wardrobe. It’s like a door, or a portal, and it can take you to another world…”
* * *
Daiki ran through the halls and knew he was in danger of being caught and reprimanded by Eiji, but right now he couldn’t care because Eiji was exactly the person he needed to talk to. They had a huge crisis on their hands and frankly Daiki wasn’t sure if *pnish* was going to be able to survive if things didn’t get fixed, and soon.
Tsuchiya Yuuichi was insane.
Daiki didn’t need a doctor to diagnose his friend. He was pretty sure that after hearing the story he and Wasshi had just listened to any professional would be of the same opinion, and that was that Tuti had clearly suffered a mental breakdown somewhere over the last few days and now they needed to find a replacement for his part in the play, or at least get their fourth member cured before the curtain came up.
After Tuti had told his story to them, at length, with more conviction and description than Daiki might have ever given the guy credit for being to come up with in the twisted corridors of his mind, Daiki had been unable to do anything but mutter out an excuse and bolt from the room. No doubt Wasshi was in there right now trying to act like the voice of reason and calmly get Tuti to deny the elaborate story he’d just told. Daiki might have been doing the same if he’d been thinking clearly, but the look in Tuti’s eyes… the passionate surety he’d gained as he’d spun out his story, the utter sincerity in his tone… those couldn’t be faked. Daiki had known Tuti for enough time to tell fact from fiction, to read where there was a joke lurking under the surface. This time there had been none.
Tuti was completely and totally obsessed with his fabrication.
And when he’d been talking about that… that faun? Whatever that was, by the name of Nagayama Takashi, if Daiki didn’t know better he’d say his friend was smitten. The little smiles, the way his voice had softened, the far away look in his eyes, the way he’d actually blushed! But worse than becoming infatuated with person that only existed in his own head he’d also cooked up an elaborate story about that person’s past, stories about magic and giants and winter and hours spent inside of a cave… it was too much for Daiki to take, and Tuti had been adamant about every word. And when had he claimed that all of this had taken place? In the span of a few minutes for the rest of them! Minutes!
Daiki wasn’t sure what had the potential to upset him more at this point. That their last member had become schizophrenic, or that Tuti had developed a vivid imagination when it was too late to put it to use in some way for the benefit of the group.
Daiki’s loud stomping finally took him past the entrance to the staging area for the theater and he came to an abrupt stop when he caught Eiji peering out into the hallway from beside one of the folding tables.
“Eiji!” Daiki exclaimed, darting into the back area.
“Daiki?” Eiji asked, taking in the sight of Daiki looking winded and flushed. “What’s going on?”
“It’s terrible!” Daiki blurted out, fisting his hands at his sides and trying to ignore the way it made the muscles in his arm ache from the motion.
“Did something happen?” Eiji asked, starting to look a little worried.
Daiki took a deep breath. “It’s Tsuchiya. He’s gone insane. I… I don’t know what to do. We’ve got to do something. It’s going to ruin everything!”
Eiji’s expression turned puzzled. “What are you talking about?”
“Tsuchiya, I found him in the prop room again and now he’s making up this whole, crazy story and talking about talking animals and missing time and I really, really think there’s something wrong with him. He’s probably gone insane!”
“Wait, wait. What? Daiki, you’re not making any sense.”
“It’s that wardrobe!” Daiki growled in frustration. “Ever since we got it Tuti’s been acting strange and now he’s making up stories and I just had to sit through an hour of his insane babble. I think he needs to see a doctor, we’ve got to cure him in time for the show, there’s no way we can make changes now and no one else can play his part. Do you think I should call Besshi and have him come in to cover for him? And maybe… maybe we can move things back if it’s really bad… my god I hope they don’t lock him up. Don’t they lock people up when they’re insane? What if-”
“Daiki!” Eiji interrupted curtly. “I don’t get what you’re saying at all. Yuuichi’s telling some story? What’s the big deal about that? He’s probably just joking around. I can’t believe you’re falling for it so easily.”
“It’s not a story! He really believes it, he just told me and Wasshi everything and we promised to believe him at the start but, but there’s no way it could be true! He’s making up this whole imaginary world with imaginary people and places and it’s all in his own head and he really, really believes he’s telling the truth. We’ve got to do something about it, what if he’s not safe anymore? What if he’s really insane?”
Eiji sighed and put a hand to his head. “Daiki. Stop. You’re overreacting. Just tell me what he said.”
Daiki frowned and crossed his arms angrily, feeling the sting this caused at his shoulder but doing his best to ignore the pain. “Fine. I’ll tell you. Tsuchiya thinks there’s another world inside that wardrobe we bought for the set.”
“He what?” Eiji said, blinking.
“He said there’s another world inside the wardrobe he’s been to two times already. Been there for hours, and he says that every time he’s come back only a few minutes or a few seconds have passed for us, but he claims it’s completely true. He says that’s a magical world with snow everywhere and has warlocks and talking trees and weird… goat creatures that can talk, and giants and an entire country that’s been stuck in winter for the last hundred years or something. He thinks he’s been there and talked to this Nagayama guy seen and heard all this stuff about this place, Naria or something.”
“Nagayama?” Eiji repeated thoughtfully. “Don’t we have someone in the staff named that?”
“I don’t know!” Daiki exclaimed, throwing up his hands. “That’s not the point! Tsuchiya’s gone insane and we have to do something about it.”
Eiji suddenly let out a short, loud laugh. “Aw man, he got you good.”
Daiki felt the air catch in his lungs, his whole body going rigid with stunned shock. “W-what?”
“He’s pulling your leg, Daiki. I can’t believe you fell for it.” Eiji laughed again, wrapping an arm around his middle as he chuckled. “You’re so gullible, you should know better than to trust Tsuchiya.”
Daiki took a halting step backward. His heart was hammering at twice the normal speed and it felt like the floor had been pulled out from under him. Eiji had known the whole time? Had they both been playing the joke on him? “You… and… why?” Daiki asked faintly.
“What? He knows you’ll believe anything, Daiki. Really, you give him too much credit. I can’t believe you ran all the way here just to tell me that. He’s probably back there laughing at your expense right now. Seriously, it’s your own fault for being so gullible. I’ve gotta organize the rest of these light gels right now anyway, and stop running through the halls okay? I heard you coming earlier and it’s not safe.”
Eiji returned his attention to the table and Daiki slowly turned and left the room without another word. There was a dark shadow around the edge of his eyesight and his chest hurt like he’d just been hit especially hard with a fist, which metaphorically speaking wasn’t all that far from the truth after what Eiji had just revealed to him. A joke? A joke played on him? How could they? How could Tsuchiya do that? How could Eiji just stand there and laugh at him when he’d known about it all along and let Daiki get that worked up and worried about it?
How could they hurt him this much?
Daiki realized he was on the verge of crying when he felt the familiar pang in his chest, and he drew in a deep breath in an effort to stem the wave of emotion washing over him. He’d never felt this betrayed and humiliated before, not even back when they’d first started out as a group and things had been rocky between them because he was so new at being the Leader and no one had known if they could trust him to do the job well. Even back then no one had treated him like this, with so little respect and amusement at the expense of his emotions. When had things changed so badly? Was it because of this production or had he been losing his hold on the group for a while and simply hadn’t noticed? Was it because of Eiji? Did Eiji not see him fit to be leader anymore? Did everyone feel that way?
As Daiki’s dragging steps took him slowly down the corridor, the last person he expected to see walk ahead of him through an intersecting hallway was Tuti himself, who disappeared to the left just as Daiki looked up and spotted him. Daiki stopped walking for a moment, something cold and hurt and bitter filling up the void in his chest that had been left by Eiji’s dismissive laughter. There was no way he was going to let Tuti get away with this without hearing a few angry words from Daiki first, and maybe in the process they’d finally get to the heart of the problem and find out just what the *pnish* members really thought of their useless leader.
Daiki took off with long strides in the direction Tuti had headed off in but found himself faced with nothing but empty hallways in either direction he looked. However a door slamming shut in one direction caught his ear and he headed towards it, turning down another adjacent hallway and coming upon a familiar section of flooring and closed doors. With narrow, angry eyes, Daiki took in the prop room door and knew with a gut-twisting certainty that Tuti was hiding in there right now, hiding and probably in wait for Daiki to come in there after him so he could laugh at his expense just like Eiji had.
With a frustrated growl Daiki threw the door open, only to find the room empty save for the haphazard piles of boxes stacked against the walls and the solitary wardrobe at the back of the room, which stood with one of the doors open about a finger’s width between it and the other door.
“Tsuchiya!” Daiki bellowed, stepping inside the narrow room. There was no answer, nothing save his own voice reverberating back at him, and Daiki found himself glaring suspiciously at the open wardrobe.
In two steps Daiki reached the wooden doors and pulled both of them open wide, hoping to catch the other actor off guard and expose his hiding place. But a row of dark coats were the only things staring back at him, and they disappeared into the back of the wardrobe and a well of darkness that even the light inside the small room had a problem penetrating behind. It went against Daiki’s better judgment, but if Tuti was going to play stupid games then he was going to march in there and drag the man out by his ear if he needed to.
Daiki stepped boldly into the wardrobe, shoving his way through the wall of coats and reaching blindly for the body of the other actor. His hands kept encountering empty space so he stepped in deeper, pushing his shoulders through the second row of coats and feeling the soft fur of the first row brush against his back. It was incredibly dark in the wardrobe so he let his hands continue waving around as he shuffled forward step by step.
“Tsuchiya, stop hiding and get out here right now,” Daiki commanded with a low growl.
A light shape moved in front of his eyes and he lunged forward, hoping to land a lucky blow or grab a fistful of Tuti’s clothing. But instead his hand plunged into something incredibly cold and bristly, and he stumbled forward from the surprise, feeling shapes catch on his clothing as he felt his shoulders and torso smacked by whatever it has he’d run into. A few more steps forward suddenly found him blinking and shivering from the intense cold all around him, and his eyes watered from the shock of going from total darkness to the light that blazed down from a mid-winter sky.
Daiki could only stand rigid and still with shock, his arms wrapped around his middle as white ghosts of breath escaped past his rapidly chilling lips. Tsuchiya had been telling the truth all along.