[JE] In the Mind's Eye 2/3
Title: In the Mind's Eye 2/3
Pairing: Kame x Jin
Word count: 25,470
Rating: PG
Disclaimer: Not mine, damnit
Part 1
In the Mind's Eye 2/3
"I hurt it at work," Kame said, rubbing his neck with his unbandaged hand. "Burned it. So I had to bring a friend to accompany me; hope that's okay?" He nodded towards Jin, standing in the doorway of Ueda's tiny office with his guitar case over his shoulder.
"As long as I only have to pay one of you, no problem." Ueda leaned back in his chair and beckoned Jin to come in. He'd had a haircut lately and gone back to his natural black, replacing his former princess style with a more suave, elegantly confident look that Jin found vaguely intimidating. There were rumours he'd won Mouse Peace in a boxing match and they finally seemed believable. "What's your name?"
"It's Kame-" Jin froze, seeking inspiration, and found it in the pear sitting untouched on Ueda's desk. "-nashi. Kamenashi Kazuya. Nice to meet you." He bowed a greeting, which Ueda returned.
"He's an old friend," Kame added. "In town for a while."
"How nice for him." To Jin, Ueda said, "You get one drink on the house - anything else, you're paying for. You'll have to negotiate with Akanishi over there for your cut."
"Got it." Good thing sweat didn't show on Jin's plain black T-shirt, because the longer they spent in Ueda's office, the more pronounced the prickling became. What if Kame did something weird? What if Jin answered to his own name? What if...
"Don't look so nervous," Kame said. "You're going to be great. We're going to be great."
"You'd better be," Ueda said. "Or you don't get paid."
They left the office for the soundcheck, Ueda remaining behind to finish his snack, so Jin gave Kame a quick tour of the place.
"Mouse Peace is a cafe club style live house," Jin explained, taking Kame into the main room. He had to speak quietly, since other staff were floating around and they knew him well enough that he'd look suspicious giving explanations to himself. "Ueda's the master here, and he's picky about the acts he lets play on his stage. Nothing too wild, mostly melodic rock. He'll spend the evening tending bar over there."
The bar ran along the right wall, near the door, where patrons who'd had too much could be discreetly escorted off the premises. Three steps led to the raised stage along the front wall, where someone had placed Jin's usual stool in the centre. Small, cosy tables filled the floor, waiting for customers to arrive. Jin sometimes sat there too, watching the other performers, picking up what he could, networking when the opportunity presented itself. (Not often, because that involved talking to strangers, and Jin's skills in that area were somewhat lacking.)
"You make much money like this?" Kame asked.
Jin shook his head. "If I did, you think I'd still be working at Family Mart? I just play every chance I get, and Pi lets me finish early when I have a show to do so long as I make it up another time. I can't make a living from this, though. Not yet."
Maybe not ever, but even if doing the show with Kame went horribly wrong, it was still more of a chance than he'd have had if the demon had succeeded in stealing his soul.
They ran through the soundcheck with Junno, Ueda's engineer and number one underling. He accepted Jin's presence easily enough on the grounds that anyone Ueda hadn't thrown out, had to be okay.
"He's easygoing," Jin muttered to Kame when Junno disappeared off the side of the stage. "Just don't let him challenge you to a game of billiards. Not for money. And try to laugh at his puns, even the really bad ones. Our sound quality's in his hands."
"If I only had my magic I could-" Kame checked himself. "Forget I said anything."
"Could I-" Jin wiggled his fingers, sadly empty of magic at the moment.
"No." Kame picked up Jin's guitar case with his unbandaged hand. "Now get to work before I forget the tunes."
Bossy little demon. Still, Jin found it reassuring that Kame was taking this so seriously. Perhaps they wouldn't be laughed off the stage after all. If they pulled this off, with next to no rehearsal time and no experience working together at all, it would be a miracle. (Like all the other miraculous things that had happened to Jin since leaving work last night...)
The mic was set up by the stool, since Jin usually sat for the show, but this time he left it for Kame to adjust and took the stool for himself, off to left, where he could play without them knocking into each other. Kame had a moment of confusion after initially adjusting the mic to his own height, rather than Jin's; soon remedied, and he clutched it like a starving child holding a bar of chocolate. Jin hoped he wouldn't try to bite it.
They didn't have time for more than a couple of songs, which Jin had picked on the way over. 'Genki', because he thought Kame could do with something light to ease him in, and 'Care', which was to be their opening number.
The fingers of Kame's body were shorter and stubbier than his own, making him stretch further than usual to get them around the neck of the guitar, but they seemed deft enough, for all that. Jin plucked a few experimental notes, had to tighten his A-string a little before they could commence. They didn't have an audience, only Junno down the side, and Ueda, who'd emerged from his office to rub a cloth over the bar, yet Jin felt as nervous as if they were playing to a stadium full of eager fans. If this didn't work...
Kame opened his mouth - opened Jin's mouth, sang with Jin's voice - and the words poured forth as if he'd written them himself. Perhaps the body remembered, even if currently occupied by a stranger. Remembered every pencil stroke in a tatty old notebook, every beat tapped out by nicotine-stained fingers. The music was in Jin's bones, in his body, and that's where Kame happened to be right now.
He sang with more confidence than he had in the store, able to let his voice sound loud and clear to reach the back tables. No one would ever have guessed he'd learned the lyrics only that afternoon, had sung the song no more than a few times in his life. He didn't falter once, which was more than could be said for Jin. Normally having longer fingers, he sometimes fell short of the strings and had to start looking down at himself to keep from missing.
"You sure you're not the one with the injured hand?" Ueda said to him afterwards.
Jin smiled apologetically. "Just a little rusty on the songs. I'll be fine now I've had the practice."
"Sounded good to me." Kame thumped Jin on the back, turned to Ueda, and grinned. "I have complete faith in Ji- in Kamenashi."
"Should you be hitting people with that hand?" Ueda asked.
"It's numb right now," Kame said, smooth as silk. "Still waiting for the injection to wear off. Can't feel a thing yet."
Ueda left them to start opening up. Jin had to ask. "I thought you said you couldn't lie?"
"You only noticed that now? I've been lying to Ueda since we got here. Anyway, I said my kind can't lie." Kame ran his tongue under his upper teeth. "I also said it was up to you whether or not to believe me. I'm a demon. Why would you believe a word I say in the first place?"
"You...seemed like you meant it." Jin hated feeling foolish. Had any of his friends taken him in in this way, he'd have resented it. Kame wasn't a friend...but then, Kame wasn't human, either, and while Jin hadn't met any of his kind before, he felt he couldn't judge demons by human standards. Maybe it was all bad press, who knew?
"I lied about that. Not about anything else," Kame said. "Not to you. I'll tell you if I do."
Jin didn't see the point in that but they didn't have time to get into a philosophical debate on the nature of truth in the universe. Ryo, Ueda's smart-mouthed number two underling, was already in place by the door, preparing to sell tickets to the fans waiting outside.
Mouse Peace didn't sell tickets in advance; patrons bought on the door, specifying which act - when there was more than one - they'd come to see. Jin's share of the take relied heavily on the fact that Ryo liked him and could be persuaded to write down his name more often than warranted, provided Jin bought him the odd beer and never refused to let him steal a cigarette. Since Jin didn't yet have enough fans to fill the live house for the night by himself, he was resigned to getting a smaller piece of the pie than some of his peers.
Hence the day job. No one ever said being a musician was profitable.
At least Kame didn't need the money - or wouldn't once he had his own body back. Jin didn't have to split anything.
Anything except the love of the crowd, who didn't know him in this body. They weren't here to see the short redhead strumming the guitar. He could've been anyone.
They were here to see Akanishi Jin - some of them, at any rate - and Kame gave them what they wanted, proving he'd been paying attention during his stalking period. Jin couldn't watch him all the time, had to keep half an eye on his fingers, but there didn't appear to be anything artificial about Kame's smile, or about the raw emotion in his voice when he sang 'Hatachi no Sensou'. He cracked in all the right places, pleaded with his eyes and voice for the crowd to fall in love with his music.
Jin wanted so badly to sing. Keeping his mouth shut was nigh on impossible. His words, his tunes, his feelings laid out in musical form for the world to hear. Sadness, pain, joy, hope and despair of the kind he doubted the demon had ever felt. Human emotions were the most powerful source of inspiration any songwriter could ask for.
Could demons feel the same?
Kame had introduced them both to start, waving his bandaged hand in the air to explain the addition of a guitarist. It was easy to tell who was here to see Jin - nobody else looked surprised. Happily, there were a number of them, and Jin couldn't help but wave. He got a few waves back, too.
By the time they reached 'Eternal', Jin had stopped watching his fingers. He didn't need to anymore. He watched the audience instead, watched the men and women watching him with interest in their eyes, some focused on his hands and others on his face. Kame's face. The demon's beauty had struck him the moment he'd entered the store; Jin felt a trifle unnerved by the thought that people were staring at him, finding his face attractive, when it wasn't his face at all.
It wasn't his voice either. He mouthed along with the lyrics, silently at first, then louder when he realised no one could hear him anyway. Singing in Kame's voice in Family Mart had been almost too strange to handle. Singing on a stage? Far more natural. Jin didn't dare try the high notes but Kame's voice sounded much sweeter to him now.
And then it was all over, and Kame was giving his thanks to the crowd. Jin bowed too, only just remembering to move the guitar from his lap in time to avoid cracking his head on it. He'd seen the inside of Ueda's first aid kit before. Never again.
When they relinquished the stage to the next act, a band of seven young men clutching instrument cases and bottles of water, Jin made a beeline for the bar to claim his free drink. They'd had water on the stage, but Ueda preferred performers to save the alcohol for afterwards, citing evidence of past misadventures with such an evil smile that neither of them felt inclined to cross him.
He looked askance at Kame asking for wine. "Didn't you say wine made you sick?"
"It's for Kamenashi," Kame said before Jin could get a word in. "I'll have my usual."
They took receipt of two glasses: red wine and vodka. Jin hoped Ueda wouldn't notice them swapping - he hadn't been kidding about the wine making him ill. Moving to the very end of the bar solved that problem. Ueda didn't encourage sitting at the bar, but as the tables were reserved for paying customers, performers had nowhere else to go.
"Sorry about the wine," Kame said, just about audible over the sounds from the front of the club. "I didn't think to check what you liked to drink."
Jin shrugged. "Beer, vodka, cocktails...not too fussy. I mean, if I drink enough of anything, it'll make me sick, but wine..." He shuddered, hoping the bad memory would take the hint and not make itself instantly available.
"Here." Kame took the wine, sipping delicately at it while Jin made a start on his glass of vodka. "Well? How was I?"
"You've ruined my music career," Jin said, completely straightfaced. "I'll be working at Family Mart for the rest of my life now."
"Oi!"
"Not really." Though Kame sounded mock-offended, his eyes held enough hesitation that Jin felt bad about teasing him. Why his opinion should matter to a demon, he had no idea. "I thought you sounded pretty good."
"We sounded pretty good," Kame corrected. "Great, in fact. The tables down in the front obviously thought so too."
"What about the ones in the back?"
"Can't tell in this body."
"But this body," Jin patted his own chest, "doesn't have super sight, or anything like that, does it?"
"No, but I can use magic to fake it. Much easier to stalk people when you can see through walls and stuff."
Jin resolved to try this later. Not that he wanted to see through walls - not when his neighbours were about a hundred years old - but enhanced senses would be nice.
"Did you...did you enjoy it?" he asked, fairly confident of the answer but wanting to be sure.
Kame set down the glass and beamed at him. "That might be the most fun I've had since Matsumoto accidentally forgot to fill in a 221B form. We all laughed for days."
Jin shook his head. Disbelief didn't even begin to cover it. "You seriously need to learn how to enjoy yourself over something other than screwed up paperwork."
"I'm trying." Kame drained his glass. "Now can we go back to your place and have another session, or do you have a third job we need to get to?"
"This is the last one," Jin assured him. "And tomorrow I have a day off. No work."
"Perfect! I'm not letting you leave your apartment at all tomorrow!"
Unfortunately for Jin, Ueda returned just in time to hear this. "I had no idea you swung that way, Akanishi..."
-----
Magic practice had to take a backseat to food, because after a day of being unable to eat unless no one but Kame was around, Jin felt ravenous. They stopped off on the way home at a stand-up udon bar; after consuming a bowl of thick, hot noodles, Jin felt full but not yet satisfied. He didn't want more food, though. That wasn't it.
The food didn't seem to help with the tiredness, either. He usually felt energised after a show, and with tomorrow being a day off, he would normally have considered staying on longer at Mouse Peace, talking to customers and trying to win over new fans. Tonight, no way. He was coming down a lot faster than usual, and all he wanted to do was curl up and sleep.
Kame frowned when he heard this. "Keeping that veil up for most of the day took it out of you. Sorry, I should've figured it would be harder for a human. Go to sleep, and we'll pick up again in the morning."
"Sorry." Jin yawned. "I know we're not really getting anywhere with this whole bodyswitching thing."
"It's okay. I can't push you till you drop dead of exhaustion - then I never get my body back!"
Jin couldn't be bothered to hit Kame with the pillow. He had better uses for it.
He woke up late the next morning, somewhat refreshed but still rough around the edges with a tiredness that sleep couldn't seem to cure. He stretched on the couch, not moving until Kame crept up and poked his bare stomach where it peeked out from under his T-shirt. Jin squealed, curling up at one end of the couch, so Kame promptly sat down next to him.
"We're going to start off with breakfast," he said.
"Great." Jin rubbed sleep from his eyes. "What are we having?"
"Whatever your imagination can provide."
"Huh?"
"Manifestation." Kame looked up as a click sound indicated that the kettle had boiled. "I'll give you a head start, though. Go get washed; I'll make the coffee."
"Since when have you known how to work my kettle?"
Kame poked him again. "Some of us have been awake for the last four hours, waiting for you to wake up. That's a lot of time to play with buttons."
Jin couldn't smell smoke and there didn't appear to be any debris lying around, so he assumed Kame hadn't blown anything up during his experiments. Hopefully it was safe to get up.
Once Jin looked more-or-less human and had a shot of caffeine in his system, Kame started up with the lesson.
"Soul transference requires you to have a very firm idea in your head of an intangible object - something you can't detect with your senses. It's harder than you think. If your mind wanders for a millisecond, the soul will be scattered all over the universe."
Jin gulped. This sounded like an awfully roundabout route to get breakfast. "You're not suggesting an intangible breakfast, are you? Because I don't think that would be very satisfying."
"Before you can even think about intangible objects, you need to learn to hold your focus on tangible ones. The best way to learn that is with something that doesn't exist yet. Then you can't mess it up too much. At the worst it'll wreck your carpet."
"This is a rental apartment..."
Kame ignored him. "What do you feel like eating? Make sure it's something you can visualise."
It was hard to go wrong with bread, Jin thought. "Toast."
"White bread? Brown bread? Granary? Plain? Butter? Jam? Cheese? Be specific."
Jin held up his hands against Kame's onslaught of questions. "Um...white bread, buttered. Do I have to imagine a plate as well?"
Kame looked down at the carpet. "I'll let you have a plate. If you can manage to get it on the plate, that's good practice too." He retrieved one from the cupboard and set it down on the floor. "Now, gather some magic. This isn't going to be too different from what you did yesterday; we're just going to take it further, that's all."
By now Jin had managed to get the hang of extracting the magic from inside, only flinching a bit at the contact with his spine. He held it out to the atmosphere as he had when creating a veil, tried to push his hands together to build the toast, and-
"Stop!" Kame commanded. "You're turning invisible again. I said this wasn't going to be too different; I didn't say it would be identical. Drop the veil and listen."
Sure enough, Jin's arms were fading out of existence, even to his own eyes. He hastily dismissed the veil with the trick Kame had taught him yesterday: imagine a waterfall, with cool, clean water washing away every trace of magic.
"Listening."
"Okay." Kame's eyes lingered on Jin's hands, softening when they no longer flickered. "Before you release the magic into the atmosphere, you have to make a container for it, or all you'll do is thicken the air again. Picture the slice of toast on the plate. Think about the texture, the taste. Think about the shape. Know this slice of toast inside out, till it's so real to you that you can practically see it."
"Become one with the toast, got it."
Kame grinned. "That's for after you've made it appear."
Jin leaned back against the couch and fixed his eyes on the plate. It remained stubbornly empty, staring back at him plain and blank. He'd done this before, hadn't he? With the turtle tattoo. Made something appear where it hadn't existed before. He could do it again.
Picturing toast was easy. Picturing toast on the plate: still no problem. Picturing it so he could see it somewhere other than his mind's eye: not so simple. Jin didn't care for hallucinations.
He tried to will it into existence, yelling inside his head for it to appear, as if he could force it if only his demands were loud enough. He tried drawing mental pictures, imagining his hand guiding a pencil around the plate till he could see the outline of the toast.
Then his stomach growled, so he got distracted.
"You're not quite getting this, are you?" Kame said.
"I'm trying!"
"Think of it this way: succeed or starve. But no pressure."
"So this is what demons are really like..."
Jin persevered, since he didn't fancy starving to death and it didn't look like Kame was going to let him find food by normal methods. Maybe the hunger would help. He could imagine the taste in his mouth, imagine the warm scent of freshly-toasted bread tickling his nose. Mmm, that was it. He licked his lips. This was going to taste so good, this thick slab of bread with hot melted butter seeping gently inside...
"Can I have a slice too?" Kame asked. "I don't think it would fit in your toaster, but it looks delicious."
"Eh?"
Kame pointed to the plate, where a giant wedge of buttered toast just barely dangled above the carpet. "I guess you didn't need to listen after all."
"What did I do?" Jin looked down at his hands, which no longer tingled with magic. He didn't even recall releasing it.
"You used the magic to give form to an idea of a slice of toast. If that even counts as a slice. Half a loaf, maybe."
"Hey!" Jin scooped up his breakfast. "I was hungry, okay?"
For a magical construct, it certainly tasted like the real thing, right down to the bland bits in the corners where Jin always missed with a knife. Kame let him finish it before asking him to repeat the exercise.
"Practice makes perfect," Kame said. "And I'm hungry too."
He made Jin do it twice more - with normal sized slices, this time - and pay better attention to his actions, so that Jin could actually feel the magic leaving through his fingertips, directed to the plate and the vision of toast lying upon it. The second time Kame wanted strawberry jam, so Jin had to adjust his mental image. He succeeded, but...
"Jin?"
Jin didn't realise he'd zoned out until Kame called him, and the toast had been completely consumed. "Yeah?"
"You look exhausted," Kame said flatly. "Do you even realise you're halfway to lying down?"
"Hmm?"
Kame worked one hand under Jin's arm, helped him sit up straight again. Jin let his head loll back against the couch, glad they were already on the floor. That bone-deep exhaustion from last night was making a comeback - not that it had ever really left, but he'd been able to put it aside till now. Not for much longer, though.
"I need to go back to sleep, sorry," he said. "I know I haven't been awake all that long, but..." He closed his eyes. The couch was too high up for him to reach; he could sleep on the floor, no problem, even sitting up like this. If Kame would just stop talking at him...
"It's not sleep you need." Kame shook him roughly by the shoulder. "Jin? Don't go to sleep. Talk to me."
"Too tired to talk." Jin couldn't keep from slurring. Even his lips were tired. "Started last night, still there this morning. Can you pass me a pillow?"
"You don't need to sleep; you need to...feed."
"More toast?"
"Not food. Not human food." Kame sighed. "You need blood."
"Blood? This body's anaemic?"
"Not exactly. I...I didn't know if it would be an issue, but it looks like there's no way around it." Kame ran a finger down one of the veins in his forearm. "Human food sustains my body, for the most part. But a demon's soul gets hungry too. We feed on other people's lives - on their blood."
Sounded like vampires. Jin didn't get along well with horror movies. "So why...why aren't you hungry? Why is it making me tired, when your soul's in my body?"
"Because my soul and body are still linked, just as yours are," Kame explained. "If I don't feed, I feel tired because I don't have enough life left. I'm starved in here," he tapped his forehead, "but I feel it here." He placed his hand over Jin's heart.
It was easy to forget Kame wasn't human until he started talking about souls, and blood, and things Jin wasn't sure he wanted to understand. What he did manage to understand from all of this was that if he didn't get some blood in him soon, well...he didn't want to know.
"You should lie down," Kame said.
"That's what I've been trying to do for the last five minutes."
"Not here. Come on."
With Kame's help, Jin made it over to the bed, crashing down gracelessly on the mattress. Kame rolled him onto his back and knelt down next to the bed, leaning over to talk.
Jin giggled. The big, bad vampire demon bending over him, about to suck his blood, like he was a young girl in a horror movie. About to be... Hang on a second.
"Shouldn't this be the other way around?" he asked, hoping Kame could understand his mumbles. Talking was such hard work. "Me drinking your blood?"
"My soul needs it, not yours. But if this doesn't work, we'll switch." Kame rubbed his nose. "It's not like I've got prior experience with this."
"That makes two of us..."
Kame left for a few minutes; Jin heard the sound of drawers opening, and then Kame returned with a knife. "I'd normally use my teeth," he said, "but you don't have fangs, and you're too exhausted to make mine grow. So we'll have to use this. I've sterilised it."
So Jin wouldn't get infected while he was being cut open and drained, wonderful. "Could...could we maybe go get you a pint at a hospital or something?"
"This'll be fine, I promise. And I'm not lying to you."
"Easy for you to say that - you're not the one about to get sliced open."
"I don't need much. Relax, Jin. A little blood, and you'll feel so much better. I know what it's like, feeling that you can't move, that even just existing takes up so much of your energy you've got nothing left." Kame's voice dropped to a whisper. "I can make it better for you."
This might've been reassuring if not for the small, sharp, vegetable knife in Kame's hand. Jin wouldn't be using it to chop carrots again. Not after feeling like one himself.
Jin's T-shirt left most of his arms exposed; Kame picked up his left by the wrist, laying it flat on the bed, still cradled by Kame's fingers. Jin's own fingers curled up in reflex, nails digging into his palm. He couldn't help tensing. This was more reckless than anything he'd ever done, up to and including some of the motorbike stunts he'd pulled in his late teens. At least he'd had a choice back then. Not this time.
Kame rubbed his thumb gently over Jin's wrist; Jin clenched his fist tighter and shuddered, dreading what was to come. Pain had never been his forte.
"Y-you do this a lot?"
"Couple of times a week. Normally I can make the donors forget, but...that takes magic, and you have all of mine."
Jin didn't see how anyone could possibly forget having their blood drunk, but magic, as he was learning, could do strange things to people. Bring things into being that didn't exist, and hide those that were already there. If only he could use it to get himself past this. He could wake up and Kame would have all the blood he needed.
Kame set the knife aside for a moment to brush Jin's bangs away from his forehead. "Calm down; I know what I'm doing."
"You're in my body, and my body has no idea what you're doing," Jin protested, words growing thicker by the moment. The longer they delayed, the worse he felt.
"Relax. Close your eyes if it would help."
For a demon, Kame's bedside manner wasn't too bad - and it did help to not be able to see sunlight glinting off the knife when Kame picked it up again. Jin screwed his eyes shut, trying to take deep, calming breaths. He could do this.
His breath caught on the sting of the knife, but he didn't open his eyes until Kame's mouth closed over his wrist, tongue lapping warm and wet against the broken skin. Not like a pet - like a lover, cradling him with strong fingers, holding him steady and safe. Kame's other hand, no longer holding the knife, rested lightly on Jin's stomach; Jin watched it start to circle. Anything was better than watching the life being sucked out of him.
Kame didn't look like a movie vampire, though. No red eyes, no dripping fangs, no clawed fingers driven into unwilling flesh. Of course, given that he currently looked like Jin, any changes in this direction would've been most unwelcome. If not for the nagging pain in his arm, Jin could've mistaken Kame's actions for romance, not nourishment. He'd had various parts of his anatomy sucked before, but generally without blood being involved, and this way wasn't as much fun.
Not until he started to notice the effects. The more blood Kame took, the more alive Jin felt, energy slowly returning to restore his heavy, useless limbs to action. For every drop he lost, he grew more alert. Running marathons might not be on the cards yet but sitting up, he could certainly manage.
"Ouch!"
Kame licked the leftover blood from his lips and sat up straight, blinking. "I told you to relax, not get up and move about!"
"Sorry..."
Jin checked his wrist, which Kame still held. He hadn't torn anything by pulling free, thankfully. Perhaps moving hadn't been a great idea; blood immediately welled up in the exposed cut. Kame flashed him a playful grin, bent down, and licked it away. Jin's stomach turned, but he didn't think it was the sight of his own tongue lapping up blood that did it.
"Have you had enough yet?" he asked Kame, wondering how much he could afford to lose. It didn't seem like they'd been at it all that long; blood donors gave entire pints, right? That had to be safe.
"Do you still feel like you need to lie down?"
"If I did, I wouldn't have tried to sit up," Jin pointed out.
"Then we're done. Lie back down anyway."
Jin wondered what for, but Kame had somehow managed to find his first aid kit (which he hadn't even seen for months) and set to work cleaning him up. Kame made him keep pressure on the wound, holding it higher than his heart until the blood clotted. It didn't take as long as Jin expected.
"Can I do something with magic to hide this?" he asked. "Everyone's going to think I tried to hurt myself."
Kame raised an eyebrow. "Like this? You'd be the most unsuccessful cutter ever."
"Huh?"
"Look." Kame tapped Jin's injured wrist, where the wound already seemed smaller. "I told you my body's only mostly human. This is one of the more useful non-human aspects."
No matter how long Jin stared at his skin, the cut never appeared to shrink, yet it disappeared within minutes. He wished he could take that particular trait back with him to his own body - he tended to pick up a lot of cuts from plastic at work.
"This arrangement isn't fair," Jin said. "If this body gets hungry, I get hungry. If your soul gets hungry, I get tired."
"Nobody asked you to switch bodies with me," Kame snapped. "In fact, I'd rather you hadn't. But we're stuck like this now until you learn how to switch us back."
Jin had merely been stating a fact, not intending to cause annoyance, but if he'd riled Kame, fine. Jin thought he had a right to be cross after having his life turned upside down for no better reason than that he might make a good snack for some creepy old demon. What could Kame do to him now? Nothing, because Jin had his magic.
Nothing, except lecture him.
"Now you're good to go again, let's try something else. We can't waste your day off; it's almost noon already. We'll never get anywhere like this."
"But-"
"You need to learn how to move things too, or nobody's souls will be going anywhere."
Kame's brusque, no-nonsense tone rubbed Jin up the wrong way and he couldn't help sniping back. "I thought you said you didn't even know exactly what had happened? So what makes you think you know how to reverse it, huh?"
Kame grabbed a fistful of Jin's T-shirt, hauling him off the bed so he had to either plant his feet on the floor or fall onto it. "I'm working on it, which is more than you're doing right now. Ready for your next lesson, human?"
Jin carefully unfolded Kame's fingers till he could pull his shirt free, straightened up so he could stand firm (if not tall), and placed his hands on his hips. "Bring it on."
The next magic lesson turned out to be telekinesis. "I was trying to move your soul into the manga when you somehow disrupted the transfer. You need to learn how to move."
"I know how to move." Jin executed a surprisingly flawless hip roll, considering the hips weren't his.
Kame snorted. "Not your body. Let's start with something simple - and unbreakable. See that used dressing?" He pointed to the bloodstained pad on the nightstand. "Try moving it into the bin without using your body."
So much for dancing. "And how am I supposed to do that? Throw it across the room using magic?"
"That's the idea. You put the toast on the plate by visualising an object in a specific place. This time, do it for an object that already exists. You have to keep both of them in mind at the same time - the dressing you see, and the dressing where you want it to be."
Jin's bin was a tiny, freestanding grey box beside his kitchen counter. He could barely see it from where he stood, never mind see inside it. Still, he had a vague idea what he'd be looking at. He'd changed the bag last night, so unless Kame had thrown anything away, the bin's contents would be nothing more interesting than a clear plastic sack, slightly wrinkled.
"Try it, hotshot. You don't need me to talk you through this one, do you?"
Kame's crossed arms issued a challenge as much as Jin's clenched teeth offered defiance. He'd be doing this one solo, then. No advice, no guidance. Moving a tiny pad from one place to another; how hard could it be? If that cocky little demon could master soul transference in twenty days then he, Akanishi Jin, could do it in ten.
Or less. And telekinesis? Piece of cake.
He sat back down on the bed, deliberately ignoring Kame glaring at him from the side, and fixed his gaze on the bloodstained pad. Red blood, as human as his own. Jin wondered how his body had reacted to it.
No. No wondering anything. He couldn't lose concentration. There was the pad - and there, in his mind's eye, the bin. All he had to do was merge the two. He dove down deep into himself, to find the dark, rotting velvet that gave him power, and seized as much as he dared. The experience didn't become any more pleasant with repetition.
There. Magic, tingling in his fingertips, ready to do his bidding. Jin could get used to this...if only it didn't mean living in someone else's body. He could save a fortune on food bills. He imagined the bin, mental camera peering inside at the bag, and reached...
It took Kame ten minutes to stop laughing after the bin shot across the room and attached itself to Jin's hand.
"It's not funny!"
"It is from where I'm standing!"
Not that Kame was standing, exactly. That involved having both feet on the floor, and he kept lifting his, a weird hop-clap laugh that seemed to take over his entire body. Jin was pretty sure his body had never attempted such strange contortions.
"Can you stop having a seizure and help me get this thing off my hand?"
Kame gave such a blatantly fake gasp he might as well have been on a variety show. "You mean that wasn't what you were trying to do?"
"You know it wasn't," Jin grumbled.
"Fine." Kame relented, dropping down next to Jin to examine his hand, though amusement kept his lips quirked in a smile. "Hmm, looks like it's stuck fast by magic. The waterfall trick should remove it."
After Jin washed away the magic with his mind, and then everything else in the sink, he suggested trying again with something less likely to give him bruises by ramming into his hand.
"Fair enough," Kame agreed. Laughter, even at Jin's expense, had cleared the air completely between them and Jin couldn't stay mad. "How about that pillow? Move it from the head to the foot of the bed. That should be safe enough."
"Or I'll end up with a mouthful of foam. I wonder what went wrong the first time?"
"It's not easy to keep multiple objects in mind simultaneously, especially when one of them doesn't exist," Kame said kindly. "You'll get it. It took me three days to get the hang of it. Though I did get interrupted a lot..."
"I'm sure you were quite the demonic overachiever," Jin said, hoping it was a property of Kame's body rather than his soul and therefore he'd inherited it.
He stood next to the bed, midway between the source and the destination. Dark green pillow, nothing special, a little flat in the middle from years of use. He restocked the magic, held both hands out in front of him and tried to project the pillow, this time, rather than reaching for it. He didn't want it glued to his hand; Kame had been using it for the last two nights and would likely need it again tonight unless Jin made ridiculous amounts of progress in the next half a day.
He should probably have laundered the bedding, what with having a guest and all. Then again, the guest was in his body, so did it really count? Kame must have his own bed somewhere, wherever it was demons lived. Did they have homes? Or did they live in tiny dormitories, only allowed out to gather souls for their boss?
"Jin, no!"
Kame's shout rang hoarse and afraid in Jin's ears as the world winked out.
-----
"I thought we agreed to use the front door in case one of us had someone over. It was your idea, Kame!"
"Huh?" Jin stared blankly at the short, spiky-haired blond man pacing up and down before him.
"Have you been drinking again?" The stranger thrust a hand under Jin's chin, holding him still so he could look him in the eyes. "You do look kind of out of it. Did you bring any back? Say you did and I'll forgive you for teleporting straight into my room."
"Your...room?"
Jin wrenched his chin free and backed up against the wall, suddenly confronted by someone who, from the sound of things, lived with Kame. Which meant he was probably a...
"You're a demon too!" Jin gasped.
The demon stared at him like he'd lost his marbles. "Yes, Kame. I'm a demon. You're a demon. The two creeps living next door are demons. Everyone in this whole damned building is a demon. Welcome back to reality. Did you have a nice trip?"
Welcome back. To where? Jin scanned the room, looking for anything that might give him a clue to his location. There wasn't much. A rumpled double bed, a half-open wardrobe with chains glinting between the doors, a nightstand with a small lamp, and a massive desk covered in sheets of paper. Above the desk, a large map of Tokyo was pinned to the wall.
At least the demon spoke Japanese. He looked Japanese too, despite the blond hair. It might even be natural, though he doubted it - having had the opportunity to take a closer look at Kame's hair, Jin had seen darker roots starting to peek through.
"Hey." The spiky-haired demon clicked his fingers in front of Jin's eyes. "You okay? Did that musician you were after get you wasted or something before you could take him?"
"I'm fine." As fine as he could be without knowing where he was or who he was with. "I'm not drunk. Or high, or crazy, or anything else!"
"You didn't get him, did you?"
"Get who?"
"That Akanishi guy you picked out for your next target. Something went wrong, that's why you've come back empty-handed, in someone else's clothes - no way do you own jeans that baggy - just dropping in suddenly instead of coming through the front door like we agreed."
"He didn't- I mean, I didn't!" Jin didn't know if it was better to own up and hope Kame's roommate would be as friendly as Kame, or bluff his way out and hope he could reverse whatever he did to get there. "And I forgot, that's all."
"And the clothes?"
"What's wrong with my clothes!"
"Whoah, there." The demon held up his hands. "A man's clothes are his own business, fine. I'll forget it. Now could you please go polish the mirrors or do some laundry or clean whatever it is you need to clean to calm down?"
Cleaning. Right. This explained a lot about why Kame kept insisting on rinsing the dishes the second they were done with them. "S-sure. I can do that." He made for the door, hoping the apartment would be easy to navigate.
The door led to a small corridor. Jin made a guess and ended up in the bathroom. That, at least, had a lock. He bolted the door and sank down on the closed toilet lid to stop and think for a moment. He had to get out of here - wherever 'here' was - and he had to do it without Kame's help, before the roommate noticed something was up.
Deep breath. Be one with the universe, and all that. Now, what had he done wrong? He'd looked at the pillow, tried to project it...and then gotten sidetracked thinking about Kame's home. Instead of moving the pillow, he'd moved himself.
And Kame had no idea where he was. He didn't have his cell phone, couldn't call home - could he even get a signal from here? It didn't seem like he could be anywhere near home. Even in Tokyo, an entire building full of demons couldn't go unnoticed, could they? Maybe in Akihabara...
He tried to visualise how to reverse the trip when a knock on the door derailed his train of thought. "Kame?"
"Yeah?" he called back.
"If you're sticking around for a while, want me to order in something for lunch? I'm supposed to be stalking this girl tonight so I gotta have something now. I'm thinking pizza?"
"Sounds great!"
"Toppings?"
"Uh...salami, peppers-" Jin broke off when the demon appeared before him, eyes blazing.
"You're not Kame. So you have exactly five seconds to tell me who you are before I set the dogs on you."
"How did you...oh." The peppers. Of course. "Um...I'm the musician?"
"You're the..." The demon shook his head. "No. No way. Did Tegoshi put you up to this? Because it's not funny. There is no possible way a human just magically appeared in my bedroom. Life doesn't work like that."
"I don't know who the hell you're talking about, but you're right, I'm not Kame," Jin babbled. "I'm Akanishi Jin, the guy whose soul he was trying to take. Something went wrong, we ended up switching, and now he's stuck in my body with no magic and I'm...I don't even know where I am. Or who you are. Or how I'm supposed to get home!"
"Wonderful." The demon perched on the edge of the bath, looking more drained than dangerous. "He's usually such a great roommate, you know? Cooks like a dream, loves cleaning, good with the dogs - never any trouble, just rolls around on the couch a lot. Do you even know how to work the washing machine?"
"Huh?" Jin spluttered, too baffled to panic. "Can't you just use magic or something?"
"Yeah, but it'd be a waste. If I used magic for household chores I'd be spending too much time asleep to steal any souls, and then where would I be?"
Jin coughed. "Could you maybe not talk about that?"
"What? Uh, yeah, whatever. I need to figure out how to get you out and Kame back in." As an afterthought, the demon added, "I'm Koki, by the way."
"Charmed."
"Maybe you are, and that's why you're here..."
Koki insisted they move from the bathroom so he could order pizza, because he wasn't going to think of anything on an empty stomach and clearly, Jin wasn't going to think of anything at all. Jin couldn't argue with him. Koki had to know more about magic than he did.
He explained about Kame showing up in his bathroom, and the business with the cracked mirror and shredded manga, and how he'd been learning to use magic so somehow he could switch their souls back again. "I need my life back," he finished. "Kame can't play guitar and I can't steal souls. And he definitely can't meet my family. Does he even have family? Do demons have families?"
"Kame's got three brothers and they all look like him," Koki said. "What, you think we're not people because we're not human?"
"Sorry..."
"And don't worry, we'll definitely get you two switched back again. We'll never make this month's quota with just me working. So many souls..." Koki sighed. "You're getting in the way of us paying our rent."
"I don't think Kame's going to be doing much to help with my rent," Jin pointed out. "He's not too enamoured with my job. So you're not the only one being inconvenienced."
They called a truce since the pizza boxes materialised on the coffee table ("They teleport it in," Koki explained. "Much faster service.") and Koki made Jin describe in great detail how he'd come to appear in the apartment. The second time he took notes. The third time he drew diagrams, complete with stick figures and arrows, and a couple of spots of grease from the pizza.
"Couldn't you just teleport me back?" Jin asked. "I could tell you where I'm supposed to be."
"Uh uh. After hearing how you screwed up Kame's magic? No thanks. We could end up merged, or worse. You're taking yourself home."
"Your diagrams are going to help with that?"
"It seems simple to me," Koki said. "You got distracted, so your focus changed. You forgot about moving the pillow to the end of the bed, and moved yourself to the place you were thinking about - Kame's home. So think about moving to your home instead, or wherever it is you want to go."
"Home," Jin said firmly. "I need to go home. Kame's probably going nuts wondering where I am."
"Then expect to find your place cleaned to within an inch of its life."
Perhaps there were benefits to having Kame as a roommate after all. Jin wiped his hands on a napkin (he didn't know where the pizza had come from and didn't like to ask, but it hadn't tasted weird or anything) closed his eyes, and reached for his magic.
Home. He'd been in the same apartment since he moved out, walls bearing silent witness to hours and hours of practice, to the party he'd thrown after the first time he'd been allowed to take the stage, to good dates and bad dates and everything in between. His apartment had been his sanctuary when he'd fallen out with friends; his comfort when he'd worried if he was even good enough to pursue his dreams. He knew every inch of it, where the floorboards creaked and where spiders liked to hide if he didn't clean often enough. There was nowhere inside that he couldn't picture in his mind.
Except Kame. Where would Kame be? Cleaning, if Koki was to be believed. Maybe Kame was still where Jin had left him, sitting on the edge of the bed, waiting for Jin to figure out how to get himself home. Maybe he'd grown tired of waiting and was taking a nap, lying with his head on that same green pillow...
The room dissolved right along with the magic, leaving Jin flat on his back, staring up at his own ceiling. (He knew it was his by the shape of the water stains.)
Kame's hands seized his shoulders. "Where did you go? What have you been doing for the last two hours?"
"Eating pizza with your roommate." Jin tried to sit up, but Kame kept him pinned to the bed. "He seems nice. He thought you'd be cleaning."
"Already did that while you were sleeping the morning away." Kame grimaced, unwrapping his fingers from Jin's shoulders and sitting back on his heels. "Then I tried to phone home to see if I could get hold of someone with magic to help me look for you, and discovered that cell phones don't work across different dimensions. I...er...sort of fried mine in the process."
"You..." Jin struggled up onto his elbows to find two phones side by side on the nightstand: his, and one he'd never seen before. "Please tell me you didn't try mine."
"Yours is locked. I didn't touch it." Jin reached for the phone and Kame added, "Much."
The phone showed two failed attempts, neither of which were the correct password of '1582'. (Jin had once tried his hand at writing a song based on Japanese history, but thrown in the towel after Yamapi had suggested he might want to build up his fanbase before going all out and singing about dead samurai and their male lovers. The phone password was all that remained.)
"I'm sorry about your phone," Jin said, though it wasn't technically his fault. "I got kind of distracted when I tried to move the pillow. Koki told me it was because I was thinking about where you lived, so that's where I went."
"You weren't even supposed to move yourself." Kame whacked him in the stomach with the offending pillow. "You were supposed to move this. Teleporting was for next week."
Jin grinned at him, ignoring the pillow. "I skipped ahead?"
"You try to move like that when you try to move our souls, I think the two of us are going end up in one body, or joined at the hip, or something equally disturbing. Try a little discipline for a change. I know you're one of those free-spirited musician types, Jin, but it wouldn't kill you to focus - and it might kill you if you don't."
Jin's smile faded. Kame looked furious. Jin had never seen his own face so cold, so locked into hard, straight planes of solid ice. Those eyes alone could freeze him over.
And then everything melted, and Kame looked at him with grateful eyes and said, "But I'm glad you made it back. I didn't want to be stuck working in Family Mart for the rest of your life."
"That makes two of us!"
"Three of us," came a familiar voice from the foot of the bed, where Koki had materialised.
"How did you-" Jin began, and Koki interrupted.
"I got a lock on your body. I mean, Kame's body." Koki looked across at Kame. "And you have to be..."
Kame grinned sheepishly. "Good to see you." He caught up his roommate in a hug, leaving Jin alone on the bed and oddly irritated by the sight. His body had no right to be hugging people when he wasn't in it.
Koki looked taken aback for a moment, but after a minute of firing questions at Kame he declared himself satisfied that this was indeed the real one, and that they needed to switch back as soon as possible. "I can't get enough souls by myself," he said. "If we fall behind you know they'll ask questions, and I'm going to have to explain why you've suddenly dropped off the radar."
"I know, but..." Kame sighed. "Jin can't do it, and I can't do anything like this. I still have to figure out what went wrong with the transference last time before I let him anywhere near trying it, especially after what happened today."
"Want a second opinion?" Koki said. "I've got a little time before I have to go see about this girl. She's a singer too - hope she's less trouble than your one."
Jin glared at him. "I hope she gives you so much trouble you have to leave her soul alone."
Koki glared back. "Can we just dispose of him afterwards?" he asked Kame.
"Definitely not." Kame pushed down the waistband of his jeans to reveal the tattoo on his hip. "You can't tell me you didn't see this when you appeared here, Koki. You know I've marked him. He's mine now."
A shiver ran down Jin's spine at this, though he didn't think it was necessarily sinister. Possessive, yes, but somehow that didn't seem so bad.
"You're insane." Koki turned to Jin. "And you must be just as bad."
"Koki," Kame warned.
"I don't want to see anything bad happen to you," Koki said. "Where else am I going to find a roommate who cooks as well as you do?"
"Koki!"
Koki broke into a grin; for a second, Jin thought he caught a glimpse of fangs. "You've got just under two weeks before the situation becomes critical. You need to figure this out quick, Kame."
At Koki's insistence, the three of them crammed into the bathroom to walk through the failed soul transfer - Koki had to stand in the shower. Jin positioned himself in front of the cracked mirror, which he still needed to replace, and Kame loomed over him from behind. They were in the wrong bodies, of course, but that couldn't be helped.
"The ritual started out fine," Kame said, holding up the notebook he was using to represent the ruined Shounen Jump issue. "The manga started glowing red, ready for transfer."
"Yeah." Jin fought back queasiness at the recollection. It hadn't been the best of days. "I saw the glow in the mirror. Then I looked at you, and your eyes were..." This was going to be embarrassing, but Jin couldn't think of any better way to put it. "I got lost in your eyes. I couldn't help it. It was like you were pulling me in."
"Your eyes." Kame ran a hand over his own. "We...we locked eyes. In the middle of the ritual."
"Sounds like I'm not the only one who can get distracted during magic," Jin said quietly.
Part 3
Pairing: Kame x Jin
Word count: 25,470
Rating: PG
Disclaimer: Not mine, damnit
Part 1
In the Mind's Eye 2/3
"I hurt it at work," Kame said, rubbing his neck with his unbandaged hand. "Burned it. So I had to bring a friend to accompany me; hope that's okay?" He nodded towards Jin, standing in the doorway of Ueda's tiny office with his guitar case over his shoulder.
"As long as I only have to pay one of you, no problem." Ueda leaned back in his chair and beckoned Jin to come in. He'd had a haircut lately and gone back to his natural black, replacing his former princess style with a more suave, elegantly confident look that Jin found vaguely intimidating. There were rumours he'd won Mouse Peace in a boxing match and they finally seemed believable. "What's your name?"
"It's Kame-" Jin froze, seeking inspiration, and found it in the pear sitting untouched on Ueda's desk. "-nashi. Kamenashi Kazuya. Nice to meet you." He bowed a greeting, which Ueda returned.
"He's an old friend," Kame added. "In town for a while."
"How nice for him." To Jin, Ueda said, "You get one drink on the house - anything else, you're paying for. You'll have to negotiate with Akanishi over there for your cut."
"Got it." Good thing sweat didn't show on Jin's plain black T-shirt, because the longer they spent in Ueda's office, the more pronounced the prickling became. What if Kame did something weird? What if Jin answered to his own name? What if...
"Don't look so nervous," Kame said. "You're going to be great. We're going to be great."
"You'd better be," Ueda said. "Or you don't get paid."
They left the office for the soundcheck, Ueda remaining behind to finish his snack, so Jin gave Kame a quick tour of the place.
"Mouse Peace is a cafe club style live house," Jin explained, taking Kame into the main room. He had to speak quietly, since other staff were floating around and they knew him well enough that he'd look suspicious giving explanations to himself. "Ueda's the master here, and he's picky about the acts he lets play on his stage. Nothing too wild, mostly melodic rock. He'll spend the evening tending bar over there."
The bar ran along the right wall, near the door, where patrons who'd had too much could be discreetly escorted off the premises. Three steps led to the raised stage along the front wall, where someone had placed Jin's usual stool in the centre. Small, cosy tables filled the floor, waiting for customers to arrive. Jin sometimes sat there too, watching the other performers, picking up what he could, networking when the opportunity presented itself. (Not often, because that involved talking to strangers, and Jin's skills in that area were somewhat lacking.)
"You make much money like this?" Kame asked.
Jin shook his head. "If I did, you think I'd still be working at Family Mart? I just play every chance I get, and Pi lets me finish early when I have a show to do so long as I make it up another time. I can't make a living from this, though. Not yet."
Maybe not ever, but even if doing the show with Kame went horribly wrong, it was still more of a chance than he'd have had if the demon had succeeded in stealing his soul.
They ran through the soundcheck with Junno, Ueda's engineer and number one underling. He accepted Jin's presence easily enough on the grounds that anyone Ueda hadn't thrown out, had to be okay.
"He's easygoing," Jin muttered to Kame when Junno disappeared off the side of the stage. "Just don't let him challenge you to a game of billiards. Not for money. And try to laugh at his puns, even the really bad ones. Our sound quality's in his hands."
"If I only had my magic I could-" Kame checked himself. "Forget I said anything."
"Could I-" Jin wiggled his fingers, sadly empty of magic at the moment.
"No." Kame picked up Jin's guitar case with his unbandaged hand. "Now get to work before I forget the tunes."
Bossy little demon. Still, Jin found it reassuring that Kame was taking this so seriously. Perhaps they wouldn't be laughed off the stage after all. If they pulled this off, with next to no rehearsal time and no experience working together at all, it would be a miracle. (Like all the other miraculous things that had happened to Jin since leaving work last night...)
The mic was set up by the stool, since Jin usually sat for the show, but this time he left it for Kame to adjust and took the stool for himself, off to left, where he could play without them knocking into each other. Kame had a moment of confusion after initially adjusting the mic to his own height, rather than Jin's; soon remedied, and he clutched it like a starving child holding a bar of chocolate. Jin hoped he wouldn't try to bite it.
They didn't have time for more than a couple of songs, which Jin had picked on the way over. 'Genki', because he thought Kame could do with something light to ease him in, and 'Care', which was to be their opening number.
The fingers of Kame's body were shorter and stubbier than his own, making him stretch further than usual to get them around the neck of the guitar, but they seemed deft enough, for all that. Jin plucked a few experimental notes, had to tighten his A-string a little before they could commence. They didn't have an audience, only Junno down the side, and Ueda, who'd emerged from his office to rub a cloth over the bar, yet Jin felt as nervous as if they were playing to a stadium full of eager fans. If this didn't work...
Kame opened his mouth - opened Jin's mouth, sang with Jin's voice - and the words poured forth as if he'd written them himself. Perhaps the body remembered, even if currently occupied by a stranger. Remembered every pencil stroke in a tatty old notebook, every beat tapped out by nicotine-stained fingers. The music was in Jin's bones, in his body, and that's where Kame happened to be right now.
He sang with more confidence than he had in the store, able to let his voice sound loud and clear to reach the back tables. No one would ever have guessed he'd learned the lyrics only that afternoon, had sung the song no more than a few times in his life. He didn't falter once, which was more than could be said for Jin. Normally having longer fingers, he sometimes fell short of the strings and had to start looking down at himself to keep from missing.
"You sure you're not the one with the injured hand?" Ueda said to him afterwards.
Jin smiled apologetically. "Just a little rusty on the songs. I'll be fine now I've had the practice."
"Sounded good to me." Kame thumped Jin on the back, turned to Ueda, and grinned. "I have complete faith in Ji- in Kamenashi."
"Should you be hitting people with that hand?" Ueda asked.
"It's numb right now," Kame said, smooth as silk. "Still waiting for the injection to wear off. Can't feel a thing yet."
Ueda left them to start opening up. Jin had to ask. "I thought you said you couldn't lie?"
"You only noticed that now? I've been lying to Ueda since we got here. Anyway, I said my kind can't lie." Kame ran his tongue under his upper teeth. "I also said it was up to you whether or not to believe me. I'm a demon. Why would you believe a word I say in the first place?"
"You...seemed like you meant it." Jin hated feeling foolish. Had any of his friends taken him in in this way, he'd have resented it. Kame wasn't a friend...but then, Kame wasn't human, either, and while Jin hadn't met any of his kind before, he felt he couldn't judge demons by human standards. Maybe it was all bad press, who knew?
"I lied about that. Not about anything else," Kame said. "Not to you. I'll tell you if I do."
Jin didn't see the point in that but they didn't have time to get into a philosophical debate on the nature of truth in the universe. Ryo, Ueda's smart-mouthed number two underling, was already in place by the door, preparing to sell tickets to the fans waiting outside.
Mouse Peace didn't sell tickets in advance; patrons bought on the door, specifying which act - when there was more than one - they'd come to see. Jin's share of the take relied heavily on the fact that Ryo liked him and could be persuaded to write down his name more often than warranted, provided Jin bought him the odd beer and never refused to let him steal a cigarette. Since Jin didn't yet have enough fans to fill the live house for the night by himself, he was resigned to getting a smaller piece of the pie than some of his peers.
Hence the day job. No one ever said being a musician was profitable.
At least Kame didn't need the money - or wouldn't once he had his own body back. Jin didn't have to split anything.
Anything except the love of the crowd, who didn't know him in this body. They weren't here to see the short redhead strumming the guitar. He could've been anyone.
They were here to see Akanishi Jin - some of them, at any rate - and Kame gave them what they wanted, proving he'd been paying attention during his stalking period. Jin couldn't watch him all the time, had to keep half an eye on his fingers, but there didn't appear to be anything artificial about Kame's smile, or about the raw emotion in his voice when he sang 'Hatachi no Sensou'. He cracked in all the right places, pleaded with his eyes and voice for the crowd to fall in love with his music.
Jin wanted so badly to sing. Keeping his mouth shut was nigh on impossible. His words, his tunes, his feelings laid out in musical form for the world to hear. Sadness, pain, joy, hope and despair of the kind he doubted the demon had ever felt. Human emotions were the most powerful source of inspiration any songwriter could ask for.
Could demons feel the same?
Kame had introduced them both to start, waving his bandaged hand in the air to explain the addition of a guitarist. It was easy to tell who was here to see Jin - nobody else looked surprised. Happily, there were a number of them, and Jin couldn't help but wave. He got a few waves back, too.
By the time they reached 'Eternal', Jin had stopped watching his fingers. He didn't need to anymore. He watched the audience instead, watched the men and women watching him with interest in their eyes, some focused on his hands and others on his face. Kame's face. The demon's beauty had struck him the moment he'd entered the store; Jin felt a trifle unnerved by the thought that people were staring at him, finding his face attractive, when it wasn't his face at all.
It wasn't his voice either. He mouthed along with the lyrics, silently at first, then louder when he realised no one could hear him anyway. Singing in Kame's voice in Family Mart had been almost too strange to handle. Singing on a stage? Far more natural. Jin didn't dare try the high notes but Kame's voice sounded much sweeter to him now.
And then it was all over, and Kame was giving his thanks to the crowd. Jin bowed too, only just remembering to move the guitar from his lap in time to avoid cracking his head on it. He'd seen the inside of Ueda's first aid kit before. Never again.
When they relinquished the stage to the next act, a band of seven young men clutching instrument cases and bottles of water, Jin made a beeline for the bar to claim his free drink. They'd had water on the stage, but Ueda preferred performers to save the alcohol for afterwards, citing evidence of past misadventures with such an evil smile that neither of them felt inclined to cross him.
He looked askance at Kame asking for wine. "Didn't you say wine made you sick?"
"It's for Kamenashi," Kame said before Jin could get a word in. "I'll have my usual."
They took receipt of two glasses: red wine and vodka. Jin hoped Ueda wouldn't notice them swapping - he hadn't been kidding about the wine making him ill. Moving to the very end of the bar solved that problem. Ueda didn't encourage sitting at the bar, but as the tables were reserved for paying customers, performers had nowhere else to go.
"Sorry about the wine," Kame said, just about audible over the sounds from the front of the club. "I didn't think to check what you liked to drink."
Jin shrugged. "Beer, vodka, cocktails...not too fussy. I mean, if I drink enough of anything, it'll make me sick, but wine..." He shuddered, hoping the bad memory would take the hint and not make itself instantly available.
"Here." Kame took the wine, sipping delicately at it while Jin made a start on his glass of vodka. "Well? How was I?"
"You've ruined my music career," Jin said, completely straightfaced. "I'll be working at Family Mart for the rest of my life now."
"Oi!"
"Not really." Though Kame sounded mock-offended, his eyes held enough hesitation that Jin felt bad about teasing him. Why his opinion should matter to a demon, he had no idea. "I thought you sounded pretty good."
"We sounded pretty good," Kame corrected. "Great, in fact. The tables down in the front obviously thought so too."
"What about the ones in the back?"
"Can't tell in this body."
"But this body," Jin patted his own chest, "doesn't have super sight, or anything like that, does it?"
"No, but I can use magic to fake it. Much easier to stalk people when you can see through walls and stuff."
Jin resolved to try this later. Not that he wanted to see through walls - not when his neighbours were about a hundred years old - but enhanced senses would be nice.
"Did you...did you enjoy it?" he asked, fairly confident of the answer but wanting to be sure.
Kame set down the glass and beamed at him. "That might be the most fun I've had since Matsumoto accidentally forgot to fill in a 221B form. We all laughed for days."
Jin shook his head. Disbelief didn't even begin to cover it. "You seriously need to learn how to enjoy yourself over something other than screwed up paperwork."
"I'm trying." Kame drained his glass. "Now can we go back to your place and have another session, or do you have a third job we need to get to?"
"This is the last one," Jin assured him. "And tomorrow I have a day off. No work."
"Perfect! I'm not letting you leave your apartment at all tomorrow!"
Unfortunately for Jin, Ueda returned just in time to hear this. "I had no idea you swung that way, Akanishi..."
-----
Magic practice had to take a backseat to food, because after a day of being unable to eat unless no one but Kame was around, Jin felt ravenous. They stopped off on the way home at a stand-up udon bar; after consuming a bowl of thick, hot noodles, Jin felt full but not yet satisfied. He didn't want more food, though. That wasn't it.
The food didn't seem to help with the tiredness, either. He usually felt energised after a show, and with tomorrow being a day off, he would normally have considered staying on longer at Mouse Peace, talking to customers and trying to win over new fans. Tonight, no way. He was coming down a lot faster than usual, and all he wanted to do was curl up and sleep.
Kame frowned when he heard this. "Keeping that veil up for most of the day took it out of you. Sorry, I should've figured it would be harder for a human. Go to sleep, and we'll pick up again in the morning."
"Sorry." Jin yawned. "I know we're not really getting anywhere with this whole bodyswitching thing."
"It's okay. I can't push you till you drop dead of exhaustion - then I never get my body back!"
Jin couldn't be bothered to hit Kame with the pillow. He had better uses for it.
He woke up late the next morning, somewhat refreshed but still rough around the edges with a tiredness that sleep couldn't seem to cure. He stretched on the couch, not moving until Kame crept up and poked his bare stomach where it peeked out from under his T-shirt. Jin squealed, curling up at one end of the couch, so Kame promptly sat down next to him.
"We're going to start off with breakfast," he said.
"Great." Jin rubbed sleep from his eyes. "What are we having?"
"Whatever your imagination can provide."
"Huh?"
"Manifestation." Kame looked up as a click sound indicated that the kettle had boiled. "I'll give you a head start, though. Go get washed; I'll make the coffee."
"Since when have you known how to work my kettle?"
Kame poked him again. "Some of us have been awake for the last four hours, waiting for you to wake up. That's a lot of time to play with buttons."
Jin couldn't smell smoke and there didn't appear to be any debris lying around, so he assumed Kame hadn't blown anything up during his experiments. Hopefully it was safe to get up.
Once Jin looked more-or-less human and had a shot of caffeine in his system, Kame started up with the lesson.
"Soul transference requires you to have a very firm idea in your head of an intangible object - something you can't detect with your senses. It's harder than you think. If your mind wanders for a millisecond, the soul will be scattered all over the universe."
Jin gulped. This sounded like an awfully roundabout route to get breakfast. "You're not suggesting an intangible breakfast, are you? Because I don't think that would be very satisfying."
"Before you can even think about intangible objects, you need to learn to hold your focus on tangible ones. The best way to learn that is with something that doesn't exist yet. Then you can't mess it up too much. At the worst it'll wreck your carpet."
"This is a rental apartment..."
Kame ignored him. "What do you feel like eating? Make sure it's something you can visualise."
It was hard to go wrong with bread, Jin thought. "Toast."
"White bread? Brown bread? Granary? Plain? Butter? Jam? Cheese? Be specific."
Jin held up his hands against Kame's onslaught of questions. "Um...white bread, buttered. Do I have to imagine a plate as well?"
Kame looked down at the carpet. "I'll let you have a plate. If you can manage to get it on the plate, that's good practice too." He retrieved one from the cupboard and set it down on the floor. "Now, gather some magic. This isn't going to be too different from what you did yesterday; we're just going to take it further, that's all."
By now Jin had managed to get the hang of extracting the magic from inside, only flinching a bit at the contact with his spine. He held it out to the atmosphere as he had when creating a veil, tried to push his hands together to build the toast, and-
"Stop!" Kame commanded. "You're turning invisible again. I said this wasn't going to be too different; I didn't say it would be identical. Drop the veil and listen."
Sure enough, Jin's arms were fading out of existence, even to his own eyes. He hastily dismissed the veil with the trick Kame had taught him yesterday: imagine a waterfall, with cool, clean water washing away every trace of magic.
"Listening."
"Okay." Kame's eyes lingered on Jin's hands, softening when they no longer flickered. "Before you release the magic into the atmosphere, you have to make a container for it, or all you'll do is thicken the air again. Picture the slice of toast on the plate. Think about the texture, the taste. Think about the shape. Know this slice of toast inside out, till it's so real to you that you can practically see it."
"Become one with the toast, got it."
Kame grinned. "That's for after you've made it appear."
Jin leaned back against the couch and fixed his eyes on the plate. It remained stubbornly empty, staring back at him plain and blank. He'd done this before, hadn't he? With the turtle tattoo. Made something appear where it hadn't existed before. He could do it again.
Picturing toast was easy. Picturing toast on the plate: still no problem. Picturing it so he could see it somewhere other than his mind's eye: not so simple. Jin didn't care for hallucinations.
He tried to will it into existence, yelling inside his head for it to appear, as if he could force it if only his demands were loud enough. He tried drawing mental pictures, imagining his hand guiding a pencil around the plate till he could see the outline of the toast.
Then his stomach growled, so he got distracted.
"You're not quite getting this, are you?" Kame said.
"I'm trying!"
"Think of it this way: succeed or starve. But no pressure."
"So this is what demons are really like..."
Jin persevered, since he didn't fancy starving to death and it didn't look like Kame was going to let him find food by normal methods. Maybe the hunger would help. He could imagine the taste in his mouth, imagine the warm scent of freshly-toasted bread tickling his nose. Mmm, that was it. He licked his lips. This was going to taste so good, this thick slab of bread with hot melted butter seeping gently inside...
"Can I have a slice too?" Kame asked. "I don't think it would fit in your toaster, but it looks delicious."
"Eh?"
Kame pointed to the plate, where a giant wedge of buttered toast just barely dangled above the carpet. "I guess you didn't need to listen after all."
"What did I do?" Jin looked down at his hands, which no longer tingled with magic. He didn't even recall releasing it.
"You used the magic to give form to an idea of a slice of toast. If that even counts as a slice. Half a loaf, maybe."
"Hey!" Jin scooped up his breakfast. "I was hungry, okay?"
For a magical construct, it certainly tasted like the real thing, right down to the bland bits in the corners where Jin always missed with a knife. Kame let him finish it before asking him to repeat the exercise.
"Practice makes perfect," Kame said. "And I'm hungry too."
He made Jin do it twice more - with normal sized slices, this time - and pay better attention to his actions, so that Jin could actually feel the magic leaving through his fingertips, directed to the plate and the vision of toast lying upon it. The second time Kame wanted strawberry jam, so Jin had to adjust his mental image. He succeeded, but...
"Jin?"
Jin didn't realise he'd zoned out until Kame called him, and the toast had been completely consumed. "Yeah?"
"You look exhausted," Kame said flatly. "Do you even realise you're halfway to lying down?"
"Hmm?"
Kame worked one hand under Jin's arm, helped him sit up straight again. Jin let his head loll back against the couch, glad they were already on the floor. That bone-deep exhaustion from last night was making a comeback - not that it had ever really left, but he'd been able to put it aside till now. Not for much longer, though.
"I need to go back to sleep, sorry," he said. "I know I haven't been awake all that long, but..." He closed his eyes. The couch was too high up for him to reach; he could sleep on the floor, no problem, even sitting up like this. If Kame would just stop talking at him...
"It's not sleep you need." Kame shook him roughly by the shoulder. "Jin? Don't go to sleep. Talk to me."
"Too tired to talk." Jin couldn't keep from slurring. Even his lips were tired. "Started last night, still there this morning. Can you pass me a pillow?"
"You don't need to sleep; you need to...feed."
"More toast?"
"Not food. Not human food." Kame sighed. "You need blood."
"Blood? This body's anaemic?"
"Not exactly. I...I didn't know if it would be an issue, but it looks like there's no way around it." Kame ran a finger down one of the veins in his forearm. "Human food sustains my body, for the most part. But a demon's soul gets hungry too. We feed on other people's lives - on their blood."
Sounded like vampires. Jin didn't get along well with horror movies. "So why...why aren't you hungry? Why is it making me tired, when your soul's in my body?"
"Because my soul and body are still linked, just as yours are," Kame explained. "If I don't feed, I feel tired because I don't have enough life left. I'm starved in here," he tapped his forehead, "but I feel it here." He placed his hand over Jin's heart.
It was easy to forget Kame wasn't human until he started talking about souls, and blood, and things Jin wasn't sure he wanted to understand. What he did manage to understand from all of this was that if he didn't get some blood in him soon, well...he didn't want to know.
"You should lie down," Kame said.
"That's what I've been trying to do for the last five minutes."
"Not here. Come on."
With Kame's help, Jin made it over to the bed, crashing down gracelessly on the mattress. Kame rolled him onto his back and knelt down next to the bed, leaning over to talk.
Jin giggled. The big, bad vampire demon bending over him, about to suck his blood, like he was a young girl in a horror movie. About to be... Hang on a second.
"Shouldn't this be the other way around?" he asked, hoping Kame could understand his mumbles. Talking was such hard work. "Me drinking your blood?"
"My soul needs it, not yours. But if this doesn't work, we'll switch." Kame rubbed his nose. "It's not like I've got prior experience with this."
"That makes two of us..."
Kame left for a few minutes; Jin heard the sound of drawers opening, and then Kame returned with a knife. "I'd normally use my teeth," he said, "but you don't have fangs, and you're too exhausted to make mine grow. So we'll have to use this. I've sterilised it."
So Jin wouldn't get infected while he was being cut open and drained, wonderful. "Could...could we maybe go get you a pint at a hospital or something?"
"This'll be fine, I promise. And I'm not lying to you."
"Easy for you to say that - you're not the one about to get sliced open."
"I don't need much. Relax, Jin. A little blood, and you'll feel so much better. I know what it's like, feeling that you can't move, that even just existing takes up so much of your energy you've got nothing left." Kame's voice dropped to a whisper. "I can make it better for you."
This might've been reassuring if not for the small, sharp, vegetable knife in Kame's hand. Jin wouldn't be using it to chop carrots again. Not after feeling like one himself.
Jin's T-shirt left most of his arms exposed; Kame picked up his left by the wrist, laying it flat on the bed, still cradled by Kame's fingers. Jin's own fingers curled up in reflex, nails digging into his palm. He couldn't help tensing. This was more reckless than anything he'd ever done, up to and including some of the motorbike stunts he'd pulled in his late teens. At least he'd had a choice back then. Not this time.
Kame rubbed his thumb gently over Jin's wrist; Jin clenched his fist tighter and shuddered, dreading what was to come. Pain had never been his forte.
"Y-you do this a lot?"
"Couple of times a week. Normally I can make the donors forget, but...that takes magic, and you have all of mine."
Jin didn't see how anyone could possibly forget having their blood drunk, but magic, as he was learning, could do strange things to people. Bring things into being that didn't exist, and hide those that were already there. If only he could use it to get himself past this. He could wake up and Kame would have all the blood he needed.
Kame set the knife aside for a moment to brush Jin's bangs away from his forehead. "Calm down; I know what I'm doing."
"You're in my body, and my body has no idea what you're doing," Jin protested, words growing thicker by the moment. The longer they delayed, the worse he felt.
"Relax. Close your eyes if it would help."
For a demon, Kame's bedside manner wasn't too bad - and it did help to not be able to see sunlight glinting off the knife when Kame picked it up again. Jin screwed his eyes shut, trying to take deep, calming breaths. He could do this.
His breath caught on the sting of the knife, but he didn't open his eyes until Kame's mouth closed over his wrist, tongue lapping warm and wet against the broken skin. Not like a pet - like a lover, cradling him with strong fingers, holding him steady and safe. Kame's other hand, no longer holding the knife, rested lightly on Jin's stomach; Jin watched it start to circle. Anything was better than watching the life being sucked out of him.
Kame didn't look like a movie vampire, though. No red eyes, no dripping fangs, no clawed fingers driven into unwilling flesh. Of course, given that he currently looked like Jin, any changes in this direction would've been most unwelcome. If not for the nagging pain in his arm, Jin could've mistaken Kame's actions for romance, not nourishment. He'd had various parts of his anatomy sucked before, but generally without blood being involved, and this way wasn't as much fun.
Not until he started to notice the effects. The more blood Kame took, the more alive Jin felt, energy slowly returning to restore his heavy, useless limbs to action. For every drop he lost, he grew more alert. Running marathons might not be on the cards yet but sitting up, he could certainly manage.
"Ouch!"
Kame licked the leftover blood from his lips and sat up straight, blinking. "I told you to relax, not get up and move about!"
"Sorry..."
Jin checked his wrist, which Kame still held. He hadn't torn anything by pulling free, thankfully. Perhaps moving hadn't been a great idea; blood immediately welled up in the exposed cut. Kame flashed him a playful grin, bent down, and licked it away. Jin's stomach turned, but he didn't think it was the sight of his own tongue lapping up blood that did it.
"Have you had enough yet?" he asked Kame, wondering how much he could afford to lose. It didn't seem like they'd been at it all that long; blood donors gave entire pints, right? That had to be safe.
"Do you still feel like you need to lie down?"
"If I did, I wouldn't have tried to sit up," Jin pointed out.
"Then we're done. Lie back down anyway."
Jin wondered what for, but Kame had somehow managed to find his first aid kit (which he hadn't even seen for months) and set to work cleaning him up. Kame made him keep pressure on the wound, holding it higher than his heart until the blood clotted. It didn't take as long as Jin expected.
"Can I do something with magic to hide this?" he asked. "Everyone's going to think I tried to hurt myself."
Kame raised an eyebrow. "Like this? You'd be the most unsuccessful cutter ever."
"Huh?"
"Look." Kame tapped Jin's injured wrist, where the wound already seemed smaller. "I told you my body's only mostly human. This is one of the more useful non-human aspects."
No matter how long Jin stared at his skin, the cut never appeared to shrink, yet it disappeared within minutes. He wished he could take that particular trait back with him to his own body - he tended to pick up a lot of cuts from plastic at work.
"This arrangement isn't fair," Jin said. "If this body gets hungry, I get hungry. If your soul gets hungry, I get tired."
"Nobody asked you to switch bodies with me," Kame snapped. "In fact, I'd rather you hadn't. But we're stuck like this now until you learn how to switch us back."
Jin had merely been stating a fact, not intending to cause annoyance, but if he'd riled Kame, fine. Jin thought he had a right to be cross after having his life turned upside down for no better reason than that he might make a good snack for some creepy old demon. What could Kame do to him now? Nothing, because Jin had his magic.
Nothing, except lecture him.
"Now you're good to go again, let's try something else. We can't waste your day off; it's almost noon already. We'll never get anywhere like this."
"But-"
"You need to learn how to move things too, or nobody's souls will be going anywhere."
Kame's brusque, no-nonsense tone rubbed Jin up the wrong way and he couldn't help sniping back. "I thought you said you didn't even know exactly what had happened? So what makes you think you know how to reverse it, huh?"
Kame grabbed a fistful of Jin's T-shirt, hauling him off the bed so he had to either plant his feet on the floor or fall onto it. "I'm working on it, which is more than you're doing right now. Ready for your next lesson, human?"
Jin carefully unfolded Kame's fingers till he could pull his shirt free, straightened up so he could stand firm (if not tall), and placed his hands on his hips. "Bring it on."
The next magic lesson turned out to be telekinesis. "I was trying to move your soul into the manga when you somehow disrupted the transfer. You need to learn how to move."
"I know how to move." Jin executed a surprisingly flawless hip roll, considering the hips weren't his.
Kame snorted. "Not your body. Let's start with something simple - and unbreakable. See that used dressing?" He pointed to the bloodstained pad on the nightstand. "Try moving it into the bin without using your body."
So much for dancing. "And how am I supposed to do that? Throw it across the room using magic?"
"That's the idea. You put the toast on the plate by visualising an object in a specific place. This time, do it for an object that already exists. You have to keep both of them in mind at the same time - the dressing you see, and the dressing where you want it to be."
Jin's bin was a tiny, freestanding grey box beside his kitchen counter. He could barely see it from where he stood, never mind see inside it. Still, he had a vague idea what he'd be looking at. He'd changed the bag last night, so unless Kame had thrown anything away, the bin's contents would be nothing more interesting than a clear plastic sack, slightly wrinkled.
"Try it, hotshot. You don't need me to talk you through this one, do you?"
Kame's crossed arms issued a challenge as much as Jin's clenched teeth offered defiance. He'd be doing this one solo, then. No advice, no guidance. Moving a tiny pad from one place to another; how hard could it be? If that cocky little demon could master soul transference in twenty days then he, Akanishi Jin, could do it in ten.
Or less. And telekinesis? Piece of cake.
He sat back down on the bed, deliberately ignoring Kame glaring at him from the side, and fixed his gaze on the bloodstained pad. Red blood, as human as his own. Jin wondered how his body had reacted to it.
No. No wondering anything. He couldn't lose concentration. There was the pad - and there, in his mind's eye, the bin. All he had to do was merge the two. He dove down deep into himself, to find the dark, rotting velvet that gave him power, and seized as much as he dared. The experience didn't become any more pleasant with repetition.
There. Magic, tingling in his fingertips, ready to do his bidding. Jin could get used to this...if only it didn't mean living in someone else's body. He could save a fortune on food bills. He imagined the bin, mental camera peering inside at the bag, and reached...
It took Kame ten minutes to stop laughing after the bin shot across the room and attached itself to Jin's hand.
"It's not funny!"
"It is from where I'm standing!"
Not that Kame was standing, exactly. That involved having both feet on the floor, and he kept lifting his, a weird hop-clap laugh that seemed to take over his entire body. Jin was pretty sure his body had never attempted such strange contortions.
"Can you stop having a seizure and help me get this thing off my hand?"
Kame gave such a blatantly fake gasp he might as well have been on a variety show. "You mean that wasn't what you were trying to do?"
"You know it wasn't," Jin grumbled.
"Fine." Kame relented, dropping down next to Jin to examine his hand, though amusement kept his lips quirked in a smile. "Hmm, looks like it's stuck fast by magic. The waterfall trick should remove it."
After Jin washed away the magic with his mind, and then everything else in the sink, he suggested trying again with something less likely to give him bruises by ramming into his hand.
"Fair enough," Kame agreed. Laughter, even at Jin's expense, had cleared the air completely between them and Jin couldn't stay mad. "How about that pillow? Move it from the head to the foot of the bed. That should be safe enough."
"Or I'll end up with a mouthful of foam. I wonder what went wrong the first time?"
"It's not easy to keep multiple objects in mind simultaneously, especially when one of them doesn't exist," Kame said kindly. "You'll get it. It took me three days to get the hang of it. Though I did get interrupted a lot..."
"I'm sure you were quite the demonic overachiever," Jin said, hoping it was a property of Kame's body rather than his soul and therefore he'd inherited it.
He stood next to the bed, midway between the source and the destination. Dark green pillow, nothing special, a little flat in the middle from years of use. He restocked the magic, held both hands out in front of him and tried to project the pillow, this time, rather than reaching for it. He didn't want it glued to his hand; Kame had been using it for the last two nights and would likely need it again tonight unless Jin made ridiculous amounts of progress in the next half a day.
He should probably have laundered the bedding, what with having a guest and all. Then again, the guest was in his body, so did it really count? Kame must have his own bed somewhere, wherever it was demons lived. Did they have homes? Or did they live in tiny dormitories, only allowed out to gather souls for their boss?
"Jin, no!"
Kame's shout rang hoarse and afraid in Jin's ears as the world winked out.
-----
"I thought we agreed to use the front door in case one of us had someone over. It was your idea, Kame!"
"Huh?" Jin stared blankly at the short, spiky-haired blond man pacing up and down before him.
"Have you been drinking again?" The stranger thrust a hand under Jin's chin, holding him still so he could look him in the eyes. "You do look kind of out of it. Did you bring any back? Say you did and I'll forgive you for teleporting straight into my room."
"Your...room?"
Jin wrenched his chin free and backed up against the wall, suddenly confronted by someone who, from the sound of things, lived with Kame. Which meant he was probably a...
"You're a demon too!" Jin gasped.
The demon stared at him like he'd lost his marbles. "Yes, Kame. I'm a demon. You're a demon. The two creeps living next door are demons. Everyone in this whole damned building is a demon. Welcome back to reality. Did you have a nice trip?"
Welcome back. To where? Jin scanned the room, looking for anything that might give him a clue to his location. There wasn't much. A rumpled double bed, a half-open wardrobe with chains glinting between the doors, a nightstand with a small lamp, and a massive desk covered in sheets of paper. Above the desk, a large map of Tokyo was pinned to the wall.
At least the demon spoke Japanese. He looked Japanese too, despite the blond hair. It might even be natural, though he doubted it - having had the opportunity to take a closer look at Kame's hair, Jin had seen darker roots starting to peek through.
"Hey." The spiky-haired demon clicked his fingers in front of Jin's eyes. "You okay? Did that musician you were after get you wasted or something before you could take him?"
"I'm fine." As fine as he could be without knowing where he was or who he was with. "I'm not drunk. Or high, or crazy, or anything else!"
"You didn't get him, did you?"
"Get who?"
"That Akanishi guy you picked out for your next target. Something went wrong, that's why you've come back empty-handed, in someone else's clothes - no way do you own jeans that baggy - just dropping in suddenly instead of coming through the front door like we agreed."
"He didn't- I mean, I didn't!" Jin didn't know if it was better to own up and hope Kame's roommate would be as friendly as Kame, or bluff his way out and hope he could reverse whatever he did to get there. "And I forgot, that's all."
"And the clothes?"
"What's wrong with my clothes!"
"Whoah, there." The demon held up his hands. "A man's clothes are his own business, fine. I'll forget it. Now could you please go polish the mirrors or do some laundry or clean whatever it is you need to clean to calm down?"
Cleaning. Right. This explained a lot about why Kame kept insisting on rinsing the dishes the second they were done with them. "S-sure. I can do that." He made for the door, hoping the apartment would be easy to navigate.
The door led to a small corridor. Jin made a guess and ended up in the bathroom. That, at least, had a lock. He bolted the door and sank down on the closed toilet lid to stop and think for a moment. He had to get out of here - wherever 'here' was - and he had to do it without Kame's help, before the roommate noticed something was up.
Deep breath. Be one with the universe, and all that. Now, what had he done wrong? He'd looked at the pillow, tried to project it...and then gotten sidetracked thinking about Kame's home. Instead of moving the pillow, he'd moved himself.
And Kame had no idea where he was. He didn't have his cell phone, couldn't call home - could he even get a signal from here? It didn't seem like he could be anywhere near home. Even in Tokyo, an entire building full of demons couldn't go unnoticed, could they? Maybe in Akihabara...
He tried to visualise how to reverse the trip when a knock on the door derailed his train of thought. "Kame?"
"Yeah?" he called back.
"If you're sticking around for a while, want me to order in something for lunch? I'm supposed to be stalking this girl tonight so I gotta have something now. I'm thinking pizza?"
"Sounds great!"
"Toppings?"
"Uh...salami, peppers-" Jin broke off when the demon appeared before him, eyes blazing.
"You're not Kame. So you have exactly five seconds to tell me who you are before I set the dogs on you."
"How did you...oh." The peppers. Of course. "Um...I'm the musician?"
"You're the..." The demon shook his head. "No. No way. Did Tegoshi put you up to this? Because it's not funny. There is no possible way a human just magically appeared in my bedroom. Life doesn't work like that."
"I don't know who the hell you're talking about, but you're right, I'm not Kame," Jin babbled. "I'm Akanishi Jin, the guy whose soul he was trying to take. Something went wrong, we ended up switching, and now he's stuck in my body with no magic and I'm...I don't even know where I am. Or who you are. Or how I'm supposed to get home!"
"Wonderful." The demon perched on the edge of the bath, looking more drained than dangerous. "He's usually such a great roommate, you know? Cooks like a dream, loves cleaning, good with the dogs - never any trouble, just rolls around on the couch a lot. Do you even know how to work the washing machine?"
"Huh?" Jin spluttered, too baffled to panic. "Can't you just use magic or something?"
"Yeah, but it'd be a waste. If I used magic for household chores I'd be spending too much time asleep to steal any souls, and then where would I be?"
Jin coughed. "Could you maybe not talk about that?"
"What? Uh, yeah, whatever. I need to figure out how to get you out and Kame back in." As an afterthought, the demon added, "I'm Koki, by the way."
"Charmed."
"Maybe you are, and that's why you're here..."
Koki insisted they move from the bathroom so he could order pizza, because he wasn't going to think of anything on an empty stomach and clearly, Jin wasn't going to think of anything at all. Jin couldn't argue with him. Koki had to know more about magic than he did.
He explained about Kame showing up in his bathroom, and the business with the cracked mirror and shredded manga, and how he'd been learning to use magic so somehow he could switch their souls back again. "I need my life back," he finished. "Kame can't play guitar and I can't steal souls. And he definitely can't meet my family. Does he even have family? Do demons have families?"
"Kame's got three brothers and they all look like him," Koki said. "What, you think we're not people because we're not human?"
"Sorry..."
"And don't worry, we'll definitely get you two switched back again. We'll never make this month's quota with just me working. So many souls..." Koki sighed. "You're getting in the way of us paying our rent."
"I don't think Kame's going to be doing much to help with my rent," Jin pointed out. "He's not too enamoured with my job. So you're not the only one being inconvenienced."
They called a truce since the pizza boxes materialised on the coffee table ("They teleport it in," Koki explained. "Much faster service.") and Koki made Jin describe in great detail how he'd come to appear in the apartment. The second time he took notes. The third time he drew diagrams, complete with stick figures and arrows, and a couple of spots of grease from the pizza.
"Couldn't you just teleport me back?" Jin asked. "I could tell you where I'm supposed to be."
"Uh uh. After hearing how you screwed up Kame's magic? No thanks. We could end up merged, or worse. You're taking yourself home."
"Your diagrams are going to help with that?"
"It seems simple to me," Koki said. "You got distracted, so your focus changed. You forgot about moving the pillow to the end of the bed, and moved yourself to the place you were thinking about - Kame's home. So think about moving to your home instead, or wherever it is you want to go."
"Home," Jin said firmly. "I need to go home. Kame's probably going nuts wondering where I am."
"Then expect to find your place cleaned to within an inch of its life."
Perhaps there were benefits to having Kame as a roommate after all. Jin wiped his hands on a napkin (he didn't know where the pizza had come from and didn't like to ask, but it hadn't tasted weird or anything) closed his eyes, and reached for his magic.
Home. He'd been in the same apartment since he moved out, walls bearing silent witness to hours and hours of practice, to the party he'd thrown after the first time he'd been allowed to take the stage, to good dates and bad dates and everything in between. His apartment had been his sanctuary when he'd fallen out with friends; his comfort when he'd worried if he was even good enough to pursue his dreams. He knew every inch of it, where the floorboards creaked and where spiders liked to hide if he didn't clean often enough. There was nowhere inside that he couldn't picture in his mind.
Except Kame. Where would Kame be? Cleaning, if Koki was to be believed. Maybe Kame was still where Jin had left him, sitting on the edge of the bed, waiting for Jin to figure out how to get himself home. Maybe he'd grown tired of waiting and was taking a nap, lying with his head on that same green pillow...
The room dissolved right along with the magic, leaving Jin flat on his back, staring up at his own ceiling. (He knew it was his by the shape of the water stains.)
Kame's hands seized his shoulders. "Where did you go? What have you been doing for the last two hours?"
"Eating pizza with your roommate." Jin tried to sit up, but Kame kept him pinned to the bed. "He seems nice. He thought you'd be cleaning."
"Already did that while you were sleeping the morning away." Kame grimaced, unwrapping his fingers from Jin's shoulders and sitting back on his heels. "Then I tried to phone home to see if I could get hold of someone with magic to help me look for you, and discovered that cell phones don't work across different dimensions. I...er...sort of fried mine in the process."
"You..." Jin struggled up onto his elbows to find two phones side by side on the nightstand: his, and one he'd never seen before. "Please tell me you didn't try mine."
"Yours is locked. I didn't touch it." Jin reached for the phone and Kame added, "Much."
The phone showed two failed attempts, neither of which were the correct password of '1582'. (Jin had once tried his hand at writing a song based on Japanese history, but thrown in the towel after Yamapi had suggested he might want to build up his fanbase before going all out and singing about dead samurai and their male lovers. The phone password was all that remained.)
"I'm sorry about your phone," Jin said, though it wasn't technically his fault. "I got kind of distracted when I tried to move the pillow. Koki told me it was because I was thinking about where you lived, so that's where I went."
"You weren't even supposed to move yourself." Kame whacked him in the stomach with the offending pillow. "You were supposed to move this. Teleporting was for next week."
Jin grinned at him, ignoring the pillow. "I skipped ahead?"
"You try to move like that when you try to move our souls, I think the two of us are going end up in one body, or joined at the hip, or something equally disturbing. Try a little discipline for a change. I know you're one of those free-spirited musician types, Jin, but it wouldn't kill you to focus - and it might kill you if you don't."
Jin's smile faded. Kame looked furious. Jin had never seen his own face so cold, so locked into hard, straight planes of solid ice. Those eyes alone could freeze him over.
And then everything melted, and Kame looked at him with grateful eyes and said, "But I'm glad you made it back. I didn't want to be stuck working in Family Mart for the rest of your life."
"That makes two of us!"
"Three of us," came a familiar voice from the foot of the bed, where Koki had materialised.
"How did you-" Jin began, and Koki interrupted.
"I got a lock on your body. I mean, Kame's body." Koki looked across at Kame. "And you have to be..."
Kame grinned sheepishly. "Good to see you." He caught up his roommate in a hug, leaving Jin alone on the bed and oddly irritated by the sight. His body had no right to be hugging people when he wasn't in it.
Koki looked taken aback for a moment, but after a minute of firing questions at Kame he declared himself satisfied that this was indeed the real one, and that they needed to switch back as soon as possible. "I can't get enough souls by myself," he said. "If we fall behind you know they'll ask questions, and I'm going to have to explain why you've suddenly dropped off the radar."
"I know, but..." Kame sighed. "Jin can't do it, and I can't do anything like this. I still have to figure out what went wrong with the transference last time before I let him anywhere near trying it, especially after what happened today."
"Want a second opinion?" Koki said. "I've got a little time before I have to go see about this girl. She's a singer too - hope she's less trouble than your one."
Jin glared at him. "I hope she gives you so much trouble you have to leave her soul alone."
Koki glared back. "Can we just dispose of him afterwards?" he asked Kame.
"Definitely not." Kame pushed down the waistband of his jeans to reveal the tattoo on his hip. "You can't tell me you didn't see this when you appeared here, Koki. You know I've marked him. He's mine now."
A shiver ran down Jin's spine at this, though he didn't think it was necessarily sinister. Possessive, yes, but somehow that didn't seem so bad.
"You're insane." Koki turned to Jin. "And you must be just as bad."
"Koki," Kame warned.
"I don't want to see anything bad happen to you," Koki said. "Where else am I going to find a roommate who cooks as well as you do?"
"Koki!"
Koki broke into a grin; for a second, Jin thought he caught a glimpse of fangs. "You've got just under two weeks before the situation becomes critical. You need to figure this out quick, Kame."
At Koki's insistence, the three of them crammed into the bathroom to walk through the failed soul transfer - Koki had to stand in the shower. Jin positioned himself in front of the cracked mirror, which he still needed to replace, and Kame loomed over him from behind. They were in the wrong bodies, of course, but that couldn't be helped.
"The ritual started out fine," Kame said, holding up the notebook he was using to represent the ruined Shounen Jump issue. "The manga started glowing red, ready for transfer."
"Yeah." Jin fought back queasiness at the recollection. It hadn't been the best of days. "I saw the glow in the mirror. Then I looked at you, and your eyes were..." This was going to be embarrassing, but Jin couldn't think of any better way to put it. "I got lost in your eyes. I couldn't help it. It was like you were pulling me in."
"Your eyes." Kame ran a hand over his own. "We...we locked eyes. In the middle of the ritual."
"Sounds like I'm not the only one who can get distracted during magic," Jin said quietly.
Part 3