JE/NEWS- "My Member-ai is so Strong it Leaves Heart-Shaped Bruises Behind"
Title: My Member-ai is so Strong it Leaves Heart-Shaped Bruises Behind
Universe: JE/ NewS
Theme/Topic: N/A
Rating: PG-13
Character/Pairing/s: ShigexNewS (guest appearances by members of K8, Yax3, and KAT-TUN)
Warnings/Spoilers: OOC, stupidly, CRACK (the usual).
Word Count: 2,649
Summary: Shige has a special kind of member-ai.
Dedication: OKAY so I started this like, forever ago for Ann’s initial holiday fic (before it was usurped for the slew of other ones I started for her). BUT it only fits that I dedicate this to her again, since you know, it’s Shige.
A/N: I’m still not quite satisfied with it despite spending the whole morning trying to fix it, but I don’t know how else to change it so it will stop sucking; I have decided that it is probably best that I just throw it up and see what happens. LOL Rough start to 2008 already? OH NOES.
Disclaimer: No harm is meant by this!
Distribution: Just lemme know.
1. Shige’s Member-ai is Taboo
“Shige and I ne, we both love all the members of NewS more than anyone else!” Koyama proudly declares to a smiling interviewer one day, as he and Shige sit down together during a magazine shoot. He slings his arm over Shige’s shoulders as he says this; it prompts the photographer to inexplicably snap several extra candid pictures of the two of them when he does.
Shige isn’t as proud as Koyama is about the whole thing; he sputters and turns red. “Oi!” he protests, hastily ducking out from under his friend’s embrace. “If you say it out of nowhere like that people will get the wrong idea about us, won’t they?”
Koyama blinks back at him innocently; “What wrong idea, Shige?”
Shige ignores him. “We’re not like that!” he insists to the interviewer. “You know. That way.”
She laughs and nods, “Of course.” Then she writes something down on her notepad, and Shige immediately looks suspicious of her because it’s in his nature to be.
Koyama just hugs his best friend again. “But Shige, you really do love NewS, don’t you?” he whines.
Shige looks embarrassed. “I already told you to stop talking like that but you just keep doing it more and more, don’t you?” he sighs, changing the subject. He smacks Koyama’s head a few times for emphasis. “Listen to what others have to say! Read the atmosphere!”
Koyama doesn’t mind being scolded or smacked like that as long as it’s Shige, so he just smiles and holds on to Shige tighter because he knows that even though Shige isn’t saying, “Yes, I love NewS!” directly, Shige really loves NewS just as much as Koyama loves NewS (which is a lot).
Koyama knows that Shige just has a different way of showing it.
2. Shige’s Member-ai is Accurate
“Jin, I’m going to kill you,” Ryo snarls when Jin walks into the room, sees Ryo in his new stage outfit, and promptly bursts out laughing.
Shige sighs, flipping through a novel on the couch. “You can just have the wardrobe department refit it, Nishikido-kun. There’s time before the concerts start.”
Ryo glares sideways at him. “That’s not the point.”
“Oh my god you’re so tiny,” Jin guffaws.
Ryo starts to see red.
Jin doesn’t notice; “You look like a little kid!” he continues, gesturing to Ryo’s outfit and unaware of the imminence of his death. “Your wrists go up to its elbows!”
Ryo silently starts towards Jin with the intention of breaking his kneecaps.
But instead, he trips on his too-long hem and falls face first onto the floor with a muffled squawk. It is decidedly not scary.
As evidenced by the fact that Jin is promptly sent into another fit of hysterics shortly thereafter. “It’s so cute! Ryo-chan is adorable!” he brays.
“I’m going to kill you,” Ryo says again.
Jin snorts and smirks, all superior like. “Oh please. I’m like, three feet taller than you,” he preens.
Ryo opens his mouth to reply, but is cut off by a voice from the couch.
“No you’re not.”
They both turn to Shige.
Jin blinks. “Huh?”
“You’re not,” Shige says again, calmly. He continues reading his book.
Ryo, still on the ground, blinks too. “Huh?”
Shige scoffs, but still doesn’t look up at either of them. “You’re not three feet taller than Nishikido-kun. You’re six centimeters taller than him, which, when you multiply by 0.3937008, gets you 2.3622048 inches. There are twelve inches in a foot; so you couldn’t logically be three feet taller than him if you’re not even half a foot taller than him.” Pause. “Unless you don’t know that twelve is greater than 2.36, I guess, in which case you could clearly delude yourself into believing that kind of lie.”
Silence.
“Huh?” Jin says, again.
Shige actually pauses to look sideways at him upon hearing that, and something about the younger boy’s eyes make Jin feel very, very stupid and- oddly enough- very, very small. “I am saying,” Shige starts again, slower this time, “that your conversion is wrong.”
A beat.
Ryo grins. “Ha,” he sneers at Jin, getting to his feet. “You’re a moron at any height.”
Shige snorts.
Jin pouts and looks between the two NewS members helplessly; for some reason he doesn’t think he can win against the both of them. So he does the first smart thing he’s done all day: he silently leaves the room to go whine to Ueda about it instead. “NewS is mean!”
In the meantime, Ryo looks at Shige, who is still reading on the couch peacefully. Ryo almost, almost wants to say something not-insulting to the younger boy for some inexplicable reason.
But before he can, he trips on the hem of his costume again.
Shige smirks. “Good one,” he says.
Ryo scowls, hikes up his robe, and wordlessly stomps out of the room.
3. Shige’s Member-ai is Long-Suffering
“I can’t believe he just crashed our vacation like that,” Shige complains bitterly, and is talking about Tegoshi, who, upon finding out that Koyama and Shige were going to Okinawa together again last weekend, happily invited himself along as well. “Who does he think he is?”
“But it was fun, right?” Koyama says. “The three of us did a lot of great stuff together because Tegoshi came along too!”
Shige scoffs. “I guess. But he could have at least called to tell us he was coming first, instead of just showing up at your house on Friday night with bags.”
Koyama laughs and knows Shige isn’t really annoyed about anything; he just needs to complain about something today because he’s tired and Tegoshi is an easy target when he isn’t around. “Maa, maa. I’ll send you some of the pictures I took of us while we were there, okay?” the older boy suggests, gently. “The ocean was really beautiful when it isn’t in monochrome!”
Shige rolls his eyes.
Later, Shige overhears Yabu complaining to Shoon about something; normally he doesn’t care when this happens because Yabu complains a lot, but this time it piques his interest for some reason.
“Tegoshi-kun can be kind of annoying,” Yabu grumbles to his former groupmate, nose in the air. “I mean, a few of us were happily eating lunch together and he just kind of bounced up to our table all of a sudden and sat down without asking. Annoying, right?”
“Sure,” Shoon agrees absently, eyes already starting to glaze over as Yabu bitches to him. “Annoying.”
Satisfied with that response, Yabu goes on. “And the way he talked to us was even more annoying! He sounded like he thought he was completely superior or something. I mean, just because he debuted first doesn’t mean anything; we’re still technically his senpai.”
“Yeah,” Shoon says. “Senpai.”
Shige is inexplicably compelled to approach them when he hears this; he comes up behind them and puts a hand on each of their shoulders, smiling. “I know, right?” he says, “But it can’t be helped sometimes; Tegoshi is just annoying like that by nature.”
Yabu lights up when he realizes that Shige agrees with him, because it clearly means that he’s right since everyone is always going on about how smart Shige is all the time. “So he does it to you too, Shige?” he asks, puffing up a little.
“All the time!” Shige tells him. “Which makes sense, all things considered. But it’s kind of a mystery to me why he would want to eat lunch with you guys.”
A moment.
Shige’s expression never changes.
Yabu furrows his eyebrows and looks like he is trying to figure out if Shige is complimenting him or insulting him with one of those famous fake smiles he likes to use. Shoon doesn’t look like he is thinking at all.
Shige doesn’t really give either of them time to figure it out. “Well, for your sakes,” he begins, sounding superior and senpai-like, “I suppose I’ll try and get Tegoshi to come sit with the rest of the grownups from now on. We don’t want you kids to be bothered by him anymore, after all.”
“Right…” Shoon says perfunctorily, and doesn’t really get what Shige is talking about.
“Um…thanks?” Yabu manages, deciding that that is probably the safest answer for now.
“No problem.”
And then Shige is off; still with that same smile on his face.
It is approximately fifteen minutes later when Yabu figures out that yes, Shige had been insulting him fifteen minutes ago.
Shoon doesn’t realize it at all. Ever.
It’s probably for the best.
4. Shige’s Member-ai is Left-handed Compliments
Shige means it as a compliment when he repeatedly tells fans and media personalities alike that Yamapi isn’t really the leader of NewS in the traditional sense of the word. “He doesn’t really do anything, which is fine, because he’s cool enough just being there,” Shige tells them offhandedly, and is confused as to why everyone seems so shocked whenever he says this. Basically what he is telling them is this: “He inspires us with his presence alone.”
They don’t seem to get it.
Well, whatever.
It doesn’t bother him, and it doesn't bother Yamapi either (as far as Shige knows), and that is what is important.
Though there is a moment one day when Shige is going to the dressing room to get his face towel after a hot shower when he overhears Kame talking to Yamapi about the rest of KAT-TUN; it is the only time Shige thinks his comments about Yamapi’s leadership abilities can be taken in a bad light.
“You’re so lucky that they still respect you as their leader even though you don’t really do anything,” Kame sighs to Yamapi, fidgeting with the straw of his drink as they sit down together in NewS’s dressing room. “I’m not even officially the leader and I still have to make sure everything runs smoothly. Even then, I don’t think that they really listen to me at all anyway.” He sits back with a small, wistful huff, “I wish I could be a little irresponsible like that sometimes. It seems like it would be nice to just to be there and not have to do anything else for a change.”
Yamapi frowns when he hears this; “Am I irresponsible?”
Shige chooses that moment to walk in and get his towel. “Of course not, Yamashita-kun,” he says offhandedly, putting the towel over his shoulder and turning back towards the door. “If you were irresponsible we wouldn’t listen to you at all. But because we respect you, we listen to you whenever you feel the need to take the lead since we know that means it’s important.”
Yamapi beams. “Oh. Okay! Thanks, Shige!” He flashes a thumbs up.
“No problem.”
Kame just blinks. “Did you just imply that…”
But Shige is already walking out of the room while rubbing his wet hair with his towel; it’s like he doesn’t even hear Kame at all.
5. Shige’s Member-ai is Not Ordinary
“I’m not going out in public with you if you’re going to wear that thing.”
Nakamaru is adamant when he tells Massu this; he is even sweating a little on his nose from the seriousness of the whole sweater issue and how it is clearly detrimental to both of their images.
Massu blinks. “You don’t like my sweater?” he asks, and is wearing his new favorite purple and green diagonal-striped fuzzy monstrosity. His lip wibbles at the prospect of someone really not liking it that much; even though Shige had complained about it to him earlier as well, the younger boy hadn’t minded it so much that he refused to go out in public with Massu. “Is it really that bad?”
“It’s gross. No one in their right mind should ever want to wear it,” Nakamaru tells him flatly and for his own good. Really, he has seen Massu wear some weird things, but they have not been truly horrible until today. “You should burn it and hope no one photographed you wearing it because they will use it to blackmail you sometime in the future.”
Massu’s eyes get very large and sad at the prospect; he looks down at his new favorite sweater and wonders if it shouldn’t be something he loves anymore since everyone else seems to hate it.
“You know what? If you get rid of it right now, I’ll even pretend I never saw you in it in the first place,” Nakamaru continues magnanimously, nodding to himself in approval at the prospect. “And we can go to this shop I know later too; it has normal clothes and I’ll help you pick out something tasteful that won’t burn people’s eyeballs.”
Massu frowns mournfully at his sweater for a moment but supposes that throwing it away is probably for the best if Nakamaru says it is; even if it is kind of beautiful to him, no one else likes it at all, even a little bit. He moves to take it off.
“Don’t worry,” Nakamaru assures him gently, “everything will be…”
But before he can finish Shige is suddenly walking by; he stops abruptly when he sees his groupmate. “Oh, Massu. Do you have plans for the afternoon? I’ve got free time; we can go bowling.”
Nakamaru frowns as Shige suddenly cuts in and starts chatting with Massu right in front of him like that. “Oi, I was still talking!” he protests.
Shige turns around. Blinks. “Oh, Nakamaru-kun. I didn’t see you standing there at all,” he reports calmly.
A beat.
Then, Shige turns back to Massu. “So, do you want to go or not?”
Nakamaru sputters.
6. Shige’s Member-ai is Referential
“You’re an idiot,” Shige says to Koyama backstage as he watches his groupmate struggle valiantly against what might be his greatest enemy to date.
Koyama looks up at Shige in embarrassment; “I guess I am ne.”
But he eventually manages to get the big knot out of his shoelace that he’d been working on for the last five minutes, and when he does, the two of them share a laugh about it together before going into the recording booth for their radio interview with Murakami and Yokoyama.
A few minutes later, Murakami slaps Koyama on the head and says, “Are you an idiot?” when Koyama explains that they were almost late because of his shoelace.
“Ahahaha,” Yokoyama chortles off to the side, “He really is an idiot!”
Koyama looks embarrassed and apologizes; beside him, Shige crosses his arms.
“Oi, Koyama,” Shige says suddenly, looking bored, “tell them about the dissertation you had to write last year. Even if it was long, I thought it was pretty interesting.”
Murakami and Yokoyama both pause. Blink. “What does dissertation mean?” they ask in tandem, and really don’t get what Shige is talking about all of a sudden like that. They were still going on about the shoelace.
Shige looks surprised. “Didn’t Yamapi already explain this type of thing to you two when he came on the show before? I’m pretty sure he did.”
Pause.
“Don’t tell me you weren’t paying attention to Yamapi when he was talking to you.”
Yokoyama and Murakami look even more boggled.
Shige just sighs.
And in the end, it is Koyama who has to gently explain to them that here, a dissertation is the same thing as a thesis.
7. Shige’s Member-ai is Exclusive
Three weeks later, they have another magazine interview and photo shoot; this time it’s for a spread in next month’s issue of Myojo.
“Next, tell us a secret about Kato-kun, Koyama-kun,” the interviewer asks them halfway into the session. She smiles.
Koyama immediately knows exactly what he’s going to say when he hears the question; he snickers and lowers his voice to a whisper. “Shige’s member-ai ne,” he explains to her warmly, “is that no one can pick on NewS but him.”
Beside him, Shige screams. “HEY!”
END
EDITS PLZ.
Universe: JE/ NewS
Theme/Topic: N/A
Rating: PG-13
Character/Pairing/s: ShigexNewS (guest appearances by members of K8, Yax3, and KAT-TUN)
Warnings/Spoilers: OOC, stupidly, CRACK (the usual).
Word Count: 2,649
Summary: Shige has a special kind of member-ai.
Dedication: OKAY so I started this like, forever ago for Ann’s initial holiday fic (before it was usurped for the slew of other ones I started for her). BUT it only fits that I dedicate this to her again, since you know, it’s Shige.
A/N: I’m still not quite satisfied with it despite spending the whole morning trying to fix it, but I don’t know how else to change it so it will stop sucking; I have decided that it is probably best that I just throw it up and see what happens. LOL Rough start to 2008 already? OH NOES.
Disclaimer: No harm is meant by this!
Distribution: Just lemme know.
1. Shige’s Member-ai is Taboo
“Shige and I ne, we both love all the members of NewS more than anyone else!” Koyama proudly declares to a smiling interviewer one day, as he and Shige sit down together during a magazine shoot. He slings his arm over Shige’s shoulders as he says this; it prompts the photographer to inexplicably snap several extra candid pictures of the two of them when he does.
Shige isn’t as proud as Koyama is about the whole thing; he sputters and turns red. “Oi!” he protests, hastily ducking out from under his friend’s embrace. “If you say it out of nowhere like that people will get the wrong idea about us, won’t they?”
Koyama blinks back at him innocently; “What wrong idea, Shige?”
Shige ignores him. “We’re not like that!” he insists to the interviewer. “You know. That way.”
She laughs and nods, “Of course.” Then she writes something down on her notepad, and Shige immediately looks suspicious of her because it’s in his nature to be.
Koyama just hugs his best friend again. “But Shige, you really do love NewS, don’t you?” he whines.
Shige looks embarrassed. “I already told you to stop talking like that but you just keep doing it more and more, don’t you?” he sighs, changing the subject. He smacks Koyama’s head a few times for emphasis. “Listen to what others have to say! Read the atmosphere!”
Koyama doesn’t mind being scolded or smacked like that as long as it’s Shige, so he just smiles and holds on to Shige tighter because he knows that even though Shige isn’t saying, “Yes, I love NewS!” directly, Shige really loves NewS just as much as Koyama loves NewS (which is a lot).
Koyama knows that Shige just has a different way of showing it.
2. Shige’s Member-ai is Accurate
“Jin, I’m going to kill you,” Ryo snarls when Jin walks into the room, sees Ryo in his new stage outfit, and promptly bursts out laughing.
Shige sighs, flipping through a novel on the couch. “You can just have the wardrobe department refit it, Nishikido-kun. There’s time before the concerts start.”
Ryo glares sideways at him. “That’s not the point.”
“Oh my god you’re so tiny,” Jin guffaws.
Ryo starts to see red.
Jin doesn’t notice; “You look like a little kid!” he continues, gesturing to Ryo’s outfit and unaware of the imminence of his death. “Your wrists go up to its elbows!”
Ryo silently starts towards Jin with the intention of breaking his kneecaps.
But instead, he trips on his too-long hem and falls face first onto the floor with a muffled squawk. It is decidedly not scary.
As evidenced by the fact that Jin is promptly sent into another fit of hysterics shortly thereafter. “It’s so cute! Ryo-chan is adorable!” he brays.
“I’m going to kill you,” Ryo says again.
Jin snorts and smirks, all superior like. “Oh please. I’m like, three feet taller than you,” he preens.
Ryo opens his mouth to reply, but is cut off by a voice from the couch.
“No you’re not.”
They both turn to Shige.
Jin blinks. “Huh?”
“You’re not,” Shige says again, calmly. He continues reading his book.
Ryo, still on the ground, blinks too. “Huh?”
Shige scoffs, but still doesn’t look up at either of them. “You’re not three feet taller than Nishikido-kun. You’re six centimeters taller than him, which, when you multiply by 0.3937008, gets you 2.3622048 inches. There are twelve inches in a foot; so you couldn’t logically be three feet taller than him if you’re not even half a foot taller than him.” Pause. “Unless you don’t know that twelve is greater than 2.36, I guess, in which case you could clearly delude yourself into believing that kind of lie.”
Silence.
“Huh?” Jin says, again.
Shige actually pauses to look sideways at him upon hearing that, and something about the younger boy’s eyes make Jin feel very, very stupid and- oddly enough- very, very small. “I am saying,” Shige starts again, slower this time, “that your conversion is wrong.”
A beat.
Ryo grins. “Ha,” he sneers at Jin, getting to his feet. “You’re a moron at any height.”
Shige snorts.
Jin pouts and looks between the two NewS members helplessly; for some reason he doesn’t think he can win against the both of them. So he does the first smart thing he’s done all day: he silently leaves the room to go whine to Ueda about it instead. “NewS is mean!”
In the meantime, Ryo looks at Shige, who is still reading on the couch peacefully. Ryo almost, almost wants to say something not-insulting to the younger boy for some inexplicable reason.
But before he can, he trips on the hem of his costume again.
Shige smirks. “Good one,” he says.
Ryo scowls, hikes up his robe, and wordlessly stomps out of the room.
3. Shige’s Member-ai is Long-Suffering
“I can’t believe he just crashed our vacation like that,” Shige complains bitterly, and is talking about Tegoshi, who, upon finding out that Koyama and Shige were going to Okinawa together again last weekend, happily invited himself along as well. “Who does he think he is?”
“But it was fun, right?” Koyama says. “The three of us did a lot of great stuff together because Tegoshi came along too!”
Shige scoffs. “I guess. But he could have at least called to tell us he was coming first, instead of just showing up at your house on Friday night with bags.”
Koyama laughs and knows Shige isn’t really annoyed about anything; he just needs to complain about something today because he’s tired and Tegoshi is an easy target when he isn’t around. “Maa, maa. I’ll send you some of the pictures I took of us while we were there, okay?” the older boy suggests, gently. “The ocean was really beautiful when it isn’t in monochrome!”
Shige rolls his eyes.
Later, Shige overhears Yabu complaining to Shoon about something; normally he doesn’t care when this happens because Yabu complains a lot, but this time it piques his interest for some reason.
“Tegoshi-kun can be kind of annoying,” Yabu grumbles to his former groupmate, nose in the air. “I mean, a few of us were happily eating lunch together and he just kind of bounced up to our table all of a sudden and sat down without asking. Annoying, right?”
“Sure,” Shoon agrees absently, eyes already starting to glaze over as Yabu bitches to him. “Annoying.”
Satisfied with that response, Yabu goes on. “And the way he talked to us was even more annoying! He sounded like he thought he was completely superior or something. I mean, just because he debuted first doesn’t mean anything; we’re still technically his senpai.”
“Yeah,” Shoon says. “Senpai.”
Shige is inexplicably compelled to approach them when he hears this; he comes up behind them and puts a hand on each of their shoulders, smiling. “I know, right?” he says, “But it can’t be helped sometimes; Tegoshi is just annoying like that by nature.”
Yabu lights up when he realizes that Shige agrees with him, because it clearly means that he’s right since everyone is always going on about how smart Shige is all the time. “So he does it to you too, Shige?” he asks, puffing up a little.
“All the time!” Shige tells him. “Which makes sense, all things considered. But it’s kind of a mystery to me why he would want to eat lunch with you guys.”
A moment.
Shige’s expression never changes.
Yabu furrows his eyebrows and looks like he is trying to figure out if Shige is complimenting him or insulting him with one of those famous fake smiles he likes to use. Shoon doesn’t look like he is thinking at all.
Shige doesn’t really give either of them time to figure it out. “Well, for your sakes,” he begins, sounding superior and senpai-like, “I suppose I’ll try and get Tegoshi to come sit with the rest of the grownups from now on. We don’t want you kids to be bothered by him anymore, after all.”
“Right…” Shoon says perfunctorily, and doesn’t really get what Shige is talking about.
“Um…thanks?” Yabu manages, deciding that that is probably the safest answer for now.
“No problem.”
And then Shige is off; still with that same smile on his face.
It is approximately fifteen minutes later when Yabu figures out that yes, Shige had been insulting him fifteen minutes ago.
Shoon doesn’t realize it at all. Ever.
It’s probably for the best.
4. Shige’s Member-ai is Left-handed Compliments
Shige means it as a compliment when he repeatedly tells fans and media personalities alike that Yamapi isn’t really the leader of NewS in the traditional sense of the word. “He doesn’t really do anything, which is fine, because he’s cool enough just being there,” Shige tells them offhandedly, and is confused as to why everyone seems so shocked whenever he says this. Basically what he is telling them is this: “He inspires us with his presence alone.”
They don’t seem to get it.
Well, whatever.
It doesn’t bother him, and it doesn't bother Yamapi either (as far as Shige knows), and that is what is important.
Though there is a moment one day when Shige is going to the dressing room to get his face towel after a hot shower when he overhears Kame talking to Yamapi about the rest of KAT-TUN; it is the only time Shige thinks his comments about Yamapi’s leadership abilities can be taken in a bad light.
“You’re so lucky that they still respect you as their leader even though you don’t really do anything,” Kame sighs to Yamapi, fidgeting with the straw of his drink as they sit down together in NewS’s dressing room. “I’m not even officially the leader and I still have to make sure everything runs smoothly. Even then, I don’t think that they really listen to me at all anyway.” He sits back with a small, wistful huff, “I wish I could be a little irresponsible like that sometimes. It seems like it would be nice to just to be there and not have to do anything else for a change.”
Yamapi frowns when he hears this; “Am I irresponsible?”
Shige chooses that moment to walk in and get his towel. “Of course not, Yamashita-kun,” he says offhandedly, putting the towel over his shoulder and turning back towards the door. “If you were irresponsible we wouldn’t listen to you at all. But because we respect you, we listen to you whenever you feel the need to take the lead since we know that means it’s important.”
Yamapi beams. “Oh. Okay! Thanks, Shige!” He flashes a thumbs up.
“No problem.”
Kame just blinks. “Did you just imply that…”
But Shige is already walking out of the room while rubbing his wet hair with his towel; it’s like he doesn’t even hear Kame at all.
5. Shige’s Member-ai is Not Ordinary
“I’m not going out in public with you if you’re going to wear that thing.”
Nakamaru is adamant when he tells Massu this; he is even sweating a little on his nose from the seriousness of the whole sweater issue and how it is clearly detrimental to both of their images.
Massu blinks. “You don’t like my sweater?” he asks, and is wearing his new favorite purple and green diagonal-striped fuzzy monstrosity. His lip wibbles at the prospect of someone really not liking it that much; even though Shige had complained about it to him earlier as well, the younger boy hadn’t minded it so much that he refused to go out in public with Massu. “Is it really that bad?”
“It’s gross. No one in their right mind should ever want to wear it,” Nakamaru tells him flatly and for his own good. Really, he has seen Massu wear some weird things, but they have not been truly horrible until today. “You should burn it and hope no one photographed you wearing it because they will use it to blackmail you sometime in the future.”
Massu’s eyes get very large and sad at the prospect; he looks down at his new favorite sweater and wonders if it shouldn’t be something he loves anymore since everyone else seems to hate it.
“You know what? If you get rid of it right now, I’ll even pretend I never saw you in it in the first place,” Nakamaru continues magnanimously, nodding to himself in approval at the prospect. “And we can go to this shop I know later too; it has normal clothes and I’ll help you pick out something tasteful that won’t burn people’s eyeballs.”
Massu frowns mournfully at his sweater for a moment but supposes that throwing it away is probably for the best if Nakamaru says it is; even if it is kind of beautiful to him, no one else likes it at all, even a little bit. He moves to take it off.
“Don’t worry,” Nakamaru assures him gently, “everything will be…”
But before he can finish Shige is suddenly walking by; he stops abruptly when he sees his groupmate. “Oh, Massu. Do you have plans for the afternoon? I’ve got free time; we can go bowling.”
Nakamaru frowns as Shige suddenly cuts in and starts chatting with Massu right in front of him like that. “Oi, I was still talking!” he protests.
Shige turns around. Blinks. “Oh, Nakamaru-kun. I didn’t see you standing there at all,” he reports calmly.
A beat.
Then, Shige turns back to Massu. “So, do you want to go or not?”
Nakamaru sputters.
6. Shige’s Member-ai is Referential
“You’re an idiot,” Shige says to Koyama backstage as he watches his groupmate struggle valiantly against what might be his greatest enemy to date.
Koyama looks up at Shige in embarrassment; “I guess I am ne.”
But he eventually manages to get the big knot out of his shoelace that he’d been working on for the last five minutes, and when he does, the two of them share a laugh about it together before going into the recording booth for their radio interview with Murakami and Yokoyama.
A few minutes later, Murakami slaps Koyama on the head and says, “Are you an idiot?” when Koyama explains that they were almost late because of his shoelace.
“Ahahaha,” Yokoyama chortles off to the side, “He really is an idiot!”
Koyama looks embarrassed and apologizes; beside him, Shige crosses his arms.
“Oi, Koyama,” Shige says suddenly, looking bored, “tell them about the dissertation you had to write last year. Even if it was long, I thought it was pretty interesting.”
Murakami and Yokoyama both pause. Blink. “What does dissertation mean?” they ask in tandem, and really don’t get what Shige is talking about all of a sudden like that. They were still going on about the shoelace.
Shige looks surprised. “Didn’t Yamapi already explain this type of thing to you two when he came on the show before? I’m pretty sure he did.”
Pause.
“Don’t tell me you weren’t paying attention to Yamapi when he was talking to you.”
Yokoyama and Murakami look even more boggled.
Shige just sighs.
And in the end, it is Koyama who has to gently explain to them that here, a dissertation is the same thing as a thesis.
7. Shige’s Member-ai is Exclusive
Three weeks later, they have another magazine interview and photo shoot; this time it’s for a spread in next month’s issue of Myojo.
“Next, tell us a secret about Kato-kun, Koyama-kun,” the interviewer asks them halfway into the session. She smiles.
Koyama immediately knows exactly what he’s going to say when he hears the question; he snickers and lowers his voice to a whisper. “Shige’s member-ai ne,” he explains to her warmly, “is that no one can pick on NewS but him.”
Beside him, Shige screams. “HEY!”
END
EDITS PLZ.