JE/NewS+KAT-TUN- "I Am a Man of Many Faces"
Geezus EFF finally done. HOW DID THIS GET SO LONG AND NOT END UP SAYING ANYTHING AT ALL THE WHOLE TIME.
Title: I Am a Man of Many Faces
Universe: JE ( Government AU)
Theme/Topic: Shige fic!
Rating: PG-15
Character/Pairing/s: NewS and KAT-TUN (with mentions of T&T)
Warnings/Spoilers: LOTS AND LOTS OF OOC, randomness. Bad law enforcement procedurals.
Word Count: 8,280
Summary: A thousand different lives each and somehow they’re all the same.
Dedication: Shige’s birthday fic (clearly late like woah), but also for mujun, whose comments I looked back on over the past few days; rereading them really cheered me up from the otherwise crappiness of the month so far.
A/N: Originally I had no plans for Jin birthday fic, but then this kind of happened; LOL I suppose it is purely from the fact that his birthday happens to be around the same time as a couple of people who matter enough to warrant birthday fic. >> Also, it makes no sense. My parallels kind of got destroyed in the process of trying to find plot, and my plot got mangled in the process of trying to work in parallels. Such is life.
Disclaimer: No harm is meant by this!
1. Worlds Apart
When Kame and Yamapi step out of their directors’ meetings with Administrators Imai and Takizawa that month neither of them looks very surprised as they hand out their latest assignments to their undercover agents.
“You’re doing some legwork,” Kame tells Jin. “There’s a club.”
Jin supposes that yes, there has to be a club.
Meanwhile, across the hall, Yamapi smiles tiredly and hands the NEWS mission folder to Shige. “Shige,” he says, “Shige, do you know a lot about law?”
Shige smiles back and somehow makes it bitter; “I suppose I will before too long,” he quips, and opens the file.
~~~~~
2. Underworld
When the agency needs an ear to the street, Jin gets the assignment.
He complains about it to Nakamaru in the break room one afternoon; “I always have to be this kind of person when I’m out there,” he mutters, looking into his coffee after putting in the creamer but before stirring. The white makes weird patterns in the black for a little bit, before turning everything brown.
“You just have the look,” Nakamaru tells him absently as he pours his own coffee, “of a hoodlum, I guess.”
Jin snorts and doesn’t take offense simply because he’s learned how not to after all this time.
He goes back to his desk and reads the case file instead; tonight it’s a seedy bar in the red light district where he’s looking to get in as an employee. They want him to establish himself there as a non-threatening figure so that he can sniff out the agency’s prime suspect in the case of several serial kidnappings involving some missing girls from the sex clubs.
“Just see if they’ll take you in,” Kame tells him at the meeting that afternoon, “and try not to get into any fights this time. It jeopardizes the mission.”
Jin nods and stands, knows that he’s wearing a suit and a tie right now but tonight it’ll be a baseball cap and a hooded sweatshirt, some cheap, nondescript jeans and an old pair of Converse sneakers.
Because when he wears them, he really looks like a hoodlum.
He’s gotten good at it.
He used to think that being an undercover agent meant that you could be a thousand different things all at once, that you could use those thousands of different lives to do the one thing that matters most in the world: catch bad guys.
Lately he thinks he’s learning how this real world works, thinks that he’s finally figuring out the difference between those old ideals he’d had back as an academy brat and how things really are out on the front lines.
He is living a thousand different lives but it somehow feels like they’re all the same; that they’re all this life.
“I can only be what they let me be,” he supposes, and can’t help but feel a little bitter about it because he wants to be so much more than that.
~~~~~
He strolls into the club promptly at eleven pm that night and earns a few wary looks from the other patrons; he’s some punk kid with a big attitude, some delinquent brat who probably can’t even remember the right stroke order to the kanji in his name. He has to be looking for trouble.
“Beer,” he says when he gets to the bar, and nods to the bartender before lighting a cigarette and taking a long, professional drawl. A pretty waitress in nothing but a frilly apron and stilettos walks by, smiling and asking him if there’s anything else she can get him tonight.
He smiles back; “Too broke tonight,” he says. “But maybe I’ll get lucky.”
She giggles and flitters off.
“Don’t see a lot of your age coming to places like this,” the bartender says to him after a beat, eyeing him suspiciously.
“Came to ask for a job,” Jin replies. “Heard there was work.”
A pause, and then eventually, a nod. “There’s work. What’re your qualifications?”
Jin smirks. “You asking me about education?”
A snort then; “Can tell by looking at you that you’re a dumbass. I’m asking how you are in a fight.”
Jin laughs. “You can tell that by looking too, can’t you?”
The bartender likes his pluck; “I’ll call the manager,” he says, and doesn’t end up charging Jin for the beer that night.
~~~~~
Jin starts work the next night bouncing rowdies who try to get too friendly with the girls without payment upfront; he learns that the waitress who had smiled at him the night before is named Yuriko and that she’s nineteen and has two kids and used to dream about being an actress.
Jin smiles and lies and says his name is Miroku, that he’s eighteen and likes motorcycles. He tries not to look at her breasts whenever they talk with one another and she appreciates that; she kind of treats him like a little brother.
~~~~~
He rents a seedy apartment near the train station because it fits who he’s decided Miroku is; there are roaches and sometimes even rodents and when Kame calls to check up on him after the first week he calmly reminds Jin not to drink too much, not to have too much fun, because it’s work despite the fact that it all must look like a giant playground to him.
Jin thinks that maybe Kame has never been to one of these places once in his whole life; he wonders what’s so different about the two of them that everyone seems to think that Jin has.
He can’t help but feel sometimes that it must be nice to be Shige, to have people take one look at him and think immediately that he’s intelligent and responsible and capable of handling himself in any situation.
He thinks he’d like to be trusted like that one day too, even if he does kind of look like a hoodlum.
~~~~~
The next week, Yuriko doesn’t show up for work.
No one worries except for Jin; the bartender says it happens all the time. Girls like that find a better job or find a man or go back home when things get so hard they want to die. They’ll have someone come in to cover for her tonight; tomorrow, if she’s not back, they’ll start interviewing for someone new.
Jin remembers how she’d told him that her son is turning three next week; she’d been saving her tips to buy him a brand new toy truck.
~~~~~
The night after that an older lady comes into the club looking for Yuriko too; she baby sits Yuriko’s kids while she’s working and is worried because she hasn’t heard anything for her since the night she disappeared.
Jin has to pretend to know nothing (and to not care); that morning, after the club closes, he returns to his apartment and wracks his brain trying to remember every person who ever talked to Yuriko since he started working with her.
He doesn’t sleep, and when Kame calls him to check in before his shift begins again that night, the groggy way he answers the phone convinces Kame that he’s hungover. “Don’t be so irresponsible,” Kame chides. “We have a case. Ueda is looking into the security camera footage after we bribed Tegoshi for his help; we’ll let you know if we find anything about the suspect.”
On his way to work, Jin stops at a little hobby shop by the station and buys a toy truck.
~~~~~
Jin sneaks into the office the following Monday morning and gets yelled at for jeopardizing the mission by being careless; Kame orders him out of there immediately and won’t even give him the profiles Ueda and Tegoshi are working on, the pictures of everyone she talked to the night before she went missing.
“She talked to a lot of people,” Kame says, “and we haven’t seen anyone on any of our lists. Now leave. We’ll contact you when we have something.”
Jin scowls and slouches out of the office in his hooded sweatshirt and cheap jeans; as he walks down the hall he catches site of Shige in conference with Yamapi in Yamapi’s office, wearing his sharpest striped suit and an equally sharp tie with leather shoes.
Jin thinks for a moment that it must be nice to be there, to be chasing the rich scumbags and the powerful corrupt, because down here at the bottom, having to worry about people who’s lives are already so miserable is the most painful thing in the world.
~~~~~
When Jin gets back to his dirty apartment there’s an e-mail on the computer from him but no return address on it; all it says in the body is:
"We thought you could use some help."
Attached is a cleaned up security camera photo of each of the people Yuriko talked to starting from five days before she disappeared.
Jin doesn’t need a signature to know who “we” is; he’s thankful and not at the same time because this means another twenty-four hours without any sleep.
~~~~~
The new girl starts the next night; she’s eighteen and her name is Aya and she wants to be a dancer. Jin thinks about Yuriko and the blur of faces he’d spent the entirety of yesterday poring over.
“Nice to meet you,” he says, when Aya-chan introduces herself. “Be careful.”
She gives him an odd look but doesn’t ask what he means; he thinks she probably knows.
~~~~~
A few days after Aya-chan starts Jin manages to hide his surprise when Kato Shigeaki pulls up to the front of the club in a sleek foreign car wearing a sleek foreign suit; he has guests dressed just like him and they call him Katase-kun.
“They’re from some big law firm downtown,” the bartender explains, and breaks out the best glasses and the best champagne and tells the best girls to go and see to them. “The rich ones are always the biggest monsters.”
Jin nods and he and Shige pretend not to know anything about each other at all, even though it’s weird to be in the same place doing the same things when the lives they’re pretending to live are so vastly different.
Shige spends two-hundred dollars in two minutes, laughing his fake laugh and smiling his fake smile and studying the men around him with sharp eyes. Jin watches him watch them and thinks that it must be easier doing this job when there’s so little around you worth caring about.
“The rich ones are the biggest monsters,” Jin murmurs to himself, and tries not to think about the toy truck sitting back on his kitchen table.
~~~~~
Half an hour after Shige arrives with his lawyer friends another guest comes and joins them at the table.
When Jin sees his face he nearly drops the cigarette he’s smoking; it’s a fat, bald man with a familiar leer that Jin is certain he saw in those pictures Tegoshi and Ueda sent him.
“He’s a talent agent,” he gets told by Aya-chan when she walks by; “I think that maybe he likes me!”
Jin’s brow furrows and he nods. “Be careful,” he says, and lights another cigarette.
~~~~~
“It has to be him,” Jin tells Kame over the phone that night. “I think it has to be him.”
He can practically hear Kame’s frown from the other end of the line. “We don’t have any evidence,” Kame reminds him coolly. “Just because you think something won’t make it true.”
“Yuriko could be dead if we wait too long!”
“More people will die if we fuck up and his lawyers get him back on the streets.”
Kame hangs up.
~~~~~
“His name is Katagiri,” Yamapi tells him on a surprise call from a secure line the following morning. “Shige said his name is Katagiri and he thinks there’s something wrong with him.”
“How do you know all of this?” Jin murmurs, sleepily. He looks at the truck on his table, pushes it forward and back, forward and back with one finger.
“Shige,” Yamapi murmurs, “Shige is working hard.”
Jin smiles crookedly. “Sometimes I wish I could be like Shige,” he says quietly. “He looked like he was going to beat those guys no matter what.”
A pause, followed by a small chuckle. “That’s just his job.”
“I’m working hard too, Pi.”
“I know.”
Jin hangs up and watches the little truck roll over the edge of the table.
He picks it up and puts it in his jacket pocket.
~~~~~
Three days later Katagiri is back; he asks for Aya-chan and she smiles and sits in his lap, naked except for the apron. Katagiri orders her good wine and says he’ll make her star.
Jin watches and bites the inside of his cheek until it bleeds because he can’t do anything yet, because as much as he hates to admit it, Kame is right. They don’t have enough evidence.
“He gave me his card!” Aya-chan chirrups to him at the end of the night, and Jin snatches it out of her hand because he can’t help it. She laughs at him; “Are you jealous? I bet if I introduced you he’d help you too, Miroku-kun. You’re good looking.”
He smiles a bit crookedly and memorizes the number on the card while looking like he’s considering the offer; after a few minutes he shrugs and hands it back. “I’m not cut out for that kind of work,” he tells her.
She pouts and says that when she’s famous, she’ll laugh at him for not taking the right opportunities.
~~~~~
“This number,” Jin reports to Kame. “this is his number.”
“We know his number,” Kame replies flatly. “That’s not evidence.”
Jin sighs. “I think he’ll try to take Aya-chan next. I don’t think we should let her see him anymore. I have a bad feeling.”
“You can’t make assumptions like that,” Kame reminds him, and is starting to sound annoyed. “We have to catch him in the act.”
“What if she dies? What if he kills her?”
“Then, at least we can catch him,” he drawls impatiently. “Now get some sleep, you sound hungover and you’re wasting time when you should be resting.”
Jin is the one to hang up first this time.
~~~~~
Jin doesn’t go to sleep. He grabs his gun and tucks it into the back of his pants before going to Aya-chan’s place instead. He parks outside in his car, smoking and watching her window from an alleyway like a stalker.
He’s tired and kind of smelly and he thinks that even though Kame was probably joking, he doesn’t want Aya-chan’s body to be the evidence they need to put Katagiri behind bars.
He doesn’t want Yuriko’s body to be in evidence either.
At noon that day, Aya-chan leaves her apartment looking excited when a black car pulls up in front of her building. Jin follows her, even though he knows that this isn’t part of what his job is about.
He thinks Kame would have a fit if he knew.
~~~~~
She gets taken to a shady building on the bad side of town, paint peeling, cement cracked, empty lots overgrown with weeds. Jin can see her in the backseat of the sedan, looking confused but being too polite to say anything.
They park and lead her to a blue building with bars on the windows; the driver-a tall man in sunglasses- is all polite smiles and courtesy and it lulls her a little, she nods and follows him inside.
Jin parks up the street and tries to find a back way in.
~~~~~
There’s a rusty fire escape towards the side of the building and Jin climbs it; he cuts his hand on a twisted jut of metal and curses under his breath as he fights his way up to one of the grime covered windows.
When he looks inside he thinks he has all the evidence in the world now.
~~~~~
Yuriko’s there, along with several other girls, all naked and chained up to the ceiling and lolling from drugs; when Aya-chan sees them she tries to scream but gets a hand clamped over he mouth and an arm twisted around her neck. She struggles and kicks but the driver is bigger and stronger and Jin has to hold himself back because after all the courtrooms he’s watched from afar and all the cases he’s had to help prepare, he knows that this still isn’t enough, that he won’t get anything from it on Katagiri.
“Just calm down,” he says under his breath, and thinks he’s talking to Aya-chan when he says it. “Just calm down and don’t make him hurt you.”
But Aya-chan is a dancer and she has a strength all her own from working at the club as well; she kicks and struggles and bites and manages to get her head free for a second so that she can scream; she stomps on the driver’s foot and elbows him in the ribs and won’t give up.
“Boss said you’d be compliant,” the driver growls, “so be a good girl and settle down.”
“Fuck you,” she spits, and screams again when he grabs her hair.
Jin curses. “Stupid,” he says, “stupid, calm down.”
She doesn’t listen.
The driver pulls a gun and aims it right at her head.
“Goddammit,” Jin shouts, and pulls out his gun too.
He breaks through the window with his elbow and thinks that Kame is going to suspend him if he lives through today.
~~~~~
He’s right.
Kame suspends him.
After he shoots the driver and saves the girls and has to get glass removed from his elbow and stitches put in, Kame storms into the doctor’s office shaking with rage and serves him the papers and storms out again without another word.
“Because you acted hastily,” Nakamaru explains later, when he visits Jin at Jin’s real apartment. “Because now Katagiri-san can’t be implicated. Maybe if you hadn’t killed the driver…”
“But the girls,” Jin starts.
“The girls can suspect that Katagiri-san was responsible but he never showed up once during their confinement. They say they were supposed to meet him the day they disappeared but no one can confirm that. It’s the word of call girls against the word of someone with very powerful lawyers.”
Jin’s response is to throw a chair across the room.
“Oi…” Nakamaru protests, and looks scared at the strange look in his teammate’s eye. “Calm down, stupid. Calm down.”
Jin flops onto the floor and looks angry.
“You saved them,” Nakamaru begins after a moment of silence, awkwardly. “From…whatever Katagiri’s clients were using them for in that place. You saved them.”
“Yeah,” Jin murmurs, and pulls a dinged up little toy truck from inside his jacket pocket.
~~~~~
He visits Yuriko in the hospital during his suspension and gives her the truck. She smiles at him tiredly from the bed and says that Yoichi-kun will really love it.
“I’m sorry I couldn’t do more,” Jin tells her.
“I’m thankful you were there,” she replies, and finally starts to cry.
~~~~~
Jin leaves the hospital both hating and loving his job, both hating and loving the world.
He sticks his hands in his pockets and thinks that maybe it would be easier if he was someone else, someone who could freely chase bad guys and not worry about the people they step on along the way.
But then he thinks to himself that if he was one of those guys, then there would be no one here like this to do the jobs he does.
He’s always the punk, the gangster, the delinquent, the lowlife, the idiot.
He’s the only one who can be, and he thinks that as tiring and heartbreaking and frustrating as it is, he’ll continue to do it simply because no one else will.
He wonders how many other lives he's condemned in the future because of his actions.
~~~~~
3. Sitting at the Top of the World
For white collar crimes, Shige is often called.
Everyone thinks that his world is glamorous and exciting; he usually gets to lease the fancy cars and get measured for the tailored suits and live in the luxury high rises. Sometimes he goes to snobby parties and five star restaurants and once he got hit on by an idol who thought he was rich, but those are just the surface things really; he thinks the people who become envious of him because of stuff like that really don’t know anything at all about what it actually means.
“For the spring, I’ll become a lawyer,” he tells his teammates tiredly one afternoon, after reading his latest mission brief from Yamapi.
They look at him sympathetically.
With good reason; he spends the next three days cramming three years’ worth of law terms and important cases into his head; he doesn’t sleep at all and Koyama worries, bringing him tea and coffee and snacks and asking, “Shige, are you okay? Shouldn’t you rest?” while wringing his hands.
“I have to be a lawyer tomorrow,” Shige tells him patiently, and takes his glasses off so he can rub his eyes before putting them right back on again. “I don’t know if I can remember all of this.”
“If it’s Shige,” Koyama assures him, “then everything you read you’ll definitely remember, ne.”
“I don’t know about that,” Shige sighs, and gratefully accepts the tea and snacks.
The next day, Shige becomes a perfect lawyer; he dresses smartly in a black pinstripe suit and ties a perfect knot with his blue and gray tie. He walks into his new office with his head held high and his shoulders back so that when people look at him, they will automatically think that he graduated at the top of the class, that he’s a first round pick, that he’s a prodigy who will climb the ladder to success quickly and become a partner in no time.
“He’s so professional,” one of the paralegals murmurs to her secretary friend that day; “He must have gone to a top notch law school.”
“Aoyama Daigaku,” the secretary whispers, “I saw it when I was processing his file, ne.”
And then the two look at each other and giggle; “I wonder if he’s married yet?”
Shige spends a very long time in that firm practicing law like a real professional; he takes cases and talks to clients and prepares paperwork based on what he’s read in books and what he’s seen on TV. It’s hard and he makes mistakes sometimes but the paralegals all like him and help him out; they think it’s comforting that even a hot-shot like Katase-san can slip up every once in a while. It makes him human.
They don’t know that Shige goes home every night and stays awake reading up on the subjects of his cases; they’ll never know that to maintain his façade he has to look up the procedurals and the paperwork and the precedents to stay on top of his game. He has to work hard to make his fake knowledge become real and Koyama worries the most on those nights, after he hasn’t had contact with Shige for a long time. He wonders if Shige is eating right and if he isn’t stressing himself out too much. Being undercover is like having two jobs all at the same time and everyone in NEWS already knows that their one job is tiring enough as it is.
Shige goes to bed around three am every evening while he’s undercover, after studying whatever role he’s been given to the best of his ability. He is someone who can be a doctor, a lawyer, an accountant, a floor manager, a martial artist, a high school student.
“I feel,” he says tiredly sometimes, over the secure line to Yamapi during his weekly report, “that I have learned how to live a thousand different lives all in my one.”
Yamapi smiles into the receiver when he hears. “Is it regretful?” he asks, and wonders if Shige knows that the things Jin complains about are the same things Shige worries over, even if the kinds of jobs they get are so very different. “Do you wish it was easier?”
Shige furrows his brow at the question; he thinks that sometimes he does wish that he could be like Akanishi and simply throw on a hooded sweater and casually walk the streets some nights, buying drinks and information as he pleases. Sometimes Shige wishes for that instead of this, because he doesn’t want to know what a motion for judgment on the pleadings is or how to file an accessory contract or how to tell the exact difference between fraud in the factum and fraud in the inducement.
He sighs. “It will never be easier,” he tells Yamapi after a moment, “So what’s the point in wishing it?”
Yamapi chuckles a little. “Everyone is doing their best, ne.”
Shige manages a small laugh too. “Yeah.”
“Shige, keep doing your best!”
“I will.”
He hangs up after that and goes back to his books for the night; tomorrow he has a pretrial conference at eight and right now, he’s two books behind on his criminal law references.
~~~~~
The next day at noon, his boss, Kawahara Souichirou-san, calls him for a special lunch meeting. “I’d like you to meet one of our most prestigious clients,” Kawahara-san says, and Shige tries not to stare as caterers walk into the conference room carrying three-hundred dollar bottles of wine to go with the kobe steak they’re having for lunch.
“A prestigious client?” Shige asks, eyebrows arching up with just the right amount of curiosity. “We have a lot of those, don’t we?”
“A personal friend of mine,” Kawahara-san replies. “We went to college together.”
“I look forward to meeting him,” Shige says dutifully. “I respect Kawahara-san very much.”
His boss laughs and they clink glasses.
Ten minutes later a round, balding older man in a gray suit strolls into the room, looking around the place like he owns it.
“This is Katagiri Kousuke,” Kawahara-san says, and Shige stands and bows politely. “Kou-chan, this is Katase Riichiro, our first-year all star.”
Katagiri smiles in a way that immediately sets Shige on edge; Shige manages to smile back in a fake way that has become completely natural. “Nice to meet you, sir,” he says.
“First-year all star, eh? Sou-chan’s been talking a lot about you,” Katagiri replies with a bark of laughter, before sitting down and motioning one of the caterers over too. “You kinda remind me of him back in the day, looking at you. You seem sharp, kid.”
Shige smiles again. “I’m flattered.”
They have lunch from there and Katagiri-san complains about how there’s this secretary at his office threatening to sue him for sexual harassment; Kawahara snorts and says they can easily bury any lawyers a mere secretary could afford to hire. “People just go around threatening lawsuits left and right,” he sighs. “Kids these days, eh?”
Katagiri laughs and nods. “All I did was grab her tits a few times. They weren’t even that big and she’s pushing thirty as it is.”
The both of them laugh too, and Shige has to join in because he needs them to trust him.
“Though speaking of tits,” Katagiri continues, and sprays saffron rice all over the table as he does, “We should go to the club soon; I’m in the mood for something young and naked.”
Kawahara whistles. “So that’s where all your money goes.”
Katagiri grins. “That’s where I get all my money,” he corrects mysteriously, and Shige blinks and wonders what he means by that. “Being an agent this day and age is getting ten percent of jack shit. A guy’s gotta have all these side ventures just to put some monkfish liver on the table once in a while, am I right?”
Kawahara nods in agreement and Shige has to too; he finishes of the rest of his kobe-steak without tasting a single bite of it.
~~~~~
Shige-or Katase Riichiro rather- is being groomed as Kawahara’s successor, as his personal protégé.
Shige learns that this means even more hours of work than normal, even more than the double time he’s already putting in.
On the weekends too, he gets called out to fancy dinners and fancy clubs and golf courses and sometimes day trips to Hong Kong casinos.
He has to rub elbows with the wealthy elite, has to listen to all their filthy stories and watch their filthy actions and play along; sometimes he has to be filthy too-he inappropriately grabs a massage girl in Hong Kong- and the feeling sticks to his skin afterwards, makes it hard to sleep even after the massage and the spa treatment, even on the hotel’s fluffy down comforters and smooth silk sheets.
This weekend it’s a club in the red light district; he gets the call and smiles fakely over the phone as he agrees to be there with bells on.
When he walks though the front doors of the club some hours later, Akanishi Jin’s face is the first thing he sees.
~~~~~
The girls are naked save for their shoes and their aprons; Shige tries to look mildly interested without leering so as to appease his bosses without offending the women, but what’s more important to him is that Jin is here, and that means their cases are connected somehow but they haven’t been told how.
That in turn, means that the agency doesn’t know. Or he hopes they don’t know and that it isn’t something purposely kept from their agents for god knows why.
Shige is investigating Kawahara-san’s law firm’s practices; they are suspected of covering up major evidence in key corporate and criminal cases and paying off or creating their own witnesses as is convenient.
Jin, as far as Shige knows, is trying to get information on some missing persons cases that have popped up in the area over the past few months; beyond that the details are fuzzy and probably only known by the rest of KAT-TUN.
Shige sits, deep in thought over what is going on, as Kawahara-san orders one of the girls into his lap. “Katase-kun’s brow is furrowed so severely,” he comments, and sloppily pours a glass of hundred dollar champagne before pushing it towards Shige.
“I’ll pour, Kawahara-san,” Shige insists, and takes the bottle while detouring the girl into the older man’s lap instead. “It’s my job as your kouhai, after all.”
Kawahara snorts but doesn’t protest when the girl giggles and falls onto him. He whoops, offers her a sip of his drink (from his mouth), and orders Shige to keep it coming.
Shige smiles his fake smile and obediently does as he’s told, making sure to drink from his own glass every once in a while so as not to be called a party pooper.
In the meantime he can feel Jin’s eyes on him from the shadows across the room and he wonders how he must look right now, if he’s coming across as dirty as he feels.
He probably does.
“This is the life, eh, Katase?” Kawahara asks, and makes the girl-Aya-chan he calls her-light his cigarette for him.
Shige nods. “Yes, sir,” he agrees quietly. “It’s the life.”
~~~~~
Thirty minutes later Katagiri-san joins them and sweeps Aya off of Kawahara’s lap and into his own, touches her with his hands and lies to her so well she forgets where his fingers are.
“I’ve got this business venture I’ve started up recently,” he explains, and lets his hand drift along the inside of her thigh, “I could make you a star.”
She eats it up while Shige’s brow furrows slightly. According to Katagiri-san’s accounts (which Shige has recently been put in charge of), there are no new start up businesses mentioned in any of his contracts; he’s still a major talent agent for one of the countries biggest agencies, but not a self-made man by any means.
“Really? A star?” Aya-chan breathes, looking so excited she might burst.
“Yeah, really,” Katagiri leers, and pulls out his card, slides it into her apron pocket. “My card.”
“I want to be a dancer,” she tells him, and he smirks.
“I’m sure you do.”
Shige’s job is about reading people; in that moment he thinks he feels something like inexplicable dread welling up somewhere deep in his gut.
But he keeps smiling and pours everyone more drinks anyway.
~~~~~
“I think something fishy is going on with that Katagiri-san,” Shige reports to Yamapi over the phone later that night. “He keeps talking about this venture he has to Kawahara-san that isn’t in any of his contracts or files anywhere.”
Yamapi is silent from the other end.
Shige sighs. “I know,” he says, “I know Katagiri-san is not the point of this mission. But I feel something odd about it.”
“Feelings aren’t evidence,” Yamapi replies in even tones.
Shige frowns.
“But,” Yamapi adds after a moment, gently, “everyone believes in Shige’s work, ne.”
“Yamapi?”
“Because everyone believes in Shige’s work, that means everyone believes in all of Shige, right? Shige’s feelings are the same as evidence for us.”
Shige sighs in relief. “Thanks.”
Yamapi hangs up without saying anything else, and fifteen minutes later, Tegoshi e-mails Shige’s phone with a few mysterious contracts cosigned under the name of someone simply called “Kou-chan.”
Tegoshi’s message reads:
“This is what I’ve been able to find so far on the paper trail from his home computer. Give me thirty more minutes, ne.”
Shige laughs a little in disbelief and starts the timer on his watch.
Thirty minutes later, he gets the location of both of the banks from which the money for the down payment was first taken from and then sent to, as well as the name of the real estate agent who signed the deal. Tegoshi’s second message reads:
“It might take a few days for me to find the security footage from the banks on those days at those times, ne. I’ll do that; Ryo-tan says he’ll ‘question’ the real estate agent. I miss you, Shige! Keep working hard!”
Shige downloads the images of the contracts to his computer and stores them away for future reference; it’s not technically part of his mission, but somehow he feels like it is anyway.
~~~~~
Three days later Ryo shows up at his apartment door in a sushi delivery-boy uniform, his fake smile looking really fake as he elbows his way into Shige’s apartment with an expensive tray of nigiri in hand. “Delivery!” he shouts.
“Come in,” Shige tells him.
“I hate fish,” Ryo mutters a few minutes later, before plopping down on Shige’s white leather couch. He pulls some photograph printouts from his pocket and tosses them onto the table.
“Tegoshi found a familiar face,” he explains, and Shige looks down at the photographs, where he can very clearly see two people walking into the first bank together. One of them is Katagiri; the other is a tall man wearing sunglasses.
“They’re signing for that warehouse?”
“No, they’re getting gay-married,” Ryo snaps.
Shige snorts. “Who’s the other guy?”
“Tegoshi’s working on it.”
“Oh.”
The two of them look at each other.
After a while, Ryo frowns. “Here,” he says after a moment, and pulls the cover off of the sushi. “Eat up.”
“Really?”
Ryo shrugs and makes himself comfortable on the couch. “You look thin lately. Or something.”
A pause, and Shige feels himself smiling in a real way for the first time in a long time. “Do you want to eat with me?” he asks, just to be a dick.
Ryo’s eyes narrow. “I hate fish.”
Shige laughs. “You can have the inarizushi,” he says, and goes to make them tea.
~~~~~
He reads it in the local paper one morning not long after; another local girl has officially been labeled as missing. She used to work in the red light district, as a maid in a sex club. She’s nineteen and her two children have temporarily been taken into state custody. She disappeared nearly a week ago.
Shige stares at the paper and the club name in bold letters. “I was there,” he thinks, and has a hard time eating the rest of his breakfast after that.
~~~~~
Katagiri-san is already in Kawahara-san’s office when Shige arrives to work that morning. “That new girl from the club was a real sweet piece,” he hears Katagiri-san say, before Shige clears his throat to make his presence known.
“Ah, Katase-kun,” his boss greets. “Have a seat, have some coffee. We were just talking.”
Shige nods and sits down. “Is this about the club?” he asks, and feigns great interest. “Aya-chan, was it?”
“So you are a man after all,” Kawahara-chuckles. “You didn’t do anything the other night, I was worried you were, you know…that way.”
Shige shakes his head. “I just wanted to do my job as your kouhai properly, sir,” he insists.
“You’re a good kid,” Kawahara-san says. “Were any of those girls your type?”
“Aya-chan,” he replies. “I like dancers.”
Katagiri chuckles. “Well if that’s the case,” he says, with a wink and a leer, “You’re in for a surprise tonight.”
Kawahara-san looks a bit surprised to hear that. “Don’t tell me you’re…”
Katagiri shrugs. “Why not? He’s your protégé, isn’t he? I trust your people instincts, Sou-chan.” He turns back to Shige. “Be prepared for a wild night, kid.”
Shige manages to smile back. “I will, sir.”
~~~~~
That wild night never happens. Instead, just as Shige is packing up to go home for the day, Kawahara-san gets a frantic call.
“They what?” he hears his boss say. “Today? Just now?”
Shige lingers for a while trying to listen; he only stays until he sees Kawahara-san shut and lock his office door because it means he won’t hear anything else tonight.
He goes home with a bad feeling sitting like a rock at the bottom of his stomach.
~~~~~
Yamapi calls him that night.
“Shige,” he says, “Shige, Jin found those girls today.”
Shige blinks. “He did?” he says, and is kind of awed and kind of jealous when he hears.
It must be nice, he thinks, to actually get to help people like that.
He’s tired of always having to play someone hateful.
“Shige,” Yamapi adds after a minute, voice grim, “Jin also shot that other guy from the photograph.”
Shige’s eyes widen. “Then that means…”
“It’s not enough,” Yamapi reminds him calmly. “It’s not enough for us to do anything. Because Jin saved them like that, there won’t be any arrests this way.”
Shige has known Yamapi long enough now to know what leader means when he says stuff like this; he knows that Yamapi is telling him that even if it’s not part of his mission, they’re making it part of his mission. Because Yamapi believes in doing the right thing, even if it isn’t always part of their job. Everyone on his team, Shige thinks, is like that.
“Work hard,” Yamapi tells him after a beat, sounding apologetic.
Shige knows it means he’ll have to; he’ll have to become more of what he hates and learn more about this world he’s sick of and merge closer with it and hope that all his efforts will come to something in the end. For the sake of the right thing.
In short, it means more sleepless nights.
~~~~~
Nothing really happens for a few days following Jin’s dramatic rescue of the women; Shige only notices Kawahara-san taking many more private phone calls in his office with the door tightly locked. He presumes it’s because all of the girls had been hospitalized and thus can’t make a big media circus of the whole thing yet; some of them are in worse conditions than others depending on how long they’d been missing.
Jin has also been suspended, Shige hears; it’s for jumping the gun and not waiting for the evidence they needed to close the deal. It’s for killing the man who was there, who was the only connection to Katagiri that the agency had.
He hears that Jin walked out of his office that day with his head held high.
And because every single girl got out alive, Shige thinks that Jin did exactly what he should have.
He sits at his desk and wonders how he can possibly help, now.
“Be patient,” Yamapi had told him earlier. “Jin jumped the gun because it was the right thing to do then; we have to be patient, because that’s the right thing to do now.”
Shige does his best to be patient; he believes in Yamapi and knows that everything he has endured after all this time will amount to something. The trust he carefully cultivated, the endless studying, the lies, the fake smiles, the filth he covered himself in, will all pay off eventually.
It has to.
And just like magic-Just like Yamapi said- he gets his chance as soon as that Friday afternoon, when Kawahara-san finally emerges from the depths of his office and says, “Katase, I need you on something. Have these files ready for me by Monday morning.”
Shige nods. “Yes sir.”
~~~~~
“No witnesses and one contract with the deceased,” Kawahara-san soothes a seething Katagiri the following Monday. “They can’t get you on anything.”
“The girls…” Katagiri says.
“Drugged out of their minds,” Kawahara assures him. “We can plant the right evidence. You know, corrupt youth; whores, the lot of them. Who can trust the word of a whore? Clearly they’re just after your money.”
“Right. So how are we going to convince people of that?”
Kawahara shrugs. “We know some guys in the crime syndicates. They can ruin those girls faster than your guys could string them up to the ceiling. Scare them quiet.”
Katagiri gives him a dark look at the reminder.
“You know what I mean,” Kawahara assures him. “The important thing here is that you go about your usual business. We’ll take care of everything.” Pause. Then, “You’re taking this all down, right Katase? Can I trust you to handle it?”
Shige nods grimly. “I am, sir,” he says, and thinks that they have no idea.
~~~~~
On Tuesday night, when a group of thugs tries to break into Aya-chan’s apartment, there is-luckily or mysteriously or neither- a police officer who has just moved in next door; he’s hosting poker night with some of his buddies from the station and they overhear the ruckus and intervene before anyone can get hurt.
The thugs are arrested, and on them is one of Kawahara-san’s business cards.
~~~~~
“What kind of incompetence is this?!” Kawahara seethes on Wednesday.
Shige blinks back. “I gave them your business card like you instructed,” Shige says carefully. “To call in the favor their boss owes you. I didn’t think they’d be so stupid as to bring it with them.”
Which is all true; he didn’t. Which was why he’d slipped an extra one into one of the men’s pockets that afternoon too.
Kawahara rails. “Fucking yakuza,” he snarls, and slams his fist. “Can’t trust anyone nowadays.”
Shige smiles. “You have me, sir.”
~~~~~
That night Shige places a call from a phone booth. “Katagiri-san,” he says, “after yesterday’s fiasco, I think Kawahara-san is going to hand you over to save his own reputation.”
“What?!” Katagiri shouts. “That backstabbing son of a bitch! I’ll show him.”
Shige hangs up and actually lets himself enjoy a little expensive champagne that night.
~~~~~
On Thursday morning Katagiri shows up at the police station saying that Kawahara was the one responsible for those girls’ abductions. He’d been played as a trusting, innocent friend; had cosigned on the warehouse because Kawahara had asked him to. “I have proof! Right before that girl was abducted, we’d been at that club! I saw how he was with her! He kidnapped her!”
“What the hell is that moron doing?!” Kawahara screams, when he hears.
“Sir,” Shige says calmly, “I think it’s time to let him go as one of our clients.” He holds up a tape recording of Monday’s conversation and hits play. Kawahara and Katagiri’s conversation about the girls being found plays back to them.
“We can edit that right?” Kawahara says.
“Yes,” Shige replies.
Kawahara smiles. “You really are a super-star, Katase,” he tells Shige.
~~~~~
Two days later, after the edited tape makes it into the mail to all the major television networks (and subsequently the police), Katagiri Kousuke is arrested.
Kawahara is not arrested-yet-but Shige is fairly certain that more opportunities will arise in the next few months, as he continues his work as Katase Riichiro in Kawahara-san’s firm.
After all, his original mission has always been to bring down all of the senior partners, not just one.
“Be patient,” Yamapi tells him on the phone again, after he gives Shige news of Katagiri’s arrest. “I know that out of everyone, Shige can be patient.”
Shige sighs. “I know,” he says, because this is his place in the agency. He sits in the background, waiting for an opportunity. He is someone they can rely on for the long haul.
It’s why he can do these jobs, be the lawyer, the doctor, the assistant professor, the office worker, the manager, the college graduate, the underling, the bad guy.
It’s why he can’t be Jin and jump the gun, or be the hero.
They already have one of those anyway.
In the silence Yamapi seems to sense the weight on his shoulders and clicks his tongue a few times. “Saturday,” he instructs. “Saturday come in for a new briefing. Koyama will pour you tea and Massu will bring donuts. I’ll even make sure Tegoshi lets you choose yours first.”
“Okay,” Shige says, and doesn’t know why he feels so comforted by the image that promise brings to mind. “Then I’ll see you Saturday.”
~~~~~
4. One World
On Saturday they have the meeting early in the morning; Massu brings the donuts and Koyama makes tea and coffee. Ryo lets Tegoshi use his shoulder as a pillow and when Shige walks into the room it’s just like Yamapi said, he gets first pick of the donuts.
“So,” Yamapi says, when they begin the meeting, “Shige ne, Shige will probably have to work hard like this for another few months.”
Koyama looks at Shige and pushes his donut towards Shige instinctively, “Shige,” he says, “have you been eating properly? You look tired.”
“Shige,” Tegoshi murmurs when he hears, “you can nap on Ryo-tan’s other shoulder if you want. He’s really comfortable, ne.”
Ryo snorts but doesn’t say no, and after a minute, Massu carefully tells Shige that he can take the extra donuts home if he wants, right after Massu has scooped out an extra two for himself.
Shige eventually nods. “I can do this for a few more months,” he finds himself saying, when there’s a donut box put in front of him with four donuts still inside, when Koyama pours him tea and coffee both and when Tegoshi and Ryo look at him from across the table and neither of them tease him at all because they know he’s too exhausted to defend himself properly.
Yamapi smiles. “Shige works hard,” he says, and hands him another folder, complete with the latest information that the rest of the team has spent all this time gathering for him. “Only Shige can do this work this way.”
They adjourn the meeting a little while later, after Shige’s eaten his donuts and finished his tea and coffee (more for Koyama’s benefit than for his own).
Meanwhile, on the opposite side of the hallway, Jin is dropping off some of the equipment he had checked out for his stint as Miroku the bouncer because Kame had insisted; on his way in he meets Shige who is on his way out, and for a moment, the two of them stop and look at each other and don’t know quite what to say.
So they don’t say anything; Shige simply nods as he passes Jin and finds himself feeling-again-that it would be nice to be like that.
“I wish I could have helped them like he did,” Shige thinks as he looks at the older agent walking casually away from him. “I wish I could have done something instead of sit on the sidelines and watch and wait. I want to save lives too, not just ruin them.”
Jin has been suspended for the next month, but Shige is the one who sometimes feels like he’s not doing anything much at all.
Meanwhile, Jin sees Shige too, standing tall in the hallway and looking as reliable as ever; he did his job and caught the bad guy and now, now Katagiri Kousuke will never be able to hurt anyone like Yuriko or Aya-chan ever again.
Jin smiles crookedly to himself; “That’s the kind of person that a team can trust, who can put bad guys away. All I wanted was to save lives, but I could have ruined hundreds more if Kato hadn’t gotten the evidence to arrest.”
Jin is suspended for the next month but knows that Shige won’t need the ear to the street that Jin provides anyway. He’ll do fine on his own, just like he always does.
“I feel like I didn’t do everything I could have,” they both think.
The two of them head down the corridor in opposite directions while feeling and contemplating the exact same things; neither of them knows that they both do their jobs so well they’ve somehow managed to fool each other too.
But then again, that might just be another part of what makes the system work so well.
END
EDITS PLZ.
Title: I Am a Man of Many Faces
Universe: JE ( Government AU)
Theme/Topic: Shige fic!
Rating: PG-15
Character/Pairing/s: NewS and KAT-TUN (with mentions of T&T)
Warnings/Spoilers: LOTS AND LOTS OF OOC, randomness. Bad law enforcement procedurals.
Word Count: 8,280
Summary: A thousand different lives each and somehow they’re all the same.
Dedication: Shige’s birthday fic (clearly late like woah), but also for mujun, whose comments I looked back on over the past few days; rereading them really cheered me up from the otherwise crappiness of the month so far.
A/N: Originally I had no plans for Jin birthday fic, but then this kind of happened; LOL I suppose it is purely from the fact that his birthday happens to be around the same time as a couple of people who matter enough to warrant birthday fic. >> Also, it makes no sense. My parallels kind of got destroyed in the process of trying to find plot, and my plot got mangled in the process of trying to work in parallels. Such is life.
Disclaimer: No harm is meant by this!
1. Worlds Apart
When Kame and Yamapi step out of their directors’ meetings with Administrators Imai and Takizawa that month neither of them looks very surprised as they hand out their latest assignments to their undercover agents.
“You’re doing some legwork,” Kame tells Jin. “There’s a club.”
Jin supposes that yes, there has to be a club.
Meanwhile, across the hall, Yamapi smiles tiredly and hands the NEWS mission folder to Shige. “Shige,” he says, “Shige, do you know a lot about law?”
Shige smiles back and somehow makes it bitter; “I suppose I will before too long,” he quips, and opens the file.
~~~~~
2. Underworld
When the agency needs an ear to the street, Jin gets the assignment.
He complains about it to Nakamaru in the break room one afternoon; “I always have to be this kind of person when I’m out there,” he mutters, looking into his coffee after putting in the creamer but before stirring. The white makes weird patterns in the black for a little bit, before turning everything brown.
“You just have the look,” Nakamaru tells him absently as he pours his own coffee, “of a hoodlum, I guess.”
Jin snorts and doesn’t take offense simply because he’s learned how not to after all this time.
He goes back to his desk and reads the case file instead; tonight it’s a seedy bar in the red light district where he’s looking to get in as an employee. They want him to establish himself there as a non-threatening figure so that he can sniff out the agency’s prime suspect in the case of several serial kidnappings involving some missing girls from the sex clubs.
“Just see if they’ll take you in,” Kame tells him at the meeting that afternoon, “and try not to get into any fights this time. It jeopardizes the mission.”
Jin nods and stands, knows that he’s wearing a suit and a tie right now but tonight it’ll be a baseball cap and a hooded sweatshirt, some cheap, nondescript jeans and an old pair of Converse sneakers.
Because when he wears them, he really looks like a hoodlum.
He’s gotten good at it.
He used to think that being an undercover agent meant that you could be a thousand different things all at once, that you could use those thousands of different lives to do the one thing that matters most in the world: catch bad guys.
Lately he thinks he’s learning how this real world works, thinks that he’s finally figuring out the difference between those old ideals he’d had back as an academy brat and how things really are out on the front lines.
He is living a thousand different lives but it somehow feels like they’re all the same; that they’re all this life.
“I can only be what they let me be,” he supposes, and can’t help but feel a little bitter about it because he wants to be so much more than that.
~~~~~
He strolls into the club promptly at eleven pm that night and earns a few wary looks from the other patrons; he’s some punk kid with a big attitude, some delinquent brat who probably can’t even remember the right stroke order to the kanji in his name. He has to be looking for trouble.
“Beer,” he says when he gets to the bar, and nods to the bartender before lighting a cigarette and taking a long, professional drawl. A pretty waitress in nothing but a frilly apron and stilettos walks by, smiling and asking him if there’s anything else she can get him tonight.
He smiles back; “Too broke tonight,” he says. “But maybe I’ll get lucky.”
She giggles and flitters off.
“Don’t see a lot of your age coming to places like this,” the bartender says to him after a beat, eyeing him suspiciously.
“Came to ask for a job,” Jin replies. “Heard there was work.”
A pause, and then eventually, a nod. “There’s work. What’re your qualifications?”
Jin smirks. “You asking me about education?”
A snort then; “Can tell by looking at you that you’re a dumbass. I’m asking how you are in a fight.”
Jin laughs. “You can tell that by looking too, can’t you?”
The bartender likes his pluck; “I’ll call the manager,” he says, and doesn’t end up charging Jin for the beer that night.
~~~~~
Jin starts work the next night bouncing rowdies who try to get too friendly with the girls without payment upfront; he learns that the waitress who had smiled at him the night before is named Yuriko and that she’s nineteen and has two kids and used to dream about being an actress.
Jin smiles and lies and says his name is Miroku, that he’s eighteen and likes motorcycles. He tries not to look at her breasts whenever they talk with one another and she appreciates that; she kind of treats him like a little brother.
~~~~~
He rents a seedy apartment near the train station because it fits who he’s decided Miroku is; there are roaches and sometimes even rodents and when Kame calls to check up on him after the first week he calmly reminds Jin not to drink too much, not to have too much fun, because it’s work despite the fact that it all must look like a giant playground to him.
Jin thinks that maybe Kame has never been to one of these places once in his whole life; he wonders what’s so different about the two of them that everyone seems to think that Jin has.
He can’t help but feel sometimes that it must be nice to be Shige, to have people take one look at him and think immediately that he’s intelligent and responsible and capable of handling himself in any situation.
He thinks he’d like to be trusted like that one day too, even if he does kind of look like a hoodlum.
~~~~~
The next week, Yuriko doesn’t show up for work.
No one worries except for Jin; the bartender says it happens all the time. Girls like that find a better job or find a man or go back home when things get so hard they want to die. They’ll have someone come in to cover for her tonight; tomorrow, if she’s not back, they’ll start interviewing for someone new.
Jin remembers how she’d told him that her son is turning three next week; she’d been saving her tips to buy him a brand new toy truck.
~~~~~
The night after that an older lady comes into the club looking for Yuriko too; she baby sits Yuriko’s kids while she’s working and is worried because she hasn’t heard anything for her since the night she disappeared.
Jin has to pretend to know nothing (and to not care); that morning, after the club closes, he returns to his apartment and wracks his brain trying to remember every person who ever talked to Yuriko since he started working with her.
He doesn’t sleep, and when Kame calls him to check in before his shift begins again that night, the groggy way he answers the phone convinces Kame that he’s hungover. “Don’t be so irresponsible,” Kame chides. “We have a case. Ueda is looking into the security camera footage after we bribed Tegoshi for his help; we’ll let you know if we find anything about the suspect.”
On his way to work, Jin stops at a little hobby shop by the station and buys a toy truck.
~~~~~
Jin sneaks into the office the following Monday morning and gets yelled at for jeopardizing the mission by being careless; Kame orders him out of there immediately and won’t even give him the profiles Ueda and Tegoshi are working on, the pictures of everyone she talked to the night before she went missing.
“She talked to a lot of people,” Kame says, “and we haven’t seen anyone on any of our lists. Now leave. We’ll contact you when we have something.”
Jin scowls and slouches out of the office in his hooded sweatshirt and cheap jeans; as he walks down the hall he catches site of Shige in conference with Yamapi in Yamapi’s office, wearing his sharpest striped suit and an equally sharp tie with leather shoes.
Jin thinks for a moment that it must be nice to be there, to be chasing the rich scumbags and the powerful corrupt, because down here at the bottom, having to worry about people who’s lives are already so miserable is the most painful thing in the world.
~~~~~
When Jin gets back to his dirty apartment there’s an e-mail on the computer from him but no return address on it; all it says in the body is:
"We thought you could use some help."
Attached is a cleaned up security camera photo of each of the people Yuriko talked to starting from five days before she disappeared.
Jin doesn’t need a signature to know who “we” is; he’s thankful and not at the same time because this means another twenty-four hours without any sleep.
~~~~~
The new girl starts the next night; she’s eighteen and her name is Aya and she wants to be a dancer. Jin thinks about Yuriko and the blur of faces he’d spent the entirety of yesterday poring over.
“Nice to meet you,” he says, when Aya-chan introduces herself. “Be careful.”
She gives him an odd look but doesn’t ask what he means; he thinks she probably knows.
~~~~~
A few days after Aya-chan starts Jin manages to hide his surprise when Kato Shigeaki pulls up to the front of the club in a sleek foreign car wearing a sleek foreign suit; he has guests dressed just like him and they call him Katase-kun.
“They’re from some big law firm downtown,” the bartender explains, and breaks out the best glasses and the best champagne and tells the best girls to go and see to them. “The rich ones are always the biggest monsters.”
Jin nods and he and Shige pretend not to know anything about each other at all, even though it’s weird to be in the same place doing the same things when the lives they’re pretending to live are so vastly different.
Shige spends two-hundred dollars in two minutes, laughing his fake laugh and smiling his fake smile and studying the men around him with sharp eyes. Jin watches him watch them and thinks that it must be easier doing this job when there’s so little around you worth caring about.
“The rich ones are the biggest monsters,” Jin murmurs to himself, and tries not to think about the toy truck sitting back on his kitchen table.
~~~~~
Half an hour after Shige arrives with his lawyer friends another guest comes and joins them at the table.
When Jin sees his face he nearly drops the cigarette he’s smoking; it’s a fat, bald man with a familiar leer that Jin is certain he saw in those pictures Tegoshi and Ueda sent him.
“He’s a talent agent,” he gets told by Aya-chan when she walks by; “I think that maybe he likes me!”
Jin’s brow furrows and he nods. “Be careful,” he says, and lights another cigarette.
~~~~~
“It has to be him,” Jin tells Kame over the phone that night. “I think it has to be him.”
He can practically hear Kame’s frown from the other end of the line. “We don’t have any evidence,” Kame reminds him coolly. “Just because you think something won’t make it true.”
“Yuriko could be dead if we wait too long!”
“More people will die if we fuck up and his lawyers get him back on the streets.”
Kame hangs up.
~~~~~
“His name is Katagiri,” Yamapi tells him on a surprise call from a secure line the following morning. “Shige said his name is Katagiri and he thinks there’s something wrong with him.”
“How do you know all of this?” Jin murmurs, sleepily. He looks at the truck on his table, pushes it forward and back, forward and back with one finger.
“Shige,” Yamapi murmurs, “Shige is working hard.”
Jin smiles crookedly. “Sometimes I wish I could be like Shige,” he says quietly. “He looked like he was going to beat those guys no matter what.”
A pause, followed by a small chuckle. “That’s just his job.”
“I’m working hard too, Pi.”
“I know.”
Jin hangs up and watches the little truck roll over the edge of the table.
He picks it up and puts it in his jacket pocket.
~~~~~
Three days later Katagiri is back; he asks for Aya-chan and she smiles and sits in his lap, naked except for the apron. Katagiri orders her good wine and says he’ll make her star.
Jin watches and bites the inside of his cheek until it bleeds because he can’t do anything yet, because as much as he hates to admit it, Kame is right. They don’t have enough evidence.
“He gave me his card!” Aya-chan chirrups to him at the end of the night, and Jin snatches it out of her hand because he can’t help it. She laughs at him; “Are you jealous? I bet if I introduced you he’d help you too, Miroku-kun. You’re good looking.”
He smiles a bit crookedly and memorizes the number on the card while looking like he’s considering the offer; after a few minutes he shrugs and hands it back. “I’m not cut out for that kind of work,” he tells her.
She pouts and says that when she’s famous, she’ll laugh at him for not taking the right opportunities.
~~~~~
“This number,” Jin reports to Kame. “this is his number.”
“We know his number,” Kame replies flatly. “That’s not evidence.”
Jin sighs. “I think he’ll try to take Aya-chan next. I don’t think we should let her see him anymore. I have a bad feeling.”
“You can’t make assumptions like that,” Kame reminds him, and is starting to sound annoyed. “We have to catch him in the act.”
“What if she dies? What if he kills her?”
“Then, at least we can catch him,” he drawls impatiently. “Now get some sleep, you sound hungover and you’re wasting time when you should be resting.”
Jin is the one to hang up first this time.
~~~~~
Jin doesn’t go to sleep. He grabs his gun and tucks it into the back of his pants before going to Aya-chan’s place instead. He parks outside in his car, smoking and watching her window from an alleyway like a stalker.
He’s tired and kind of smelly and he thinks that even though Kame was probably joking, he doesn’t want Aya-chan’s body to be the evidence they need to put Katagiri behind bars.
He doesn’t want Yuriko’s body to be in evidence either.
At noon that day, Aya-chan leaves her apartment looking excited when a black car pulls up in front of her building. Jin follows her, even though he knows that this isn’t part of what his job is about.
He thinks Kame would have a fit if he knew.
~~~~~
She gets taken to a shady building on the bad side of town, paint peeling, cement cracked, empty lots overgrown with weeds. Jin can see her in the backseat of the sedan, looking confused but being too polite to say anything.
They park and lead her to a blue building with bars on the windows; the driver-a tall man in sunglasses- is all polite smiles and courtesy and it lulls her a little, she nods and follows him inside.
Jin parks up the street and tries to find a back way in.
~~~~~
There’s a rusty fire escape towards the side of the building and Jin climbs it; he cuts his hand on a twisted jut of metal and curses under his breath as he fights his way up to one of the grime covered windows.
When he looks inside he thinks he has all the evidence in the world now.
~~~~~
Yuriko’s there, along with several other girls, all naked and chained up to the ceiling and lolling from drugs; when Aya-chan sees them she tries to scream but gets a hand clamped over he mouth and an arm twisted around her neck. She struggles and kicks but the driver is bigger and stronger and Jin has to hold himself back because after all the courtrooms he’s watched from afar and all the cases he’s had to help prepare, he knows that this still isn’t enough, that he won’t get anything from it on Katagiri.
“Just calm down,” he says under his breath, and thinks he’s talking to Aya-chan when he says it. “Just calm down and don’t make him hurt you.”
But Aya-chan is a dancer and she has a strength all her own from working at the club as well; she kicks and struggles and bites and manages to get her head free for a second so that she can scream; she stomps on the driver’s foot and elbows him in the ribs and won’t give up.
“Boss said you’d be compliant,” the driver growls, “so be a good girl and settle down.”
“Fuck you,” she spits, and screams again when he grabs her hair.
Jin curses. “Stupid,” he says, “stupid, calm down.”
She doesn’t listen.
The driver pulls a gun and aims it right at her head.
“Goddammit,” Jin shouts, and pulls out his gun too.
He breaks through the window with his elbow and thinks that Kame is going to suspend him if he lives through today.
~~~~~
He’s right.
Kame suspends him.
After he shoots the driver and saves the girls and has to get glass removed from his elbow and stitches put in, Kame storms into the doctor’s office shaking with rage and serves him the papers and storms out again without another word.
“Because you acted hastily,” Nakamaru explains later, when he visits Jin at Jin’s real apartment. “Because now Katagiri-san can’t be implicated. Maybe if you hadn’t killed the driver…”
“But the girls,” Jin starts.
“The girls can suspect that Katagiri-san was responsible but he never showed up once during their confinement. They say they were supposed to meet him the day they disappeared but no one can confirm that. It’s the word of call girls against the word of someone with very powerful lawyers.”
Jin’s response is to throw a chair across the room.
“Oi…” Nakamaru protests, and looks scared at the strange look in his teammate’s eye. “Calm down, stupid. Calm down.”
Jin flops onto the floor and looks angry.
“You saved them,” Nakamaru begins after a moment of silence, awkwardly. “From…whatever Katagiri’s clients were using them for in that place. You saved them.”
“Yeah,” Jin murmurs, and pulls a dinged up little toy truck from inside his jacket pocket.
~~~~~
He visits Yuriko in the hospital during his suspension and gives her the truck. She smiles at him tiredly from the bed and says that Yoichi-kun will really love it.
“I’m sorry I couldn’t do more,” Jin tells her.
“I’m thankful you were there,” she replies, and finally starts to cry.
~~~~~
Jin leaves the hospital both hating and loving his job, both hating and loving the world.
He sticks his hands in his pockets and thinks that maybe it would be easier if he was someone else, someone who could freely chase bad guys and not worry about the people they step on along the way.
But then he thinks to himself that if he was one of those guys, then there would be no one here like this to do the jobs he does.
He’s always the punk, the gangster, the delinquent, the lowlife, the idiot.
He’s the only one who can be, and he thinks that as tiring and heartbreaking and frustrating as it is, he’ll continue to do it simply because no one else will.
He wonders how many other lives he's condemned in the future because of his actions.
~~~~~
3. Sitting at the Top of the World
For white collar crimes, Shige is often called.
Everyone thinks that his world is glamorous and exciting; he usually gets to lease the fancy cars and get measured for the tailored suits and live in the luxury high rises. Sometimes he goes to snobby parties and five star restaurants and once he got hit on by an idol who thought he was rich, but those are just the surface things really; he thinks the people who become envious of him because of stuff like that really don’t know anything at all about what it actually means.
“For the spring, I’ll become a lawyer,” he tells his teammates tiredly one afternoon, after reading his latest mission brief from Yamapi.
They look at him sympathetically.
With good reason; he spends the next three days cramming three years’ worth of law terms and important cases into his head; he doesn’t sleep at all and Koyama worries, bringing him tea and coffee and snacks and asking, “Shige, are you okay? Shouldn’t you rest?” while wringing his hands.
“I have to be a lawyer tomorrow,” Shige tells him patiently, and takes his glasses off so he can rub his eyes before putting them right back on again. “I don’t know if I can remember all of this.”
“If it’s Shige,” Koyama assures him, “then everything you read you’ll definitely remember, ne.”
“I don’t know about that,” Shige sighs, and gratefully accepts the tea and snacks.
The next day, Shige becomes a perfect lawyer; he dresses smartly in a black pinstripe suit and ties a perfect knot with his blue and gray tie. He walks into his new office with his head held high and his shoulders back so that when people look at him, they will automatically think that he graduated at the top of the class, that he’s a first round pick, that he’s a prodigy who will climb the ladder to success quickly and become a partner in no time.
“He’s so professional,” one of the paralegals murmurs to her secretary friend that day; “He must have gone to a top notch law school.”
“Aoyama Daigaku,” the secretary whispers, “I saw it when I was processing his file, ne.”
And then the two look at each other and giggle; “I wonder if he’s married yet?”
Shige spends a very long time in that firm practicing law like a real professional; he takes cases and talks to clients and prepares paperwork based on what he’s read in books and what he’s seen on TV. It’s hard and he makes mistakes sometimes but the paralegals all like him and help him out; they think it’s comforting that even a hot-shot like Katase-san can slip up every once in a while. It makes him human.
They don’t know that Shige goes home every night and stays awake reading up on the subjects of his cases; they’ll never know that to maintain his façade he has to look up the procedurals and the paperwork and the precedents to stay on top of his game. He has to work hard to make his fake knowledge become real and Koyama worries the most on those nights, after he hasn’t had contact with Shige for a long time. He wonders if Shige is eating right and if he isn’t stressing himself out too much. Being undercover is like having two jobs all at the same time and everyone in NEWS already knows that their one job is tiring enough as it is.
Shige goes to bed around three am every evening while he’s undercover, after studying whatever role he’s been given to the best of his ability. He is someone who can be a doctor, a lawyer, an accountant, a floor manager, a martial artist, a high school student.
“I feel,” he says tiredly sometimes, over the secure line to Yamapi during his weekly report, “that I have learned how to live a thousand different lives all in my one.”
Yamapi smiles into the receiver when he hears. “Is it regretful?” he asks, and wonders if Shige knows that the things Jin complains about are the same things Shige worries over, even if the kinds of jobs they get are so very different. “Do you wish it was easier?”
Shige furrows his brow at the question; he thinks that sometimes he does wish that he could be like Akanishi and simply throw on a hooded sweater and casually walk the streets some nights, buying drinks and information as he pleases. Sometimes Shige wishes for that instead of this, because he doesn’t want to know what a motion for judgment on the pleadings is or how to file an accessory contract or how to tell the exact difference between fraud in the factum and fraud in the inducement.
He sighs. “It will never be easier,” he tells Yamapi after a moment, “So what’s the point in wishing it?”
Yamapi chuckles a little. “Everyone is doing their best, ne.”
Shige manages a small laugh too. “Yeah.”
“Shige, keep doing your best!”
“I will.”
He hangs up after that and goes back to his books for the night; tomorrow he has a pretrial conference at eight and right now, he’s two books behind on his criminal law references.
~~~~~
The next day at noon, his boss, Kawahara Souichirou-san, calls him for a special lunch meeting. “I’d like you to meet one of our most prestigious clients,” Kawahara-san says, and Shige tries not to stare as caterers walk into the conference room carrying three-hundred dollar bottles of wine to go with the kobe steak they’re having for lunch.
“A prestigious client?” Shige asks, eyebrows arching up with just the right amount of curiosity. “We have a lot of those, don’t we?”
“A personal friend of mine,” Kawahara-san replies. “We went to college together.”
“I look forward to meeting him,” Shige says dutifully. “I respect Kawahara-san very much.”
His boss laughs and they clink glasses.
Ten minutes later a round, balding older man in a gray suit strolls into the room, looking around the place like he owns it.
“This is Katagiri Kousuke,” Kawahara-san says, and Shige stands and bows politely. “Kou-chan, this is Katase Riichiro, our first-year all star.”
Katagiri smiles in a way that immediately sets Shige on edge; Shige manages to smile back in a fake way that has become completely natural. “Nice to meet you, sir,” he says.
“First-year all star, eh? Sou-chan’s been talking a lot about you,” Katagiri replies with a bark of laughter, before sitting down and motioning one of the caterers over too. “You kinda remind me of him back in the day, looking at you. You seem sharp, kid.”
Shige smiles again. “I’m flattered.”
They have lunch from there and Katagiri-san complains about how there’s this secretary at his office threatening to sue him for sexual harassment; Kawahara snorts and says they can easily bury any lawyers a mere secretary could afford to hire. “People just go around threatening lawsuits left and right,” he sighs. “Kids these days, eh?”
Katagiri laughs and nods. “All I did was grab her tits a few times. They weren’t even that big and she’s pushing thirty as it is.”
The both of them laugh too, and Shige has to join in because he needs them to trust him.
“Though speaking of tits,” Katagiri continues, and sprays saffron rice all over the table as he does, “We should go to the club soon; I’m in the mood for something young and naked.”
Kawahara whistles. “So that’s where all your money goes.”
Katagiri grins. “That’s where I get all my money,” he corrects mysteriously, and Shige blinks and wonders what he means by that. “Being an agent this day and age is getting ten percent of jack shit. A guy’s gotta have all these side ventures just to put some monkfish liver on the table once in a while, am I right?”
Kawahara nods in agreement and Shige has to too; he finishes of the rest of his kobe-steak without tasting a single bite of it.
~~~~~
Shige-or Katase Riichiro rather- is being groomed as Kawahara’s successor, as his personal protégé.
Shige learns that this means even more hours of work than normal, even more than the double time he’s already putting in.
On the weekends too, he gets called out to fancy dinners and fancy clubs and golf courses and sometimes day trips to Hong Kong casinos.
He has to rub elbows with the wealthy elite, has to listen to all their filthy stories and watch their filthy actions and play along; sometimes he has to be filthy too-he inappropriately grabs a massage girl in Hong Kong- and the feeling sticks to his skin afterwards, makes it hard to sleep even after the massage and the spa treatment, even on the hotel’s fluffy down comforters and smooth silk sheets.
This weekend it’s a club in the red light district; he gets the call and smiles fakely over the phone as he agrees to be there with bells on.
When he walks though the front doors of the club some hours later, Akanishi Jin’s face is the first thing he sees.
~~~~~
The girls are naked save for their shoes and their aprons; Shige tries to look mildly interested without leering so as to appease his bosses without offending the women, but what’s more important to him is that Jin is here, and that means their cases are connected somehow but they haven’t been told how.
That in turn, means that the agency doesn’t know. Or he hopes they don’t know and that it isn’t something purposely kept from their agents for god knows why.
Shige is investigating Kawahara-san’s law firm’s practices; they are suspected of covering up major evidence in key corporate and criminal cases and paying off or creating their own witnesses as is convenient.
Jin, as far as Shige knows, is trying to get information on some missing persons cases that have popped up in the area over the past few months; beyond that the details are fuzzy and probably only known by the rest of KAT-TUN.
Shige sits, deep in thought over what is going on, as Kawahara-san orders one of the girls into his lap. “Katase-kun’s brow is furrowed so severely,” he comments, and sloppily pours a glass of hundred dollar champagne before pushing it towards Shige.
“I’ll pour, Kawahara-san,” Shige insists, and takes the bottle while detouring the girl into the older man’s lap instead. “It’s my job as your kouhai, after all.”
Kawahara snorts but doesn’t protest when the girl giggles and falls onto him. He whoops, offers her a sip of his drink (from his mouth), and orders Shige to keep it coming.
Shige smiles his fake smile and obediently does as he’s told, making sure to drink from his own glass every once in a while so as not to be called a party pooper.
In the meantime he can feel Jin’s eyes on him from the shadows across the room and he wonders how he must look right now, if he’s coming across as dirty as he feels.
He probably does.
“This is the life, eh, Katase?” Kawahara asks, and makes the girl-Aya-chan he calls her-light his cigarette for him.
Shige nods. “Yes, sir,” he agrees quietly. “It’s the life.”
~~~~~
Thirty minutes later Katagiri-san joins them and sweeps Aya off of Kawahara’s lap and into his own, touches her with his hands and lies to her so well she forgets where his fingers are.
“I’ve got this business venture I’ve started up recently,” he explains, and lets his hand drift along the inside of her thigh, “I could make you a star.”
She eats it up while Shige’s brow furrows slightly. According to Katagiri-san’s accounts (which Shige has recently been put in charge of), there are no new start up businesses mentioned in any of his contracts; he’s still a major talent agent for one of the countries biggest agencies, but not a self-made man by any means.
“Really? A star?” Aya-chan breathes, looking so excited she might burst.
“Yeah, really,” Katagiri leers, and pulls out his card, slides it into her apron pocket. “My card.”
“I want to be a dancer,” she tells him, and he smirks.
“I’m sure you do.”
Shige’s job is about reading people; in that moment he thinks he feels something like inexplicable dread welling up somewhere deep in his gut.
But he keeps smiling and pours everyone more drinks anyway.
~~~~~
“I think something fishy is going on with that Katagiri-san,” Shige reports to Yamapi over the phone later that night. “He keeps talking about this venture he has to Kawahara-san that isn’t in any of his contracts or files anywhere.”
Yamapi is silent from the other end.
Shige sighs. “I know,” he says, “I know Katagiri-san is not the point of this mission. But I feel something odd about it.”
“Feelings aren’t evidence,” Yamapi replies in even tones.
Shige frowns.
“But,” Yamapi adds after a moment, gently, “everyone believes in Shige’s work, ne.”
“Yamapi?”
“Because everyone believes in Shige’s work, that means everyone believes in all of Shige, right? Shige’s feelings are the same as evidence for us.”
Shige sighs in relief. “Thanks.”
Yamapi hangs up without saying anything else, and fifteen minutes later, Tegoshi e-mails Shige’s phone with a few mysterious contracts cosigned under the name of someone simply called “Kou-chan.”
Tegoshi’s message reads:
“This is what I’ve been able to find so far on the paper trail from his home computer. Give me thirty more minutes, ne.”
Shige laughs a little in disbelief and starts the timer on his watch.
Thirty minutes later, he gets the location of both of the banks from which the money for the down payment was first taken from and then sent to, as well as the name of the real estate agent who signed the deal. Tegoshi’s second message reads:
“It might take a few days for me to find the security footage from the banks on those days at those times, ne. I’ll do that; Ryo-tan says he’ll ‘question’ the real estate agent. I miss you, Shige! Keep working hard!”
Shige downloads the images of the contracts to his computer and stores them away for future reference; it’s not technically part of his mission, but somehow he feels like it is anyway.
~~~~~
Three days later Ryo shows up at his apartment door in a sushi delivery-boy uniform, his fake smile looking really fake as he elbows his way into Shige’s apartment with an expensive tray of nigiri in hand. “Delivery!” he shouts.
“Come in,” Shige tells him.
“I hate fish,” Ryo mutters a few minutes later, before plopping down on Shige’s white leather couch. He pulls some photograph printouts from his pocket and tosses them onto the table.
“Tegoshi found a familiar face,” he explains, and Shige looks down at the photographs, where he can very clearly see two people walking into the first bank together. One of them is Katagiri; the other is a tall man wearing sunglasses.
“They’re signing for that warehouse?”
“No, they’re getting gay-married,” Ryo snaps.
Shige snorts. “Who’s the other guy?”
“Tegoshi’s working on it.”
“Oh.”
The two of them look at each other.
After a while, Ryo frowns. “Here,” he says after a moment, and pulls the cover off of the sushi. “Eat up.”
“Really?”
Ryo shrugs and makes himself comfortable on the couch. “You look thin lately. Or something.”
A pause, and Shige feels himself smiling in a real way for the first time in a long time. “Do you want to eat with me?” he asks, just to be a dick.
Ryo’s eyes narrow. “I hate fish.”
Shige laughs. “You can have the inarizushi,” he says, and goes to make them tea.
~~~~~
He reads it in the local paper one morning not long after; another local girl has officially been labeled as missing. She used to work in the red light district, as a maid in a sex club. She’s nineteen and her two children have temporarily been taken into state custody. She disappeared nearly a week ago.
Shige stares at the paper and the club name in bold letters. “I was there,” he thinks, and has a hard time eating the rest of his breakfast after that.
~~~~~
Katagiri-san is already in Kawahara-san’s office when Shige arrives to work that morning. “That new girl from the club was a real sweet piece,” he hears Katagiri-san say, before Shige clears his throat to make his presence known.
“Ah, Katase-kun,” his boss greets. “Have a seat, have some coffee. We were just talking.”
Shige nods and sits down. “Is this about the club?” he asks, and feigns great interest. “Aya-chan, was it?”
“So you are a man after all,” Kawahara-chuckles. “You didn’t do anything the other night, I was worried you were, you know…that way.”
Shige shakes his head. “I just wanted to do my job as your kouhai properly, sir,” he insists.
“You’re a good kid,” Kawahara-san says. “Were any of those girls your type?”
“Aya-chan,” he replies. “I like dancers.”
Katagiri chuckles. “Well if that’s the case,” he says, with a wink and a leer, “You’re in for a surprise tonight.”
Kawahara-san looks a bit surprised to hear that. “Don’t tell me you’re…”
Katagiri shrugs. “Why not? He’s your protégé, isn’t he? I trust your people instincts, Sou-chan.” He turns back to Shige. “Be prepared for a wild night, kid.”
Shige manages to smile back. “I will, sir.”
~~~~~
That wild night never happens. Instead, just as Shige is packing up to go home for the day, Kawahara-san gets a frantic call.
“They what?” he hears his boss say. “Today? Just now?”
Shige lingers for a while trying to listen; he only stays until he sees Kawahara-san shut and lock his office door because it means he won’t hear anything else tonight.
He goes home with a bad feeling sitting like a rock at the bottom of his stomach.
~~~~~
Yamapi calls him that night.
“Shige,” he says, “Shige, Jin found those girls today.”
Shige blinks. “He did?” he says, and is kind of awed and kind of jealous when he hears.
It must be nice, he thinks, to actually get to help people like that.
He’s tired of always having to play someone hateful.
“Shige,” Yamapi adds after a minute, voice grim, “Jin also shot that other guy from the photograph.”
Shige’s eyes widen. “Then that means…”
“It’s not enough,” Yamapi reminds him calmly. “It’s not enough for us to do anything. Because Jin saved them like that, there won’t be any arrests this way.”
Shige has known Yamapi long enough now to know what leader means when he says stuff like this; he knows that Yamapi is telling him that even if it’s not part of his mission, they’re making it part of his mission. Because Yamapi believes in doing the right thing, even if it isn’t always part of their job. Everyone on his team, Shige thinks, is like that.
“Work hard,” Yamapi tells him after a beat, sounding apologetic.
Shige knows it means he’ll have to; he’ll have to become more of what he hates and learn more about this world he’s sick of and merge closer with it and hope that all his efforts will come to something in the end. For the sake of the right thing.
In short, it means more sleepless nights.
~~~~~
Nothing really happens for a few days following Jin’s dramatic rescue of the women; Shige only notices Kawahara-san taking many more private phone calls in his office with the door tightly locked. He presumes it’s because all of the girls had been hospitalized and thus can’t make a big media circus of the whole thing yet; some of them are in worse conditions than others depending on how long they’d been missing.
Jin has also been suspended, Shige hears; it’s for jumping the gun and not waiting for the evidence they needed to close the deal. It’s for killing the man who was there, who was the only connection to Katagiri that the agency had.
He hears that Jin walked out of his office that day with his head held high.
And because every single girl got out alive, Shige thinks that Jin did exactly what he should have.
He sits at his desk and wonders how he can possibly help, now.
“Be patient,” Yamapi had told him earlier. “Jin jumped the gun because it was the right thing to do then; we have to be patient, because that’s the right thing to do now.”
Shige does his best to be patient; he believes in Yamapi and knows that everything he has endured after all this time will amount to something. The trust he carefully cultivated, the endless studying, the lies, the fake smiles, the filth he covered himself in, will all pay off eventually.
It has to.
And just like magic-Just like Yamapi said- he gets his chance as soon as that Friday afternoon, when Kawahara-san finally emerges from the depths of his office and says, “Katase, I need you on something. Have these files ready for me by Monday morning.”
Shige nods. “Yes sir.”
~~~~~
“No witnesses and one contract with the deceased,” Kawahara-san soothes a seething Katagiri the following Monday. “They can’t get you on anything.”
“The girls…” Katagiri says.
“Drugged out of their minds,” Kawahara assures him. “We can plant the right evidence. You know, corrupt youth; whores, the lot of them. Who can trust the word of a whore? Clearly they’re just after your money.”
“Right. So how are we going to convince people of that?”
Kawahara shrugs. “We know some guys in the crime syndicates. They can ruin those girls faster than your guys could string them up to the ceiling. Scare them quiet.”
Katagiri gives him a dark look at the reminder.
“You know what I mean,” Kawahara assures him. “The important thing here is that you go about your usual business. We’ll take care of everything.” Pause. Then, “You’re taking this all down, right Katase? Can I trust you to handle it?”
Shige nods grimly. “I am, sir,” he says, and thinks that they have no idea.
~~~~~
On Tuesday night, when a group of thugs tries to break into Aya-chan’s apartment, there is-luckily or mysteriously or neither- a police officer who has just moved in next door; he’s hosting poker night with some of his buddies from the station and they overhear the ruckus and intervene before anyone can get hurt.
The thugs are arrested, and on them is one of Kawahara-san’s business cards.
~~~~~
“What kind of incompetence is this?!” Kawahara seethes on Wednesday.
Shige blinks back. “I gave them your business card like you instructed,” Shige says carefully. “To call in the favor their boss owes you. I didn’t think they’d be so stupid as to bring it with them.”
Which is all true; he didn’t. Which was why he’d slipped an extra one into one of the men’s pockets that afternoon too.
Kawahara rails. “Fucking yakuza,” he snarls, and slams his fist. “Can’t trust anyone nowadays.”
Shige smiles. “You have me, sir.”
~~~~~
That night Shige places a call from a phone booth. “Katagiri-san,” he says, “after yesterday’s fiasco, I think Kawahara-san is going to hand you over to save his own reputation.”
“What?!” Katagiri shouts. “That backstabbing son of a bitch! I’ll show him.”
Shige hangs up and actually lets himself enjoy a little expensive champagne that night.
~~~~~
On Thursday morning Katagiri shows up at the police station saying that Kawahara was the one responsible for those girls’ abductions. He’d been played as a trusting, innocent friend; had cosigned on the warehouse because Kawahara had asked him to. “I have proof! Right before that girl was abducted, we’d been at that club! I saw how he was with her! He kidnapped her!”
“What the hell is that moron doing?!” Kawahara screams, when he hears.
“Sir,” Shige says calmly, “I think it’s time to let him go as one of our clients.” He holds up a tape recording of Monday’s conversation and hits play. Kawahara and Katagiri’s conversation about the girls being found plays back to them.
“We can edit that right?” Kawahara says.
“Yes,” Shige replies.
Kawahara smiles. “You really are a super-star, Katase,” he tells Shige.
~~~~~
Two days later, after the edited tape makes it into the mail to all the major television networks (and subsequently the police), Katagiri Kousuke is arrested.
Kawahara is not arrested-yet-but Shige is fairly certain that more opportunities will arise in the next few months, as he continues his work as Katase Riichiro in Kawahara-san’s firm.
After all, his original mission has always been to bring down all of the senior partners, not just one.
“Be patient,” Yamapi tells him on the phone again, after he gives Shige news of Katagiri’s arrest. “I know that out of everyone, Shige can be patient.”
Shige sighs. “I know,” he says, because this is his place in the agency. He sits in the background, waiting for an opportunity. He is someone they can rely on for the long haul.
It’s why he can do these jobs, be the lawyer, the doctor, the assistant professor, the office worker, the manager, the college graduate, the underling, the bad guy.
It’s why he can’t be Jin and jump the gun, or be the hero.
They already have one of those anyway.
In the silence Yamapi seems to sense the weight on his shoulders and clicks his tongue a few times. “Saturday,” he instructs. “Saturday come in for a new briefing. Koyama will pour you tea and Massu will bring donuts. I’ll even make sure Tegoshi lets you choose yours first.”
“Okay,” Shige says, and doesn’t know why he feels so comforted by the image that promise brings to mind. “Then I’ll see you Saturday.”
~~~~~
4. One World
On Saturday they have the meeting early in the morning; Massu brings the donuts and Koyama makes tea and coffee. Ryo lets Tegoshi use his shoulder as a pillow and when Shige walks into the room it’s just like Yamapi said, he gets first pick of the donuts.
“So,” Yamapi says, when they begin the meeting, “Shige ne, Shige will probably have to work hard like this for another few months.”
Koyama looks at Shige and pushes his donut towards Shige instinctively, “Shige,” he says, “have you been eating properly? You look tired.”
“Shige,” Tegoshi murmurs when he hears, “you can nap on Ryo-tan’s other shoulder if you want. He’s really comfortable, ne.”
Ryo snorts but doesn’t say no, and after a minute, Massu carefully tells Shige that he can take the extra donuts home if he wants, right after Massu has scooped out an extra two for himself.
Shige eventually nods. “I can do this for a few more months,” he finds himself saying, when there’s a donut box put in front of him with four donuts still inside, when Koyama pours him tea and coffee both and when Tegoshi and Ryo look at him from across the table and neither of them tease him at all because they know he’s too exhausted to defend himself properly.
Yamapi smiles. “Shige works hard,” he says, and hands him another folder, complete with the latest information that the rest of the team has spent all this time gathering for him. “Only Shige can do this work this way.”
They adjourn the meeting a little while later, after Shige’s eaten his donuts and finished his tea and coffee (more for Koyama’s benefit than for his own).
Meanwhile, on the opposite side of the hallway, Jin is dropping off some of the equipment he had checked out for his stint as Miroku the bouncer because Kame had insisted; on his way in he meets Shige who is on his way out, and for a moment, the two of them stop and look at each other and don’t know quite what to say.
So they don’t say anything; Shige simply nods as he passes Jin and finds himself feeling-again-that it would be nice to be like that.
“I wish I could have helped them like he did,” Shige thinks as he looks at the older agent walking casually away from him. “I wish I could have done something instead of sit on the sidelines and watch and wait. I want to save lives too, not just ruin them.”
Jin has been suspended for the next month, but Shige is the one who sometimes feels like he’s not doing anything much at all.
Meanwhile, Jin sees Shige too, standing tall in the hallway and looking as reliable as ever; he did his job and caught the bad guy and now, now Katagiri Kousuke will never be able to hurt anyone like Yuriko or Aya-chan ever again.
Jin smiles crookedly to himself; “That’s the kind of person that a team can trust, who can put bad guys away. All I wanted was to save lives, but I could have ruined hundreds more if Kato hadn’t gotten the evidence to arrest.”
Jin is suspended for the next month but knows that Shige won’t need the ear to the street that Jin provides anyway. He’ll do fine on his own, just like he always does.
“I feel like I didn’t do everything I could have,” they both think.
The two of them head down the corridor in opposite directions while feeling and contemplating the exact same things; neither of them knows that they both do their jobs so well they’ve somehow managed to fool each other too.
But then again, that might just be another part of what makes the system work so well.
END
EDITS PLZ.