JE/NewS+KAT-TUN- "Counting Down"
Title: Counting Down
Universe: JE ( Government AU)
Theme/Topic: The request was for decent-length, non-romance fic (i.e. epic gen? XD)
Rating: PG-13
Character/Pairing/s: NEWS, KAT-TUN (with guest appearances by Inohara, Tsuyoshi, Tackey, and Koichi)
Warnings/Spoilers: OOC, bad police procedurals.
Word Count: 10,070
Summary: The difference between saving lives and taking them and the toll it takes on the gentlest of people.
Dedication: For crystallekil and Ann, I love you both lots. You’re both good people who are in the midst of having to do something crappy. Crys, I totally fail at making people FEEL.
A/N: Because Nakamaru and Koyama need love too. Also, this had a point when I started out but you can sort of see where it pittered out after the writer’s block hit and I couldn’t quite wrap it as well as I’d first imagined. I TRIED MY BEST. These two are no strangers to fail anyway, so it’s kind of um, strangely poetic that their fic fails too? Or something. Yeah. Also, I don’t know anything about chemistry so for those of you who do, pretend my idea was plausible and leave me alone, k. Did some minor edits but nothing huge, so also kind of raw.
Disclaimer: No harm is meant by this!
10.
Present
The footsteps are getting closer every second and Shige is getting heavier and heavier between he and Tegoshi in the meantime; Koyama throws a nervous glance down the dark hallway behind them while Shige struggles to put one foot in front of the other without passing out.
Tegoshi’s hands are covered in Shige’s blood and he looks worried and scared and a thousand other bad things that Koyama thinks shouldn’t be on a face as pretty as Tegoshi’s ever; the youngest NEWS member keeps uncharacteristically quiet and presses his hands tight to Shige’s side through it all, trying to stop the blood, to slow it down just a little bit.
“Here,” Koyama says a bit desperately, when he sees an inconspicuous looking supply closet thrown in the back corner of the compound. “We have to stop.”
“We can’t,” Shige wheezes, ever practical as he bleeds all over the floor, “they’ll catch us for sure if we stop moving.”
“You need to rest,” Koyama counters, snapping at Shige for the first time in a long time and meaning it.
Tegoshi continues not to say anything through the exchange, brow knit with concern for Shige as he easily disregards the undercover agent’s logical concerns and deftly steers them towards the outlying corridor anyway. “Go,” he whispers, and starts to shrug off his coat, “I’ll buy you guys some time, ne.”
“Tegoshi…” Shige starts, but gets ignored, pushed into Koyama’s arms while Tegoshi mops up the blood on the floor with his jacket as best he can.
“They’ll never fall for that,” Shige croaks in protest. “They’ll know because the trail is gone at the intersection.”
Koyama wants to protest too because he doesn’t like the idea of splitting up, of losing sight of any one of his teammates.
But Tegoshi just winks at them; “Believe,” he says mysteriously, and as he does, shares a significant look with Koyama that makes the older agent’s jaw snap shut inexplicably, his protests dying in his throat. He dutifully pulls Shige into the closet instead, and watches through the crack in the door when Tegoshi grabs his knife from the pocket of his utility belt as he ducks back out into the main hallway. The young hacker bites his bottom lip resolutely as he draws the blade across the flesh of his left arm, sharp and quick.
He takes off down the hallway without missing a beat after that, leaving a fresh trail of blood for their pursuers to follow. The rest is up to his two teammates.
Koyama cringes and doesn’t think the image of Tegoshi cutting himself open for them will ever leave him ever; he quickly shuts the door and tells himself not to cry because that won’t help anyone right now.
Meanwhile, Shige staggers to a corner of the supply closet and plops down in front of a large ventilation grate there, holding his wounded side. “You should have gone with him. You should have left me here,” he says to Koyama quietly, like he means it. Koyama is almost thankful when Shige says idiotic things like that, because it takes his mind off of the dread for a moment and focuses it on something a lot like anger instead.
“You won’t die,” he tells Shige sharply, and starts looking around the room for things he can use, things that will help them.
After a few minutes of fumbling around in the dark while listening to Shige’s shaky breathing, Koyama eventually finds some bandages and antiseptic stacked on top of a metal cabinet in the corner. For the first time since this nightmare mission began, he is thankful that this is a medical laboratory with medical laboratory supplies, despite the horrible things that he and his teammates had to witness upon their capture and incarceration here.
He grabs them and gets to work on Shige’s injury first, trying not to wince when the antiseptic he pours onto the wound makes Shige dig his fingers into Koyama’s shoulder sharply, hard enough to bruise.
“You should go,” Shige hisses again after the pain has subsided a little; his brow is dotted with sweat and his lip is freshly torn from where he’d bitten down on it just now to hold back his scream. “You still have time.”
“I’ll get us out of here,” Koyama promises. “Both of us.” He manages a small smile. “We owe Tegoshi dinner.”
Shige snorts and shifts slightly when Koyama starts to apply the gauze and bandages. He smiles ironically and reaches out to pat Koyama’s arm. “I always owe someone something, don’t I?” he asks tiredly.
“I’ll get us out of here,” Koyama says again.
His mind races as he tries to figure out how.
~~~~~
9.
Present
“We’re government agents,” Nakamaru tries to reason calmly, around the sweat beaded on his nose and the guns pointed at he and Taguchi and the knife pressed against Jin’s throat. “If you kill us, any one of us, people will um, people will be really angry.”
Or kind of sad, but he doesn’t think that that’s a threat that will intimidate their captors into letting them go.
Apparently the threat of angry government agents hunting them down for vengeance doesn’t intimidate their captors either, because the man holding the knife to Jin’s throat spits, pressing the edge down a little harder and making Jin wince slightly as a thin trail of blood appears, trickling onto the tip of the blade like punctuation.
Nakamaru feels it when Junno tenses automatically beside him at the sight of his teammate’s blood.
The man with the knife notices.
“We aren’t afraid of you,” he laughs, drawing the knife point along Jin’s jaw just to be a dick. “From the looks of things, you’re the ones afraid of us.”
Nakamaru hates his nose sweat sometimes.
He takes a deep breath. “Okay,” he says, after swiping his face against his shoulder and blinking once or twice. “We have to be able to talk about this somehow. Like…demands. Make demands. Trade us for stuff. Money maybe. I bet you like money.”
He gets punched in the face.
“Hey!” Junno protests- ultimately ineffective- and struggles against the chains shackling him to the floor. He gets kicked in the stomach for his efforts.
Nakamaru winces, tastes the blood welling up in his mouth from where his teeth cut the inside of his cheek open just now.
“Thanks lots for the rescue, guys,” Jin drawls, and is only inappropriately sarcastic when he’s trying to hide something else he’s feeling.
Nakamaru decides to ignore him. “Look,” he begins to their captors again, trying to sound civil and keep his voice from wavering at the same time, “you really, really don’t want to do this. I mean, our teammates…”
“Would have struck by now if they knew where you were,” the one with the knife theorizes.
Jin snorts. “Clearly you don’t know our teammates!”
“Shut up,” Nakamaru and the knife-holding terrorist say at the same time.
Nakamaru, Jin, and Junno all get hit again.
“Alright,” the terrorist starts, after the three agents have stopped coughing and choking. “Which one of you wants to play with us first?”
Junno is curled up on the floor but manages a smile anyway, bloody-toothed and swollen. “Play? I’m good at word games,” he manages, and struggles to sit up.
Jin looks like he’s about to protest; Nakamaru’s “No!” is on the tip of his tongue too, but when Junno smiles at them from the floor there’s an edge to it, or maybe a request.
The two older agents stand down.
“Alright, take the loudmouth,” the leader agrees, when no one else speaks up. He finally pulls the knife away from Jin’s throat. “I’m sick of the stupid look on that guy’s face anyway.”
They yank Junno up by his hair and unlock his chains from the floor; Jin and Nakamaru watch as the younger agent gets taken (shoved) towards a small, adjoining room in the back. Before they disappear, Junno gets punched in the head one more time, when he tells the knife-man, “This may just be a stab in the dark, but this is probably your torture room, huh.”
Nakamaru takes a deep breath as the door closes behind the men and his teammate; he thinks that the next few hours are going to be some of the longest in his life.
~~~~~
8.
June, 1999
In the academy, there is a long interview process for the first year cadets when they are just starting their coursework out; it consists of several written tests and personal essays, a slew of physical exams and even a few timed proficiency trials in various concentrations of agency specialties. The initial week for new recruits at the academy typically ends with a series of long, intensely personal talks with various instructors and recruiters and directors alike.
After Koyama gets through it all, after he tells them he’s here because he wants to help people and to save lives and do good, after he gets his physical results back and finishes all of his trials and essays and tests, the instructors and recruiters and directors he talks to smile at him and tell him that they want him to see if he likes volatile mechanics, where his highest category scores were.
“It will give you the opportunity,” they tell him, “to save a lot of people all at the same time.”
Naturally he agrees, naturally he’s proud for placing in the top 1% of his incoming class in this field. And deep down, he also thinks that he prefers working on disarming things that could hurt people to using weapons that will hurt people (even criminals) any day. “I want to save people more than anything else,” he says when he agrees to enroll in the volatile mechanics concentration and not the general education concentration like the majority of his freshman classmates.
On his first day in the classroom the Monday following his placement in the program, he comes face to face with a bomb's ticking counter for the first time, as it sits in the hands of special guest instructor Inohara Yoshihiko, current 2IC of the agency's most elite volatile mechanics unit, V6.
The first thing Koyama and his classmates learn that morning is that they weren't chosen to be explosives experts because they're already good at it.
“You’re here,” Inohara tells them, spinning the faux bomb in his hands a bit ominously, “because you’re all good people.”
Koyama blinks oddly at that because he’d thought they were here for showing special talent on the explosives portion of the proficiency trials. When he looks around, it seems like all of his classmates are thinking the very same thing that he is; they’re just as confused by Inohara-sensei’s strange opening words.
Inohara reads their expressions and laughs a little, gently. “You’re not the only ones who scored well on the volatile mechanics portion of the exams for this program,” he admits to them with a broad smile. “But the biggest difference between you and your classmates who didn’t make the final cut is that you also qualified emotionally where they didn’t.”
A cadet in the back of the room, one with a big nose and bed-mussed hair, raises his hand. “Excuse me,” he says, seemingly not ashamed to reveal exactly how incomprehensible he finds all of this out loud at all, “I don’t know if I get what those two things have to do with each other.”
Inohara props himself up on top of his desk and tucks his knees up against his chest as he looks at every one of the students gathered there; the toy bomb continues to count down second by second in his hands. “It makes sense, doesn’t it?” he asks after a moment, “you all showed us that you’re more sensitive, more communicative, and more concerned than the average cadet. Some of you care so much it hurts.”
Silence.
“And that means,” Inohara finishes for them, “you’re the kind of people who we can trust to handle some very, very dangerous things. And some very, very painful things.”
He tosses the bomb out into the students abruptly; Koyama is the one who catches the device on instinct.
"You've got thirty seconds left," Inohara tells him abruptly. "You've got ten classmates and me in the room and it's all on you to stop that counter before we all die."
Koyama stares. "E-eh?"
"Twenty-eight seconds."
Koyama looks around the room frantically, device clutched tightly in his hands as he feels something like panic starting to brew deep in his chest at how sudden this all is.
"Twenty-five seconds."
The counter confirms Inohara’s reading and instantly surpasses it; Koyama can’t help it when he automatically starts to think about Inohara's words as he looks at the ominous red numbers ticking away moment by moment right in front of him. He thinks about how it could be just like this one day, where there will be twelve- or more- lives other than his own at the very tips of his fingers, all counting on him. He can feel his own stomach start to twist unexpectedly at the thought and he realizes that it must feel even worse when it’s the real thing. Given how he kind of wants to throw up right now, he’s not sure if his heart could hold up to having that actual kind of responsibility on his shoulders for real someday.
In the meantime, the faces of his classmates look back at Koyama as he holds the bomb; he meets all of their eyes briefly and thinks about them without meaning or wanting to. He speculates about their fathers and mothers and sisters and brothers, about their pet kitties and pet puppies and their aunts and uncles and the cousins they only see during the summer or at family reunions. They have friends and lovers too, and they have lives ahead of them that will be full of accomplishment and joy and hard work and laughter.
He could help keep those lives on track, or he could fail and take them away, all in the blink of an eye.
"Twenty seconds."
Koyama starts to shake.
All these people-and people like them- could be counting on him someday in a situation just like this; they'll all look at him almost exactly like how they're looking at him now, telling him that it's up to him to make sure that they can see those fathers and mothers and sisters and brothers and kitties and puppies and aunts and uncles and cousins and friends and lovers tomorrow. That they’ll be alive to.
It's the singular most terrifying feeling Koyama has ever experienced.
"Eighteen seconds."
Koyama feels a cold sweat starting to bead along his brow; he begins to pale despite knowing that this is just a drill, that this isn't a real bomb. Thinking that it could be one day is the scariest part.
Inohara's eyebrows jump when Koyama just continues to stare at the counter, unable to move. "Fifteen seconds. What are you going to do, cadet? Everyone is counting on you."
Koyama looks back at the older agent, almost helpless.
Inohara doesn't budge. "Ten seconds."
Koyama tells himself to calm down. Calm down.
He takes a deep breath.
"Eight seconds."
A second deep breath.
"Five seconds."
He reaches out.
"Three..."
Closes his eyes.
"Two..."
He pulls the red wire free and hopes for the best.
Silence.
Then, "Good job, cadet."
Koyama opens his eyes.
The counter blinks back at him, stuck at 00:01, almost like in a Hollywood action movie except without the subsequent rush of glory and congratulations.
Koyama simply slumps over onto his desk in inglorious relief. His hands are still shaking just a tiny bit and he can feel his heart pounding in his chest a thousand beats per second.
Inohara grins. "Good reaction."
The kid in the back with the big nose blinks some more, raises his hand again. "I still don't think I get it," he says. “The whole being good people thing plus bombs.”
Inohara wordlessly hops off his desk and plucks the device out of Koyama's hands. He fiddles with it a little as he walks the length of the classroom, pulling at some of the wires, turning some of the dials, sticking different wires into different places. "The most important part about this job," he tells them straight up, "is to care. Sometimes too much. That's what'll ultimately save you in this line of work."
"What do you mean?"
When Inohara smiles at them this time, it's also a little bit sad. "Because," he explains, holding up the bomb, "defusing things like this is the easy part."
"Then what's the hard part?"
Inohara stops fiddling with the fake explosive like that's the million dollar question, the one he’s been waiting for all morning. He promptly tosses the device to the lucky asker and seems a little bit pained when he does. "Fix it," he instructs next, and looks at his watch this time. "You've got thirty seconds to make it work again."
Koyama starts to feel kind of sick when he finally realizes what Inohara is getting at.
~~~~~
7.
June, 1999
The first thing Nakamaru learns on his first day in class at the academy’s special volatile mechanics concentration is that he’s a good person.
It’s kind of nice. Random, but kind of nice.
The second thing Nakamaru learns is that saving lives isn't the only thing they're going to do here.
He just barely manages to catch the device when Inohara abruptly throws it at him and he blinks down at it; it's almost cartoonish in a way, with multi-colored wires protruding from all sides and bells, whistles, dials, and buttons everywhere.
"You better get to work," Inohara says, and might be trying to sound encouraging.
Nakamaru stares. Raises his hand again. "Excuse me, but isn't this a very bad thing?" Pause. "Very, very bad?" He shakes the bomb a little at the instructor, to help emphasize his point in case it isn’t clear.
Inohara nods. "It's a horrible thing.” And that’s all he says.
Nakamaru starts to sweat inexplicably; he feels it beading on his nose and along his hairline. "Then why would I need to put it back together? Isn’t the point to make it stop?"
"Because," Inohara tells him patiently, "sometimes there are worse things waiting if you don't put it together."
Nakamaru surmises that maybe he’s just having a bad day because he hasn’t been able to understand anything that’s happened so far; given how cryptic and vague their instructor has become he hopes he isn’t the only one who’s not following (though in his life experiences thus far, it would hardly be odd if he was the only one). As far as he’s concerned bombs are bad, blowing things up is bad, and as such, he thinks that there should be no reason on this green earth for a federal agent to have to turn an explosive back on. They’re the good guys after all.
But despite the logic behind his own thought processes he also knows instinctively that this is a job where you do what you're told with no questions asked, and so he hunkers over the device and gets to work with what little time he has left. The sweating on his nose gradually becomes more and more intense as he pulls wires out and resets them in what he sincerely hopes is the reverse order of what Inohara was doing as he'd fiddled with it earlier; in any case Nakamaru does it to the best of his memory. “How much more time?”
"Ten seconds."
Nakamaru starts to feel his heart rate speed up. "I don't think I can do this!" he complains frantically, as more time slips by, "shouldn't we be trying to learn about the basics first, before we do these types of things? Shouldn’t today’s lesson be an equipment orientation? Or one where we play games to remember everyone else’s names? Hi, I’m Nakamaru."
Inohara laughs a little. "Five to go."
"Oh god, oh god, oh god..." Nakamaru, in a panic, ends up eenie-meenie-miney-moe-ing the stupid thing and at the final moment, yelps as he pushes a small black button at the back of the device.
The red countdown numbers flash back to life; the display reads an ominous 5:00.
When he looks back up at his classmates and Inohara-incredulously-Inohara seems both impressed and supremely, supremely sad all at the same time. “Good work,” he says again, and holds his hands up.
Nakamaru wordlessly tosses the stupid toy back to him and is glad to be rid of it.
When Inohara catches it, he puts it on his desk facing out, as the 5:00 starts to count down all over again, just like at the beginning of class when they’d all walked in.
“You’re all good people,” he says one more time, like he can’t say it enough. “You care a lot and that’s why we can trust ourselves to put some very, very dangerous things in your hands. We know you’ll save people-hundreds or even thousands of people-because that’s what nice guys do in this line of work. It’s the obvious part. The easy part.” Pause. Deep breath. “But that’s not all we do.”
He glances down at the desktop, to his innocuous little toy bomb. He sets his hand on top of it. “We don’t just defuse these; we don’t just stop them from exploding and hurting people. We also make them.”
Silence.
“Volatile mechanics means exactly what it sounds like. We deal with bombs. And that means we also build them, we set their timers, we arm them and adjust their power, range, trajectory, and contents to do exactly what we need them to do to get the mission done. And then, once they’re put together perfectly, we put them in places and turn them on so that they’ll ultimately kill and injure other people.”
No one knows what to say when they hear that; Nakamaru stares at the ticking bomb across the room and feels like it’s looking right at him. He suddenly wants to throw up.
“You were chosen,” Inohara says again, “because we know you won’t take any joy from that part of your job. Because you’ll lose sleep over it, because your hands will shake and you’ll sweat and you’ll want to throw up nine times out of ten. You’ll hate yourself a little every time you have to do it but you’ll do it anyway. You’re all good people who have to do horrible, horrible things.”
”Why?” Nakamaru hears the narrow-eyed kid who’d defused the device first ask, voice shaky and almost inaudible.
Inohara looks a little helpless. “Because you know it’s the right thing to do.”
The counter ticks down to one minute remaining and no one says a word. It feels like forever.
At 00:45, Inohara takes one last look at all of his students and ends class early for the day because he knows they’re no good to him anymore, at least for now. He tells them to think about everything he said and to come back again tomorrow morning, if they feel like they can. No one will hold it against them if they don’t, he says.
But somehow, he sounds confident that they all will anyway.
Nakamaru walks out of the classroom like the rest of his classmates-- doing his best impression of a zombie. He glances at the narrow-eyed kid as they stumble out into the hallway together and thinks that he looks exactly like how Nakamaru feels right now.
As elite members of this year’s incoming freshman class, the two of them have both been specially chosen for the special volatile mechanics track at the agency's most famous branch of the training academy.
The first thing they learn that day is that they are good people. People who care.
The second thing they learn is that they are good people who will one day, have to kill other people.
It takes a very long time to sink in for both of them.
~~~~~
6.
December, 2003
The first time that Koyama kills someone it is during NEWS’s fourth mission as a new unit.
He goes all out too-fifty men die in their beds when he puts his mind to it that night and not a single one of them ever once sees the face of the person who kills them because he does it perfectly from a distance, like a real professional.
He watches that entire area go up abruptly from the safety of one of the alleyways between two of the enemy compound’s many buildings, the flames and debris shooting up into the night sky in a series of bright, smoky pillars. It’s like hell, except one that he created with his own two hands.
Shouts (and some screams) fill the compound moments later, followed by a volley of gunfire; the panic caused by the explosion is exactly what they needed to have a snowball’s chance at freeing Kusano and Massu from where they’ve been imprisoned and tortured for the past three days. The enemy bunkhouse was the target they chose, simply to help even the odds.
It’s three am but the flames light up the sky like it’s dawn; either way Koyama doesn’t have time to think about what he’s done here because the next thing he knows Ryo is yanking open the door and they are storming in from the north end of the building where Kusano and Massu are being held. In the meantime Shige and Uchi keep the chaos going outside with random bursts of gunfire under the hazy cover of residual smoke and debris while Tegoshi guides Ryo and Koyama down the long, dank hallways on their headsets. Yamapi looks on anxiously.
The trek through the dark is eerily quiet compared to the burning frenzy outside, and as he puts one foot in front of the other mechanically, Koyama wonders what kind of men he killed tonight, if they have families at home and people waiting for them or circumstances in their lives that make all of this unfair, that make their deaths not right.
Not everyone chooses a life of crime, after all. Sometimes it’s all they have.
“Left here,” Tegoshi tells them, and startles Koyama out of his musings so badly that he almost misfires his gun. “There’s a cellblock at the bottom of those stairs and one guard to the left of the outside door.”
“Roger,” Ryo responds sharply, and increases his pace while Koyama follows on autopilot, his mind stuck in a rush of conjuring up all the imaginary faces and stories and loved ones for the people he’s killed here tonight.
He thinks to himself that he’s a murderer now.
Ryo takes the stairs two at a time in front of him, turning the corner and opening up with two quick shots to the guard, sending him to his knees and a gurgling, gasping death.
“Koyama!” Ryo shouts, when he doesn’t see the explosives expert right behind him. “Hurry the fuck up!”
Koyama jumps. “Right!” he replies hastily, and Ryo bends down to fish the keys from the dead guard’s pockets; there’s one last steel door in the back of the room and Massu and Kusano are both behind it.
“No keys,” Ryo grunts in dissatisfaction after he finishes searching the body a few seconds later. “You’re up.”
He posts up by the door while Koyama shakes himself and nods, stepping forward with a small block of C-4 and a detonator.
It feels like Play-doh in his hands, as soft and innocuous as a child’s toy. He thinks that right now, it’s the very last thing he wants to hold after what just happened.
But he has to. Just a little while longer.
He bites the inside of his cheek and fifteen seconds later, the handle of the door is blown off in a much smaller explosion than the one he’d triggered earlier.
Somehow, it still manages to sound like thunder in his ears.
“Koyama!” Ryo hisses impatiently, when the explosives expert just kind of stands there in front of the smoking door, not moving. “The hell?!”
“Sorry,” Koyama replies automatically, shaking his head and telling himself to concentrate as he pulls his sleeve over his hand to keep from burning himself. He yanks the door open.
The sight that greets him when he does makes him forget about himself completely.
Massu blinks back at him when the door swings open, and when he sees Koyama’s face on the other side, he manages to smile through his swollen left eye and his bleeding lip and two hands full of broken fingers. “Koyama,” he breathes, sounding relieved as he struggles to stay awake and keep an unconscious Kusano propped up on his shoulder so he doesn’t fall onto the blood and vomit-stained floor. The youngest agent has burn marks marring his chest and his arms; his nose is also broken and there are a series of long, narrow gashes on his back that are starting to look puffy and yellow. “You’re here.”
Koyama feels his heart stop for a moment as he dashes forward, as Massu finally lets himself fall unconscious in his eldest teammate’s arms with a murmured, “Sorry, tired,” on his lips. And then his one good eye finally flutters closed after days of waiting and hoping and enduring.
Ryo follows Koyama into the cell a second later, grabbing Kusano and hefting him over his shoulder without missing a beat. “Let’s go,” he barks, “we don’t have any more time.”
“Right,” Koyama replies automatically, and gently picks Massu up.
For now, he concentrates on his teammates.
He figures there will be plenty of time to hate himself again later.
~~~~~
5.
June, 2002
The first time Nakamaru kills someone is as a junior agent working backup for Director (then Agent) Domoto Koichi. It happens while Koichi is deep undercover as an overnight rich boy drug buyer; the senior agent sets up a meeting with the runners that night and Koichi says that Nakamaru’s task for the exchange is just a precaution, that it’s just back up.
It’s for in case the targets get out of the building, in case something goes wrong. Most likely, the explosives won’t even be triggered.
Koichi tells him not to look so nervous. They’re all professionals here, after all.
It soothes Nakamaru just enough as he finishes the wiring and the set up; it’s always nice to have a senpai who knows exactly what he’s doing to take charge of things.
Everything is going fine as the drug dealers arrive with the goods some hours later; the lead seller likes Koichi’s face, says he’s got a reliable bone-structure. Right as he’s about to hand over the drugs and invite Koichi back to his car for a little extra gift, Jin jumps the gun.
He’s Koichi’s bodyguard in this case, tall and tough and silent behind the older agent, up until the moment when one of the dealer’s men makes a sudden move-i.e. he reaches into his jacket for a tissue- and makes Jin react instinctively, drawing his gun a beat too fast and firing.
Needless to say, the whole deal goes south from there.
Because sometimes, even if you have an experienced senpai at your side running the show, it won’t cover up the fact that you and your teammates are still hopeless rookies.
Guns start firing after that and Koichi grabs Jin quickly, shoving him behind a rusty old conveyor belt in the back of the old factory; he gets shot in the shoulder in the process, before Koki is sure they’re both out of the way and starts shooting from the balcony.
From there the rest of the team is a beat too slow to move because Kame’s nervous, incredulous order is delayed in a moment of horrified disbelief. Because of it, the dealer and his men manage to lay enough gunfire down to make it to the back door together, where Nakamaru’s backup trap is set.
The one that they weren’t planning on triggering.
Nakamaru is just running out of the van with Taguchi and Kame when the explosion rocks the back half of the building.
When he hears the sound Taguchi instinctively grabs Kame and Nakamaru and slides them to the ground to avoid any subsequent blasts of heat, sheltering their heads with his arms.
“That’s it, that’s it!” Nakamaru assures him hastily, “there was only one!”
The younger agent looks worried anyway, “Are you sure?”
“Yes!”
“Let’s go,” Kame insists, pushing Taguchi’s arms off of him and standing quickly. “We messed up.”
Taguchi lets them go and they all get to their feet again, rushing inside to survey the damage.
Nakamaru can smell the burning from the explosion as he follows his team leader inside.
~~~~~
By the time the fire department and the paramedics arrive to put out the blaze, the bleeding from Koichi’s shoulder has been slowed by ample pressure and Kame’s profuse apologies. Jin is nursing a nick to the forehead from where he’d clipped the edge of the conveyor belt as Koichi had pushed him to safety.
“I thought he was going for his gun,” Jin sulks, and leaves the apologizing to Kame after Kame gives him a look that would freeze the blood of a more conscientious agent.
The paramedics take over from there and Koichi doesn’t say anything beyond telling the junior KAT-TUN agents to help with the clean up and to search the dealer’s car for the evidence they’d been hoping to get out of live prisoners on this case.
When they go to do so, Nakamaru doesn’t find a car, but rather, a pile of flaming wreckage in the final stages of being hosed down by the firefighters.
“What happened?” he asks, feeling a little bit sick because he thinks he knows already.
“When the wall blew out, some of the debris got fired right at the car,” the fire chief reports. “A bunch of burning steel took out the whole backseat and just fried it.”
Nakamaru swallows. “I-is there…is there anything inside?”
The chief frowns. “From what we’ve been able to find so far, two bodies, both female, and one body, male.”
Nakamaru realizes what that little extra gift the dealer had been inviting Koichi to take part in is, and what it means for what he just did.
He stumbles to the nearest dumpster and promptly throws up.
~~~~~
4.
December, 2003
After the mission is finally over they all sit in the hallway just outside of the emergency room together; Koyama spends the hours waiting for word on Massu and Kusano’s conditions staring straight ahead at the whitewashed wall in front of him. Tegoshi and Shige are leaning on one another in an exhausted sleep-their first in days given the surveillance work they were doing- while Yamapi is on the phone in the background because he never stops working, not for a moment. In the meantime, Uchi paces the hallway restlessly while Ryo stands by the door, somehow still on guard even here.
Koyama is as tired as everyone else looks, but every time he closes his eyes all he sees are explosions.
“Koyama,” Yamapi says after a moment, and holds his phone towards the older member, “Tackey wants to talk to you, ne.”
Koyama blinks and nods; he stands and takes the phone. “H-hello?”
“The fire’s out now,” Tackey tells him without preamble, “you did a great job controlling your burn when you set the charges. The fire department had no problem keeping it out of the woods.”
A deep breath. “I see.”
“Anyway,” Tackey continues, and Koyama can hear the shouts of firefighters and policemen in the background, “everything’s all cleaned up here; one of the EMTs said you left a note wanting me to contact you about something afterwards?”
Koyama clutches the phone a little tighter and heads further down the hallway, away from his teammates. He chances a look over his shoulder and sees Ryo watching him intently.
Koyama offers Ryo what he hopes is a convincing smile before ducking into the privacy of the restroom. “I uh, I wanted to ask,” he begins again, once he’s alone, “if there were any survivors in the explosion.”
A beat.
“No,” Tackey informs him after a moment. “The body count is fifty-one so far in the explosion and ten on the ground from gunfire.”
Koyama can’t believe his ears when he hears it. “Everyone. We…”
“You got them all,” Tackey confirms. Pause. “Let’s not talk about this right now. We’ll have a full debriefing on Monday morning. There are more important things to take care of in the meantime. Don’t think too much about it.”
And then he hangs up without waiting for a response.
Silence.
Koyama clutches the phone tightly in his hand, standing alone in the bathroom just like that for a while. Despite Director Takizawa’s words just now, Koyama can’t help it when he thinks about everything that happened earlier, all of it.
Eventually, he sinks to the floor and buries his head between his knees.
They killed everyone. Not a single survivor from amongst the drug manufacturing compound they’d failed to infiltrate and take down three days prior.
Well, Koyama thinks, they certainly made up for that initial failure tonight.
He flips Yamapi’s phone closed and thinks that it’s just like Inohara said all those years ago; his hands are shaking and tears start to sting the backs of his eyes. He hates himself a little too, almost wants to throw up.
But before he can even let the first tear fall, the door slams open.
Ryo stands in front of him, glowering down and looking impatient. “Kusano’s conscious,” he tells him. “Massu’s out of surgery. They’re okay.”
Koyama blinks back up at him. “Ryo-chan, we killed them all.”
“I don’t care. Whatever you’re doing, however you’re feeling. It doesn’t matter. We can see them now. Everyone already went ahead while you’ve been sitting here feeling sorry for yourself.”
Koyama feels oddly bitter at the sniper’s easy dismissal. “You don’t underst…”
“I’ve killed eight people on this mission alone,” Ryo growls. “Don’t tell me I don’t understand. You got fifty in one night? Great. I’m at eighty-two and since my job is to shoot, killing is all I really do anyway. So unless you blow up Tokyo Dome in the middle of an idol concert, I will probably have you beat in the body count by the time we both retire.”
Koyama stares. Realizes that Ryo is right, that he isn’t the only one who has to deal with this kind of thing. They all will, probably. Eventually.
But even knowing that doesn’t make the guilt go away; if anything Koyama feels worse now. “Then… how are we supposed to deal with this?” he asks, sounding helpless as he looks up at his more senior teammate for some words of guidance, some sort of help.
Eventually, Ryo sighs.
Offers him a hand. “C’mon.”
Koyama blinks.
“Would you stop looking at me like that and get the fuck up?”
Koyama quickly takes Ryo’s hand when his tone starts to get short, letting his teammate pull him to his feet. Ryo doesn’t say anything else right away.
“Ryo-chan?” Koyama asks, when Ryo leads him out of the bathroom and down the hall.
“Just shut up for a second,” Ryo tells him, and suddenly sounds more embarrassed than angry now. He turns a corner at the end of the corridor, and abruptly stops short, drops Koyama’s hand.
They’re in front of the ICU unit, peering into a room where their teammates are. All of them.
Ryo doesn’t look Koyama in the eye when he talks; whether it’s because he doesn’t want to or because he can’t is a mystery. “Listen up because I’m only going to say this once," he starts, “and if you ever bring it up anywhere else ever again I’ll deny all knowledge of it and shoot you in the foot, got me?”
Koyama swallows. Nods.
Ryo points into the window of the ICU room, where a Massu who hasn’t slept for the last three days is finally slumbering peacefully and a Kusano who probably hasn’t been conscious for the last three days is finally wide awake and happily surrounded by the rest of the team. The two oldest agents watch in silence for a moment, as Kusano promptly ruins his grand homecoming by sneezing right into Yamapi’s face. Uchi grudgingly wipes Kusano’s nose for him while Shige laughs and hands Yamapi a tissue of his own; Tegoshi simply curls up at the foot of Kusano’s bed and blinks sleepily (but happily) up at his teammates.
“I would trade,” Ryo murmurs eventually, voice low, “ten, twenty, fifty, a hundred of those bastards that died tonight for any one of them. In a heartbeat. And I wouldn’t lose a second of sleep over it afterwards either.”
He looks at Koyama.
“If you don’t feel exactly the same way, if you weigh one of those lives in there exactly the same as any scumbag you meet on the street, then leave this job right now because I don’t want you on my team.” He points inside. “They don’t either.”
His piece said, he doesn’t wait for a response, wordlessly sliding around Koyama and into the hospital room to join the others.
Koyama stands outside by himself for a little while longer and watches his teammates interact, thinking to himself about whether he can do this job after all.
And then Massu stirs and starts to wake up.
Koyama sees it from the window when the young combat agent blinks blearily to himself in his bed for a moment, looking troubled and disoriented as he tries to regain his bearings. Part of him must still think that he’s imprisoned in an underground cell being tortured for information; part of him probably still believes that seeing Koyama’s face earlier had all been nothing more than a pleasant dream. But when Massu finally does manage to focus well enough to see Koyama really there, looking at him through the glass of the ICU room’s window, he takes a relieved breath and raises one of his broken hands up in tired, happy greeting.
Koyama smiles at the sight without knowing he’s doing it; when he waves back at Massu and all his troubles suddenly feel very far away, he thinks he understands exactly what Ryo means now. Or rather, that he always has without knowing it.
In the end, no matter how many people he has to hurt or kill in the line of duty, Koyama wouldn’t trade any of the members of his team for anything in the world because there is nothing in this world that is worth more to him than they are.
Not even his own soul.
~~~~~
3.
June, 2002
Nakamaru washes his face three times in the locker room afterwards, long after Kamenashi has gone home and Koki has packed up, long after Ueda’s chauffer has already arrived to take him back to his mansion in the sky and Taguchi has left on foot in the hopes of making the last train. Jin is the only other one still here, currently in Agent Domoto’s office, being yelled at for making an amateur mistake. Again.
Nakamaru continues to wash his face, his hands, his arms. He feels like he’ll never get that blood off of him, or the burn of gunpowder from behind his eyes and in his nostrils.
He knows he should go home, should go get some sleep, should prepare for a very detailed report and series of investigations tomorrow, after Koichi’s superiors hear about what happened and order a full and detailed examination of the events.
He shouldn’t be lingering in the locker room thinking about what happened, especially because he can’t do anything to change it now. He can only learn from his mistakes, his miscalculations, his lack of attention to detail.
He never took what the building was made of into account when he set the charges.
Because he’d believed Koichi, because he’d thought they wouldn’t need the explosives.
He wasn’t careful enough.
So instead of going home, he slides down onto the bench in front of his locker and bangs his head against the door once, twice, three times. He hates himself.
The door behind him opens and closes.
Jin walks through it, looking slightly perturbed but fine, a small X-shaped bandage on his head over the cut there.
He sees Nakamaru banging his head on the locker.
He mentally shrugs and heads to his own locker to get ready to go home.
Nakamaru stops banging when he sees his teammate out of the corner of his eye. He watches Jin calmly put in his combination on the lock before starting to change out of his undercover gear.
“What did Tsuyoshi have to say?” Nakamaru asks, when he can’t stand the silence anymore.
“He’s acting supervisor for our team until Koichi’s shoulder is better,” Jin replies. “I’m suspended again.” He adds the last part like they’re talking about the weather.
“Oh.”
Silence.
Jin tosses his tie into the depths of his locker. Nakamaru can’t help it when he thinks about how his teammate is dealing with his first kill on the job too; he wonders how Jin feels about having to actually see another human being’s face as he’d taken that person’s life.
As far as he can tell, Jin looks fine.
Jin notices Nakamaru staring at him.
“Did you need something?” he asks.
Nakamaru shakes his head. “I was just… um, are you okay?”
A pause.
Jin fingers the X on his head and for a moment, looks kind of touched. “It doesn’t hurt.”
“Not that,” Nakamaru tells him. Pause. “I mean, I’m glad it doesn’t hurt. But…” he trails off and blinks a few times, trying to find the right words.
“What?” Jin is clearly getting impatient.
Nakamaru sighs. “We killed people today,” he admits lamely, after a moment.
Jin still looks like he’s getting impatient. “Yeah.”
Nakamaru doesn’t know whether to admire or be alarmed by his teammate’s reaction to something so weighty. “So… how do you feel about that? I mean…we’re killers now.”
Jin snorts. “We were doing our job,” he replies simply, and finishes pulling on his civilian clothes. He brushes his hands through his hair before throwing on a baseball cap to cover his wound.
Nakamaru sighs and thinks that his younger teammate is missing the point. “We’re killers now,” he says again, in case the severity maybe hasn’t sunk in with Jin yet.
Jin closes his locker. “I don’t think of what I do as who I am,” he replies with an air of boredom, and throws his bag over his shoulder as he heads for the door. “See you in a week.”
He strolls out of the room like he owns the world and leaves Nakamaru sitting alone in the locker room for two hours afterwards, trying to make sense of it all.
~~~~~
2.
Present
An hour later, Shige starts to bleed through his bandages.
Koyama changes them before going back to the row of cabinets in the back and searching one more time for anything that can be of use to them; there are only more bandages and bottles of antiseptic stacked on top of the metal cabinets, along with some scrubs and towels. Nothing they can use to get out of here. The shelf on the other side of the storage room has boxes of test tubes on it, a few glass cases full of needles, syringes, and a handful of Petri dishes.
More nothing.
Koyama wipes sweat from his forehead and thinks that maybe there’s something inside the cabinets; they wouldn’t seal them up otherwise. He grabs a needle from one of the glass cases by the door and tries picking the padlock to one of them, just like Kusano had showed he and Shige how to do once, many years ago.
Shige eyes him tiredly from the corner and manages a small smile when he sees what Koyama is up to. “You have to push and twist at the same time, remember?” he asks, voice dry around his chuckle.
Koyama smiles back but can’t hide the worry in it. “Oh yeah,” he says, and takes a break to dry his palms on his pant legs before he continues.
When the lock clicks open fifteen minutes later, Koyama takes a deep breath and prays that there is something he can use on the other side, something miraculous that can get them out of here.
He opens the door.
And finds out something very important.
It’s not a cabinet, it’s a fridge. And there are chemicals inside it. Lots of them, all different kinds.
But not the fun kind.
He stares.
Gets an idea.
“Koyama? What is it?” Shige asks, when he sees the look on his teammate’s face but not the contents of the cabinet.
Koyama turns to his best friend and smiles a little; it looks more confident than it had been all day. “Shige,” he says softly, “Shige I’m going to get us out of here.”
Shige blinks. “What? How?”
Koyama wordlessly starts pulling the chemicals out of the fridge. “Just rest,” he tells his friend mysteriously, before going to the other side of the room and grabbing a box of test tubes as well. “I’ll handle it.”
He works for another fifteen minutes and Shige tries to watch but ends up dozing; Koyama is kind of glad he won’t be there to see the things he’s about to do to the people searching for them inside the building.
Once he finishes, he strides to the other side of the room and grabs two towels, dousing them in a different chemical.
“Shige,” he says, crouching beside his best friend and touching his cheek to wake him. “Shige, I’m going to need you to move for a minute, okay?”
Shige grunts and blinks, wincing when it jostles his wound. “Koyama?”
“Sorry, but you’re blocking the vent,” Koyama tells him apologetically, before helping him move to the side a little.
“What are you doing? Where are you going?”
“Here,” Koyama tells him, purposefully vague. He holds up one of the wet towels to his friend. “I’m going to tie this to your face; it won’t smell good but you’ll get used to it. Just keep breathing into it until I come back and tell you it’s okay to take it off. Don’t take it off even for a second.”
Shige looks like he wants to ask questions, but stops short when he sees the look on his friend’s face, no longer scared or worried, now just grimly resolute. He doesn’t say anything, just nods and lets Koyama tie the towel over his nose and mouth.
Then Koyama puts the second towel over his own face, before pulling the grate off of the vent and crawling into the shaft.
Shige thinks he hears the tinkling of glass as Koyama disappears into the dark.
~~~~~
Every time Koyama comes upon a ventilation grate that opens up into a room he leaves a small, corked test tube in front of it, with innocuous clear liquid inside.
As he does he tells himself Tegoshi is safe; Tegoshi has gotten out a long time ago and is hacking a computer somewhere nearby, getting the agency their coordinates so backup will be arrive soon.
Koyama has to believe it, because if he doesn’t, then he might kill his teammate.
Koyama tells himself that Tegoshi’s luck will not have left him like that yet.
He leaves his test tubes behind and checks his watch.
When he crawls over what looks to be a luxurious office with a large, fat man talking to one of the men in uniform who had been chasing them earlier, he stops. Listens.
“Even though it was dark, we are fairly certain we only saw one of them escape outside of the property, sir,” the uniformed man reports, “that means the other two are still here somewhere. With your traitor accountant’s gunshot wound, they can’t have gotten far.”
Koyama doesn’t let himself sigh out loud in relief when he hears the news of Tegoshi’s success, but something inside of him loses some of its tension now that what he’d believed earlier is officially what he knows now.
He puts a test tube beside the grate and moves on; he doesn’t have time to feel guilty even as he drops two of the tubes by the opening of what looks like a bunk room.
He’s got twenty minutes left.
~~~~~
Nineteen minutes later, Koyama crawls back through the grate into the supply closet and startles a dozing Shige; the towel is musty and disgusting over his nose and mouth but still there. Koyama signals for him to keep it on, and the two of them sit together in the room gagging on sour chemicals while Koyama glances at his watch intently, counting down with his fingers to let Shige know.
When Koyama makes a fist at zero, the gases that have been building inside each of the sealed test tubes he left behind start to expand beyond their containers, until they break the glass.
From there, the gas seeps into the rooms, pushed forward into every corner of the facility by the air blowing through the ventilation system.
It kills everything inside of the building that needs to breathe.
And then it dissipates like it was never there.
~~~~~
A nice, safe, thirty minutes after he is certain the gas has dissipated, Koyama nods at Shige, and they remove the towels from their faces.
“Let’s get out of here, ne,” the explosives expert says, and smiles reassuringly. “We need to find Tegoshi and get you to a hospital.”
Shige is still confused; the blood loss probably doesn’t help. “Koyama? What did you do?” he asks.
Koyama looks a little bit regretful, but not that much. “Not all of the bombs we learned how to make,” he explains, “are the kind that explode.”
And then he hefts Shige’s arm around his shoulders so that the two of them can finally leave.
~~~~~
By the time they get outside Tegoshi is in the midst of ordering a virtual army of agents to storm the complex; standing behind him are around twenty junior units of unnecessary backup that he’d managed to contact via Morse-code on an ancient ham radio he’d stumbled across in the abandoned building next door.
When he sees Koyama and Shige limping out of the compound alone and very much alive, he forgets about the attack order and collapses in relief instead. “You two,” he breathes in awe, and starts to laugh to himself because he can’t help it. “Sasuga, ne.”
The junior agents all blink; some of their guns are still poised and ready. “So…what was your SOS about, Tegoshi-san?” they ask.
Tegoshi doesn’t answer, standing up and jogging over to meet his teammates instead. He happily takes Shige’s other arm, and the three of them walk themselves to one of the waiting ambulances back on the main road together.
As they do, Koyama sees the bloody gash on Tegoshi’s arm- still not bandaged- as well as the blood from where Shige is starting to bleed through his bandages again.
When face to face with things like that, he doesn’t have any time or energy left to think about what-and who- he’s left in that building behind them.
Knowing that his teammates are both going to be okay makes it impossible to have any regrets.
~~~~~
1.
Present
“Stop it, assholes!” Jin shouts, and earns another fist to the face for his complaints as he and Nakamaru are forced to listen to Junno’s agonized screams from the other side of the door.
Nakamaru winces sympathetically and looks down at his lap. They’ve been hearing screams just like that for the better part of an hour and a half now, but they still aren’t used to it, will never be. He prays for Junno to hold on for just a little while longer, but not too long. Otherwise they’re doomed.
“You’re next, pretty boy,” Jin gets told by their one remaining guard, as the undercover agent struggles anxiously against his bonds with each subsequent cry of agony from behind the door. “Better hope your teammate can last just that much longer. For your sake.”
“Fuck you,” Jin counters. He gets punched again.
“He’s right,” Nakamaru tells Jin, because Jin will get punched to death out here if he doesn’t learn how to shut up. “Taguchi can last just a little bit longer.”
Jin and their guard both look at him oddly.
“What’s that supposed to mean?” the guard asks suspiciously, and Jin’s face echoes his question.
But before anyone can press for an answer the screams suddenly stop and the door slams open. An unconscious Taguchi is dragged back out onto the floor by the other men.
Jin averts his eyes when he sees the condition of Junno’s face.
“That wasn’t nearly as fun as I thought it would be,” the leader sighs after a moment, using a white handkerchief to clean some of the blood off of his hands. “For such a strong looking guy, your teammate is a real crybaby.”
Junno isn’t moving.
Nakamaru holds his breath and thinks that something should happen right about now.
Hopefully.
The leader just looks bored. “So!” he starts, looking between Jin and Nakamaru. “Which of you two want to go ne…”
The question gets cut off by an explosion, a pillar of fire suddenly blasting through the wall behind them and incinerating two of the terrorists. It stops just shy of obliterating Junno too.
“Now!” Nakamaru shouts, and Junno is suddenly awake again, gritting his teeth through the pain and wrapping his legs around the leader powerfully, flipping him to the ground and grabbing his gun mid-air.
He spins, the leader still in a leg-lock, and promptly shoots the remaining three men in the head.
Silence.
Jin stares. “How…”
Junno smiles, invincible. “The louder you scream the less they think you can take,” he chuckles, though his voice is weaker than either Nakamaru or Jin ever remembers hearing it. He spits blood onto the floor and knocks his prisoner out with the butt of his own gun.
His smile never changes.
In the meantime, Nakamaru slumps in his chair in relief. “Oh thank god that worked,” he breathes, and Junno cheerfully moves to free his teammates.
Behind them, the flames eventually run out of fuel and pitter out all on their own.
Nakamaru thinks that over the course of the years, his job has shaped him into a very precise killer.
Luckily, he’s working on that whole not letting what he does be who he is thing.
He thinks he’s almost there.
~~~~~
0.
Future
Nakamaru and Koyama look slightly regretful as they stand in front of a class full of wide-eyed, nervously excited academy freshmen.
There are nine of them this year, nine very young, very capable people who have been specially chosen for the elite volatile mechanics track. Just like all those who have come before them, they’re here not just because of their proficiency in the field but also because they’re all good people.
This time Nakamaru holds the device while Koyama starts role call; they are the special guest instructors this year, with a very familiar, very grim task ahead of them.
But they’ve learned a lot since their first days in class, since their first missions and their first kills and the first time they looked into the face of a teammate or a civilian whose life they saved at great cost to themselves.
“You’re here,” Nakamaru starts, when the device begins to count down, “because you’re all good people.”
Then he tosses it to Koyama, who catches it.
“And before we say anything else,” Koyama continues, smiling sadly, “we want you to know that no matter what happens, you’ll always be good people.”
That said, they proceed to teach nine very new, very capable recruits how to kill other people.
Because it’s the right thing to do.
END
EDITS PLZ.
Universe: JE ( Government AU)
Theme/Topic: The request was for decent-length, non-romance fic (i.e. epic gen? XD)
Rating: PG-13
Character/Pairing/s: NEWS, KAT-TUN (with guest appearances by Inohara, Tsuyoshi, Tackey, and Koichi)
Warnings/Spoilers: OOC, bad police procedurals.
Word Count: 10,070
Summary: The difference between saving lives and taking them and the toll it takes on the gentlest of people.
Dedication: For crystallekil and Ann, I love you both lots. You’re both good people who are in the midst of having to do something crappy. Crys, I totally fail at making people FEEL.
A/N: Because Nakamaru and Koyama need love too. Also, this had a point when I started out but you can sort of see where it pittered out after the writer’s block hit and I couldn’t quite wrap it as well as I’d first imagined. I TRIED MY BEST. These two are no strangers to fail anyway, so it’s kind of um, strangely poetic that their fic fails too? Or something. Yeah. Also, I don’t know anything about chemistry so for those of you who do, pretend my idea was plausible and leave me alone, k. Did some minor edits but nothing huge, so also kind of raw.
Disclaimer: No harm is meant by this!
10.
Present
The footsteps are getting closer every second and Shige is getting heavier and heavier between he and Tegoshi in the meantime; Koyama throws a nervous glance down the dark hallway behind them while Shige struggles to put one foot in front of the other without passing out.
Tegoshi’s hands are covered in Shige’s blood and he looks worried and scared and a thousand other bad things that Koyama thinks shouldn’t be on a face as pretty as Tegoshi’s ever; the youngest NEWS member keeps uncharacteristically quiet and presses his hands tight to Shige’s side through it all, trying to stop the blood, to slow it down just a little bit.
“Here,” Koyama says a bit desperately, when he sees an inconspicuous looking supply closet thrown in the back corner of the compound. “We have to stop.”
“We can’t,” Shige wheezes, ever practical as he bleeds all over the floor, “they’ll catch us for sure if we stop moving.”
“You need to rest,” Koyama counters, snapping at Shige for the first time in a long time and meaning it.
Tegoshi continues not to say anything through the exchange, brow knit with concern for Shige as he easily disregards the undercover agent’s logical concerns and deftly steers them towards the outlying corridor anyway. “Go,” he whispers, and starts to shrug off his coat, “I’ll buy you guys some time, ne.”
“Tegoshi…” Shige starts, but gets ignored, pushed into Koyama’s arms while Tegoshi mops up the blood on the floor with his jacket as best he can.
“They’ll never fall for that,” Shige croaks in protest. “They’ll know because the trail is gone at the intersection.”
Koyama wants to protest too because he doesn’t like the idea of splitting up, of losing sight of any one of his teammates.
But Tegoshi just winks at them; “Believe,” he says mysteriously, and as he does, shares a significant look with Koyama that makes the older agent’s jaw snap shut inexplicably, his protests dying in his throat. He dutifully pulls Shige into the closet instead, and watches through the crack in the door when Tegoshi grabs his knife from the pocket of his utility belt as he ducks back out into the main hallway. The young hacker bites his bottom lip resolutely as he draws the blade across the flesh of his left arm, sharp and quick.
He takes off down the hallway without missing a beat after that, leaving a fresh trail of blood for their pursuers to follow. The rest is up to his two teammates.
Koyama cringes and doesn’t think the image of Tegoshi cutting himself open for them will ever leave him ever; he quickly shuts the door and tells himself not to cry because that won’t help anyone right now.
Meanwhile, Shige staggers to a corner of the supply closet and plops down in front of a large ventilation grate there, holding his wounded side. “You should have gone with him. You should have left me here,” he says to Koyama quietly, like he means it. Koyama is almost thankful when Shige says idiotic things like that, because it takes his mind off of the dread for a moment and focuses it on something a lot like anger instead.
“You won’t die,” he tells Shige sharply, and starts looking around the room for things he can use, things that will help them.
After a few minutes of fumbling around in the dark while listening to Shige’s shaky breathing, Koyama eventually finds some bandages and antiseptic stacked on top of a metal cabinet in the corner. For the first time since this nightmare mission began, he is thankful that this is a medical laboratory with medical laboratory supplies, despite the horrible things that he and his teammates had to witness upon their capture and incarceration here.
He grabs them and gets to work on Shige’s injury first, trying not to wince when the antiseptic he pours onto the wound makes Shige dig his fingers into Koyama’s shoulder sharply, hard enough to bruise.
“You should go,” Shige hisses again after the pain has subsided a little; his brow is dotted with sweat and his lip is freshly torn from where he’d bitten down on it just now to hold back his scream. “You still have time.”
“I’ll get us out of here,” Koyama promises. “Both of us.” He manages a small smile. “We owe Tegoshi dinner.”
Shige snorts and shifts slightly when Koyama starts to apply the gauze and bandages. He smiles ironically and reaches out to pat Koyama’s arm. “I always owe someone something, don’t I?” he asks tiredly.
“I’ll get us out of here,” Koyama says again.
His mind races as he tries to figure out how.
~~~~~
9.
Present
“We’re government agents,” Nakamaru tries to reason calmly, around the sweat beaded on his nose and the guns pointed at he and Taguchi and the knife pressed against Jin’s throat. “If you kill us, any one of us, people will um, people will be really angry.”
Or kind of sad, but he doesn’t think that that’s a threat that will intimidate their captors into letting them go.
Apparently the threat of angry government agents hunting them down for vengeance doesn’t intimidate their captors either, because the man holding the knife to Jin’s throat spits, pressing the edge down a little harder and making Jin wince slightly as a thin trail of blood appears, trickling onto the tip of the blade like punctuation.
Nakamaru feels it when Junno tenses automatically beside him at the sight of his teammate’s blood.
The man with the knife notices.
“We aren’t afraid of you,” he laughs, drawing the knife point along Jin’s jaw just to be a dick. “From the looks of things, you’re the ones afraid of us.”
Nakamaru hates his nose sweat sometimes.
He takes a deep breath. “Okay,” he says, after swiping his face against his shoulder and blinking once or twice. “We have to be able to talk about this somehow. Like…demands. Make demands. Trade us for stuff. Money maybe. I bet you like money.”
He gets punched in the face.
“Hey!” Junno protests- ultimately ineffective- and struggles against the chains shackling him to the floor. He gets kicked in the stomach for his efforts.
Nakamaru winces, tastes the blood welling up in his mouth from where his teeth cut the inside of his cheek open just now.
“Thanks lots for the rescue, guys,” Jin drawls, and is only inappropriately sarcastic when he’s trying to hide something else he’s feeling.
Nakamaru decides to ignore him. “Look,” he begins to their captors again, trying to sound civil and keep his voice from wavering at the same time, “you really, really don’t want to do this. I mean, our teammates…”
“Would have struck by now if they knew where you were,” the one with the knife theorizes.
Jin snorts. “Clearly you don’t know our teammates!”
“Shut up,” Nakamaru and the knife-holding terrorist say at the same time.
Nakamaru, Jin, and Junno all get hit again.
“Alright,” the terrorist starts, after the three agents have stopped coughing and choking. “Which one of you wants to play with us first?”
Junno is curled up on the floor but manages a smile anyway, bloody-toothed and swollen. “Play? I’m good at word games,” he manages, and struggles to sit up.
Jin looks like he’s about to protest; Nakamaru’s “No!” is on the tip of his tongue too, but when Junno smiles at them from the floor there’s an edge to it, or maybe a request.
The two older agents stand down.
“Alright, take the loudmouth,” the leader agrees, when no one else speaks up. He finally pulls the knife away from Jin’s throat. “I’m sick of the stupid look on that guy’s face anyway.”
They yank Junno up by his hair and unlock his chains from the floor; Jin and Nakamaru watch as the younger agent gets taken (shoved) towards a small, adjoining room in the back. Before they disappear, Junno gets punched in the head one more time, when he tells the knife-man, “This may just be a stab in the dark, but this is probably your torture room, huh.”
Nakamaru takes a deep breath as the door closes behind the men and his teammate; he thinks that the next few hours are going to be some of the longest in his life.
~~~~~
8.
June, 1999
In the academy, there is a long interview process for the first year cadets when they are just starting their coursework out; it consists of several written tests and personal essays, a slew of physical exams and even a few timed proficiency trials in various concentrations of agency specialties. The initial week for new recruits at the academy typically ends with a series of long, intensely personal talks with various instructors and recruiters and directors alike.
After Koyama gets through it all, after he tells them he’s here because he wants to help people and to save lives and do good, after he gets his physical results back and finishes all of his trials and essays and tests, the instructors and recruiters and directors he talks to smile at him and tell him that they want him to see if he likes volatile mechanics, where his highest category scores were.
“It will give you the opportunity,” they tell him, “to save a lot of people all at the same time.”
Naturally he agrees, naturally he’s proud for placing in the top 1% of his incoming class in this field. And deep down, he also thinks that he prefers working on disarming things that could hurt people to using weapons that will hurt people (even criminals) any day. “I want to save people more than anything else,” he says when he agrees to enroll in the volatile mechanics concentration and not the general education concentration like the majority of his freshman classmates.
On his first day in the classroom the Monday following his placement in the program, he comes face to face with a bomb's ticking counter for the first time, as it sits in the hands of special guest instructor Inohara Yoshihiko, current 2IC of the agency's most elite volatile mechanics unit, V6.
The first thing Koyama and his classmates learn that morning is that they weren't chosen to be explosives experts because they're already good at it.
“You’re here,” Inohara tells them, spinning the faux bomb in his hands a bit ominously, “because you’re all good people.”
Koyama blinks oddly at that because he’d thought they were here for showing special talent on the explosives portion of the proficiency trials. When he looks around, it seems like all of his classmates are thinking the very same thing that he is; they’re just as confused by Inohara-sensei’s strange opening words.
Inohara reads their expressions and laughs a little, gently. “You’re not the only ones who scored well on the volatile mechanics portion of the exams for this program,” he admits to them with a broad smile. “But the biggest difference between you and your classmates who didn’t make the final cut is that you also qualified emotionally where they didn’t.”
A cadet in the back of the room, one with a big nose and bed-mussed hair, raises his hand. “Excuse me,” he says, seemingly not ashamed to reveal exactly how incomprehensible he finds all of this out loud at all, “I don’t know if I get what those two things have to do with each other.”
Inohara props himself up on top of his desk and tucks his knees up against his chest as he looks at every one of the students gathered there; the toy bomb continues to count down second by second in his hands. “It makes sense, doesn’t it?” he asks after a moment, “you all showed us that you’re more sensitive, more communicative, and more concerned than the average cadet. Some of you care so much it hurts.”
Silence.
“And that means,” Inohara finishes for them, “you’re the kind of people who we can trust to handle some very, very dangerous things. And some very, very painful things.”
He tosses the bomb out into the students abruptly; Koyama is the one who catches the device on instinct.
"You've got thirty seconds left," Inohara tells him abruptly. "You've got ten classmates and me in the room and it's all on you to stop that counter before we all die."
Koyama stares. "E-eh?"
"Twenty-eight seconds."
Koyama looks around the room frantically, device clutched tightly in his hands as he feels something like panic starting to brew deep in his chest at how sudden this all is.
"Twenty-five seconds."
The counter confirms Inohara’s reading and instantly surpasses it; Koyama can’t help it when he automatically starts to think about Inohara's words as he looks at the ominous red numbers ticking away moment by moment right in front of him. He thinks about how it could be just like this one day, where there will be twelve- or more- lives other than his own at the very tips of his fingers, all counting on him. He can feel his own stomach start to twist unexpectedly at the thought and he realizes that it must feel even worse when it’s the real thing. Given how he kind of wants to throw up right now, he’s not sure if his heart could hold up to having that actual kind of responsibility on his shoulders for real someday.
In the meantime, the faces of his classmates look back at Koyama as he holds the bomb; he meets all of their eyes briefly and thinks about them without meaning or wanting to. He speculates about their fathers and mothers and sisters and brothers, about their pet kitties and pet puppies and their aunts and uncles and the cousins they only see during the summer or at family reunions. They have friends and lovers too, and they have lives ahead of them that will be full of accomplishment and joy and hard work and laughter.
He could help keep those lives on track, or he could fail and take them away, all in the blink of an eye.
"Twenty seconds."
Koyama starts to shake.
All these people-and people like them- could be counting on him someday in a situation just like this; they'll all look at him almost exactly like how they're looking at him now, telling him that it's up to him to make sure that they can see those fathers and mothers and sisters and brothers and kitties and puppies and aunts and uncles and cousins and friends and lovers tomorrow. That they’ll be alive to.
It's the singular most terrifying feeling Koyama has ever experienced.
"Eighteen seconds."
Koyama feels a cold sweat starting to bead along his brow; he begins to pale despite knowing that this is just a drill, that this isn't a real bomb. Thinking that it could be one day is the scariest part.
Inohara's eyebrows jump when Koyama just continues to stare at the counter, unable to move. "Fifteen seconds. What are you going to do, cadet? Everyone is counting on you."
Koyama looks back at the older agent, almost helpless.
Inohara doesn't budge. "Ten seconds."
Koyama tells himself to calm down. Calm down.
He takes a deep breath.
"Eight seconds."
A second deep breath.
"Five seconds."
He reaches out.
"Three..."
Closes his eyes.
"Two..."
He pulls the red wire free and hopes for the best.
Silence.
Then, "Good job, cadet."
Koyama opens his eyes.
The counter blinks back at him, stuck at 00:01, almost like in a Hollywood action movie except without the subsequent rush of glory and congratulations.
Koyama simply slumps over onto his desk in inglorious relief. His hands are still shaking just a tiny bit and he can feel his heart pounding in his chest a thousand beats per second.
Inohara grins. "Good reaction."
The kid in the back with the big nose blinks some more, raises his hand again. "I still don't think I get it," he says. “The whole being good people thing plus bombs.”
Inohara wordlessly hops off his desk and plucks the device out of Koyama's hands. He fiddles with it a little as he walks the length of the classroom, pulling at some of the wires, turning some of the dials, sticking different wires into different places. "The most important part about this job," he tells them straight up, "is to care. Sometimes too much. That's what'll ultimately save you in this line of work."
"What do you mean?"
When Inohara smiles at them this time, it's also a little bit sad. "Because," he explains, holding up the bomb, "defusing things like this is the easy part."
"Then what's the hard part?"
Inohara stops fiddling with the fake explosive like that's the million dollar question, the one he’s been waiting for all morning. He promptly tosses the device to the lucky asker and seems a little bit pained when he does. "Fix it," he instructs next, and looks at his watch this time. "You've got thirty seconds to make it work again."
Koyama starts to feel kind of sick when he finally realizes what Inohara is getting at.
~~~~~
7.
June, 1999
The first thing Nakamaru learns on his first day in class at the academy’s special volatile mechanics concentration is that he’s a good person.
It’s kind of nice. Random, but kind of nice.
The second thing Nakamaru learns is that saving lives isn't the only thing they're going to do here.
He just barely manages to catch the device when Inohara abruptly throws it at him and he blinks down at it; it's almost cartoonish in a way, with multi-colored wires protruding from all sides and bells, whistles, dials, and buttons everywhere.
"You better get to work," Inohara says, and might be trying to sound encouraging.
Nakamaru stares. Raises his hand again. "Excuse me, but isn't this a very bad thing?" Pause. "Very, very bad?" He shakes the bomb a little at the instructor, to help emphasize his point in case it isn’t clear.
Inohara nods. "It's a horrible thing.” And that’s all he says.
Nakamaru starts to sweat inexplicably; he feels it beading on his nose and along his hairline. "Then why would I need to put it back together? Isn’t the point to make it stop?"
"Because," Inohara tells him patiently, "sometimes there are worse things waiting if you don't put it together."
Nakamaru surmises that maybe he’s just having a bad day because he hasn’t been able to understand anything that’s happened so far; given how cryptic and vague their instructor has become he hopes he isn’t the only one who’s not following (though in his life experiences thus far, it would hardly be odd if he was the only one). As far as he’s concerned bombs are bad, blowing things up is bad, and as such, he thinks that there should be no reason on this green earth for a federal agent to have to turn an explosive back on. They’re the good guys after all.
But despite the logic behind his own thought processes he also knows instinctively that this is a job where you do what you're told with no questions asked, and so he hunkers over the device and gets to work with what little time he has left. The sweating on his nose gradually becomes more and more intense as he pulls wires out and resets them in what he sincerely hopes is the reverse order of what Inohara was doing as he'd fiddled with it earlier; in any case Nakamaru does it to the best of his memory. “How much more time?”
"Ten seconds."
Nakamaru starts to feel his heart rate speed up. "I don't think I can do this!" he complains frantically, as more time slips by, "shouldn't we be trying to learn about the basics first, before we do these types of things? Shouldn’t today’s lesson be an equipment orientation? Or one where we play games to remember everyone else’s names? Hi, I’m Nakamaru."
Inohara laughs a little. "Five to go."
"Oh god, oh god, oh god..." Nakamaru, in a panic, ends up eenie-meenie-miney-moe-ing the stupid thing and at the final moment, yelps as he pushes a small black button at the back of the device.
The red countdown numbers flash back to life; the display reads an ominous 5:00.
When he looks back up at his classmates and Inohara-incredulously-Inohara seems both impressed and supremely, supremely sad all at the same time. “Good work,” he says again, and holds his hands up.
Nakamaru wordlessly tosses the stupid toy back to him and is glad to be rid of it.
When Inohara catches it, he puts it on his desk facing out, as the 5:00 starts to count down all over again, just like at the beginning of class when they’d all walked in.
“You’re all good people,” he says one more time, like he can’t say it enough. “You care a lot and that’s why we can trust ourselves to put some very, very dangerous things in your hands. We know you’ll save people-hundreds or even thousands of people-because that’s what nice guys do in this line of work. It’s the obvious part. The easy part.” Pause. Deep breath. “But that’s not all we do.”
He glances down at the desktop, to his innocuous little toy bomb. He sets his hand on top of it. “We don’t just defuse these; we don’t just stop them from exploding and hurting people. We also make them.”
Silence.
“Volatile mechanics means exactly what it sounds like. We deal with bombs. And that means we also build them, we set their timers, we arm them and adjust their power, range, trajectory, and contents to do exactly what we need them to do to get the mission done. And then, once they’re put together perfectly, we put them in places and turn them on so that they’ll ultimately kill and injure other people.”
No one knows what to say when they hear that; Nakamaru stares at the ticking bomb across the room and feels like it’s looking right at him. He suddenly wants to throw up.
“You were chosen,” Inohara says again, “because we know you won’t take any joy from that part of your job. Because you’ll lose sleep over it, because your hands will shake and you’ll sweat and you’ll want to throw up nine times out of ten. You’ll hate yourself a little every time you have to do it but you’ll do it anyway. You’re all good people who have to do horrible, horrible things.”
”Why?” Nakamaru hears the narrow-eyed kid who’d defused the device first ask, voice shaky and almost inaudible.
Inohara looks a little helpless. “Because you know it’s the right thing to do.”
The counter ticks down to one minute remaining and no one says a word. It feels like forever.
At 00:45, Inohara takes one last look at all of his students and ends class early for the day because he knows they’re no good to him anymore, at least for now. He tells them to think about everything he said and to come back again tomorrow morning, if they feel like they can. No one will hold it against them if they don’t, he says.
But somehow, he sounds confident that they all will anyway.
Nakamaru walks out of the classroom like the rest of his classmates-- doing his best impression of a zombie. He glances at the narrow-eyed kid as they stumble out into the hallway together and thinks that he looks exactly like how Nakamaru feels right now.
As elite members of this year’s incoming freshman class, the two of them have both been specially chosen for the special volatile mechanics track at the agency's most famous branch of the training academy.
The first thing they learn that day is that they are good people. People who care.
The second thing they learn is that they are good people who will one day, have to kill other people.
It takes a very long time to sink in for both of them.
~~~~~
6.
December, 2003
The first time that Koyama kills someone it is during NEWS’s fourth mission as a new unit.
He goes all out too-fifty men die in their beds when he puts his mind to it that night and not a single one of them ever once sees the face of the person who kills them because he does it perfectly from a distance, like a real professional.
He watches that entire area go up abruptly from the safety of one of the alleyways between two of the enemy compound’s many buildings, the flames and debris shooting up into the night sky in a series of bright, smoky pillars. It’s like hell, except one that he created with his own two hands.
Shouts (and some screams) fill the compound moments later, followed by a volley of gunfire; the panic caused by the explosion is exactly what they needed to have a snowball’s chance at freeing Kusano and Massu from where they’ve been imprisoned and tortured for the past three days. The enemy bunkhouse was the target they chose, simply to help even the odds.
It’s three am but the flames light up the sky like it’s dawn; either way Koyama doesn’t have time to think about what he’s done here because the next thing he knows Ryo is yanking open the door and they are storming in from the north end of the building where Kusano and Massu are being held. In the meantime Shige and Uchi keep the chaos going outside with random bursts of gunfire under the hazy cover of residual smoke and debris while Tegoshi guides Ryo and Koyama down the long, dank hallways on their headsets. Yamapi looks on anxiously.
The trek through the dark is eerily quiet compared to the burning frenzy outside, and as he puts one foot in front of the other mechanically, Koyama wonders what kind of men he killed tonight, if they have families at home and people waiting for them or circumstances in their lives that make all of this unfair, that make their deaths not right.
Not everyone chooses a life of crime, after all. Sometimes it’s all they have.
“Left here,” Tegoshi tells them, and startles Koyama out of his musings so badly that he almost misfires his gun. “There’s a cellblock at the bottom of those stairs and one guard to the left of the outside door.”
“Roger,” Ryo responds sharply, and increases his pace while Koyama follows on autopilot, his mind stuck in a rush of conjuring up all the imaginary faces and stories and loved ones for the people he’s killed here tonight.
He thinks to himself that he’s a murderer now.
Ryo takes the stairs two at a time in front of him, turning the corner and opening up with two quick shots to the guard, sending him to his knees and a gurgling, gasping death.
“Koyama!” Ryo shouts, when he doesn’t see the explosives expert right behind him. “Hurry the fuck up!”
Koyama jumps. “Right!” he replies hastily, and Ryo bends down to fish the keys from the dead guard’s pockets; there’s one last steel door in the back of the room and Massu and Kusano are both behind it.
“No keys,” Ryo grunts in dissatisfaction after he finishes searching the body a few seconds later. “You’re up.”
He posts up by the door while Koyama shakes himself and nods, stepping forward with a small block of C-4 and a detonator.
It feels like Play-doh in his hands, as soft and innocuous as a child’s toy. He thinks that right now, it’s the very last thing he wants to hold after what just happened.
But he has to. Just a little while longer.
He bites the inside of his cheek and fifteen seconds later, the handle of the door is blown off in a much smaller explosion than the one he’d triggered earlier.
Somehow, it still manages to sound like thunder in his ears.
“Koyama!” Ryo hisses impatiently, when the explosives expert just kind of stands there in front of the smoking door, not moving. “The hell?!”
“Sorry,” Koyama replies automatically, shaking his head and telling himself to concentrate as he pulls his sleeve over his hand to keep from burning himself. He yanks the door open.
The sight that greets him when he does makes him forget about himself completely.
Massu blinks back at him when the door swings open, and when he sees Koyama’s face on the other side, he manages to smile through his swollen left eye and his bleeding lip and two hands full of broken fingers. “Koyama,” he breathes, sounding relieved as he struggles to stay awake and keep an unconscious Kusano propped up on his shoulder so he doesn’t fall onto the blood and vomit-stained floor. The youngest agent has burn marks marring his chest and his arms; his nose is also broken and there are a series of long, narrow gashes on his back that are starting to look puffy and yellow. “You’re here.”
Koyama feels his heart stop for a moment as he dashes forward, as Massu finally lets himself fall unconscious in his eldest teammate’s arms with a murmured, “Sorry, tired,” on his lips. And then his one good eye finally flutters closed after days of waiting and hoping and enduring.
Ryo follows Koyama into the cell a second later, grabbing Kusano and hefting him over his shoulder without missing a beat. “Let’s go,” he barks, “we don’t have any more time.”
“Right,” Koyama replies automatically, and gently picks Massu up.
For now, he concentrates on his teammates.
He figures there will be plenty of time to hate himself again later.
~~~~~
5.
June, 2002
The first time Nakamaru kills someone is as a junior agent working backup for Director (then Agent) Domoto Koichi. It happens while Koichi is deep undercover as an overnight rich boy drug buyer; the senior agent sets up a meeting with the runners that night and Koichi says that Nakamaru’s task for the exchange is just a precaution, that it’s just back up.
It’s for in case the targets get out of the building, in case something goes wrong. Most likely, the explosives won’t even be triggered.
Koichi tells him not to look so nervous. They’re all professionals here, after all.
It soothes Nakamaru just enough as he finishes the wiring and the set up; it’s always nice to have a senpai who knows exactly what he’s doing to take charge of things.
Everything is going fine as the drug dealers arrive with the goods some hours later; the lead seller likes Koichi’s face, says he’s got a reliable bone-structure. Right as he’s about to hand over the drugs and invite Koichi back to his car for a little extra gift, Jin jumps the gun.
He’s Koichi’s bodyguard in this case, tall and tough and silent behind the older agent, up until the moment when one of the dealer’s men makes a sudden move-i.e. he reaches into his jacket for a tissue- and makes Jin react instinctively, drawing his gun a beat too fast and firing.
Needless to say, the whole deal goes south from there.
Because sometimes, even if you have an experienced senpai at your side running the show, it won’t cover up the fact that you and your teammates are still hopeless rookies.
Guns start firing after that and Koichi grabs Jin quickly, shoving him behind a rusty old conveyor belt in the back of the old factory; he gets shot in the shoulder in the process, before Koki is sure they’re both out of the way and starts shooting from the balcony.
From there the rest of the team is a beat too slow to move because Kame’s nervous, incredulous order is delayed in a moment of horrified disbelief. Because of it, the dealer and his men manage to lay enough gunfire down to make it to the back door together, where Nakamaru’s backup trap is set.
The one that they weren’t planning on triggering.
Nakamaru is just running out of the van with Taguchi and Kame when the explosion rocks the back half of the building.
When he hears the sound Taguchi instinctively grabs Kame and Nakamaru and slides them to the ground to avoid any subsequent blasts of heat, sheltering their heads with his arms.
“That’s it, that’s it!” Nakamaru assures him hastily, “there was only one!”
The younger agent looks worried anyway, “Are you sure?”
“Yes!”
“Let’s go,” Kame insists, pushing Taguchi’s arms off of him and standing quickly. “We messed up.”
Taguchi lets them go and they all get to their feet again, rushing inside to survey the damage.
Nakamaru can smell the burning from the explosion as he follows his team leader inside.
~~~~~
By the time the fire department and the paramedics arrive to put out the blaze, the bleeding from Koichi’s shoulder has been slowed by ample pressure and Kame’s profuse apologies. Jin is nursing a nick to the forehead from where he’d clipped the edge of the conveyor belt as Koichi had pushed him to safety.
“I thought he was going for his gun,” Jin sulks, and leaves the apologizing to Kame after Kame gives him a look that would freeze the blood of a more conscientious agent.
The paramedics take over from there and Koichi doesn’t say anything beyond telling the junior KAT-TUN agents to help with the clean up and to search the dealer’s car for the evidence they’d been hoping to get out of live prisoners on this case.
When they go to do so, Nakamaru doesn’t find a car, but rather, a pile of flaming wreckage in the final stages of being hosed down by the firefighters.
“What happened?” he asks, feeling a little bit sick because he thinks he knows already.
“When the wall blew out, some of the debris got fired right at the car,” the fire chief reports. “A bunch of burning steel took out the whole backseat and just fried it.”
Nakamaru swallows. “I-is there…is there anything inside?”
The chief frowns. “From what we’ve been able to find so far, two bodies, both female, and one body, male.”
Nakamaru realizes what that little extra gift the dealer had been inviting Koichi to take part in is, and what it means for what he just did.
He stumbles to the nearest dumpster and promptly throws up.
~~~~~
4.
December, 2003
After the mission is finally over they all sit in the hallway just outside of the emergency room together; Koyama spends the hours waiting for word on Massu and Kusano’s conditions staring straight ahead at the whitewashed wall in front of him. Tegoshi and Shige are leaning on one another in an exhausted sleep-their first in days given the surveillance work they were doing- while Yamapi is on the phone in the background because he never stops working, not for a moment. In the meantime, Uchi paces the hallway restlessly while Ryo stands by the door, somehow still on guard even here.
Koyama is as tired as everyone else looks, but every time he closes his eyes all he sees are explosions.
“Koyama,” Yamapi says after a moment, and holds his phone towards the older member, “Tackey wants to talk to you, ne.”
Koyama blinks and nods; he stands and takes the phone. “H-hello?”
“The fire’s out now,” Tackey tells him without preamble, “you did a great job controlling your burn when you set the charges. The fire department had no problem keeping it out of the woods.”
A deep breath. “I see.”
“Anyway,” Tackey continues, and Koyama can hear the shouts of firefighters and policemen in the background, “everything’s all cleaned up here; one of the EMTs said you left a note wanting me to contact you about something afterwards?”
Koyama clutches the phone a little tighter and heads further down the hallway, away from his teammates. He chances a look over his shoulder and sees Ryo watching him intently.
Koyama offers Ryo what he hopes is a convincing smile before ducking into the privacy of the restroom. “I uh, I wanted to ask,” he begins again, once he’s alone, “if there were any survivors in the explosion.”
A beat.
“No,” Tackey informs him after a moment. “The body count is fifty-one so far in the explosion and ten on the ground from gunfire.”
Koyama can’t believe his ears when he hears it. “Everyone. We…”
“You got them all,” Tackey confirms. Pause. “Let’s not talk about this right now. We’ll have a full debriefing on Monday morning. There are more important things to take care of in the meantime. Don’t think too much about it.”
And then he hangs up without waiting for a response.
Silence.
Koyama clutches the phone tightly in his hand, standing alone in the bathroom just like that for a while. Despite Director Takizawa’s words just now, Koyama can’t help it when he thinks about everything that happened earlier, all of it.
Eventually, he sinks to the floor and buries his head between his knees.
They killed everyone. Not a single survivor from amongst the drug manufacturing compound they’d failed to infiltrate and take down three days prior.
Well, Koyama thinks, they certainly made up for that initial failure tonight.
He flips Yamapi’s phone closed and thinks that it’s just like Inohara said all those years ago; his hands are shaking and tears start to sting the backs of his eyes. He hates himself a little too, almost wants to throw up.
But before he can even let the first tear fall, the door slams open.
Ryo stands in front of him, glowering down and looking impatient. “Kusano’s conscious,” he tells him. “Massu’s out of surgery. They’re okay.”
Koyama blinks back up at him. “Ryo-chan, we killed them all.”
“I don’t care. Whatever you’re doing, however you’re feeling. It doesn’t matter. We can see them now. Everyone already went ahead while you’ve been sitting here feeling sorry for yourself.”
Koyama feels oddly bitter at the sniper’s easy dismissal. “You don’t underst…”
“I’ve killed eight people on this mission alone,” Ryo growls. “Don’t tell me I don’t understand. You got fifty in one night? Great. I’m at eighty-two and since my job is to shoot, killing is all I really do anyway. So unless you blow up Tokyo Dome in the middle of an idol concert, I will probably have you beat in the body count by the time we both retire.”
Koyama stares. Realizes that Ryo is right, that he isn’t the only one who has to deal with this kind of thing. They all will, probably. Eventually.
But even knowing that doesn’t make the guilt go away; if anything Koyama feels worse now. “Then… how are we supposed to deal with this?” he asks, sounding helpless as he looks up at his more senior teammate for some words of guidance, some sort of help.
Eventually, Ryo sighs.
Offers him a hand. “C’mon.”
Koyama blinks.
“Would you stop looking at me like that and get the fuck up?”
Koyama quickly takes Ryo’s hand when his tone starts to get short, letting his teammate pull him to his feet. Ryo doesn’t say anything else right away.
“Ryo-chan?” Koyama asks, when Ryo leads him out of the bathroom and down the hall.
“Just shut up for a second,” Ryo tells him, and suddenly sounds more embarrassed than angry now. He turns a corner at the end of the corridor, and abruptly stops short, drops Koyama’s hand.
They’re in front of the ICU unit, peering into a room where their teammates are. All of them.
Ryo doesn’t look Koyama in the eye when he talks; whether it’s because he doesn’t want to or because he can’t is a mystery. “Listen up because I’m only going to say this once," he starts, “and if you ever bring it up anywhere else ever again I’ll deny all knowledge of it and shoot you in the foot, got me?”
Koyama swallows. Nods.
Ryo points into the window of the ICU room, where a Massu who hasn’t slept for the last three days is finally slumbering peacefully and a Kusano who probably hasn’t been conscious for the last three days is finally wide awake and happily surrounded by the rest of the team. The two oldest agents watch in silence for a moment, as Kusano promptly ruins his grand homecoming by sneezing right into Yamapi’s face. Uchi grudgingly wipes Kusano’s nose for him while Shige laughs and hands Yamapi a tissue of his own; Tegoshi simply curls up at the foot of Kusano’s bed and blinks sleepily (but happily) up at his teammates.
“I would trade,” Ryo murmurs eventually, voice low, “ten, twenty, fifty, a hundred of those bastards that died tonight for any one of them. In a heartbeat. And I wouldn’t lose a second of sleep over it afterwards either.”
He looks at Koyama.
“If you don’t feel exactly the same way, if you weigh one of those lives in there exactly the same as any scumbag you meet on the street, then leave this job right now because I don’t want you on my team.” He points inside. “They don’t either.”
His piece said, he doesn’t wait for a response, wordlessly sliding around Koyama and into the hospital room to join the others.
Koyama stands outside by himself for a little while longer and watches his teammates interact, thinking to himself about whether he can do this job after all.
And then Massu stirs and starts to wake up.
Koyama sees it from the window when the young combat agent blinks blearily to himself in his bed for a moment, looking troubled and disoriented as he tries to regain his bearings. Part of him must still think that he’s imprisoned in an underground cell being tortured for information; part of him probably still believes that seeing Koyama’s face earlier had all been nothing more than a pleasant dream. But when Massu finally does manage to focus well enough to see Koyama really there, looking at him through the glass of the ICU room’s window, he takes a relieved breath and raises one of his broken hands up in tired, happy greeting.
Koyama smiles at the sight without knowing he’s doing it; when he waves back at Massu and all his troubles suddenly feel very far away, he thinks he understands exactly what Ryo means now. Or rather, that he always has without knowing it.
In the end, no matter how many people he has to hurt or kill in the line of duty, Koyama wouldn’t trade any of the members of his team for anything in the world because there is nothing in this world that is worth more to him than they are.
Not even his own soul.
~~~~~
3.
June, 2002
Nakamaru washes his face three times in the locker room afterwards, long after Kamenashi has gone home and Koki has packed up, long after Ueda’s chauffer has already arrived to take him back to his mansion in the sky and Taguchi has left on foot in the hopes of making the last train. Jin is the only other one still here, currently in Agent Domoto’s office, being yelled at for making an amateur mistake. Again.
Nakamaru continues to wash his face, his hands, his arms. He feels like he’ll never get that blood off of him, or the burn of gunpowder from behind his eyes and in his nostrils.
He knows he should go home, should go get some sleep, should prepare for a very detailed report and series of investigations tomorrow, after Koichi’s superiors hear about what happened and order a full and detailed examination of the events.
He shouldn’t be lingering in the locker room thinking about what happened, especially because he can’t do anything to change it now. He can only learn from his mistakes, his miscalculations, his lack of attention to detail.
He never took what the building was made of into account when he set the charges.
Because he’d believed Koichi, because he’d thought they wouldn’t need the explosives.
He wasn’t careful enough.
So instead of going home, he slides down onto the bench in front of his locker and bangs his head against the door once, twice, three times. He hates himself.
The door behind him opens and closes.
Jin walks through it, looking slightly perturbed but fine, a small X-shaped bandage on his head over the cut there.
He sees Nakamaru banging his head on the locker.
He mentally shrugs and heads to his own locker to get ready to go home.
Nakamaru stops banging when he sees his teammate out of the corner of his eye. He watches Jin calmly put in his combination on the lock before starting to change out of his undercover gear.
“What did Tsuyoshi have to say?” Nakamaru asks, when he can’t stand the silence anymore.
“He’s acting supervisor for our team until Koichi’s shoulder is better,” Jin replies. “I’m suspended again.” He adds the last part like they’re talking about the weather.
“Oh.”
Silence.
Jin tosses his tie into the depths of his locker. Nakamaru can’t help it when he thinks about how his teammate is dealing with his first kill on the job too; he wonders how Jin feels about having to actually see another human being’s face as he’d taken that person’s life.
As far as he can tell, Jin looks fine.
Jin notices Nakamaru staring at him.
“Did you need something?” he asks.
Nakamaru shakes his head. “I was just… um, are you okay?”
A pause.
Jin fingers the X on his head and for a moment, looks kind of touched. “It doesn’t hurt.”
“Not that,” Nakamaru tells him. Pause. “I mean, I’m glad it doesn’t hurt. But…” he trails off and blinks a few times, trying to find the right words.
“What?” Jin is clearly getting impatient.
Nakamaru sighs. “We killed people today,” he admits lamely, after a moment.
Jin still looks like he’s getting impatient. “Yeah.”
Nakamaru doesn’t know whether to admire or be alarmed by his teammate’s reaction to something so weighty. “So… how do you feel about that? I mean…we’re killers now.”
Jin snorts. “We were doing our job,” he replies simply, and finishes pulling on his civilian clothes. He brushes his hands through his hair before throwing on a baseball cap to cover his wound.
Nakamaru sighs and thinks that his younger teammate is missing the point. “We’re killers now,” he says again, in case the severity maybe hasn’t sunk in with Jin yet.
Jin closes his locker. “I don’t think of what I do as who I am,” he replies with an air of boredom, and throws his bag over his shoulder as he heads for the door. “See you in a week.”
He strolls out of the room like he owns the world and leaves Nakamaru sitting alone in the locker room for two hours afterwards, trying to make sense of it all.
~~~~~
2.
Present
An hour later, Shige starts to bleed through his bandages.
Koyama changes them before going back to the row of cabinets in the back and searching one more time for anything that can be of use to them; there are only more bandages and bottles of antiseptic stacked on top of the metal cabinets, along with some scrubs and towels. Nothing they can use to get out of here. The shelf on the other side of the storage room has boxes of test tubes on it, a few glass cases full of needles, syringes, and a handful of Petri dishes.
More nothing.
Koyama wipes sweat from his forehead and thinks that maybe there’s something inside the cabinets; they wouldn’t seal them up otherwise. He grabs a needle from one of the glass cases by the door and tries picking the padlock to one of them, just like Kusano had showed he and Shige how to do once, many years ago.
Shige eyes him tiredly from the corner and manages a small smile when he sees what Koyama is up to. “You have to push and twist at the same time, remember?” he asks, voice dry around his chuckle.
Koyama smiles back but can’t hide the worry in it. “Oh yeah,” he says, and takes a break to dry his palms on his pant legs before he continues.
When the lock clicks open fifteen minutes later, Koyama takes a deep breath and prays that there is something he can use on the other side, something miraculous that can get them out of here.
He opens the door.
And finds out something very important.
It’s not a cabinet, it’s a fridge. And there are chemicals inside it. Lots of them, all different kinds.
But not the fun kind.
He stares.
Gets an idea.
“Koyama? What is it?” Shige asks, when he sees the look on his teammate’s face but not the contents of the cabinet.
Koyama turns to his best friend and smiles a little; it looks more confident than it had been all day. “Shige,” he says softly, “Shige I’m going to get us out of here.”
Shige blinks. “What? How?”
Koyama wordlessly starts pulling the chemicals out of the fridge. “Just rest,” he tells his friend mysteriously, before going to the other side of the room and grabbing a box of test tubes as well. “I’ll handle it.”
He works for another fifteen minutes and Shige tries to watch but ends up dozing; Koyama is kind of glad he won’t be there to see the things he’s about to do to the people searching for them inside the building.
Once he finishes, he strides to the other side of the room and grabs two towels, dousing them in a different chemical.
“Shige,” he says, crouching beside his best friend and touching his cheek to wake him. “Shige, I’m going to need you to move for a minute, okay?”
Shige grunts and blinks, wincing when it jostles his wound. “Koyama?”
“Sorry, but you’re blocking the vent,” Koyama tells him apologetically, before helping him move to the side a little.
“What are you doing? Where are you going?”
“Here,” Koyama tells him, purposefully vague. He holds up one of the wet towels to his friend. “I’m going to tie this to your face; it won’t smell good but you’ll get used to it. Just keep breathing into it until I come back and tell you it’s okay to take it off. Don’t take it off even for a second.”
Shige looks like he wants to ask questions, but stops short when he sees the look on his friend’s face, no longer scared or worried, now just grimly resolute. He doesn’t say anything, just nods and lets Koyama tie the towel over his nose and mouth.
Then Koyama puts the second towel over his own face, before pulling the grate off of the vent and crawling into the shaft.
Shige thinks he hears the tinkling of glass as Koyama disappears into the dark.
~~~~~
Every time Koyama comes upon a ventilation grate that opens up into a room he leaves a small, corked test tube in front of it, with innocuous clear liquid inside.
As he does he tells himself Tegoshi is safe; Tegoshi has gotten out a long time ago and is hacking a computer somewhere nearby, getting the agency their coordinates so backup will be arrive soon.
Koyama has to believe it, because if he doesn’t, then he might kill his teammate.
Koyama tells himself that Tegoshi’s luck will not have left him like that yet.
He leaves his test tubes behind and checks his watch.
When he crawls over what looks to be a luxurious office with a large, fat man talking to one of the men in uniform who had been chasing them earlier, he stops. Listens.
“Even though it was dark, we are fairly certain we only saw one of them escape outside of the property, sir,” the uniformed man reports, “that means the other two are still here somewhere. With your traitor accountant’s gunshot wound, they can’t have gotten far.”
Koyama doesn’t let himself sigh out loud in relief when he hears the news of Tegoshi’s success, but something inside of him loses some of its tension now that what he’d believed earlier is officially what he knows now.
He puts a test tube beside the grate and moves on; he doesn’t have time to feel guilty even as he drops two of the tubes by the opening of what looks like a bunk room.
He’s got twenty minutes left.
~~~~~
Nineteen minutes later, Koyama crawls back through the grate into the supply closet and startles a dozing Shige; the towel is musty and disgusting over his nose and mouth but still there. Koyama signals for him to keep it on, and the two of them sit together in the room gagging on sour chemicals while Koyama glances at his watch intently, counting down with his fingers to let Shige know.
When Koyama makes a fist at zero, the gases that have been building inside each of the sealed test tubes he left behind start to expand beyond their containers, until they break the glass.
From there, the gas seeps into the rooms, pushed forward into every corner of the facility by the air blowing through the ventilation system.
It kills everything inside of the building that needs to breathe.
And then it dissipates like it was never there.
~~~~~
A nice, safe, thirty minutes after he is certain the gas has dissipated, Koyama nods at Shige, and they remove the towels from their faces.
“Let’s get out of here, ne,” the explosives expert says, and smiles reassuringly. “We need to find Tegoshi and get you to a hospital.”
Shige is still confused; the blood loss probably doesn’t help. “Koyama? What did you do?” he asks.
Koyama looks a little bit regretful, but not that much. “Not all of the bombs we learned how to make,” he explains, “are the kind that explode.”
And then he hefts Shige’s arm around his shoulders so that the two of them can finally leave.
~~~~~
By the time they get outside Tegoshi is in the midst of ordering a virtual army of agents to storm the complex; standing behind him are around twenty junior units of unnecessary backup that he’d managed to contact via Morse-code on an ancient ham radio he’d stumbled across in the abandoned building next door.
When he sees Koyama and Shige limping out of the compound alone and very much alive, he forgets about the attack order and collapses in relief instead. “You two,” he breathes in awe, and starts to laugh to himself because he can’t help it. “Sasuga, ne.”
The junior agents all blink; some of their guns are still poised and ready. “So…what was your SOS about, Tegoshi-san?” they ask.
Tegoshi doesn’t answer, standing up and jogging over to meet his teammates instead. He happily takes Shige’s other arm, and the three of them walk themselves to one of the waiting ambulances back on the main road together.
As they do, Koyama sees the bloody gash on Tegoshi’s arm- still not bandaged- as well as the blood from where Shige is starting to bleed through his bandages again.
When face to face with things like that, he doesn’t have any time or energy left to think about what-and who- he’s left in that building behind them.
Knowing that his teammates are both going to be okay makes it impossible to have any regrets.
~~~~~
1.
Present
“Stop it, assholes!” Jin shouts, and earns another fist to the face for his complaints as he and Nakamaru are forced to listen to Junno’s agonized screams from the other side of the door.
Nakamaru winces sympathetically and looks down at his lap. They’ve been hearing screams just like that for the better part of an hour and a half now, but they still aren’t used to it, will never be. He prays for Junno to hold on for just a little while longer, but not too long. Otherwise they’re doomed.
“You’re next, pretty boy,” Jin gets told by their one remaining guard, as the undercover agent struggles anxiously against his bonds with each subsequent cry of agony from behind the door. “Better hope your teammate can last just that much longer. For your sake.”
“Fuck you,” Jin counters. He gets punched again.
“He’s right,” Nakamaru tells Jin, because Jin will get punched to death out here if he doesn’t learn how to shut up. “Taguchi can last just a little bit longer.”
Jin and their guard both look at him oddly.
“What’s that supposed to mean?” the guard asks suspiciously, and Jin’s face echoes his question.
But before anyone can press for an answer the screams suddenly stop and the door slams open. An unconscious Taguchi is dragged back out onto the floor by the other men.
Jin averts his eyes when he sees the condition of Junno’s face.
“That wasn’t nearly as fun as I thought it would be,” the leader sighs after a moment, using a white handkerchief to clean some of the blood off of his hands. “For such a strong looking guy, your teammate is a real crybaby.”
Junno isn’t moving.
Nakamaru holds his breath and thinks that something should happen right about now.
Hopefully.
The leader just looks bored. “So!” he starts, looking between Jin and Nakamaru. “Which of you two want to go ne…”
The question gets cut off by an explosion, a pillar of fire suddenly blasting through the wall behind them and incinerating two of the terrorists. It stops just shy of obliterating Junno too.
“Now!” Nakamaru shouts, and Junno is suddenly awake again, gritting his teeth through the pain and wrapping his legs around the leader powerfully, flipping him to the ground and grabbing his gun mid-air.
He spins, the leader still in a leg-lock, and promptly shoots the remaining three men in the head.
Silence.
Jin stares. “How…”
Junno smiles, invincible. “The louder you scream the less they think you can take,” he chuckles, though his voice is weaker than either Nakamaru or Jin ever remembers hearing it. He spits blood onto the floor and knocks his prisoner out with the butt of his own gun.
His smile never changes.
In the meantime, Nakamaru slumps in his chair in relief. “Oh thank god that worked,” he breathes, and Junno cheerfully moves to free his teammates.
Behind them, the flames eventually run out of fuel and pitter out all on their own.
Nakamaru thinks that over the course of the years, his job has shaped him into a very precise killer.
Luckily, he’s working on that whole not letting what he does be who he is thing.
He thinks he’s almost there.
~~~~~
0.
Future
Nakamaru and Koyama look slightly regretful as they stand in front of a class full of wide-eyed, nervously excited academy freshmen.
There are nine of them this year, nine very young, very capable people who have been specially chosen for the elite volatile mechanics track. Just like all those who have come before them, they’re here not just because of their proficiency in the field but also because they’re all good people.
This time Nakamaru holds the device while Koyama starts role call; they are the special guest instructors this year, with a very familiar, very grim task ahead of them.
But they’ve learned a lot since their first days in class, since their first missions and their first kills and the first time they looked into the face of a teammate or a civilian whose life they saved at great cost to themselves.
“You’re here,” Nakamaru starts, when the device begins to count down, “because you’re all good people.”
Then he tosses it to Koyama, who catches it.
“And before we say anything else,” Koyama continues, smiling sadly, “we want you to know that no matter what happens, you’ll always be good people.”
That said, they proceed to teach nine very new, very capable recruits how to kill other people.
Because it’s the right thing to do.
END
EDITS PLZ.