JE/NEWS- "Even Though Fear Keeps us Sharp it Doesn’t Look Good on Camera"
Here everyone, have Halloween fic. A week early. (B/c I am LAME)
Title: Even Though Fear Keeps us Sharp it Doesn’t Look Good on Camera
Universe: JE/NEWS
Theme/Topic: Halloween fic!
Rating: PG-13
Character/Pairing/s: NewS (Shige and Tego focus)
Warnings/Spoilers: CRACK. AND CRACK. And stupid. And probably OOC.
Word Count: 5,100
Summary: One night, the bus breaks down.
Dedication: For Ann. Just because. I swear to god this was funnier in my head. I think putting it into words just made it lame(r).
A/N: LOL I should be working on JEHols. Yet here I am. Also, as a quick note, I don’t actually know the tour dates or the geography or if they still use buses like this but whatever. It’s not like my stories are written because they have a high probability of actually happening. XD;; And sorry for the lame, I just can’t be funny lately. Hopefully practice will fix whatever in me is broken. In the meantime, here I am, stealing the plots to old BSB videos.
Disclaimer: No harm is meant by this!
When NEWS’s tour bus breaks down in the middle of the night in the middle of winter in the middle of a freak snowstorm in the middle of the concert tour in the middle of nowhere, there is, luckily-or unluckily as the case may be-an old abandoned house nearby.
The bus driver promptly urges the members to trek up the hill and take shelter at the aforementioned old house so that they can stay warm and protect their voices for the next show (especially since he doesn’t want them to get sick, because he will probably get blamed for it by the company afterwards). He assures them that he doesn’t mind staying out here to try and fix the problem alone in the meantime. Mightily stirred by the man’s self-sacrificing manner and his concern for others’ wellbeing, Yamapi vows to not let his selflessness go to waste by doing exactly as he says, even as Shige is busy pointing out the many flaws of that plan, which include (but are not limited to) letting a group of idols wander around by themselves in rural Japan in low visibility without any cell phone reception.
But Leader’s words of inspiration always end up beating Shige’s words of wisdom and caution, and so, before long, the six of them find themselves trekking up a steep hill to the ominous looking house that sits atop it, with Yamapi fearlessly taking the lead and Shige bringing up the rear while Koyama, Ryo, and Massu take turns carrying a sleepy Tegoshi for most of the way.
The first thing that happens when they get to the doorstep is Tegoshi finally wakes up; he looks at the door-wide-eyed- and then exclaims, “Wow!” with much more energy than he’d had just now, when they’d told him they were climbing a hill.
The next thing that happens is the door promptly creaks open, all by itself.
“Oh my god,” Shige declares, and finds it an entirely appropriate response to the situation given the fact that he has seen about a billion horror movies that begin exactly like this.
“What a neat house,” Tegoshi says after that, completely unfazed and in a completely situation-inappropriate manner. The others all agree with his assessment-rather inappropriately- as they step in to the house and out of the storm without further ado. “My door at home never does that, no matter how much I want it to, ne,” the youngest member adds, voice rife with admiration for today’s amazing technological breakthroughs.
It leaves Shige outside alone for a moment, standing at the doorstep with his mouth wide open. When he eventually sighs in a resigned sort of manner and steps in after them-after weighing the pros and cons of leaving them all to die in the murder house without him versus standing outside and freezing to death- the door promptly closes right as he enters, all on its own again.
“That was amazing!” Yamapi marvels, when he sees it. “Japanese technology is really the best in the world, ne.”
Sometimes Shige wishes that the other people in his group were not so KY.
~~~~~
“Eh, no one’s home,” Massu realizes out loud sometime later, after they have searched the house top to bottom in the hopes of finding the owners (sort of, as Shige doesn’t really want to meet the types of people who live in these kinds of seedy places given that they are probably psychotic murderers).
A beat.
In which Shige hopes the others will realize that if no one has been home this whole time, the door must have opened by itself. Of its own volition.
But then, Massu smiles. “I wonder if they’ll mind if we make ourselves some snacks while we wait for them to come back,” he says, instead of coming to any of the important realizations that Shige has already come to.
Massu ambles off towards the kitchen. Yamapi-also hungry-happily follows.
~~~~~
“I think,” Shige feels the need to say out loud later, “that this house is trying to kill us.”
Everyone gives him a weird look. Koyama is-naturally- the first to be very concerned. “Shige,” he starts, and reaches out to touch Shige’s forehead with his own, “Shige are you feeling sick? Do you have a temperature? Do you think you need to vomit?”
“I am not sick!” Shige insists, and scuttles backwards and out of Koyama’s reach before he does anything even more embarrassing. “This house is trying to kill us!”
He points to the hallway to his left, which is full of suits of armor. All of which had suddenly collapsed earlier, resulting in the axes in the suits’ hands all nearly falling on Massu and Yamapi as the two of them had walked past with trays full of snacks from the kitchen.
Ryo makes a face. “They just fell, idiot,” he says. “Stop being so paranoid.”
“Eh, they must all be fragile antiques, ne,” Tegoshi surmises, “if they can fall so easily like that.”
Yamapi and Massu, completely unscathed and with all snacks fully intact, look perfectly at peace as they sit cross-legged on the floor and start eating together. “I’m glad,” Yamapi says around a mouthful of Triscuit and cheese, “that Massu and I both like to dance.”
Massu beams, and like Leader, can find a silver lining in most anything. “I needed a haircut anyway.”
Shige slaps a hand to his forehead.
~~~~~
“This house is definitely trying to kill us!” Shige insists again after the snacks have been eaten and he and Ryo and Tegoshi have been charged with cleaning the dishes.
Ryo and Tegoshi look at each other.
“Ne,” Tegoshi begins after a moment, and reaches out to touch Shige’s face, “Does Shige have a fever?”
Shige smacks his hand away. “KNIVES!” he screams, and points to the circle of cutlery currently imbedded in the tile in a neat circle around where the three of them are all standing at the sink.
Ryo sighs. “That wouldn’t have happened,” he begins shortly, “if you hadn’t knocked over the bin in the cabinet up there.”
“I didn’t touch it!” Shige insists.
Tegoshi laughs. “Shige is clumsy, ne,” he says, sounding unintentionally superior as he rinses the dishes clean and hands them to Ryo to dry.
Shige sputters. “Knives!” he manages again after a minute of struggling with his indignant disbelief. He gestures emphatically to the blades, still quivering in the ground, uncomfortably close to their feet. He is fairly certain they would have gotten him just now too, if not for some strange miracle of God in which everything suddenly got diverted from them last minute, the cutlery landing in a perfect circle equidistant from where Tegoshi is standing at the center instead.
“Shige’s right,” Tegoshi realizes, when he turns to hand Ryo another dish and sees that Shige is pointing to the knives again.
Shige sighs in relief. Finally.
“We have to pick those up and wash them now too, since they fell on the floor and it’s dirty, ne,” Tegoshi finishes, obliviously.
“Shige should wash them himself, Tego-nyan,” Ryo begins, “since he knocked them down in the first place, when he was supposed to be putting the clean dishes away.”
Tegoshi laughs. “Ryo-tan has a very strong sense of justice, ne,” he says, and obediently turns off the water before hopping over the ring of deadly cutlery. “Ganbatte, Shige!” he says encouragingly (and in that superior fashion again).
And as he and Ryo head out of the kitchen together-leaving Shige alone with the knives that clearly just tried to kill him-Shige is fairly certain that he can hear something like evil laughter in the distance.
He’s just not sure whether it is coming from Ryo or the house.
~~~~~
Later, after Shige finishes the dishes without any more mishap, the six of them split up into three groups of two and get assigned bedrooms to try and get some sleep in while they wait for word on the bus.
About fifteen minutes after crawling into bed and passing out, Koyama suddenly wakes up screaming.
Which wakes up Shige and makes him scream as well, and pretty soon the two of them are just looking at each other from opposite sides of their shared room, holding the sheets to their chests and screaming their heads off like idiots.
“What’s wrong?” Shige demands eventually, heart in his throat and already half out of breath as he looks at Koyama disbelievingly.
“I had a nightmare,” Koyama admits, equally terrified.
Shige’s blood runs cold. Is the house trying to kill them in their sleep now? “What was it about?” he asks, voice barely above a whisper.
Koyama responds in like, lowering his voice as well. “I dreamed,” he begins, twisting his bedsheets in his palms, “that I was a clown and I had to find a way to make Matchy laugh or leave the jimusho.”
Shige stares.
“Tego-nyan was there too,” Koyama adds, “he kept telling me I had to try harder. And then, when I failed, he poked me in the butt as punishment and I woke up.”
Silence.
Then, “What?” Shige demands, incredulously.
Koyama looks sheepish. “Shige, can I sleep in your bed with you?” he asks next.
“No,” Shige replies flatly on instinct, even though Koyama is already starting to climb out of his bed anyway.
“But Shige…”
“No!”
Koyama pouts. “Fine, I’m going to go sleep with Yamapi and Ryo-chan then,” he says, and folds the comforter back over his pillow as he gets off of the mattress.
The moment he turns around, his bed collapses through the floor with a crash.
“Oh god!” Shige shouts, in what is once again, an entirely situation appropriate manner.
Koyama stares at the giant hole in the floor, where his bed used to be.
Except now, he is looking down into the bedroom below, where Yamapi and Ryo are sleeping.
“Yamapi!” he screams, terrified when he realizes what might have just happened.
Shige struggles to his feet to join his friend, fearing for the worst as well: a squashed Yamapi.
But just as he gets there Yamapi ambles into view of the giant hole, brushing his teeth casually. “I forgot my toothbrush so Tegoshi said I could use his,” Yamapi explains after a moment, looking at Koyama’s bed that has crushed his bed. “Lucky!”
From the other side of the room, where Ryo was sleeping, there is a cranky groan. “Fucking old houses.”
~~~~~
“See?” Shige insists sometime later, when the six of them are all squashed inside of Massu and Tegoshi’s room together. “The house is trying to kill us!”
“Yeah, because haunted houses are real. I thought you were supposed to be the smart one?” Ryo grumps, and rolls a sleepy-eyed Tegoshi over so that everyone can fit.
Massu blinks. “So your bed fell through the floor?” he asks Koyama, wide-eyed.
Koyama nods back, equally wide-eyed.
Then Massu smiles. “I’m glad no one was hurt.”
Koyama smiles back automatically when he too, sees the silver lining around the whole incident. “Me too!” he breathes to Massu, and instantly feels at ease again when he thinks about it like that.
And that thus taken care of, the two of them settle close to each other to sleep, because six people to one full-sized bed can get tricky. Not impossible for Japanese-sized celebrities, but tricky.
“I don’t believe this,” Shige continues, as the others start to try to go back to sleep just like that. “There are too many things that happened tonight for it to all be a coincidence! They have to be signs or something. Why don’t you believe me?”
Yamapi looks at him very seriously. “Shige,” he starts after a beat, and inches closer.
“Do you believe me, Yamashita-kun?” Shige asks, hopefully.
Then Yamapi reaches out to touch his forehead. “Are you feeling okay?” he asks, brow knit with worry. "You're not sick, are you?"
Shige’s response is to turn around so that he can bury his face into his pillow and scream, at least until Ryo kicks him in the side and says, “Shut up.”
~~~~~
Five minutes later, everyone is asleep.
Except for Shige, who has the sheets tucked up to his chin and is looking around the room constantly, for signs of danger. Since his friends clearly have no self-preservation instincts and don’t notice when things-like evil houses- are obviously trying to kill them.
He hears a tapping on the window.
Shige tries to hide under the blankets.
The tapping continues.
Shige peeks out from a crack in his blanket. From what he can make out through it, there is a dark shape that he can’t quite identify standing at the pane, its shape distorted by the dramatic shadow it casts through the drapery. Even knowing that it’s probably a trick of the light, Shige thinks it somehow looks like a giant horned monster and as such, reacts appropriately by latching onto the arm of the person beside him, who just happens to be Massu.
He does it hard.
Massu grunts. “Eh?” he murmurs, blinking sleepily. “Shige?”
“Shhhh!” Shige hisses hastily, eyes wide and panicked. “The window. There’s something by the window.”
Massu does not get the hint for discretion that comes with the use of Shige’s fearful whisper and promptly sits up to look at the aforementioned window. Shige yelps. “What are you doing?!” he screams under his breath.
Massu points to the window, and the figure, and does not notice that the shadow it is casting over the bed still looks like a giant horned demon. “Sometimes,” Massu responds obliviously, taking care not to wake up the others, “birds will crash into the window outside my bedroom at night and get stuck in the mesh. Maybe that’s what happened.”
Shige stares. “No, I don’t think…”
Massu climbs out of bed to go investigate.
“Oh god,” Shige shudders, in what he feels is a completely situation appropriate manner. “Massu, don’t…”
Massu throws open the curtain.
And comes face to face with exactly what he expected: a bird.
Shige stares.
Massu happily opens the window as a crow caws back at him ominously, completely black save for a pair of red, murderous looking eyes.
“Don’t let it in!” Shige screams, and earns himself another kick in the ribs from Ryo.
“Shut up!”
But Shige isn’t paying attention to Ryo anymore (or even the pain in his side), because Massu is obliviously looking the crow over for injuries while the crow is pulling its beak back, very clearly ready to attack by pecking out Massu’s eyes.
Shige holds his breath and can’t bear to watch.
But then, just as the bird moves to lunge forward, Massu’s hand shoots out-somehow much faster- and grasps it around its body.
So rather than pecking out Massu’s eyes like it had clearly wanted to, the crow makes a sound suspiciously like an “Urk,” in the back of its throat instead, at about the exact same time Shige hears something suspiciously like a crunch come from somewhere inside its body.
Shige continues to stare.
“I can’t tell if it’s injured anywhere because it’s so dark, ne,” Massu explains, and pulls his fistful of unhappy bird into the room.
“Oh my god would you two shut up,” Ryo hisses, blinking awake again as Shige starts to make odd wheezing noises at the back of his throat right by Ryo’s head.
“What’s going on?” Koyama complains sleepily from the other side of the bed, and sits up with a grunt. “Is everything okay?”
Yamapi and Tegoshi continue to sleep.
Shige just silently points at Massu by way of explanation, the older boy standing by the window and holding a red-eyed bird in his hand.
Then, Massu smiles and puts the bewildered bird on the desk, keeping it pinned down with the flat of his hand. “I think its wing is broken,” he says eventually, and Koyama is instantly at his side blubbering when he hears. “And its leg on the same side seems hurt too.”
“Poor birdy!” Koyama sympathizes. “Do you think it was looking for food in this storm and got lost?”
Massu shrugs.
“Should we feed it? What do they eat?”
Shige refrains from screaming, “Dead bodies, you idiot!” for fear of being kicked by Ryo again.
“I wonder how it got so broken up, ne,” Koyama clucks quietly, as the two set the dazed creature down in a drawer they pull out from the nearby dresser.
“Maybe when it flew into the window,” Massu theorizes.
Shige supposes that it’s probably better that Massu doesn’t know his own strength.
~~~~~
After that Koyama and Massu line the dresser drawer with clothes for padding and set the injured bird in the closet to rest for the night (it continues to try to peck out their eyes the entire time but can’t quite move due to its newly broken limbs). The two idols look at it pityingly and tell it to get better fast before crawling back into bed and falling asleep again, both of them feeling very good about themselves for being able to help another creature in need today.
Shige resigns himself to not sleeping for the rest of the night.
~~~~~
An hour later, blood red letters start materializing on the mirror on the other side of the room. Shige sees it when it reads “Die, Die, Die,” in a flash of well-timed lightning.
He tries to wake up Ryo to show him; Ryo’s answer is to elbow him in the sternum, roll over, and bury his nose between Tegoshi’s shoulder blades.
When Shige looks at the mirror again, the words are gone.
~~~~~
Shige’s watch reads two am when the walls start to distort all around him like they’re melting, the world turning on its axis suddenly and changing into funny colors like it’s made of bad CG effects from a low budget drama.
An evil, overpowering laugh goes “Mwahahahahaha!!!” as all this is happening, and Shige is fairly certain he isn’t the only one who hears it, because Ryo kicks him again and mutters, “quit it,” before falling back asleep.
At two fifteen am, when Tegoshi sits up in bed with a cute yawn, the world is suddenly right side up again.
Tegoshi stretches, stands, and rubs the back of his neck sleepily; he sees Shige staring at him from his side of the bed, wide-eyed and clearly terrified.
“Shige, are you awake?” Tegoshi whispers, looking concerned, “Are you still not feeling well?”
“Where are you going?” Shige asks.
“I need to use the bathroom, ne.” He laughs a little bit. “All that turning around just now made my stomach kind of woozy.”
Shige stares at him as he pads out of the room.
~~~~~
Approximately thirty seconds later, Shige realizes what Tegoshi had just said and dashes out of the room after him.
“You felt it?!” he demands, and grabs Tegoshi by the shoulders. He may or may not shake him a little.
Tegoshi blinks. “Of course,” he says, and points to the bathroom again. “Shige, I have to pee now, ne.”
Shige stops shaking him. “Oh. Right.”
~~~~~
After Tegoshi has peed, Shige corners him outside of the bathroom again. “So you noticed, right? I’m not crazy?”
Tegoshi laughs. “I don’t think you’re crazy. You do look a little pale though, are you sure you’re not sick?”
He reaches out like he’s going to touch Shige’s face again, and Shige slaps his hand away. “Focus,” he says. “This house is clearly trying to kill us, and we are the only ones who have noticed!”
Tegoshi cocks his head sideways thoughtfully. “Eh, the house isn’t trying to kill us, Shige,” he says, “that’s just silly. It’s only a normal house, after all.”
Shige gapes. “But! But the spinning! And the melting! And the redrum! Didn’t you say you noticed it all?”
Tegoshi nods. “Yup! That’s the poltergeist, ne. The house isn’t trying to do anything. Since it’s just a house.” Tegoshi says this like it should be the most obvious thing in the world, in that unintentionally condescending manner of his.
A beat.
Then Tegoshi smiles and reaches up to pat Shige’s head. “Silly Shige.”
“Oh my god,” Shige groans, in what he feels is an entirely situation appropriate manner.
~~~~~
“So what are we going to do about it?” Shige asks eventually, as he and Tegoshi linger in the hallway outside the bedroom a few minutes later.
Tegoshi yawns into his hand. “I was going to go back to sleep,” he admits, and gives Shige a look that means he thinks Shige should do the same, since Shige is still pale and looks like he’s maybe starting to get sick.
Shige glares. “Unlike some people, I can’t sleep when there is a murderous ghost floating around, trying to kill me!”
Tegoshi laughs. “But it’s so bad at it!” he replies. “It’s trying really hard but it isn’t really getting anywhere, ne.”
Shige feels strangely bitter when he hears his younger groupmate’s (startlingly accurate) assessment. “Still,” he mutters, crossing his arms, “even if it keeps failing, as long as it keeps trying, it might eventually succeed.”
Tegoshi looks thoughtful. “But that could take years,” he pouts, and clearly just wants to go back to bed.
Shige bristles. “Or it could have already been trying for years and this is the year where it finally accomplishes what it wants to accomplish!” he insists, and isn’t sure why he is feeling so defensive as he says this.
Tegoshi doesn’t notice his tone; he just sighs. “Okay,” he concedes reluctantly, “since Shige believes in it, then that means it must be getting more power from Shige’s fear, right?”
Shige sputters. “Don’t blame this on me!” Pause. “And how do you know if that’s even how it works, anyway?”
Tegoshi smiles lopsidedly. “Because it’s just like Leader says, right? If someone believes in you, you have to try harder because of it.”
Then, before Shige can formulate an appropriately sarcastic answer, Tegoshi turns around and heads down the opposite hallway.
Shige hastens to follow.
~~~~~
“You don’t have to come if you don’t want to, Shige,” Tegoshi tells him as they walk down the corridor side-by-side and Shige jumps at every creak and groan the house makes under their feet.
“Don’t tell me you think you can do this yourself,” Shige snaps back instinctively, starting to get more annoyed with Tegoshi’s superior attitude and less wary of the dangers inside the house the more he hears Tegoshi talk.
Tegoshi shrugs. “It’s just that you don’t look so good,” he responds, and promptly leads them to a dead end.
“Well you clearly need all the help you can get. I mean, do you even know where we’re going? What are we going to do? Exorcise it? We don’t know how to do that.”
Tegoshi yawns again, and shrugs one shoulder. “I was thinking of talking to it,” he admits. “And it feels like it’s somewhere around here.”
“You mean you can feel it?”
“Sort of. It makes me itchy.”
Shige stares. “Itchy.”
Tegoshi beams. “Yup! Like how you itch when you’re pulling off a wool sweater. Like that.” Then, without feeling the need to elaborate, he reaches up, fumbles around, and after a minute or two, successfully pulls down a chain that neither of them had known was there, which in turn reveals a small staircase, which very clearly leads to a secret attic. “There we go.”
“It’s not just there we go!” Shige screams.
But by then, Tegoshi is already halfway up the stairs.
~~~~~
At the top of the stairs, they find a circular symbol with lots of funny looking squiggles drawn all over it painted on the floor. Just above that, there is a dark, swirling gray maelstrom of dust and debris pulling everything inside of the room towards its center, like a mystical black hole.
The evil “Mwahahahahaha!!!” that Shige had heard in bed earlier is back again, only louder this time.
Shige may or may not cling to Tegoshi’s arm.
“What do we do?” he hisses, and braces his other hand against the back wall, so as not to get sucked into the swirling mass of evil in the center of the attic. “Maybe we need to smash that symbol to get rid of it.”
“Or free it,” Tegoshi adds, reasonably.
Shige finds it painfully unfair that Tegoshi has decided to become logical now.
“What can we do then? Clearly I’m not the exorcism specialist here,” Shige drawls, once again, feeling his annoyance at Tegoshi overpower the whole paralyzing fear thing that he’s been experiencing all night.
Tegoshi simply takes a step forward. “Hi!” he says, sounding super cute, like he does whenever he introduces himself to a senpai or a celebrity he’s never met before.
Shige gapes. “THAT WON’T WORK ON GHOSTS!” he sputters.
Except that the maelstrom suddenly stops turning, and all the ominous “Mwahahahahahas” suddenly stop as well. Instead, the same voice asks, sounding oddly apprehensive, “Have you come to vanquish me, creature?”
Tegoshi sighs when he gets called that; it reminds him of all those years ago, when Ueda kept calling him a fairy. “I don’t want to vanquish anyone,” Tegoshi says, adorable and sleepy still. “But I just wanted to tell you that you’re scaring Shige, and I think it’s bad for his health.”
A beat.
Then, the voice answers, “So…I’m actually scaring someone?”
Tegoshi smiles brightly and gestures behind him. “Un! Shige ne, Shige’s all pale.”
“Hey!” Shige barks, indignant but still trying to crouch behind Tegoshi a little bit anyway.
Suddenly, the dark aura around the room seems to feel a lot less heavy. “Finally,” the voice says after a minute, and sounds pretty cheerful for a malevolent, blood thirsty poltergeist. “I’ve been trying for so long to get it right.”
Tegoshi nods in understanding. “I know exactly how you feel, ne,” he says sympathetically.
“No you don’t!” Shige shouts on instinct, but gets ignored.
“I was worried I’d actually have to kill someone one day, to make people scared of me like a proper ghost,” the voice continues to tell Tegoshi, oblivious to Shige’s presence. “You know, like those American poltergeists do.”
“They’re very rude and have no taste,” Tegoshi assures it. “But look!” he adds happily, pointing behind him, “Shige is still really scared, ne.”
The maelstrom laughs, and as it does, loses some of its dark gray pallor in lieu of something whiter and more…fluffy looking. “He is, he is!” it says, and Shige would be offended at how happy it is that he’s terrified of it if not for the fact that it being happy clearly makes things better for him.
Tegoshi yawns. “So!” he says after a beat, stretching languidly. “Can we go back to sleep now? I think Shige needs to get his rest so that he doesn’t get any sicker; we have a concert tomorrow, you know.”
The maelstrom gets excited again. “You’re in a band?!” it asks, voice awe-filled.
Tegoshi nods. “Sort of! We’re idols.”
The maelstrom starts to get worked up when it hears that, and the spinning resumes, except without the aura of evil and more with the aura of fangirl, which can be just as terrifying only in different ways.
“Woah there,” Shige says, and tries to calm it down, “we’re not that popular and…”
“Sure we are!” Tegoshi counters. “People love us.”
The winds pick up again, but it seems like only Shige notices. “Um, Tegoshi…” he starts.
“Tell me all about it!” the maelstrom insists. “Are you really famous?”
“Well, we have Yamapi,” Tegoshi tells it, once again not reacting appropriately to the situation at hand as the dust and debris in the room starts to swirl around once more, “so I’d say that makes us really famous! Everyone knows who Yamapi is.”
“Amazing!” the maelstrom shouts, and when it does, manages to shake the whole room like they’re in the middle of an earthquake.
Which makes Shige lose his footing.
Which, in turn, makes him fall, just in time to catch the outside wave of the maelstrom’s edge, which, consequently, sends him flying into the opposite wall rather hard.
In the background, Tegoshi still doesn’t notice, because he is too busy sitting down in the middle of the circle with all those funny symbols drawn on it; he starts happily chatting to the poltergeist about the concert tour.
Meanwhile, on the floor at the back end of the attic, Shige finds himself wishing-again, for the thousandth time since this whole stupid night began- that his groupmates weren’t all so KY.
Eventually, he blacks out.
~~~~~
When Shige wakes up the next morning he is somehow in bed again, and Ryo is poking him in the face. Repeatedly.
“Ugh,” Shige groans, and the inside of his mouth feels dry and tastes bad, like he inhaled a whole cloud full of dust or something. Also, his memories are fuzzy.
“For someone who tried to keep everyone up all night by being a dick face it sure must be nice sleeping in until the very last minute,” Ryo snorts, and pinches both of Shige’s cheeks hard.
“OW,” Shige complains, and swats Ryo’s hands away as he struggles to sit up. “What happened?”
Ryo stares at him. “Our bus broke down,” he begins, after a moment.
Shige glares. “I know that. I mean, what happened last night?”
Ryo continues to stare. “We came up to this house on top of the hill after our bus broke down.”
“I know that too!”
Ryo snorts. “Then stop asking stupid questions and get ready to go. The bus is fixed and we have to leave now if we want to make it in time for tonight’s concert.”
“But what about the ghost?” Shige demands. “The poltergeist that was trying to kill us!”
When they hear that, his groupmates all stop in the middle of whatever it is they are doing in their morning routines so that they can stare at him (except for Tegoshi, who is over by the window, apparently having a very animated conversation with either himself or something else that none of the others can see).
“Shige,” Koyama begins worriedly, after a minute or so of awkward silence, “Shige, are you feeling alright? Does your head feel hot?” He reaches out to touch Shige’s head.
“Would you quit asking that? I AM NOT SICK!” Shige yells.
He storms off in disbelief and is the first one back on the bus.
~~~~~
Later that week, Shige comes down with the flu.
No one is surprised.
END
EDITS PLZ.
Title: Even Though Fear Keeps us Sharp it Doesn’t Look Good on Camera
Universe: JE/NEWS
Theme/Topic: Halloween fic!
Rating: PG-13
Character/Pairing/s: NewS (Shige and Tego focus)
Warnings/Spoilers: CRACK. AND CRACK. And stupid. And probably OOC.
Word Count: 5,100
Summary: One night, the bus breaks down.
Dedication: For Ann. Just because. I swear to god this was funnier in my head. I think putting it into words just made it lame(r).
A/N: LOL I should be working on JEHols. Yet here I am. Also, as a quick note, I don’t actually know the tour dates or the geography or if they still use buses like this but whatever. It’s not like my stories are written because they have a high probability of actually happening. XD;; And sorry for the lame, I just can’t be funny lately. Hopefully practice will fix whatever in me is broken. In the meantime, here I am, stealing the plots to old BSB videos.
Disclaimer: No harm is meant by this!
When NEWS’s tour bus breaks down in the middle of the night in the middle of winter in the middle of a freak snowstorm in the middle of the concert tour in the middle of nowhere, there is, luckily-or unluckily as the case may be-an old abandoned house nearby.
The bus driver promptly urges the members to trek up the hill and take shelter at the aforementioned old house so that they can stay warm and protect their voices for the next show (especially since he doesn’t want them to get sick, because he will probably get blamed for it by the company afterwards). He assures them that he doesn’t mind staying out here to try and fix the problem alone in the meantime. Mightily stirred by the man’s self-sacrificing manner and his concern for others’ wellbeing, Yamapi vows to not let his selflessness go to waste by doing exactly as he says, even as Shige is busy pointing out the many flaws of that plan, which include (but are not limited to) letting a group of idols wander around by themselves in rural Japan in low visibility without any cell phone reception.
But Leader’s words of inspiration always end up beating Shige’s words of wisdom and caution, and so, before long, the six of them find themselves trekking up a steep hill to the ominous looking house that sits atop it, with Yamapi fearlessly taking the lead and Shige bringing up the rear while Koyama, Ryo, and Massu take turns carrying a sleepy Tegoshi for most of the way.
The first thing that happens when they get to the doorstep is Tegoshi finally wakes up; he looks at the door-wide-eyed- and then exclaims, “Wow!” with much more energy than he’d had just now, when they’d told him they were climbing a hill.
The next thing that happens is the door promptly creaks open, all by itself.
“Oh my god,” Shige declares, and finds it an entirely appropriate response to the situation given the fact that he has seen about a billion horror movies that begin exactly like this.
“What a neat house,” Tegoshi says after that, completely unfazed and in a completely situation-inappropriate manner. The others all agree with his assessment-rather inappropriately- as they step in to the house and out of the storm without further ado. “My door at home never does that, no matter how much I want it to, ne,” the youngest member adds, voice rife with admiration for today’s amazing technological breakthroughs.
It leaves Shige outside alone for a moment, standing at the doorstep with his mouth wide open. When he eventually sighs in a resigned sort of manner and steps in after them-after weighing the pros and cons of leaving them all to die in the murder house without him versus standing outside and freezing to death- the door promptly closes right as he enters, all on its own again.
“That was amazing!” Yamapi marvels, when he sees it. “Japanese technology is really the best in the world, ne.”
Sometimes Shige wishes that the other people in his group were not so KY.
~~~~~
“Eh, no one’s home,” Massu realizes out loud sometime later, after they have searched the house top to bottom in the hopes of finding the owners (sort of, as Shige doesn’t really want to meet the types of people who live in these kinds of seedy places given that they are probably psychotic murderers).
A beat.
In which Shige hopes the others will realize that if no one has been home this whole time, the door must have opened by itself. Of its own volition.
But then, Massu smiles. “I wonder if they’ll mind if we make ourselves some snacks while we wait for them to come back,” he says, instead of coming to any of the important realizations that Shige has already come to.
Massu ambles off towards the kitchen. Yamapi-also hungry-happily follows.
~~~~~
“I think,” Shige feels the need to say out loud later, “that this house is trying to kill us.”
Everyone gives him a weird look. Koyama is-naturally- the first to be very concerned. “Shige,” he starts, and reaches out to touch Shige’s forehead with his own, “Shige are you feeling sick? Do you have a temperature? Do you think you need to vomit?”
“I am not sick!” Shige insists, and scuttles backwards and out of Koyama’s reach before he does anything even more embarrassing. “This house is trying to kill us!”
He points to the hallway to his left, which is full of suits of armor. All of which had suddenly collapsed earlier, resulting in the axes in the suits’ hands all nearly falling on Massu and Yamapi as the two of them had walked past with trays full of snacks from the kitchen.
Ryo makes a face. “They just fell, idiot,” he says. “Stop being so paranoid.”
“Eh, they must all be fragile antiques, ne,” Tegoshi surmises, “if they can fall so easily like that.”
Yamapi and Massu, completely unscathed and with all snacks fully intact, look perfectly at peace as they sit cross-legged on the floor and start eating together. “I’m glad,” Yamapi says around a mouthful of Triscuit and cheese, “that Massu and I both like to dance.”
Massu beams, and like Leader, can find a silver lining in most anything. “I needed a haircut anyway.”
Shige slaps a hand to his forehead.
~~~~~
“This house is definitely trying to kill us!” Shige insists again after the snacks have been eaten and he and Ryo and Tegoshi have been charged with cleaning the dishes.
Ryo and Tegoshi look at each other.
“Ne,” Tegoshi begins after a moment, and reaches out to touch Shige’s face, “Does Shige have a fever?”
Shige smacks his hand away. “KNIVES!” he screams, and points to the circle of cutlery currently imbedded in the tile in a neat circle around where the three of them are all standing at the sink.
Ryo sighs. “That wouldn’t have happened,” he begins shortly, “if you hadn’t knocked over the bin in the cabinet up there.”
“I didn’t touch it!” Shige insists.
Tegoshi laughs. “Shige is clumsy, ne,” he says, sounding unintentionally superior as he rinses the dishes clean and hands them to Ryo to dry.
Shige sputters. “Knives!” he manages again after a minute of struggling with his indignant disbelief. He gestures emphatically to the blades, still quivering in the ground, uncomfortably close to their feet. He is fairly certain they would have gotten him just now too, if not for some strange miracle of God in which everything suddenly got diverted from them last minute, the cutlery landing in a perfect circle equidistant from where Tegoshi is standing at the center instead.
“Shige’s right,” Tegoshi realizes, when he turns to hand Ryo another dish and sees that Shige is pointing to the knives again.
Shige sighs in relief. Finally.
“We have to pick those up and wash them now too, since they fell on the floor and it’s dirty, ne,” Tegoshi finishes, obliviously.
“Shige should wash them himself, Tego-nyan,” Ryo begins, “since he knocked them down in the first place, when he was supposed to be putting the clean dishes away.”
Tegoshi laughs. “Ryo-tan has a very strong sense of justice, ne,” he says, and obediently turns off the water before hopping over the ring of deadly cutlery. “Ganbatte, Shige!” he says encouragingly (and in that superior fashion again).
And as he and Ryo head out of the kitchen together-leaving Shige alone with the knives that clearly just tried to kill him-Shige is fairly certain that he can hear something like evil laughter in the distance.
He’s just not sure whether it is coming from Ryo or the house.
~~~~~
Later, after Shige finishes the dishes without any more mishap, the six of them split up into three groups of two and get assigned bedrooms to try and get some sleep in while they wait for word on the bus.
About fifteen minutes after crawling into bed and passing out, Koyama suddenly wakes up screaming.
Which wakes up Shige and makes him scream as well, and pretty soon the two of them are just looking at each other from opposite sides of their shared room, holding the sheets to their chests and screaming their heads off like idiots.
“What’s wrong?” Shige demands eventually, heart in his throat and already half out of breath as he looks at Koyama disbelievingly.
“I had a nightmare,” Koyama admits, equally terrified.
Shige’s blood runs cold. Is the house trying to kill them in their sleep now? “What was it about?” he asks, voice barely above a whisper.
Koyama responds in like, lowering his voice as well. “I dreamed,” he begins, twisting his bedsheets in his palms, “that I was a clown and I had to find a way to make Matchy laugh or leave the jimusho.”
Shige stares.
“Tego-nyan was there too,” Koyama adds, “he kept telling me I had to try harder. And then, when I failed, he poked me in the butt as punishment and I woke up.”
Silence.
Then, “What?” Shige demands, incredulously.
Koyama looks sheepish. “Shige, can I sleep in your bed with you?” he asks next.
“No,” Shige replies flatly on instinct, even though Koyama is already starting to climb out of his bed anyway.
“But Shige…”
“No!”
Koyama pouts. “Fine, I’m going to go sleep with Yamapi and Ryo-chan then,” he says, and folds the comforter back over his pillow as he gets off of the mattress.
The moment he turns around, his bed collapses through the floor with a crash.
“Oh god!” Shige shouts, in what is once again, an entirely situation appropriate manner.
Koyama stares at the giant hole in the floor, where his bed used to be.
Except now, he is looking down into the bedroom below, where Yamapi and Ryo are sleeping.
“Yamapi!” he screams, terrified when he realizes what might have just happened.
Shige struggles to his feet to join his friend, fearing for the worst as well: a squashed Yamapi.
But just as he gets there Yamapi ambles into view of the giant hole, brushing his teeth casually. “I forgot my toothbrush so Tegoshi said I could use his,” Yamapi explains after a moment, looking at Koyama’s bed that has crushed his bed. “Lucky!”
From the other side of the room, where Ryo was sleeping, there is a cranky groan. “Fucking old houses.”
~~~~~
“See?” Shige insists sometime later, when the six of them are all squashed inside of Massu and Tegoshi’s room together. “The house is trying to kill us!”
“Yeah, because haunted houses are real. I thought you were supposed to be the smart one?” Ryo grumps, and rolls a sleepy-eyed Tegoshi over so that everyone can fit.
Massu blinks. “So your bed fell through the floor?” he asks Koyama, wide-eyed.
Koyama nods back, equally wide-eyed.
Then Massu smiles. “I’m glad no one was hurt.”
Koyama smiles back automatically when he too, sees the silver lining around the whole incident. “Me too!” he breathes to Massu, and instantly feels at ease again when he thinks about it like that.
And that thus taken care of, the two of them settle close to each other to sleep, because six people to one full-sized bed can get tricky. Not impossible for Japanese-sized celebrities, but tricky.
“I don’t believe this,” Shige continues, as the others start to try to go back to sleep just like that. “There are too many things that happened tonight for it to all be a coincidence! They have to be signs or something. Why don’t you believe me?”
Yamapi looks at him very seriously. “Shige,” he starts after a beat, and inches closer.
“Do you believe me, Yamashita-kun?” Shige asks, hopefully.
Then Yamapi reaches out to touch his forehead. “Are you feeling okay?” he asks, brow knit with worry. "You're not sick, are you?"
Shige’s response is to turn around so that he can bury his face into his pillow and scream, at least until Ryo kicks him in the side and says, “Shut up.”
~~~~~
Five minutes later, everyone is asleep.
Except for Shige, who has the sheets tucked up to his chin and is looking around the room constantly, for signs of danger. Since his friends clearly have no self-preservation instincts and don’t notice when things-like evil houses- are obviously trying to kill them.
He hears a tapping on the window.
Shige tries to hide under the blankets.
The tapping continues.
Shige peeks out from a crack in his blanket. From what he can make out through it, there is a dark shape that he can’t quite identify standing at the pane, its shape distorted by the dramatic shadow it casts through the drapery. Even knowing that it’s probably a trick of the light, Shige thinks it somehow looks like a giant horned monster and as such, reacts appropriately by latching onto the arm of the person beside him, who just happens to be Massu.
He does it hard.
Massu grunts. “Eh?” he murmurs, blinking sleepily. “Shige?”
“Shhhh!” Shige hisses hastily, eyes wide and panicked. “The window. There’s something by the window.”
Massu does not get the hint for discretion that comes with the use of Shige’s fearful whisper and promptly sits up to look at the aforementioned window. Shige yelps. “What are you doing?!” he screams under his breath.
Massu points to the window, and the figure, and does not notice that the shadow it is casting over the bed still looks like a giant horned demon. “Sometimes,” Massu responds obliviously, taking care not to wake up the others, “birds will crash into the window outside my bedroom at night and get stuck in the mesh. Maybe that’s what happened.”
Shige stares. “No, I don’t think…”
Massu climbs out of bed to go investigate.
“Oh god,” Shige shudders, in what he feels is a completely situation appropriate manner. “Massu, don’t…”
Massu throws open the curtain.
And comes face to face with exactly what he expected: a bird.
Shige stares.
Massu happily opens the window as a crow caws back at him ominously, completely black save for a pair of red, murderous looking eyes.
“Don’t let it in!” Shige screams, and earns himself another kick in the ribs from Ryo.
“Shut up!”
But Shige isn’t paying attention to Ryo anymore (or even the pain in his side), because Massu is obliviously looking the crow over for injuries while the crow is pulling its beak back, very clearly ready to attack by pecking out Massu’s eyes.
Shige holds his breath and can’t bear to watch.
But then, just as the bird moves to lunge forward, Massu’s hand shoots out-somehow much faster- and grasps it around its body.
So rather than pecking out Massu’s eyes like it had clearly wanted to, the crow makes a sound suspiciously like an “Urk,” in the back of its throat instead, at about the exact same time Shige hears something suspiciously like a crunch come from somewhere inside its body.
Shige continues to stare.
“I can’t tell if it’s injured anywhere because it’s so dark, ne,” Massu explains, and pulls his fistful of unhappy bird into the room.
“Oh my god would you two shut up,” Ryo hisses, blinking awake again as Shige starts to make odd wheezing noises at the back of his throat right by Ryo’s head.
“What’s going on?” Koyama complains sleepily from the other side of the bed, and sits up with a grunt. “Is everything okay?”
Yamapi and Tegoshi continue to sleep.
Shige just silently points at Massu by way of explanation, the older boy standing by the window and holding a red-eyed bird in his hand.
Then, Massu smiles and puts the bewildered bird on the desk, keeping it pinned down with the flat of his hand. “I think its wing is broken,” he says eventually, and Koyama is instantly at his side blubbering when he hears. “And its leg on the same side seems hurt too.”
“Poor birdy!” Koyama sympathizes. “Do you think it was looking for food in this storm and got lost?”
Massu shrugs.
“Should we feed it? What do they eat?”
Shige refrains from screaming, “Dead bodies, you idiot!” for fear of being kicked by Ryo again.
“I wonder how it got so broken up, ne,” Koyama clucks quietly, as the two set the dazed creature down in a drawer they pull out from the nearby dresser.
“Maybe when it flew into the window,” Massu theorizes.
Shige supposes that it’s probably better that Massu doesn’t know his own strength.
~~~~~
After that Koyama and Massu line the dresser drawer with clothes for padding and set the injured bird in the closet to rest for the night (it continues to try to peck out their eyes the entire time but can’t quite move due to its newly broken limbs). The two idols look at it pityingly and tell it to get better fast before crawling back into bed and falling asleep again, both of them feeling very good about themselves for being able to help another creature in need today.
Shige resigns himself to not sleeping for the rest of the night.
~~~~~
An hour later, blood red letters start materializing on the mirror on the other side of the room. Shige sees it when it reads “Die, Die, Die,” in a flash of well-timed lightning.
He tries to wake up Ryo to show him; Ryo’s answer is to elbow him in the sternum, roll over, and bury his nose between Tegoshi’s shoulder blades.
When Shige looks at the mirror again, the words are gone.
~~~~~
Shige’s watch reads two am when the walls start to distort all around him like they’re melting, the world turning on its axis suddenly and changing into funny colors like it’s made of bad CG effects from a low budget drama.
An evil, overpowering laugh goes “Mwahahahahaha!!!” as all this is happening, and Shige is fairly certain he isn’t the only one who hears it, because Ryo kicks him again and mutters, “quit it,” before falling back asleep.
At two fifteen am, when Tegoshi sits up in bed with a cute yawn, the world is suddenly right side up again.
Tegoshi stretches, stands, and rubs the back of his neck sleepily; he sees Shige staring at him from his side of the bed, wide-eyed and clearly terrified.
“Shige, are you awake?” Tegoshi whispers, looking concerned, “Are you still not feeling well?”
“Where are you going?” Shige asks.
“I need to use the bathroom, ne.” He laughs a little bit. “All that turning around just now made my stomach kind of woozy.”
Shige stares at him as he pads out of the room.
~~~~~
Approximately thirty seconds later, Shige realizes what Tegoshi had just said and dashes out of the room after him.
“You felt it?!” he demands, and grabs Tegoshi by the shoulders. He may or may not shake him a little.
Tegoshi blinks. “Of course,” he says, and points to the bathroom again. “Shige, I have to pee now, ne.”
Shige stops shaking him. “Oh. Right.”
~~~~~
After Tegoshi has peed, Shige corners him outside of the bathroom again. “So you noticed, right? I’m not crazy?”
Tegoshi laughs. “I don’t think you’re crazy. You do look a little pale though, are you sure you’re not sick?”
He reaches out like he’s going to touch Shige’s face again, and Shige slaps his hand away. “Focus,” he says. “This house is clearly trying to kill us, and we are the only ones who have noticed!”
Tegoshi cocks his head sideways thoughtfully. “Eh, the house isn’t trying to kill us, Shige,” he says, “that’s just silly. It’s only a normal house, after all.”
Shige gapes. “But! But the spinning! And the melting! And the redrum! Didn’t you say you noticed it all?”
Tegoshi nods. “Yup! That’s the poltergeist, ne. The house isn’t trying to do anything. Since it’s just a house.” Tegoshi says this like it should be the most obvious thing in the world, in that unintentionally condescending manner of his.
A beat.
Then Tegoshi smiles and reaches up to pat Shige’s head. “Silly Shige.”
“Oh my god,” Shige groans, in what he feels is an entirely situation appropriate manner.
~~~~~
“So what are we going to do about it?” Shige asks eventually, as he and Tegoshi linger in the hallway outside the bedroom a few minutes later.
Tegoshi yawns into his hand. “I was going to go back to sleep,” he admits, and gives Shige a look that means he thinks Shige should do the same, since Shige is still pale and looks like he’s maybe starting to get sick.
Shige glares. “Unlike some people, I can’t sleep when there is a murderous ghost floating around, trying to kill me!”
Tegoshi laughs. “But it’s so bad at it!” he replies. “It’s trying really hard but it isn’t really getting anywhere, ne.”
Shige feels strangely bitter when he hears his younger groupmate’s (startlingly accurate) assessment. “Still,” he mutters, crossing his arms, “even if it keeps failing, as long as it keeps trying, it might eventually succeed.”
Tegoshi looks thoughtful. “But that could take years,” he pouts, and clearly just wants to go back to bed.
Shige bristles. “Or it could have already been trying for years and this is the year where it finally accomplishes what it wants to accomplish!” he insists, and isn’t sure why he is feeling so defensive as he says this.
Tegoshi doesn’t notice his tone; he just sighs. “Okay,” he concedes reluctantly, “since Shige believes in it, then that means it must be getting more power from Shige’s fear, right?”
Shige sputters. “Don’t blame this on me!” Pause. “And how do you know if that’s even how it works, anyway?”
Tegoshi smiles lopsidedly. “Because it’s just like Leader says, right? If someone believes in you, you have to try harder because of it.”
Then, before Shige can formulate an appropriately sarcastic answer, Tegoshi turns around and heads down the opposite hallway.
Shige hastens to follow.
~~~~~
“You don’t have to come if you don’t want to, Shige,” Tegoshi tells him as they walk down the corridor side-by-side and Shige jumps at every creak and groan the house makes under their feet.
“Don’t tell me you think you can do this yourself,” Shige snaps back instinctively, starting to get more annoyed with Tegoshi’s superior attitude and less wary of the dangers inside the house the more he hears Tegoshi talk.
Tegoshi shrugs. “It’s just that you don’t look so good,” he responds, and promptly leads them to a dead end.
“Well you clearly need all the help you can get. I mean, do you even know where we’re going? What are we going to do? Exorcise it? We don’t know how to do that.”
Tegoshi yawns again, and shrugs one shoulder. “I was thinking of talking to it,” he admits. “And it feels like it’s somewhere around here.”
“You mean you can feel it?”
“Sort of. It makes me itchy.”
Shige stares. “Itchy.”
Tegoshi beams. “Yup! Like how you itch when you’re pulling off a wool sweater. Like that.” Then, without feeling the need to elaborate, he reaches up, fumbles around, and after a minute or two, successfully pulls down a chain that neither of them had known was there, which in turn reveals a small staircase, which very clearly leads to a secret attic. “There we go.”
“It’s not just there we go!” Shige screams.
But by then, Tegoshi is already halfway up the stairs.
~~~~~
At the top of the stairs, they find a circular symbol with lots of funny looking squiggles drawn all over it painted on the floor. Just above that, there is a dark, swirling gray maelstrom of dust and debris pulling everything inside of the room towards its center, like a mystical black hole.
The evil “Mwahahahahaha!!!” that Shige had heard in bed earlier is back again, only louder this time.
Shige may or may not cling to Tegoshi’s arm.
“What do we do?” he hisses, and braces his other hand against the back wall, so as not to get sucked into the swirling mass of evil in the center of the attic. “Maybe we need to smash that symbol to get rid of it.”
“Or free it,” Tegoshi adds, reasonably.
Shige finds it painfully unfair that Tegoshi has decided to become logical now.
“What can we do then? Clearly I’m not the exorcism specialist here,” Shige drawls, once again, feeling his annoyance at Tegoshi overpower the whole paralyzing fear thing that he’s been experiencing all night.
Tegoshi simply takes a step forward. “Hi!” he says, sounding super cute, like he does whenever he introduces himself to a senpai or a celebrity he’s never met before.
Shige gapes. “THAT WON’T WORK ON GHOSTS!” he sputters.
Except that the maelstrom suddenly stops turning, and all the ominous “Mwahahahahahas” suddenly stop as well. Instead, the same voice asks, sounding oddly apprehensive, “Have you come to vanquish me, creature?”
Tegoshi sighs when he gets called that; it reminds him of all those years ago, when Ueda kept calling him a fairy. “I don’t want to vanquish anyone,” Tegoshi says, adorable and sleepy still. “But I just wanted to tell you that you’re scaring Shige, and I think it’s bad for his health.”
A beat.
Then, the voice answers, “So…I’m actually scaring someone?”
Tegoshi smiles brightly and gestures behind him. “Un! Shige ne, Shige’s all pale.”
“Hey!” Shige barks, indignant but still trying to crouch behind Tegoshi a little bit anyway.
Suddenly, the dark aura around the room seems to feel a lot less heavy. “Finally,” the voice says after a minute, and sounds pretty cheerful for a malevolent, blood thirsty poltergeist. “I’ve been trying for so long to get it right.”
Tegoshi nods in understanding. “I know exactly how you feel, ne,” he says sympathetically.
“No you don’t!” Shige shouts on instinct, but gets ignored.
“I was worried I’d actually have to kill someone one day, to make people scared of me like a proper ghost,” the voice continues to tell Tegoshi, oblivious to Shige’s presence. “You know, like those American poltergeists do.”
“They’re very rude and have no taste,” Tegoshi assures it. “But look!” he adds happily, pointing behind him, “Shige is still really scared, ne.”
The maelstrom laughs, and as it does, loses some of its dark gray pallor in lieu of something whiter and more…fluffy looking. “He is, he is!” it says, and Shige would be offended at how happy it is that he’s terrified of it if not for the fact that it being happy clearly makes things better for him.
Tegoshi yawns. “So!” he says after a beat, stretching languidly. “Can we go back to sleep now? I think Shige needs to get his rest so that he doesn’t get any sicker; we have a concert tomorrow, you know.”
The maelstrom gets excited again. “You’re in a band?!” it asks, voice awe-filled.
Tegoshi nods. “Sort of! We’re idols.”
The maelstrom starts to get worked up when it hears that, and the spinning resumes, except without the aura of evil and more with the aura of fangirl, which can be just as terrifying only in different ways.
“Woah there,” Shige says, and tries to calm it down, “we’re not that popular and…”
“Sure we are!” Tegoshi counters. “People love us.”
The winds pick up again, but it seems like only Shige notices. “Um, Tegoshi…” he starts.
“Tell me all about it!” the maelstrom insists. “Are you really famous?”
“Well, we have Yamapi,” Tegoshi tells it, once again not reacting appropriately to the situation at hand as the dust and debris in the room starts to swirl around once more, “so I’d say that makes us really famous! Everyone knows who Yamapi is.”
“Amazing!” the maelstrom shouts, and when it does, manages to shake the whole room like they’re in the middle of an earthquake.
Which makes Shige lose his footing.
Which, in turn, makes him fall, just in time to catch the outside wave of the maelstrom’s edge, which, consequently, sends him flying into the opposite wall rather hard.
In the background, Tegoshi still doesn’t notice, because he is too busy sitting down in the middle of the circle with all those funny symbols drawn on it; he starts happily chatting to the poltergeist about the concert tour.
Meanwhile, on the floor at the back end of the attic, Shige finds himself wishing-again, for the thousandth time since this whole stupid night began- that his groupmates weren’t all so KY.
Eventually, he blacks out.
~~~~~
When Shige wakes up the next morning he is somehow in bed again, and Ryo is poking him in the face. Repeatedly.
“Ugh,” Shige groans, and the inside of his mouth feels dry and tastes bad, like he inhaled a whole cloud full of dust or something. Also, his memories are fuzzy.
“For someone who tried to keep everyone up all night by being a dick face it sure must be nice sleeping in until the very last minute,” Ryo snorts, and pinches both of Shige’s cheeks hard.
“OW,” Shige complains, and swats Ryo’s hands away as he struggles to sit up. “What happened?”
Ryo stares at him. “Our bus broke down,” he begins, after a moment.
Shige glares. “I know that. I mean, what happened last night?”
Ryo continues to stare. “We came up to this house on top of the hill after our bus broke down.”
“I know that too!”
Ryo snorts. “Then stop asking stupid questions and get ready to go. The bus is fixed and we have to leave now if we want to make it in time for tonight’s concert.”
“But what about the ghost?” Shige demands. “The poltergeist that was trying to kill us!”
When they hear that, his groupmates all stop in the middle of whatever it is they are doing in their morning routines so that they can stare at him (except for Tegoshi, who is over by the window, apparently having a very animated conversation with either himself or something else that none of the others can see).
“Shige,” Koyama begins worriedly, after a minute or so of awkward silence, “Shige, are you feeling alright? Does your head feel hot?” He reaches out to touch Shige’s head.
“Would you quit asking that? I AM NOT SICK!” Shige yells.
He storms off in disbelief and is the first one back on the bus.
~~~~~
Later that week, Shige comes down with the flu.
No one is surprised.
END
EDITS PLZ.