[JE] [JEF #3] Photographic Memories 6/8
Title: JE Fleet III: Photographic Memories ch. 6/8
Series: JE Fleet
Fandom: KAT-TUN
Pairing: Akame (though others are mentioned)
Rating: PG-13? Maybe occasionally bordering on R?
Total word count: Approx. 37,550
Genre: AU, sci-fi, crack
Disclaimer: Not mine, dammit.
Summary: Mere hours away from Earth, the crew of the JE Fleet ship KAT-TUN have their leave cut short as Commodore Yamashita sends Captains Akanishi and Kamenashi on a top secret mission to Venus. But when Kame's past as the tactical advisor for the Fahngarlians catches up with him, the planet of love becomes the planet of war...
Chapter 6
"What did you hang up for?"
Kame ignored Jin's poking him in the ribs and snapped his cellphone shut. "Do you have any chocolate?"
"Huh? Don't try to distract me with food, I know what you're up to."
"I was hoping you'd distract *me* with food." Kame found the roomservice menu, flipped through till he found the most sickening chocolate dessert known to mankind, and placed an order for half a dozen.
Jin frowned. "Please tell me those aren't all for you."
"You want one as well?" Kame shouldn't have been surprised. "I'd better order another couple."
Jin stopped him before he could key in any more. "I don't think binge-eating is going to help with whatever it is. What did Nakamaru say to you before you cut him off?"
Kame's phone rang again: he snarled and switched it off altogether. "Forget it."
"I'd like to but someone's trying to kill you, so that's just not going to happen." Jin squashed himself in between Kame and the pillows so he could try to massage some of the tension out of his partner's shoulders. "I could nag you till your desserts arrive, I could give Nakamaru a call and find out for myself, or you could save us all the trouble and just tell me."
Jin's fingers felt good through the barely-there barrier of Kame's thin T-shirt, working out the knots with more care than finesse. Kame wished himself a million light-years away from his life, to a whole new universe - one where he hadn't tried to wipe out his own species - but if he ever made it there, he wanted Jin to be at his side. Always.
"About that photograph," he began.
"Which one? The one we're supposed to find?"
Kame shook his head; Jin's fingers slipped and nails dug into the skin of his neck. "The one Maki had in her bag, the one I took a picture of."
"You know who the other guy in the picture is now?"
"No, but I think I know where it was taken. I thought the park background looked familiar, and now I know why." Kame drew his knees up to his chest and leaned forward, resisting Jin's attempts to pull him back. "That bench behind them looks like a thousand others, but the only one I ever carved my initials into was on Titan Colony."
As soon as Kame said the name, the tension flooded back into his muscles to undo Jin's hard work. Undeterred, Jin kept going, maintaining a steady pace as he tried to will Kame to relax.
"You carved your initials into a bench?"
"I was a bored ten-year-old on holiday." Kame pulled out his datapad and showed Jin the photo again, zooming in on the bench. "My older brothers were doing it, so I had to join in. Bled all over the bench 'cause I cut myself with a penknife. The blood's gone now, of course."
Sure enough, etched with thick, deep lines into the back of the bench was a child's messy 'K.K.', drawn on...
"What is that, a cricket ball?" Jin asked.
Kame turned round to glare at him, angst temporarily forgotten. "It's a baseball!"
Jin smiled weakly. "Of course it is. I knew that." Clearly, Kame's artistic talents hadn't improved much in the last sixteen years. "So they were on Titan Colony. What's the significance?"
Kame felt sick even thinking about it. He'd heard reports afterwards, of course - the Fahngarlians had been ecstatic about their victory, and at the time, he'd been able to take a cold sort of pleasure in it. They'd asked him how he'd destroy an entire colony of people in one fell swoop and he, thinking they were playing their war games, had laughingly suggested contaminating their water supply.
With hair dye.
Titan Colony hadn't been big - less than a million people - and the moon itself hadn't exactly been one of the more popular residential areas of the Sol System. Mostly it was inhabited by hermit types, people who wanted out of the hassle of mainstream life. Kame's family had spent three weeks there, with the kids bored out of their minds while their mother embraced a short-lived love of meditation.
Life in a terraformed dome wasn't for everyone, especially someone who'd been born on Earth and knew how it felt to have real breeze waft across his face. Kame hadn't liked the colony, but he hadn't wanted to destroy it, either...not until a combination of excess testosterone and bitter, twisted jealousy had convinced him that yes, the wretched humans living on Titan deserved everything they got.
The colonists had derived every drop of their water from beneath the layers of rock and ice. After filtering to remove the ammonia, it had been pumped into every corner of the dome, with as much recycled as possible. Thanks to Kame's suggestion, the Fahngarlians infiltrated the filtration plant and used their entire stock of red hair dye (aside from a few bottles Kame had secreted for himself) to contaminate the whole system.
To compensate for the fact that nobody was likely to drink pale red water, they'd infiltrated Dome Maintenance at the same time and changed the settings for all the lights to 'crimson', accompanying it with an announcement, supposedly from the governor of Titan, to warn people that they shouldn't panic and that it was only a temporary problem.
When a supply ship arrived from Saturn a few weeks later, the crew couldn't separate out the water from the blood. There was no one left alive to tell them the difference.
And it was all Kame's fault because damnit, he'd known by then that the Fahngarlians weren't playing games, no matter how much he'd liked to pretend otherwise.
"The significance, Jin, is that I'm responsible for wiping out the entire colony." Kame heaved a sigh. "Nakamaru told me that's why these guys want me dead. They must've known someone there - maybe the third person in the photo? I never looked at the obituaries."
"But Toma didn't- no, wait, he did," Jin corrected himself. "I remember now. He had a friend on Titan, used to go visit him sometimes. Oguri something. Old man Kitagawa didn't like him going so far out - I don't think he trusted him more than a couple of microparsecs away from Earth, like Toma might turn around and quit if he got a little taste of freedom."
"Obviously, he did," Kame pointed out. "So did you. And Yamapi."
"Yeah, but Yamapi left 'cause he was hoping to run into Captain Takizawa again, and he wanted to make a better impression than 'stupid kid with a love of bright pink ships who hangs around orbital museums'."
Kame was tactful enough not to talk about Jin's own reasons for leaving Kitagawa, but he hadn't heard Yamapi's before. "That's why he left Earth? Because of his crush on the admiral?"
"He was only a captain back then."
Jin cracked a grin at the memory. He'd been seventeen, sharing a pink-and-black bedroom with his best friend, sixteen year-old Yamashita Tomohisa: both of them living in a house owned by Kitagawa and running all manner of illegal errands. They were underage - they weren't supposed to fly yet, though they'd both been taught, and the old man hadn't used them on anything they could be put to death for. They hadn't killed anybody, they hadn't done any irreparable damage to anyone or anything, and they'd never been caught.
"We met him when we were at this orbital museum round Mars, had all these old spaceships on display?" he explained to Kame. "We were supposed to be there on a school assignment, that was our cover, but we actually had to steal a model from the curator's office. Takki was giving some sort of lecture when we got there, talking about the ships they were using in the military at the time, and we fell in with his crowd for a while.
"We were interested, so we asked a lot of questions - some of which were really, really stupid - and he answered every last one. He was just so nice to everyone - sure, he teased a bit, but we thought he was a great guy. I went to the bathroom when the crowd was clearing out, and when I got back, Pi was talking to him about ship colours, of all things."
"That doesn't surprise me," Kame interjected.
"He'd always wanted his own ship, something in pink - but obviously he wasn't going to tell Takki exactly how he planned to afford it! Kitagawa wouldn't have let us fly anything so conspicuous, even when we were older, and it didn't occur to Pi that if he wanted to spend more time with the captain, he could've joined the military. We didn't have anything serious on our records at the time, it wouldn't have been a problem, and he *was* old enough.
"We ran into Takki a few times again after that, mostly on Earth, and he was always nice to us. He introduced us to Tsubasa then, too - that was before he was elected Earth President, he was only ruling Japan at the time, but it was still really impressive!"
"So why did Yamapi take up smuggling?" Kame asked.
"Apparently, it was all part of his plan to a) get more money by being independent, which didn't work out because he hooked up with these two brothers, Golf and Mike, and they worked as a trio for a while, and b) make Takki interested in pursuing him."
"As a felon?"
Jin shrugged. "I think he had some sort of vision of making a glorious final stand on a deserted moon, and then being dragged off in handcuffs. I usually understand the way his mind works, but I think only one of us was drunk when he came up with that idea and I'm pretty sure it wasn't me."
Kame's desserts arrived at that point, diverting his attention from Jin's story, and he reluctantly agreed to share them. Both men being fairly enthusiastic eaters, it didn't take them long to make significant inroads in the enormous dishes.
"You think Yamapi's seen Toma since then?" Kame enquired through a mouthful of chocolate.
Jin lapped the whipped cream from his spoon as he considered this. The utensil felt heavy in his hand - the stun hadn't done wonders for either his energy levels or his coordination, and he had to concentrate hard on not spilling all down himself. "I doubt it. He'd have told me if he'd been in touch with anyone from the old days."
"So trying to contact him for information won't help. Fine." Kame set aside the second dish and started work on the third. "I don't think we're going to find the death roll for Titan Colony all the way over here."
Gorging himself on pudding so rich even Yamapi would've turned it down was starting to help a little, and if it didn't do wonders for his figure, well, Kame figured the stress would burn it off soon enough. And if that failed, there was always pole-dancing. Jin was usually an appreciative audience.
"Oguri Shun!" Jin snapped his fingers in triumph at having remembered. "That was his name! If he was still living there when you...um..." He took a huge bite of chocolate chip brownie to avoid having to finish his sentence.
"Fine, I get it." Kame pushed his tray aside, no longer in the mood for pudding. One name represented the thousands, millions of corpses that could be laid at his feet. Without names, victims didn't have faces, didn't have identities...didn't have lives. But once they had names, they were people. Dead people. Kame's stomach churned miserably.
Jin cast a sideways glance at him and discreetly set down his own spoon. Clearly, the time for eating had come to an end. And he'd been fed so well since coming to Venus, too.
It wasn't as if he could change the subject. They needed to figure out what to do next, and if Kame allowed himself to wrap up snugly in a black cloak of guilt, they'd never get anywhere. All Jin could do was be there for his partner, make sure Kame knew that no matter what he did, there was one person who would always forgive him.
"You weren't in your right mind," he said gently. "You couldn't have done anything different. Don't pick now to shut down over it, *please* - I need you to help me work this out.
"Ikuta Toma, Hasegawa Jun, Kazama Shunsuke, and the girl, Maki. Maki must've gotten your picture from your file, and found out where we were headed while she was working at the JE Fleet HQ. Everyone knew where we were going, it wouldn't have been much of a secret."
"What kind of security does that place have, anyway?" Kame said incredulously.
Jin suppressed a giggle produced half by amusement, half by exhaustion. "They keep the self-destruct codes for four major military bases lying around in a photo in President Tsubasa's office - what does that tell you?"
Kame looked thoughtful. "That tells me this whole thing is a set-up."
The Niagara Falls documentary ended, only to be replaced by an episode of '1407.6', in which Jack Bauer XXIV saved the day on Mercury. The resulting explosions were more than adequate to cover their conversation.
"I'm serious. The only way anyone could've known about the codes in the photograph would be if the information was deliberately leaked. What would you do if you knew you had an enemy, but you didn't know how to find them?"
"Lure them out," Jin said. "If I knew what they wanted, I'd find some way to bait a trap with it."
"Exactly." Kame's voice was grim. "And I'm the bait."
"Why would the president and Admiral Takki go to so much trouble just to set up a handful of people who want to kill you, though? Not that you're not important - to me, anyway - but don't you think-"
"Jin." Kame held up a hand to hush him. "Do you hear something?"
Jin looked around, wild-eyed, with one hand reaching for his blaster. Was that a scrabbling at the door? An intruder, trying to shortcircuit the keycard mechanism and break in to do who knew what to them?
Kame climbed noiselessly off the bed and tiptoed towards the door, drawing his blaster and holding it steady in front of him. He motioned for Jin to back him up. One step, then another. The rustling from the door grew louder.
Then there was a muffled thump, followed closely by Koki's cry of dismay. "I give up! Jin, what did you do to the doorbell?"
Jin refused to stop sulking till Koki had apologised to him twice. He hadn't broken the doorbell, hadn't been near the stupid thing, and Kame wouldn't let him use the keycard anyway on the grounds that he'd probably lose it.
"What are you doing here?" he asked Koki. "Aren't you supposed to be on guard duty?"
"I *am* on guard duty. For you two. Kazama regained consciousness a while ago, and I couldn't get hold of either of you to give you an update."
Kame remembered he'd switched his phone off. What about Jin's?
A hunt for Jin's cellphone concluded with the discovery of said device underneath a towel in the still sauna-like bathroom. It, too, was switched off.
Koki attempted to deliver a stern lecture to them both about how important it was that his captains be reachable at all times, but his efforts met with failure when Jin interrupted him mid-spiel with a spoonful of chocolate sauce. He aimed for Koki's mouth - unfortunately, the effects of the stunner resulted in Koki wearing, rather than eating, the proffered sauce.
At least it made Kame smile. "I never liked that shirt anyway," he said.
"But you always told me I looked good in it!" Koki protested.
A tiny, fierce spark of jealousy flared in Jin's chest and he smothered it before it could set fire to anything. Kame was nice to *everyone* - that didn't mean he was seeing someone else on the side.
"You said you had an update?" Jin's words came out more brusque than he'd intended.
"Kazama refused to talk. We tried threats, bribes, Ueda's smile...nothing worked until Taguchi got bored and challenged him to a card game."
"Poker?"
"Duel Monsters. Kazama was so traumatised after a couple of rounds he'd have sold out his own mother."
"We're not interested in his mother," Kame pointed out. "Did he have anything to say that might actually be helpful?"
Koki gave up dabbing at his ruined shirt with a tissue. "Have you guys ever heard of the 4Tops?"
Kame hadn't, which wasn't surprising given the lengths he'd gone to in order to keep himself apart from the outside world during his arrest period. He'd avoided looking at the viewscreen, ignored all the news bulletins, and even his knowledge of Fleet gossip was badly out-of-date. Why, everyone else had known months ago that the Pin's Lieutenant Kusano had been busted down to Ensign for unspecified alcohol-related incidents.
But Jin had done no such thing. He hadn't gone out of his way to keep himself informed, but he'd watched news broadcasts from time to time, and Yamapi could always be relied upon to pass on the latest scandals.
"They're a terrorist organisation, aren't they? They believe in the superiority of Mercury, Venus, Earth and Mars - the four 'tops' - and think Earth President Tsubasa should bring the outer planets under tighter control."
Koki nodded. "That's the group. They've been stirring up trouble for the last couple of years, but they only really started making a noise after the war. It shouldn't surprise you that Ikuta Toma, Horikita Maki, Hasegawa Jun and Kazama Shunsuke are all members."
"And that's very nice for them, I'm sure," Kame said, "but what does killing me have to do with their inner planet superiority complex?"
"Probably nothing," Koki admitted. "Kazama said this was a personal thing for Ikuta and Horikita, and he and Hasegawa were helping them out for old times' sake. They had a friend on Titan Colony, and through Horikita's job at JE Fleet HQ, they knew you were responsible for that particular mess. They'd been using stolen intelligence to plan their movements, it was no big deal for her to pull your file, get them a picture. You probably don't realise this, Kame, but your name and face have been kept out of the media. All of ours have."
"Because it doesn't look good for the military to hand over all this destructive, expensive technology to a load of ex-space pirates," Jin chimed in. "Even Yamapi's exposure is minimised. Probably why Hasegawa didn't recognise me when he stunned me - I was a skinny, short-haired blond the last time we saw each other, and I doubt he's seen any recent pictures."
Kame liked the mental image this conjured. "You'd have been such a cute blond."
"I was!"
Koki scratched his nose. "I don't know about that..." He relented when Jin batted him over the head, though. "All right, I'm sure you must've been a knockout. Anyway, Ikuta was looking for a way to get you off the ship and within reach, so when Horikita found out about the codes in the photograph, they decided to steal it, knowing full well the KAT-TUN would get the job. After that...the rest you know."
Jin recognised Kame's calculating expression. "You still think the info about the codes was leaked deliberately, don't you?"
"Yeah. If the 4Tops have been stealing secrets for years, somebody at HQ must have realised they'd been infiltrated by the group. Having the codes for the inner planet HQ self-destructs would've been irresistible to them - think of the demands they could've made, using those as leverage. Leak the info, wait for the photograph to go missing, then..." Kame stopped and frowned.
"Then?" Jin prompted.
"I don't know. What were the president and the admiral hoping to achieve? That by sending us after the thieves, we'd manage to catch them and bring the whole organisation down? I can understand the trust issues, but it still wouldn't make sense to send us - this isn't our job. The only way it *does* make sense is if they knew someone in the group wanted to get to me." Kame clutched his head and groaned. "I'm tying myself up in knots, here!"
"I don't think it's that kind of hotel." Jin yawned widely and sneaked a peek at the wall clock. Half past one in the morning. No wonder he was tired. They'd only arrived earlier that day, and in that time a lot had happened. In any case, nobody woke up refreshed from periods of stun-induced unconsciousness, and his eyes were protesting at still being open.
"There's nothing more we can do tonight," Kame decided. "My brain's asleep and the rest of me wants to follow. Jin's even worse off."
"I could do with some sleep myself," Koki admitted. "I'd better be getting back. Hasegawa's still out for the count but someone should keep an eye on Kazama." He rose from the bed, looked ruefully down at his ruined shirt, and started to head for the door. "I think you two should come with me."
Kame shook his head. "I think we're safe enough until we leave the hotel. Nobody's tried to get us here, and if Nakamaru was right, they don't even know where I'm staying. Besides," he touched his fingers lightly to Jin's shoulder, "the only way we're getting Captain Bakanishi off the bed is if we carry him."
"Akanishi," Jin mumbled, voice heavy with sleep.
Koki contemplated Jin's weight and the quantity of pudding he'd consumed, and decided it wasn't worth giving himself a hernia. "I'll be back first thing in the morning."
Once Koki had left, Kame managed to propel his semi-conscious partner towards the bathroom and get them both ready for bed. Jin did remarkably well given that his eyes were closed the entire time, only missing his mouth with the toothbrush once, though he remained oblivious to the fact that Kame was putting them to bed still fully-dressed.
"Kame," Jin murmured when they finally switched off the lights. "You really think we're safe in here?"
Kame's blaster was tucked underneath his pillow, within easy reach, and he lay on his side, facing away from Jin so if anyone came through the door, he'd have a clear shot. (If anyone came through the window, he'd have to rely on Jin, but since they were on the third floor he thought it was unlikely.)
There was no sense in worrying Jin - he was almost asleep already, and saying "actually, I think we stand a good chance of being disturbed before Koki ever gets to us" would only wake him up. Years of experience had taught Kame that he did a lot better on only a few hours sleep than Jin did.
"Yeah," Kame whispered back. "Go to sleep. It's all right."
Reassured, Jin obeyed, allowing his body to relax. He sank gratefully into the mattress, content to be oblivious until morning.
Kame lay awake in the dark and waited. There was one question he'd forgotten to ask Koki, though he doubted the other man could've answered it.
Were you followed from the Heartbreak Club?
Because Kame had been very careful, on his way back from the restaurant, and it didn't sound like Hasegawa had been bothered enough with the man he'd stunned - Jin - to follow him to the hotel. If he had, he wouldn't have returned to the club in time to pull a gun on Nakamaru.
But Koki and the others had been hampered by two bound and unconscious men, and no matter how they'd explained it, they would've attracted attention. They probably hadn't been checking for tails, either. There was a very real possibility that they'd been followed to their hotel - and that Koki had been followed from there to Cupid's Gate.
Jin's breath caught in his sleep; Kame half-turned to check on him but he seemed easy enough. They'd woken each other up quite a few times with nightmares, images of deformed computers with thick black cables that reached out to grab their ankles and drag them into the human mulch below, but for now, Jin's sleep was free from interruption. Perhaps being stunned was good for something after all.
Kame let the rhythm of Jin's breathing lull him into a light doze: he knew it wouldn't take much to snap him out of it.
But when a stolen staff keycard swiped through the lock and the bedroom door slowly slid open, it was Jin who woke first.
Series: JE Fleet
Fandom: KAT-TUN
Pairing: Akame (though others are mentioned)
Rating: PG-13? Maybe occasionally bordering on R?
Total word count: Approx. 37,550
Genre: AU, sci-fi, crack
Disclaimer: Not mine, dammit.
Summary: Mere hours away from Earth, the crew of the JE Fleet ship KAT-TUN have their leave cut short as Commodore Yamashita sends Captains Akanishi and Kamenashi on a top secret mission to Venus. But when Kame's past as the tactical advisor for the Fahngarlians catches up with him, the planet of love becomes the planet of war...
Chapter 6
"What did you hang up for?"
Kame ignored Jin's poking him in the ribs and snapped his cellphone shut. "Do you have any chocolate?"
"Huh? Don't try to distract me with food, I know what you're up to."
"I was hoping you'd distract *me* with food." Kame found the roomservice menu, flipped through till he found the most sickening chocolate dessert known to mankind, and placed an order for half a dozen.
Jin frowned. "Please tell me those aren't all for you."
"You want one as well?" Kame shouldn't have been surprised. "I'd better order another couple."
Jin stopped him before he could key in any more. "I don't think binge-eating is going to help with whatever it is. What did Nakamaru say to you before you cut him off?"
Kame's phone rang again: he snarled and switched it off altogether. "Forget it."
"I'd like to but someone's trying to kill you, so that's just not going to happen." Jin squashed himself in between Kame and the pillows so he could try to massage some of the tension out of his partner's shoulders. "I could nag you till your desserts arrive, I could give Nakamaru a call and find out for myself, or you could save us all the trouble and just tell me."
Jin's fingers felt good through the barely-there barrier of Kame's thin T-shirt, working out the knots with more care than finesse. Kame wished himself a million light-years away from his life, to a whole new universe - one where he hadn't tried to wipe out his own species - but if he ever made it there, he wanted Jin to be at his side. Always.
"About that photograph," he began.
"Which one? The one we're supposed to find?"
Kame shook his head; Jin's fingers slipped and nails dug into the skin of his neck. "The one Maki had in her bag, the one I took a picture of."
"You know who the other guy in the picture is now?"
"No, but I think I know where it was taken. I thought the park background looked familiar, and now I know why." Kame drew his knees up to his chest and leaned forward, resisting Jin's attempts to pull him back. "That bench behind them looks like a thousand others, but the only one I ever carved my initials into was on Titan Colony."
As soon as Kame said the name, the tension flooded back into his muscles to undo Jin's hard work. Undeterred, Jin kept going, maintaining a steady pace as he tried to will Kame to relax.
"You carved your initials into a bench?"
"I was a bored ten-year-old on holiday." Kame pulled out his datapad and showed Jin the photo again, zooming in on the bench. "My older brothers were doing it, so I had to join in. Bled all over the bench 'cause I cut myself with a penknife. The blood's gone now, of course."
Sure enough, etched with thick, deep lines into the back of the bench was a child's messy 'K.K.', drawn on...
"What is that, a cricket ball?" Jin asked.
Kame turned round to glare at him, angst temporarily forgotten. "It's a baseball!"
Jin smiled weakly. "Of course it is. I knew that." Clearly, Kame's artistic talents hadn't improved much in the last sixteen years. "So they were on Titan Colony. What's the significance?"
Kame felt sick even thinking about it. He'd heard reports afterwards, of course - the Fahngarlians had been ecstatic about their victory, and at the time, he'd been able to take a cold sort of pleasure in it. They'd asked him how he'd destroy an entire colony of people in one fell swoop and he, thinking they were playing their war games, had laughingly suggested contaminating their water supply.
With hair dye.
Titan Colony hadn't been big - less than a million people - and the moon itself hadn't exactly been one of the more popular residential areas of the Sol System. Mostly it was inhabited by hermit types, people who wanted out of the hassle of mainstream life. Kame's family had spent three weeks there, with the kids bored out of their minds while their mother embraced a short-lived love of meditation.
Life in a terraformed dome wasn't for everyone, especially someone who'd been born on Earth and knew how it felt to have real breeze waft across his face. Kame hadn't liked the colony, but he hadn't wanted to destroy it, either...not until a combination of excess testosterone and bitter, twisted jealousy had convinced him that yes, the wretched humans living on Titan deserved everything they got.
The colonists had derived every drop of their water from beneath the layers of rock and ice. After filtering to remove the ammonia, it had been pumped into every corner of the dome, with as much recycled as possible. Thanks to Kame's suggestion, the Fahngarlians infiltrated the filtration plant and used their entire stock of red hair dye (aside from a few bottles Kame had secreted for himself) to contaminate the whole system.
To compensate for the fact that nobody was likely to drink pale red water, they'd infiltrated Dome Maintenance at the same time and changed the settings for all the lights to 'crimson', accompanying it with an announcement, supposedly from the governor of Titan, to warn people that they shouldn't panic and that it was only a temporary problem.
When a supply ship arrived from Saturn a few weeks later, the crew couldn't separate out the water from the blood. There was no one left alive to tell them the difference.
And it was all Kame's fault because damnit, he'd known by then that the Fahngarlians weren't playing games, no matter how much he'd liked to pretend otherwise.
"The significance, Jin, is that I'm responsible for wiping out the entire colony." Kame heaved a sigh. "Nakamaru told me that's why these guys want me dead. They must've known someone there - maybe the third person in the photo? I never looked at the obituaries."
"But Toma didn't- no, wait, he did," Jin corrected himself. "I remember now. He had a friend on Titan, used to go visit him sometimes. Oguri something. Old man Kitagawa didn't like him going so far out - I don't think he trusted him more than a couple of microparsecs away from Earth, like Toma might turn around and quit if he got a little taste of freedom."
"Obviously, he did," Kame pointed out. "So did you. And Yamapi."
"Yeah, but Yamapi left 'cause he was hoping to run into Captain Takizawa again, and he wanted to make a better impression than 'stupid kid with a love of bright pink ships who hangs around orbital museums'."
Kame was tactful enough not to talk about Jin's own reasons for leaving Kitagawa, but he hadn't heard Yamapi's before. "That's why he left Earth? Because of his crush on the admiral?"
"He was only a captain back then."
Jin cracked a grin at the memory. He'd been seventeen, sharing a pink-and-black bedroom with his best friend, sixteen year-old Yamashita Tomohisa: both of them living in a house owned by Kitagawa and running all manner of illegal errands. They were underage - they weren't supposed to fly yet, though they'd both been taught, and the old man hadn't used them on anything they could be put to death for. They hadn't killed anybody, they hadn't done any irreparable damage to anyone or anything, and they'd never been caught.
"We met him when we were at this orbital museum round Mars, had all these old spaceships on display?" he explained to Kame. "We were supposed to be there on a school assignment, that was our cover, but we actually had to steal a model from the curator's office. Takki was giving some sort of lecture when we got there, talking about the ships they were using in the military at the time, and we fell in with his crowd for a while.
"We were interested, so we asked a lot of questions - some of which were really, really stupid - and he answered every last one. He was just so nice to everyone - sure, he teased a bit, but we thought he was a great guy. I went to the bathroom when the crowd was clearing out, and when I got back, Pi was talking to him about ship colours, of all things."
"That doesn't surprise me," Kame interjected.
"He'd always wanted his own ship, something in pink - but obviously he wasn't going to tell Takki exactly how he planned to afford it! Kitagawa wouldn't have let us fly anything so conspicuous, even when we were older, and it didn't occur to Pi that if he wanted to spend more time with the captain, he could've joined the military. We didn't have anything serious on our records at the time, it wouldn't have been a problem, and he *was* old enough.
"We ran into Takki a few times again after that, mostly on Earth, and he was always nice to us. He introduced us to Tsubasa then, too - that was before he was elected Earth President, he was only ruling Japan at the time, but it was still really impressive!"
"So why did Yamapi take up smuggling?" Kame asked.
"Apparently, it was all part of his plan to a) get more money by being independent, which didn't work out because he hooked up with these two brothers, Golf and Mike, and they worked as a trio for a while, and b) make Takki interested in pursuing him."
"As a felon?"
Jin shrugged. "I think he had some sort of vision of making a glorious final stand on a deserted moon, and then being dragged off in handcuffs. I usually understand the way his mind works, but I think only one of us was drunk when he came up with that idea and I'm pretty sure it wasn't me."
Kame's desserts arrived at that point, diverting his attention from Jin's story, and he reluctantly agreed to share them. Both men being fairly enthusiastic eaters, it didn't take them long to make significant inroads in the enormous dishes.
"You think Yamapi's seen Toma since then?" Kame enquired through a mouthful of chocolate.
Jin lapped the whipped cream from his spoon as he considered this. The utensil felt heavy in his hand - the stun hadn't done wonders for either his energy levels or his coordination, and he had to concentrate hard on not spilling all down himself. "I doubt it. He'd have told me if he'd been in touch with anyone from the old days."
"So trying to contact him for information won't help. Fine." Kame set aside the second dish and started work on the third. "I don't think we're going to find the death roll for Titan Colony all the way over here."
Gorging himself on pudding so rich even Yamapi would've turned it down was starting to help a little, and if it didn't do wonders for his figure, well, Kame figured the stress would burn it off soon enough. And if that failed, there was always pole-dancing. Jin was usually an appreciative audience.
"Oguri Shun!" Jin snapped his fingers in triumph at having remembered. "That was his name! If he was still living there when you...um..." He took a huge bite of chocolate chip brownie to avoid having to finish his sentence.
"Fine, I get it." Kame pushed his tray aside, no longer in the mood for pudding. One name represented the thousands, millions of corpses that could be laid at his feet. Without names, victims didn't have faces, didn't have identities...didn't have lives. But once they had names, they were people. Dead people. Kame's stomach churned miserably.
Jin cast a sideways glance at him and discreetly set down his own spoon. Clearly, the time for eating had come to an end. And he'd been fed so well since coming to Venus, too.
It wasn't as if he could change the subject. They needed to figure out what to do next, and if Kame allowed himself to wrap up snugly in a black cloak of guilt, they'd never get anywhere. All Jin could do was be there for his partner, make sure Kame knew that no matter what he did, there was one person who would always forgive him.
"You weren't in your right mind," he said gently. "You couldn't have done anything different. Don't pick now to shut down over it, *please* - I need you to help me work this out.
"Ikuta Toma, Hasegawa Jun, Kazama Shunsuke, and the girl, Maki. Maki must've gotten your picture from your file, and found out where we were headed while she was working at the JE Fleet HQ. Everyone knew where we were going, it wouldn't have been much of a secret."
"What kind of security does that place have, anyway?" Kame said incredulously.
Jin suppressed a giggle produced half by amusement, half by exhaustion. "They keep the self-destruct codes for four major military bases lying around in a photo in President Tsubasa's office - what does that tell you?"
Kame looked thoughtful. "That tells me this whole thing is a set-up."
The Niagara Falls documentary ended, only to be replaced by an episode of '1407.6', in which Jack Bauer XXIV saved the day on Mercury. The resulting explosions were more than adequate to cover their conversation.
"I'm serious. The only way anyone could've known about the codes in the photograph would be if the information was deliberately leaked. What would you do if you knew you had an enemy, but you didn't know how to find them?"
"Lure them out," Jin said. "If I knew what they wanted, I'd find some way to bait a trap with it."
"Exactly." Kame's voice was grim. "And I'm the bait."
"Why would the president and Admiral Takki go to so much trouble just to set up a handful of people who want to kill you, though? Not that you're not important - to me, anyway - but don't you think-"
"Jin." Kame held up a hand to hush him. "Do you hear something?"
Jin looked around, wild-eyed, with one hand reaching for his blaster. Was that a scrabbling at the door? An intruder, trying to shortcircuit the keycard mechanism and break in to do who knew what to them?
Kame climbed noiselessly off the bed and tiptoed towards the door, drawing his blaster and holding it steady in front of him. He motioned for Jin to back him up. One step, then another. The rustling from the door grew louder.
Then there was a muffled thump, followed closely by Koki's cry of dismay. "I give up! Jin, what did you do to the doorbell?"
Jin refused to stop sulking till Koki had apologised to him twice. He hadn't broken the doorbell, hadn't been near the stupid thing, and Kame wouldn't let him use the keycard anyway on the grounds that he'd probably lose it.
"What are you doing here?" he asked Koki. "Aren't you supposed to be on guard duty?"
"I *am* on guard duty. For you two. Kazama regained consciousness a while ago, and I couldn't get hold of either of you to give you an update."
Kame remembered he'd switched his phone off. What about Jin's?
A hunt for Jin's cellphone concluded with the discovery of said device underneath a towel in the still sauna-like bathroom. It, too, was switched off.
Koki attempted to deliver a stern lecture to them both about how important it was that his captains be reachable at all times, but his efforts met with failure when Jin interrupted him mid-spiel with a spoonful of chocolate sauce. He aimed for Koki's mouth - unfortunately, the effects of the stunner resulted in Koki wearing, rather than eating, the proffered sauce.
At least it made Kame smile. "I never liked that shirt anyway," he said.
"But you always told me I looked good in it!" Koki protested.
A tiny, fierce spark of jealousy flared in Jin's chest and he smothered it before it could set fire to anything. Kame was nice to *everyone* - that didn't mean he was seeing someone else on the side.
"You said you had an update?" Jin's words came out more brusque than he'd intended.
"Kazama refused to talk. We tried threats, bribes, Ueda's smile...nothing worked until Taguchi got bored and challenged him to a card game."
"Poker?"
"Duel Monsters. Kazama was so traumatised after a couple of rounds he'd have sold out his own mother."
"We're not interested in his mother," Kame pointed out. "Did he have anything to say that might actually be helpful?"
Koki gave up dabbing at his ruined shirt with a tissue. "Have you guys ever heard of the 4Tops?"
Kame hadn't, which wasn't surprising given the lengths he'd gone to in order to keep himself apart from the outside world during his arrest period. He'd avoided looking at the viewscreen, ignored all the news bulletins, and even his knowledge of Fleet gossip was badly out-of-date. Why, everyone else had known months ago that the Pin's Lieutenant Kusano had been busted down to Ensign for unspecified alcohol-related incidents.
But Jin had done no such thing. He hadn't gone out of his way to keep himself informed, but he'd watched news broadcasts from time to time, and Yamapi could always be relied upon to pass on the latest scandals.
"They're a terrorist organisation, aren't they? They believe in the superiority of Mercury, Venus, Earth and Mars - the four 'tops' - and think Earth President Tsubasa should bring the outer planets under tighter control."
Koki nodded. "That's the group. They've been stirring up trouble for the last couple of years, but they only really started making a noise after the war. It shouldn't surprise you that Ikuta Toma, Horikita Maki, Hasegawa Jun and Kazama Shunsuke are all members."
"And that's very nice for them, I'm sure," Kame said, "but what does killing me have to do with their inner planet superiority complex?"
"Probably nothing," Koki admitted. "Kazama said this was a personal thing for Ikuta and Horikita, and he and Hasegawa were helping them out for old times' sake. They had a friend on Titan Colony, and through Horikita's job at JE Fleet HQ, they knew you were responsible for that particular mess. They'd been using stolen intelligence to plan their movements, it was no big deal for her to pull your file, get them a picture. You probably don't realise this, Kame, but your name and face have been kept out of the media. All of ours have."
"Because it doesn't look good for the military to hand over all this destructive, expensive technology to a load of ex-space pirates," Jin chimed in. "Even Yamapi's exposure is minimised. Probably why Hasegawa didn't recognise me when he stunned me - I was a skinny, short-haired blond the last time we saw each other, and I doubt he's seen any recent pictures."
Kame liked the mental image this conjured. "You'd have been such a cute blond."
"I was!"
Koki scratched his nose. "I don't know about that..." He relented when Jin batted him over the head, though. "All right, I'm sure you must've been a knockout. Anyway, Ikuta was looking for a way to get you off the ship and within reach, so when Horikita found out about the codes in the photograph, they decided to steal it, knowing full well the KAT-TUN would get the job. After that...the rest you know."
Jin recognised Kame's calculating expression. "You still think the info about the codes was leaked deliberately, don't you?"
"Yeah. If the 4Tops have been stealing secrets for years, somebody at HQ must have realised they'd been infiltrated by the group. Having the codes for the inner planet HQ self-destructs would've been irresistible to them - think of the demands they could've made, using those as leverage. Leak the info, wait for the photograph to go missing, then..." Kame stopped and frowned.
"Then?" Jin prompted.
"I don't know. What were the president and the admiral hoping to achieve? That by sending us after the thieves, we'd manage to catch them and bring the whole organisation down? I can understand the trust issues, but it still wouldn't make sense to send us - this isn't our job. The only way it *does* make sense is if they knew someone in the group wanted to get to me." Kame clutched his head and groaned. "I'm tying myself up in knots, here!"
"I don't think it's that kind of hotel." Jin yawned widely and sneaked a peek at the wall clock. Half past one in the morning. No wonder he was tired. They'd only arrived earlier that day, and in that time a lot had happened. In any case, nobody woke up refreshed from periods of stun-induced unconsciousness, and his eyes were protesting at still being open.
"There's nothing more we can do tonight," Kame decided. "My brain's asleep and the rest of me wants to follow. Jin's even worse off."
"I could do with some sleep myself," Koki admitted. "I'd better be getting back. Hasegawa's still out for the count but someone should keep an eye on Kazama." He rose from the bed, looked ruefully down at his ruined shirt, and started to head for the door. "I think you two should come with me."
Kame shook his head. "I think we're safe enough until we leave the hotel. Nobody's tried to get us here, and if Nakamaru was right, they don't even know where I'm staying. Besides," he touched his fingers lightly to Jin's shoulder, "the only way we're getting Captain Bakanishi off the bed is if we carry him."
"Akanishi," Jin mumbled, voice heavy with sleep.
Koki contemplated Jin's weight and the quantity of pudding he'd consumed, and decided it wasn't worth giving himself a hernia. "I'll be back first thing in the morning."
Once Koki had left, Kame managed to propel his semi-conscious partner towards the bathroom and get them both ready for bed. Jin did remarkably well given that his eyes were closed the entire time, only missing his mouth with the toothbrush once, though he remained oblivious to the fact that Kame was putting them to bed still fully-dressed.
"Kame," Jin murmured when they finally switched off the lights. "You really think we're safe in here?"
Kame's blaster was tucked underneath his pillow, within easy reach, and he lay on his side, facing away from Jin so if anyone came through the door, he'd have a clear shot. (If anyone came through the window, he'd have to rely on Jin, but since they were on the third floor he thought it was unlikely.)
There was no sense in worrying Jin - he was almost asleep already, and saying "actually, I think we stand a good chance of being disturbed before Koki ever gets to us" would only wake him up. Years of experience had taught Kame that he did a lot better on only a few hours sleep than Jin did.
"Yeah," Kame whispered back. "Go to sleep. It's all right."
Reassured, Jin obeyed, allowing his body to relax. He sank gratefully into the mattress, content to be oblivious until morning.
Kame lay awake in the dark and waited. There was one question he'd forgotten to ask Koki, though he doubted the other man could've answered it.
Were you followed from the Heartbreak Club?
Because Kame had been very careful, on his way back from the restaurant, and it didn't sound like Hasegawa had been bothered enough with the man he'd stunned - Jin - to follow him to the hotel. If he had, he wouldn't have returned to the club in time to pull a gun on Nakamaru.
But Koki and the others had been hampered by two bound and unconscious men, and no matter how they'd explained it, they would've attracted attention. They probably hadn't been checking for tails, either. There was a very real possibility that they'd been followed to their hotel - and that Koki had been followed from there to Cupid's Gate.
Jin's breath caught in his sleep; Kame half-turned to check on him but he seemed easy enough. They'd woken each other up quite a few times with nightmares, images of deformed computers with thick black cables that reached out to grab their ankles and drag them into the human mulch below, but for now, Jin's sleep was free from interruption. Perhaps being stunned was good for something after all.
Kame let the rhythm of Jin's breathing lull him into a light doze: he knew it wouldn't take much to snap him out of it.
But when a stolen staff keycard swiped through the lock and the bedroom door slowly slid open, it was Jin who woke first.