[JE] Fast Train to Chinatown 1/2
Title: Fast Train to Chinatown (1/2)
Fandom: KAT-TUN
Pairing: Kame/Jin
Rating: R, just to be safe
Genre: Kind of AU
Word count: 14,410
Disclaimer: Not mine, damnit
Summary: Kame gets carried away with his new drama role, so Jin carries him off to Kobe for the weekend.
A/N: Will make no sense whatsoever if you haven't read the first five in the series, which starts with Be Your Own Secret Girlfriend. Click on the series: transjinder tag for all the fics in this 'verse.
Fast Train to Chinatown (1/2)
One of Kame's biggest concerns before filming a drama is what to do with his hair. He's dyed it red, he's dyed it black, he's chopped it all off, he's grown it long enough to hang between his shoulder blades. The director of Split says it's up to him, but tells him to make up his mind quickly. It's not long now before they start shooting and there are promotional pictures to be taken.
Kame normally thinks about his character. What kind of person is he? A teenage rebel? A conservative salaryman? A surf-loving freeter? This time he's got two characters to think about: Nishikawa Hikaru, the young, earnest police detective; and Kage, his shadow self, a thief who lives in a much darker world.
Nishikawa's starting off by-the-book, the straightest of the straight, so Kame thinks he probably doesn't dye his hair or do anything fancy with it. Kage has no superiors to impress, no one to answer to but himself, so he can do whatever he wants. Both men are disciplined and organised, each in their own way, and Kage can't afford to be sloppy. He wears a knitted hat when he works to keep his hair out of sight, but Kame thinks he probably wouldn't do much with it anyway. Being memorable wouldn't help his career.
In the end, Kame opts to dye it black again and lets it grow a little more. Nishikawa will wear a short ponytail at work (because he's such a nice, polite, hardworking young man nobody minds) and Kage, when not wearing a hat, will leave his loose. The director likes this idea. Meisa likes it too, because it means her character, Tamai Sachiko, can get Nishikawa's attention by tugging on his ponytail. Kame gets the feeling he's going to end the series with no hair at all, because Tamai's going to be permanently on his case.
According to the script they're supposed to be developing a love triangle between Nishikawa, Tamai and Kage, only it's not a real triangle and it makes Kame's head spin. Tamai's a good detective but a bad girl, always skirting the edges of insubordination as she stalks through the series in her long leather coat, dark eyes flashing and hair whipping in the wind. A rule-breaker like Kage is much more to her taste than teacher's pet Nishikawa, but as Nishikawa gradually changes, he becomes more to his partner's liking.
"Chemistry," the director says. "If you can't manage to make it look like you're dying to get in Kuroki-san's pants, there's just no hope for you."
"Which one of me?" Kame asks.
"Both of you!"
Kame sighs and promises to do his best. He can play Nishikawa as a lovelorn pup, that can't be too hard. Jin managed it in Anego, after all. Kage, well...
"Wouldn't it be better if Kage had no interest in Tamai?" he says. "He's needling Nishikawa, not her. She's the one with the crush. Doesn't it make it more interesting if both sides of Nishikawa have different feelings about her?"
The director pats him on the head, tells him he's brilliant and runs off to spread the word. Kame breathes a sigh of relief that he's managed to avoid playing a dual romantic lead. It never seems to work out for him. He only survived it in Tatta Hitotsu no Koi because Ayase Haruka bore a remarkable resemblance to Jin, and that made it easier to pretend he was in love.
That's not something he can do with Meisa, but he figures if she complains he's not being passionate enough, he can just say he's too used to thinking of her as a nun and couldn't possibly defile her purity. Besides, he's not in this for the romance. He's in this for the villainy.
Even if he was in it for the romance, his mind would be elsewhere. He hasn't seen Jin since his Twitter tutorial - both of them have been busy - and neither of them have elaborated on their T-shirt choices. Kame knows why he's confused, because this situation with Jin is doing his head in, but he's uncertain about Jin's reasons. They'd shared a sheepish smile after Kame had said his shirt would read the same as Jin's, and the evening had fizzled out from there.
Fortunately work has always provided an excellent distraction, and Kame's first day on the set relegates all thoughts of Jin to the very back of his mind. The extra-long pilot episode revolves around the theft of a series of Hokusai prints on display in an Omotesando gallery and the special team created to catch the perpetrator: the Shadow Unit. Kame's only playing Nishikawa today and he finds it easy to lose himself in the role. It's the one he's been playing all his life, after all.
"We're honoured to be selected for this unit," Nishikawa says to Chief Nakata, discreetly elbowing his partner to make her join him in bowing politely. Tamai morphs her scowl into a semi-civil smile and nods her head a fraction of an inch. "I'm sure we'll have this thief behind bars soon."
"I'm counting on you, Nishikawa-kun, Tamai-kun." The chief gives them a fond smile. "The pair of you have an excellent track record; I'm sure you'll be an asset to the Shadows."
Tamai waits for Chief Nakata to walk out of earshot before she snorts. "An asset to the Shadows? The entire unit's just you, me, and a pair of old men. We'll be the stars of the show."
Nishikawa laughs nervously. Tamai doesn't have a great deal of respect for any man who hasn't proven his worth in front of her and she's not always tactful about concealing it. "I think they prefer to be thought of as 'veterans'. Satou-san and Takahashi-san are experienced detectives and they've been hunting this thief for months. I'm sure they'll have a great deal to teach us."
Tamai raises an unimpressed eyebrow. "If they were that good, they'd already have caught him."
They film a couple of scenes in the police station, where the Shadows meet for the first time and Kame and Meisa's characters are briefed on Kage. There's a scene they won't shoot until tomorrow which will be used in the briefing, the opening sequence and the CMs and shows Kage (in shadow, of course) creeping through a museum at night. The clip will end with a close-up of his signature, a black cloth with 'KAGE' hand-stitched in the corner in white. From reading ahead Kame knows it's a blindfold, but it'll be some time before Nishikawa figures it out. The young detective is smart but not good at thinking outside the box - not yet. He will be by the end of the series, though, and Kame can't wait to start transitioning.
In the afternoon they shoot more scenes using the police station set. Kame finds it a little weird to be working on solving a crime that hasn't even happened yet but he does his best to convey Nishikawa's determination, a drive fuelled by Kage's blatant disregard for both the law and human life. There's a scene in the morgue, too, where a security guard lies on the table, throat slit for doing his duty, and it's the sight of that corpse that makes Nishikawa step up his game.
"He was just doing his job!"
"Easy, son," soothes the medical examiner. "The best thing you can do for him now is catch the swine who did this to him."
Nishikawa looks down at the body on the table - pale, lifeless, a family man taken before his time - and feels something curdle inside him. He's always possessed an inner core of optimism, a belief that no matter what, he can make things right. But nothing anyone can do can make this right. There's a dead man in the room and there's no way he can get up and go home to his wife and three kids.
A little of the optimism burns itself out, transforms into steel, and when Nishikawa turns away from the table and meets his partner's eyes, she looks startled.
"I want this guy too," Tamai says. "He's crossed the line - so let's follow him over it."
Nishikawa gives himself a mental shake. It's no good to start thinking like a vigilante. "We're supposed to arrest him, not slit his throat. Let's try not to land ourselves in too much trouble, huh?"
Tamai tugs on his ponytail. "Wimp."
They film the resolution too, except it's not much of one because Kage remains uncaught, even though they managed to retrieve the Hokusai prints in the end. Nishikawa and Tamai are totally committed to the Shadows now...and Nishikawa finds a cut on his finger that he doesn't remember getting. Cut to KAT-TUN's dramatic end theme, 'Behind the Light'.
The next day they film on location in a gallery in Omotesando. Kame's there first because they need him for the stock "sneaking around in the dark" footage. It's early on a freezing December morning and he's glad to be able to pull the black woolly hat over his ears. He's wearing solid black from head to foot and looks like he's blatantly up to no good, but that's the point. Subtlety will come later. The black leather gloves don't do much to keep him warm but they look good, and Kage, so Kame's read, is a fan of anything that will boost his ego.
The security here is barely worthy of the name. A building is only as secure as the people who guard it, and of the two guards, one - the most senior - reserves the right to stay indoors the whole night. He suffers badly in the cold but he likes the second floor, where it's always warmer. He won't be coming down the stairs tonight.
The other guard is young. At closing time, he checked every room personally to ensure no visitors remained. He'd said goodnight to the plump young lady he'd routed from the women's toilets, the last person in the building, and she'd smiled and walked past him on her way out. A simple distraction. The guard never even thought to look at the window, still slightly ajar.
That young lady's back now, a lady no more and slender enough to crawl through the window. Kage drops noiselessly to the ground and checks his watch. The younger guard is about to patrol the grounds, which means he's got less than ten minutes to get upstairs. There won't be any cat-and-mouse with the elder guard, though - he only stirs himself once or twice an hour, usually giving the floor a cursory once-over on his way to the vending machines. By the time he notices the prints are missing, Kage plans to be long gone.
He doesn't bank on the guard having a fever and drinking more than usual.
Kame finds it somewhat ironic that after all he's said to Jin, he still ends up dressing like a woman for a drama role. At least it's only for a minute and doesn't require him to shave his legs. He doesn't have to look pretty, only unlike himself, so he wears a long dark wig and a permanent smile so his cheeks puff out.
When they take a break he pulls out his phone and tweets that the female of the species is deadlier than the male, figuring that constitutes a hint. He's only tweeted four times so far; even so, his follower numbers are increasing since the news about the drama account went out to fans. He's having trouble deciding what to write, though. He couldn't do this sort of thing for himself - has no idea how Jin can bring himself to update the world at large on his private life - but it should be easier for a fictional character.
They don't actually show the guard's throat being slit - this is NTV, after all. But they do film Kage being caught by surprise and being forced to improvise when the guard sees his face. Kage's eyes appear over the guard's shoulder, Kage's blade settles against the guard's throat, and everything goes black.
Kame likes the final scene they shoot for the day. It doesn't matter that he looks exhausted because the camera's not on his face at all. It films Kage cleaning the blood from his knife, slowly and methodically...until the blade slips. Blood wells up on Kame's left ring finger; the director says he doesn't have to show the skin being sliced, that they can angle it to keep the actual wound hidden, but Kame doesn't want there to be any doubt how far he's willing to go for this role. He's done worse for work than shed a few drops of blood.
-----
When the cast are finally allowed to see the finished first episode, Kame and Meisa clink beer bottles and celebrate. Nishikawa has acquired just enough of an edge to promise interesting developments in the future; Tamai is guaranteed to be a hit with both guys and girls, and they've got sufficient older talent to draw in the rest of the family too. Kame hopes it will be enough. By the time Kami no Shizuku flopped he'd managed to distance himself, take it less personally, but he's been hit hard by ratings failures before and sometimes it's difficult to keep it all in perspective.
He's not sure whether or not the Japanese public is ready to see him as a villain, which is the only reason why the stolen prints are recovered by the end of the first episode. It's not because Kage is sloppy, which Kame feels he'd have to object to, but because he deliberately leaves them as a tease for Nishikawa. Mindgames, he can get behind.
Filming for the second episode takes them up inside the Sunshine 60 building, where Kage steals paintings adorning the offices of wealthy businessmen. On his breaks, Kame takes the lift thirty floors down and hangs out at the Seattle's Best Coffee, listening to jazz as he reclines on the comfy brown chairs. Foreign shoppers come in to leech the free wi-fi and eat overpriced cake, and one of them takes a picture of her cookie. That gives Kame an idea. He pulls out his phone and surreptitiously takes a picture of the sign, to be sent to Twitter later. He's leaving a trail for his followers - but also for himself, in a way.
Kage doesn't kill anyone this time but the paintings he steals all belong to men who obtained them illegally in the first place, as Nishikawa and Tamai discover during the course of their investigation. Kame finds it interesting, Kage's variety of motives. Perhaps Nishikawa influences his shadow self too - it need not all be one way, and it's going to challenge him, figuring out how to play them both in the future.
"You obviously sleep like the dead," Tamai says. "I must've tried calling you ten times last night."
Nishikawa shrugs. For someone who slept that well, he sure feels tired. His left knee's sore, too; he probably knocked it on the wall, flailing around in bed. He hopes it doesn't stiffen up. "I didn't hear a thing." He found all the missed calls in the morning. "Was it important?"
"If it's from me, it's always important," Tamai scolds him. "Never ignore your partner - it could mean life or death."
"We're both still alive, so I guess it wasn't." Nishikawa winces when Tamai tugs his ponytail. "So what was so critical you had to call me at three in the morning?"
Tamai tosses her hair back over her shoulder. "I had an idea about Kage. Last night it hit me that all the paintings he's taken from the offices are by French artists, right? I checked the list we got yesterday and there are only two left in the building. Yamaguchi has a Manet and Shirafumi has a Renoir. We cover those two offices and we'll get him."
"I don't think the nationality of the artist has anything to do with it," Nishikawa says, though he's not sure why. His partner's idea is sound, perfectly logical, yet his gut instinct is to reject it. "There's something we're missing."
"We're running out of chances," Tamai sneers. "You can check the connections over and over again, or you can man up and do something about it."
Nishikawa agrees to run surveillance on the two possibilities Tamai's identified. They take Yamaguchi; Satou and Takahashi take Shirafumi. They watch for three nights and nothing happens.
On the fourth night, they hand over to a couple of uniforms and another office, one belonging to Hisao, gets robbed. He's got a Caravaggio.
Kame finds himself filming at strange hours. It's not just the drama - there's the PV for 'Behind the Light' and the usual round of performances too. He goes straight from Hey Hey Hey to the set, because there's been a last minute script change and they need to reshoot a couple of scenes. By the time he gets home he has barely enough time to grab a bite to eat and snatch a few hours of sleep before it's back to work, this time for a TV Pia shoot.
Koki keeps sending him reminders to eat and sleep. Kame has to switch his phone off so the mails don't wake him up. It's a hectic time and he finds himself blocking out everything else as much as he can, not wanting anything to distract him from the delicate balancing act he's got going at the moment. This isn't just time management - it's juggling personalities.
The first episode airs the Monday before Christmas, a few weeks earlier than normal because the previous drama in their timeslot was cut down to eight episodes from the original eleven. The ratings work out at just over an amazing twenty-one per cent. Everyone else is happy. Kame's completely ecstatic. It means a lot of pressure, of course. The ratings always fall with the second episode, but if they're lucky the damage won't be too bad.
If they keep the viewers hooked. If he's done his job.
On the set, there's a real sense of accomplishment now. Kame feels like he's not just playing a guy on a team but that he's on the team, that they're all one unit working together to achieve the same goal. He takes a box of miniature Christmas cakes to the set and hands them out to everyone he sees. There's a new episode to film and they're all hyped, some of them from too much coffee and too little sleep.
Kame's one of those people. On the Wednesday night he gets a phone call from Jin, which wouldn't ordinarily be a problem except that he's still at work with another scene to shoot before he can leave, because the director wants them all to take the weekend off so he can spend Christmas with his American wife and young daughters and therefore has ramped up the schedule. He's hot, he's exhausted, and he's having trouble keeping it professional because every little thing is starting to annoy him.
When he's on a fast cigarette break and his phone rings, the first thing he does is snap that he's still at work and doesn't have time to talk right now.
"Oh." Jin hesitates for a second. "I just...I had something to tell you, but I guess I can send a mail."
Kame takes another drag of his cigarette and wills himself to calm down, because Jin hasn't done anything to deserve being snapped at and there's no reason to be rude to him. "Sorry. You just caught me at a bad moment." There, he sounds almost civil. That will have to do.
"No kidding. There's such a thing as getting too far into character; try not to slit anyone's throat while you're there."
There's no time for this. "I'll do my best. What did you want to tell me?"
"Um...I told my dad and brother today. About me. We were having a family dinner, and-"
"That's great, Jin." Meisa's waving at him; they're due back on. "I'm happy for you. Got to go, sorry."
"Sure." Jin sounds as weary as Kame feels. "Talk to you later."
He hangs up and Kame realises he doesn't know the outcome - Jin might've been calling to say his dad had disowned him, as unlikely as that would be. He doesn't have time to pay attention to the twinge of guilt, not tonight. He can find out tomorrow.
When he finally gets home and plugs his phone in to charge, he finds a mail from Jin.
Reio's never going to let me live it down, but I don't think he was surprised. Dad said he was expecting to hear something else. Mum helped a lot.
That still doesn't tell Kame anything, but it doesn't seem bad. Surely if things had gone terribly, Jin would've said. The message is a couple of hours old and there's no point replying right now. It can wait until morning.
Morning's a rush. Kame types his reply while brushing his teeth, which is why he uses no emoji whatsoever.
I'm glad it went okay. Sorry about last night; my schedule's insane.
Your schedule's always insane, Jin replies. You need a break.
Kame responds with, Even though Friday's a holiday the director's pushing for us to film then, but after that I've got the entire weekend off. You can give me all the details then, unless you've got Christmas plans.
Do you have plans? Jin asks.
Eating and sleeping. Then some more sleeping.
Jin doesn't respond to that, which is just as well because Kame needs to dress and get to work. The response, when it arrives, comes on Friday night, straight to Kame's doorstep, and it comes in person.
"Please tell me there's a good reason you're sitting in front of my door with a bag," Kame says when he finds Jin on the floor. "You're not playing Santa, are you?"
"Not exactly." Jin leans on the door, pushing himself to his feet. He's all wrapped up, ridiculously oversized bobble hat pulled down almost to his eyes and coat collar hiding his chin. "You're finished until Monday now, right?"
They'd wrapped up early so the director could take his family out for a meal, and Kame had come straight home, so it's barely six o'clock now. He just wants to take a bubble bath, eat something at a normal pace, and catch up on his missing thirty or so hours of sleep. He has a horrible feeling Jin has other ideas.
"Yeah, we don't start again until Monday morning." He nudges Jin aside so he can unlock the door. "I'm going to sleep."
"You can sleep on the train."
"What train!"
"You need a break," Jin says, pushing Kame gently through the open door. "Somewhere quiet, where nobody's making demands on your time and you stand a chance of being able to go out without all hell breaking loose. Just trust me and go pack a bag. I promise to get you home in time for work."
The overworked and underappreciated part of Kame wants to turn around and growl at Jin to get out and leave him alone to rest, to stop babbling nonsense like this. The other part, the part that likes to grab his passport and take the first plane to anywhere, thinks this sounds like fun.
The latter wins. "How long have I got?"
"Not that long."
Kame stuffs a couple of changes of clothing and some toiletries into a bag, throws in his phone charger, mp3 player and headphones, and believes Jin when he says no hairdryer is required. Jin gives him just enough time to go the bathroom before dragging him off to the station.
There's a Nozomi shinkansen leaving Tokyo at 19:10. They spring for reserved seats, managing to get two together, and Kame takes the window. He hangs their jackets on the little hook while Jin starts unpacking some of the goodies they picked up at the station. Kame's been eating at weird hours all week, always in a rush, and it feels good to know he doesn't have to move for a while. If he wants to take nearly three hours over his meal, he can do it. The train's not due in to Shin-Kobe until just before 22:00.
At least now Kame knows where they're going. As the train starts moving he removes the lid of his boxed meal, preparing to tuck in. Food has never looked so good.
"I'm glad to see you can still smile," Jin says. "I thought you'd forgotten how."
"Sometimes I need a reminder." Kame takes a bite of tamagoyaki and melts into bliss.
"I'm just returning the favour."
Kame grins. Jin's lost his smile many times in the past, but it always comes back brighter than before. "So why Kobe?"
"Quietest place I could think of that didn't involve us going out to the middle of nowhere. Do you mind?"
"Ask me when we're on our way home again."
Whatever Jin has planned, Kame doesn't think he'll mind, though. He thinks back to last year, when he'd gone to Kyocera Dome to throw out the first pitch and ended up in a club in Kobe. He wonders if that girl still works there. She'd asked about his relationship with Jin and, being ever-so-slightly tipsy, he'd smiled and compared them to twins. It's true that they're alike in a lot of ways but he'd been thinking of the closeness of twins rather than any form of resemblance.
They talk while they eat, with Jin refusing to let Kame say a single word about work. The train's empty enough for them to talk freely and not have to worry about their conversation being reported in gossip columns, which is why Kame eventually brings them around to the subject of Jin's family.
"What made you change your mind? I thought you'd decided not to say anything."
"Don't laugh, but...it was that stupid Glee episode, okay?"
Not laughing proves to be impossible for Kame, because Jin looks absolutely mortified by his admission.
"I told you not to laugh! It just got me thinking, you know? That this isn't something I can change - I mean, I probably could if I let myself be brainwashed or something - and I need to be able to accept that, no matter how I feel about it."
Hugging Jin would be a bad move right now, even if they weren't on a train, so Kame settles for a friendly elbow in the ribs. "I've been working on you for almost eight months and all I had to do was make you watch a TV show? I think I've missed my calling in life."
"Kamenselor Kazuya strikes again," Jin says, rubbing his side and pretending to be mortally wounded. "Somehow you always manage to make me do difficult things."
"It worked out though, didn't it? With your family."
"Pretty much. I told Mum what I was going to say, so she cooked for all of us, and put herself between me and Dad so she could kick me under the table, and..." Jin trails off.
"Your mum's amazing."
"Yeah. I'm really grateful to her for everything, even if I have bruised ankles now. She told Reio it wasn't hereditary and that helped too."
"Is he worried he'll end up in dresses?"
Jin shakes his head. "No, but he's very glad he's not in Johnny's. I think he thinks that's what the problem is."
"How about your dad?"
"Dad...uh..." Jin looks down, chews his lower lip for a second. "He thought I was going to say I was moving to America for good."
It's a worry Kame's had too, that Jin will leave Japan permanently and make his home wherever his heart takes him - Los Angeles, probably. It's not impossible. But there are people and places Jin loves all over the world, and Kame's not sure it's possible for him to settle in one city for good.
"Was he relieved?"
"Actually, yeah. I'm not sure how much of it he got, or if he even took me seriously - I started off with the clothing and worked my way up - but it's not like he said anything bad. I don't know, maybe he thinks I'm playing around."
"Or maybe it's just because your family is so naturally weird that nothing seems strange to them?"
"Maybe." Jin sinks back into his seat with a contented sigh. "They're wonderful."
You're wonderful too, Kame wants to say, but doesn't. They've still got a couple of hours before they get to Shin-Kobe and he has no idea what the plan is from there. He hopes Jin's got one, because he really doesn't want to be wandering around on a cold, dark winter's night with nowhere to go.
He drifts off in a light doze against Jin's shoulder, not so deep he's unaware of the stops but too far gone for conversation. Jin wakes him when they pull into Shin-Kobe; they gather up their things and dispose of the rubbish on the way out.
"Now what?"
"Now we board another train," Jin says.
They take the Seishin Yamate Line to Sannomiya, Kame mostly walking on auto-pilot. Jin stops him just in time from inserting a ten thousand yen bill in the ticket machine.
"You're asleep already, aren't you?"
Kame makes a valiant effort to open his eyes fully. "I'm awake!"
"Sure you are." Jin pulls out a few hundred yen in coins for the subway ticket. "I think it's about time you went to bed."
"That's what I was planning to do before you showed up..."
When they reach Sannomiya, Jin says he knows a hotel right by the next station, near Chinatown, and they switch to the JR Kobe Line to travel the one stop to Motomachi. That's about as far as Kame can go. The Kobe Plaza Hotel is right in front of the station and Jin marches them inside.
Kame waits in a daze at the desk, looking longingly at the wheelchairs, and it's only when Jin shakes him that he realises his input is needed.
"They've only got double rooms left," Jin says. "Is that okay? We could go somewhere else, but it's getting late and-"
"It's fine." Kame waves a weary hand. "I'll be asleep in seconds anyway."
Jin gets them checked in and sees them safely up to the fifth floor, where their room turns out to be close to the lifts. Kame barely notices, can only spare concentration for not tripping over his own feet as he gets ready for bed. He can deal with it all in the morning. The bed's narrower than he'd be comfortable with, in other circumstances, but at least he's exhausted enough that he's unlikely to be lying awake all night, trying not to close the gap between himself and Jin.
Part 2
Fandom: KAT-TUN
Pairing: Kame/Jin
Rating: R, just to be safe
Genre: Kind of AU
Word count: 14,410
Disclaimer: Not mine, damnit
Summary: Kame gets carried away with his new drama role, so Jin carries him off to Kobe for the weekend.
A/N: Will make no sense whatsoever if you haven't read the first five in the series, which starts with Be Your Own Secret Girlfriend. Click on the series: transjinder tag for all the fics in this 'verse.
Fast Train to Chinatown (1/2)
One of Kame's biggest concerns before filming a drama is what to do with his hair. He's dyed it red, he's dyed it black, he's chopped it all off, he's grown it long enough to hang between his shoulder blades. The director of Split says it's up to him, but tells him to make up his mind quickly. It's not long now before they start shooting and there are promotional pictures to be taken.
Kame normally thinks about his character. What kind of person is he? A teenage rebel? A conservative salaryman? A surf-loving freeter? This time he's got two characters to think about: Nishikawa Hikaru, the young, earnest police detective; and Kage, his shadow self, a thief who lives in a much darker world.
Nishikawa's starting off by-the-book, the straightest of the straight, so Kame thinks he probably doesn't dye his hair or do anything fancy with it. Kage has no superiors to impress, no one to answer to but himself, so he can do whatever he wants. Both men are disciplined and organised, each in their own way, and Kage can't afford to be sloppy. He wears a knitted hat when he works to keep his hair out of sight, but Kame thinks he probably wouldn't do much with it anyway. Being memorable wouldn't help his career.
In the end, Kame opts to dye it black again and lets it grow a little more. Nishikawa will wear a short ponytail at work (because he's such a nice, polite, hardworking young man nobody minds) and Kage, when not wearing a hat, will leave his loose. The director likes this idea. Meisa likes it too, because it means her character, Tamai Sachiko, can get Nishikawa's attention by tugging on his ponytail. Kame gets the feeling he's going to end the series with no hair at all, because Tamai's going to be permanently on his case.
According to the script they're supposed to be developing a love triangle between Nishikawa, Tamai and Kage, only it's not a real triangle and it makes Kame's head spin. Tamai's a good detective but a bad girl, always skirting the edges of insubordination as she stalks through the series in her long leather coat, dark eyes flashing and hair whipping in the wind. A rule-breaker like Kage is much more to her taste than teacher's pet Nishikawa, but as Nishikawa gradually changes, he becomes more to his partner's liking.
"Chemistry," the director says. "If you can't manage to make it look like you're dying to get in Kuroki-san's pants, there's just no hope for you."
"Which one of me?" Kame asks.
"Both of you!"
Kame sighs and promises to do his best. He can play Nishikawa as a lovelorn pup, that can't be too hard. Jin managed it in Anego, after all. Kage, well...
"Wouldn't it be better if Kage had no interest in Tamai?" he says. "He's needling Nishikawa, not her. She's the one with the crush. Doesn't it make it more interesting if both sides of Nishikawa have different feelings about her?"
The director pats him on the head, tells him he's brilliant and runs off to spread the word. Kame breathes a sigh of relief that he's managed to avoid playing a dual romantic lead. It never seems to work out for him. He only survived it in Tatta Hitotsu no Koi because Ayase Haruka bore a remarkable resemblance to Jin, and that made it easier to pretend he was in love.
That's not something he can do with Meisa, but he figures if she complains he's not being passionate enough, he can just say he's too used to thinking of her as a nun and couldn't possibly defile her purity. Besides, he's not in this for the romance. He's in this for the villainy.
Even if he was in it for the romance, his mind would be elsewhere. He hasn't seen Jin since his Twitter tutorial - both of them have been busy - and neither of them have elaborated on their T-shirt choices. Kame knows why he's confused, because this situation with Jin is doing his head in, but he's uncertain about Jin's reasons. They'd shared a sheepish smile after Kame had said his shirt would read the same as Jin's, and the evening had fizzled out from there.
Fortunately work has always provided an excellent distraction, and Kame's first day on the set relegates all thoughts of Jin to the very back of his mind. The extra-long pilot episode revolves around the theft of a series of Hokusai prints on display in an Omotesando gallery and the special team created to catch the perpetrator: the Shadow Unit. Kame's only playing Nishikawa today and he finds it easy to lose himself in the role. It's the one he's been playing all his life, after all.
"We're honoured to be selected for this unit," Nishikawa says to Chief Nakata, discreetly elbowing his partner to make her join him in bowing politely. Tamai morphs her scowl into a semi-civil smile and nods her head a fraction of an inch. "I'm sure we'll have this thief behind bars soon."
"I'm counting on you, Nishikawa-kun, Tamai-kun." The chief gives them a fond smile. "The pair of you have an excellent track record; I'm sure you'll be an asset to the Shadows."
Tamai waits for Chief Nakata to walk out of earshot before she snorts. "An asset to the Shadows? The entire unit's just you, me, and a pair of old men. We'll be the stars of the show."
Nishikawa laughs nervously. Tamai doesn't have a great deal of respect for any man who hasn't proven his worth in front of her and she's not always tactful about concealing it. "I think they prefer to be thought of as 'veterans'. Satou-san and Takahashi-san are experienced detectives and they've been hunting this thief for months. I'm sure they'll have a great deal to teach us."
Tamai raises an unimpressed eyebrow. "If they were that good, they'd already have caught him."
They film a couple of scenes in the police station, where the Shadows meet for the first time and Kame and Meisa's characters are briefed on Kage. There's a scene they won't shoot until tomorrow which will be used in the briefing, the opening sequence and the CMs and shows Kage (in shadow, of course) creeping through a museum at night. The clip will end with a close-up of his signature, a black cloth with 'KAGE' hand-stitched in the corner in white. From reading ahead Kame knows it's a blindfold, but it'll be some time before Nishikawa figures it out. The young detective is smart but not good at thinking outside the box - not yet. He will be by the end of the series, though, and Kame can't wait to start transitioning.
In the afternoon they shoot more scenes using the police station set. Kame finds it a little weird to be working on solving a crime that hasn't even happened yet but he does his best to convey Nishikawa's determination, a drive fuelled by Kage's blatant disregard for both the law and human life. There's a scene in the morgue, too, where a security guard lies on the table, throat slit for doing his duty, and it's the sight of that corpse that makes Nishikawa step up his game.
"He was just doing his job!"
"Easy, son," soothes the medical examiner. "The best thing you can do for him now is catch the swine who did this to him."
Nishikawa looks down at the body on the table - pale, lifeless, a family man taken before his time - and feels something curdle inside him. He's always possessed an inner core of optimism, a belief that no matter what, he can make things right. But nothing anyone can do can make this right. There's a dead man in the room and there's no way he can get up and go home to his wife and three kids.
A little of the optimism burns itself out, transforms into steel, and when Nishikawa turns away from the table and meets his partner's eyes, she looks startled.
"I want this guy too," Tamai says. "He's crossed the line - so let's follow him over it."
Nishikawa gives himself a mental shake. It's no good to start thinking like a vigilante. "We're supposed to arrest him, not slit his throat. Let's try not to land ourselves in too much trouble, huh?"
Tamai tugs on his ponytail. "Wimp."
They film the resolution too, except it's not much of one because Kage remains uncaught, even though they managed to retrieve the Hokusai prints in the end. Nishikawa and Tamai are totally committed to the Shadows now...and Nishikawa finds a cut on his finger that he doesn't remember getting. Cut to KAT-TUN's dramatic end theme, 'Behind the Light'.
The next day they film on location in a gallery in Omotesando. Kame's there first because they need him for the stock "sneaking around in the dark" footage. It's early on a freezing December morning and he's glad to be able to pull the black woolly hat over his ears. He's wearing solid black from head to foot and looks like he's blatantly up to no good, but that's the point. Subtlety will come later. The black leather gloves don't do much to keep him warm but they look good, and Kage, so Kame's read, is a fan of anything that will boost his ego.
The security here is barely worthy of the name. A building is only as secure as the people who guard it, and of the two guards, one - the most senior - reserves the right to stay indoors the whole night. He suffers badly in the cold but he likes the second floor, where it's always warmer. He won't be coming down the stairs tonight.
The other guard is young. At closing time, he checked every room personally to ensure no visitors remained. He'd said goodnight to the plump young lady he'd routed from the women's toilets, the last person in the building, and she'd smiled and walked past him on her way out. A simple distraction. The guard never even thought to look at the window, still slightly ajar.
That young lady's back now, a lady no more and slender enough to crawl through the window. Kage drops noiselessly to the ground and checks his watch. The younger guard is about to patrol the grounds, which means he's got less than ten minutes to get upstairs. There won't be any cat-and-mouse with the elder guard, though - he only stirs himself once or twice an hour, usually giving the floor a cursory once-over on his way to the vending machines. By the time he notices the prints are missing, Kage plans to be long gone.
He doesn't bank on the guard having a fever and drinking more than usual.
Kame finds it somewhat ironic that after all he's said to Jin, he still ends up dressing like a woman for a drama role. At least it's only for a minute and doesn't require him to shave his legs. He doesn't have to look pretty, only unlike himself, so he wears a long dark wig and a permanent smile so his cheeks puff out.
When they take a break he pulls out his phone and tweets that the female of the species is deadlier than the male, figuring that constitutes a hint. He's only tweeted four times so far; even so, his follower numbers are increasing since the news about the drama account went out to fans. He's having trouble deciding what to write, though. He couldn't do this sort of thing for himself - has no idea how Jin can bring himself to update the world at large on his private life - but it should be easier for a fictional character.
They don't actually show the guard's throat being slit - this is NTV, after all. But they do film Kage being caught by surprise and being forced to improvise when the guard sees his face. Kage's eyes appear over the guard's shoulder, Kage's blade settles against the guard's throat, and everything goes black.
Kame likes the final scene they shoot for the day. It doesn't matter that he looks exhausted because the camera's not on his face at all. It films Kage cleaning the blood from his knife, slowly and methodically...until the blade slips. Blood wells up on Kame's left ring finger; the director says he doesn't have to show the skin being sliced, that they can angle it to keep the actual wound hidden, but Kame doesn't want there to be any doubt how far he's willing to go for this role. He's done worse for work than shed a few drops of blood.
-----
When the cast are finally allowed to see the finished first episode, Kame and Meisa clink beer bottles and celebrate. Nishikawa has acquired just enough of an edge to promise interesting developments in the future; Tamai is guaranteed to be a hit with both guys and girls, and they've got sufficient older talent to draw in the rest of the family too. Kame hopes it will be enough. By the time Kami no Shizuku flopped he'd managed to distance himself, take it less personally, but he's been hit hard by ratings failures before and sometimes it's difficult to keep it all in perspective.
He's not sure whether or not the Japanese public is ready to see him as a villain, which is the only reason why the stolen prints are recovered by the end of the first episode. It's not because Kage is sloppy, which Kame feels he'd have to object to, but because he deliberately leaves them as a tease for Nishikawa. Mindgames, he can get behind.
Filming for the second episode takes them up inside the Sunshine 60 building, where Kage steals paintings adorning the offices of wealthy businessmen. On his breaks, Kame takes the lift thirty floors down and hangs out at the Seattle's Best Coffee, listening to jazz as he reclines on the comfy brown chairs. Foreign shoppers come in to leech the free wi-fi and eat overpriced cake, and one of them takes a picture of her cookie. That gives Kame an idea. He pulls out his phone and surreptitiously takes a picture of the sign, to be sent to Twitter later. He's leaving a trail for his followers - but also for himself, in a way.
Kage doesn't kill anyone this time but the paintings he steals all belong to men who obtained them illegally in the first place, as Nishikawa and Tamai discover during the course of their investigation. Kame finds it interesting, Kage's variety of motives. Perhaps Nishikawa influences his shadow self too - it need not all be one way, and it's going to challenge him, figuring out how to play them both in the future.
"You obviously sleep like the dead," Tamai says. "I must've tried calling you ten times last night."
Nishikawa shrugs. For someone who slept that well, he sure feels tired. His left knee's sore, too; he probably knocked it on the wall, flailing around in bed. He hopes it doesn't stiffen up. "I didn't hear a thing." He found all the missed calls in the morning. "Was it important?"
"If it's from me, it's always important," Tamai scolds him. "Never ignore your partner - it could mean life or death."
"We're both still alive, so I guess it wasn't." Nishikawa winces when Tamai tugs his ponytail. "So what was so critical you had to call me at three in the morning?"
Tamai tosses her hair back over her shoulder. "I had an idea about Kage. Last night it hit me that all the paintings he's taken from the offices are by French artists, right? I checked the list we got yesterday and there are only two left in the building. Yamaguchi has a Manet and Shirafumi has a Renoir. We cover those two offices and we'll get him."
"I don't think the nationality of the artist has anything to do with it," Nishikawa says, though he's not sure why. His partner's idea is sound, perfectly logical, yet his gut instinct is to reject it. "There's something we're missing."
"We're running out of chances," Tamai sneers. "You can check the connections over and over again, or you can man up and do something about it."
Nishikawa agrees to run surveillance on the two possibilities Tamai's identified. They take Yamaguchi; Satou and Takahashi take Shirafumi. They watch for three nights and nothing happens.
On the fourth night, they hand over to a couple of uniforms and another office, one belonging to Hisao, gets robbed. He's got a Caravaggio.
Kame finds himself filming at strange hours. It's not just the drama - there's the PV for 'Behind the Light' and the usual round of performances too. He goes straight from Hey Hey Hey to the set, because there's been a last minute script change and they need to reshoot a couple of scenes. By the time he gets home he has barely enough time to grab a bite to eat and snatch a few hours of sleep before it's back to work, this time for a TV Pia shoot.
Koki keeps sending him reminders to eat and sleep. Kame has to switch his phone off so the mails don't wake him up. It's a hectic time and he finds himself blocking out everything else as much as he can, not wanting anything to distract him from the delicate balancing act he's got going at the moment. This isn't just time management - it's juggling personalities.
The first episode airs the Monday before Christmas, a few weeks earlier than normal because the previous drama in their timeslot was cut down to eight episodes from the original eleven. The ratings work out at just over an amazing twenty-one per cent. Everyone else is happy. Kame's completely ecstatic. It means a lot of pressure, of course. The ratings always fall with the second episode, but if they're lucky the damage won't be too bad.
If they keep the viewers hooked. If he's done his job.
On the set, there's a real sense of accomplishment now. Kame feels like he's not just playing a guy on a team but that he's on the team, that they're all one unit working together to achieve the same goal. He takes a box of miniature Christmas cakes to the set and hands them out to everyone he sees. There's a new episode to film and they're all hyped, some of them from too much coffee and too little sleep.
Kame's one of those people. On the Wednesday night he gets a phone call from Jin, which wouldn't ordinarily be a problem except that he's still at work with another scene to shoot before he can leave, because the director wants them all to take the weekend off so he can spend Christmas with his American wife and young daughters and therefore has ramped up the schedule. He's hot, he's exhausted, and he's having trouble keeping it professional because every little thing is starting to annoy him.
When he's on a fast cigarette break and his phone rings, the first thing he does is snap that he's still at work and doesn't have time to talk right now.
"Oh." Jin hesitates for a second. "I just...I had something to tell you, but I guess I can send a mail."
Kame takes another drag of his cigarette and wills himself to calm down, because Jin hasn't done anything to deserve being snapped at and there's no reason to be rude to him. "Sorry. You just caught me at a bad moment." There, he sounds almost civil. That will have to do.
"No kidding. There's such a thing as getting too far into character; try not to slit anyone's throat while you're there."
There's no time for this. "I'll do my best. What did you want to tell me?"
"Um...I told my dad and brother today. About me. We were having a family dinner, and-"
"That's great, Jin." Meisa's waving at him; they're due back on. "I'm happy for you. Got to go, sorry."
"Sure." Jin sounds as weary as Kame feels. "Talk to you later."
He hangs up and Kame realises he doesn't know the outcome - Jin might've been calling to say his dad had disowned him, as unlikely as that would be. He doesn't have time to pay attention to the twinge of guilt, not tonight. He can find out tomorrow.
When he finally gets home and plugs his phone in to charge, he finds a mail from Jin.
Reio's never going to let me live it down, but I don't think he was surprised. Dad said he was expecting to hear something else. Mum helped a lot.
That still doesn't tell Kame anything, but it doesn't seem bad. Surely if things had gone terribly, Jin would've said. The message is a couple of hours old and there's no point replying right now. It can wait until morning.
Morning's a rush. Kame types his reply while brushing his teeth, which is why he uses no emoji whatsoever.
I'm glad it went okay. Sorry about last night; my schedule's insane.
Your schedule's always insane, Jin replies. You need a break.
Kame responds with, Even though Friday's a holiday the director's pushing for us to film then, but after that I've got the entire weekend off. You can give me all the details then, unless you've got Christmas plans.
Do you have plans? Jin asks.
Eating and sleeping. Then some more sleeping.
Jin doesn't respond to that, which is just as well because Kame needs to dress and get to work. The response, when it arrives, comes on Friday night, straight to Kame's doorstep, and it comes in person.
"Please tell me there's a good reason you're sitting in front of my door with a bag," Kame says when he finds Jin on the floor. "You're not playing Santa, are you?"
"Not exactly." Jin leans on the door, pushing himself to his feet. He's all wrapped up, ridiculously oversized bobble hat pulled down almost to his eyes and coat collar hiding his chin. "You're finished until Monday now, right?"
They'd wrapped up early so the director could take his family out for a meal, and Kame had come straight home, so it's barely six o'clock now. He just wants to take a bubble bath, eat something at a normal pace, and catch up on his missing thirty or so hours of sleep. He has a horrible feeling Jin has other ideas.
"Yeah, we don't start again until Monday morning." He nudges Jin aside so he can unlock the door. "I'm going to sleep."
"You can sleep on the train."
"What train!"
"You need a break," Jin says, pushing Kame gently through the open door. "Somewhere quiet, where nobody's making demands on your time and you stand a chance of being able to go out without all hell breaking loose. Just trust me and go pack a bag. I promise to get you home in time for work."
The overworked and underappreciated part of Kame wants to turn around and growl at Jin to get out and leave him alone to rest, to stop babbling nonsense like this. The other part, the part that likes to grab his passport and take the first plane to anywhere, thinks this sounds like fun.
The latter wins. "How long have I got?"
"Not that long."
Kame stuffs a couple of changes of clothing and some toiletries into a bag, throws in his phone charger, mp3 player and headphones, and believes Jin when he says no hairdryer is required. Jin gives him just enough time to go the bathroom before dragging him off to the station.
There's a Nozomi shinkansen leaving Tokyo at 19:10. They spring for reserved seats, managing to get two together, and Kame takes the window. He hangs their jackets on the little hook while Jin starts unpacking some of the goodies they picked up at the station. Kame's been eating at weird hours all week, always in a rush, and it feels good to know he doesn't have to move for a while. If he wants to take nearly three hours over his meal, he can do it. The train's not due in to Shin-Kobe until just before 22:00.
At least now Kame knows where they're going. As the train starts moving he removes the lid of his boxed meal, preparing to tuck in. Food has never looked so good.
"I'm glad to see you can still smile," Jin says. "I thought you'd forgotten how."
"Sometimes I need a reminder." Kame takes a bite of tamagoyaki and melts into bliss.
"I'm just returning the favour."
Kame grins. Jin's lost his smile many times in the past, but it always comes back brighter than before. "So why Kobe?"
"Quietest place I could think of that didn't involve us going out to the middle of nowhere. Do you mind?"
"Ask me when we're on our way home again."
Whatever Jin has planned, Kame doesn't think he'll mind, though. He thinks back to last year, when he'd gone to Kyocera Dome to throw out the first pitch and ended up in a club in Kobe. He wonders if that girl still works there. She'd asked about his relationship with Jin and, being ever-so-slightly tipsy, he'd smiled and compared them to twins. It's true that they're alike in a lot of ways but he'd been thinking of the closeness of twins rather than any form of resemblance.
They talk while they eat, with Jin refusing to let Kame say a single word about work. The train's empty enough for them to talk freely and not have to worry about their conversation being reported in gossip columns, which is why Kame eventually brings them around to the subject of Jin's family.
"What made you change your mind? I thought you'd decided not to say anything."
"Don't laugh, but...it was that stupid Glee episode, okay?"
Not laughing proves to be impossible for Kame, because Jin looks absolutely mortified by his admission.
"I told you not to laugh! It just got me thinking, you know? That this isn't something I can change - I mean, I probably could if I let myself be brainwashed or something - and I need to be able to accept that, no matter how I feel about it."
Hugging Jin would be a bad move right now, even if they weren't on a train, so Kame settles for a friendly elbow in the ribs. "I've been working on you for almost eight months and all I had to do was make you watch a TV show? I think I've missed my calling in life."
"Kamenselor Kazuya strikes again," Jin says, rubbing his side and pretending to be mortally wounded. "Somehow you always manage to make me do difficult things."
"It worked out though, didn't it? With your family."
"Pretty much. I told Mum what I was going to say, so she cooked for all of us, and put herself between me and Dad so she could kick me under the table, and..." Jin trails off.
"Your mum's amazing."
"Yeah. I'm really grateful to her for everything, even if I have bruised ankles now. She told Reio it wasn't hereditary and that helped too."
"Is he worried he'll end up in dresses?"
Jin shakes his head. "No, but he's very glad he's not in Johnny's. I think he thinks that's what the problem is."
"How about your dad?"
"Dad...uh..." Jin looks down, chews his lower lip for a second. "He thought I was going to say I was moving to America for good."
It's a worry Kame's had too, that Jin will leave Japan permanently and make his home wherever his heart takes him - Los Angeles, probably. It's not impossible. But there are people and places Jin loves all over the world, and Kame's not sure it's possible for him to settle in one city for good.
"Was he relieved?"
"Actually, yeah. I'm not sure how much of it he got, or if he even took me seriously - I started off with the clothing and worked my way up - but it's not like he said anything bad. I don't know, maybe he thinks I'm playing around."
"Or maybe it's just because your family is so naturally weird that nothing seems strange to them?"
"Maybe." Jin sinks back into his seat with a contented sigh. "They're wonderful."
You're wonderful too, Kame wants to say, but doesn't. They've still got a couple of hours before they get to Shin-Kobe and he has no idea what the plan is from there. He hopes Jin's got one, because he really doesn't want to be wandering around on a cold, dark winter's night with nowhere to go.
He drifts off in a light doze against Jin's shoulder, not so deep he's unaware of the stops but too far gone for conversation. Jin wakes him when they pull into Shin-Kobe; they gather up their things and dispose of the rubbish on the way out.
"Now what?"
"Now we board another train," Jin says.
They take the Seishin Yamate Line to Sannomiya, Kame mostly walking on auto-pilot. Jin stops him just in time from inserting a ten thousand yen bill in the ticket machine.
"You're asleep already, aren't you?"
Kame makes a valiant effort to open his eyes fully. "I'm awake!"
"Sure you are." Jin pulls out a few hundred yen in coins for the subway ticket. "I think it's about time you went to bed."
"That's what I was planning to do before you showed up..."
When they reach Sannomiya, Jin says he knows a hotel right by the next station, near Chinatown, and they switch to the JR Kobe Line to travel the one stop to Motomachi. That's about as far as Kame can go. The Kobe Plaza Hotel is right in front of the station and Jin marches them inside.
Kame waits in a daze at the desk, looking longingly at the wheelchairs, and it's only when Jin shakes him that he realises his input is needed.
"They've only got double rooms left," Jin says. "Is that okay? We could go somewhere else, but it's getting late and-"
"It's fine." Kame waves a weary hand. "I'll be asleep in seconds anyway."
Jin gets them checked in and sees them safely up to the fifth floor, where their room turns out to be close to the lifts. Kame barely notices, can only spare concentration for not tripping over his own feet as he gets ready for bed. He can deal with it all in the morning. The bed's narrower than he'd be comfortable with, in other circumstances, but at least he's exhausted enough that he's unlikely to be lying awake all night, trying not to close the gap between himself and Jin.
Part 2