JE/NewS- "Well Deserved"
Title: Well Deserved
Universe: JE/NewS
Theme/Topic: N/A
Rating: G
Character/Pairing/s: NewS (mentions of various other JE personalities as well)
Warnings/Spoilers: randomness. LOL screwed up timeline? Whatevs. XD
Word Count: 1,360
Summary: NewS works towards bribing their manager.
Dedication: Nicole! Just because it’s been a while.
A/N: A quickie fic inspired by Yamapi’s 2008 December Myojo translation as found here. Figures a porn challenge went up today and I all I manage is to write something G-rated instead. Also, I totally skipped the gym today for this. FAIL.
Disclaimer: No harm is meant by this!
It starts off as some sort of inner-group joke after Yamapi’s interview in the December Myojo gets printed right before their winter concert tour is scheduled to kick off; it’s probably Ryo’s idea or Shige’s idea or it might actually be a combination of everyone feeling a little bit mischievous while waiting for all of the other members and staff to arrive to work that day. Whatever it is, when Yamapi walks into rehearsals promptly at eight that morning, he sees a shiny tin box with a slit cut into the lid resting on top of the coffee table. Across the front of it are the words, NEWS’s One Million Yen Manager-san Bribe Box, handwritten in permanent black marker.
Yamapi laughs at the sight because he can’t help it, because it’s a little bit ridiculous in all the right ways. “Eh, can’t you idiots put a better sounding label there? Like, NEWS’s Vacation Time Charity Fund or something?” he demands gruffly, and fishes around in his pockets for loose change. He comes up with five hundred yen and tosses it decisively into the box while everyone shares a chuckle about it.
After that they don’t think about it at all for the rest of the day, or the rest of the week, or the rest of the month, or even for what’s left of the year.
There are other things to think about instead after all, things that are definitely more urgent and in their own ways, more important as well.
~~~~~
So it isn’t until early January of 2009 when Ryo opens the box again, simply because he wants a soda from the machine and doesn’t have any change of his own currently on him.
“Holy shit,” he breathes after he pries the lid off, and earns a few inquisitive noises from Koyama on the couch.
“Is something the matter, Ryo-chan?” Koyama asks eventually, and sits up, blinking his overworked eyes open.
“There is like 300,000 yen in here,” Ryo counts, and holds fistfuls of messily crumpled bills in both hands.
“Eh, really?” the others murmur, and suddenly everyone is paying more serious attention to the joke box that they’d been dumping all of their spare change and small bills into over the past few months.
“How much have you idiots been putting in here?” Ryo demands, and forgets about his vending machine money altogether.
The others all shrug, but as the random admittances of, “a few bills here and there,” and, “I don’t like carrying coins,” and Tegoshi’s bright, “I saw a staff-san put one thousand yen in there once!” all start coming in one after another, the picture begins to get a little bit clearer.
Yamapi whistles thoughtfully. “Eh,” he breathes, only half joking when he does, “maybe if we get the money we need, I’ll have to pay for that group vacation after all, ne?”
“It could happen, Leader!” Tegoshi and Koyama agree quickly, and seem pleased at the possibility. “We’re almost there, right?”
“No,” Shige begins, and crouches down by the tin to point out why being at 300,000 yen does not actually put them very close to having one million yen at all. Except before he can, he gets elbowed in the stomach by Ryo.
He sighs and proceeds to empty his pockets into the tin instead. They all do.
~~~~~
A week later, Yamapi sees it when Tegoshi and Massu go door to door through the jimusho, knocking on dressing rooms. “Senpai,” they say sweetly, whether it’s to Inohara or Sakamoto or Nagase or Koichi or Sho or Tsubasa, “would you like to donate to our fund?”
At the end of that day, Ryo tallies them just shy of the midway point, but only because Matsumoto is a cheapskate.
~~~~~
The following Monday Shige spends a hellish afternoon tutoring the juniors at one-hundred-yen per question while Koyama sits behind a folding table just outside of the main lobby’s elevators (on his day off), with packages of homemade cookies wrapped in multicolored cellophane at two hundred yen a pop.
“It’s a good idea,” the others all insist, “because Shige is smart and everyone loves Kei-chan.”
They don’t realize that Koki buys all of Koyama’s cookies for the sole purpose of putting them in Jin’s bag so that Jin will be fat for their One Drop PV filming later this week.
In the meantime, NEWS somehow makes it to 650,000 yen.
~~~~~
When Yamapi sees all of that he thinks that he can’t lose to the other members in their resolve for this; he promptly takes all of the money envelopes he received from New Year’s-the ones from Higashiyama and his grandmother and his mother and his senpai from outside of Johnny’s-and slips them in the tin too, bowing his head and thinking that something like this will definitely bring good luck in his animal year, in the beginning of his third twelve-year cycle of life as Yamashita Tomohisa.
Because he believes that only good things can come from hard work and personal sacrifice.
He’s right; at their next count in, Shige announces that they are 250,000 yen from their goal.
~~~~~
The mastermind behind their final push is-unsurprisingly- Ryo.
He takes the box and puts it in the front of the commissary one morning, after pulling along a bleary-eyed Yamapi after him, who is fresh off of his Code Blue SP promotions.
“Everyone who looks this guy in the face and thinks he needs a vacation, please put one thousand yen in here,” Ryo announces loudly, while shaking the tin at all of the managers, choreographers, agents, writers, publicists, stylists, directors, ADs, PAs, cameramen, photographers, and other various crew members present.
Yamapi blinks and yawns.
By the middle of that afternoon, they have easily overshot their mark by two thousand yen.
~~~~~
During their next CM shoot in Hawaii a few months later, Yamapi and the rest of the members all gather very seriously in their manager’s hotel room during the early morning hours of their first day there, before anything is scheduled to begin.
The battered collection tin is clutched tightly in Yamapi’s hands, filled to bursting.
Eventually, he calmly pushes it across the table, towards their manager. “A little something,” he explains calmly, “to look the other way in the next five minutes.”
Their manager blinks at him.
Stares at the box.
And then, after a moment, decisively pushes the tin back to Yamapi.
“Eh, you’re not taking it?” the members fret when they see, and look horribly disappointed at what an honest guy Manager-san is turning out to be.
“Just go,” the beleaguered man mutters eventually, face buried in his hands so he doesn’t have to look them in the eye while they sadface all over the room. He doesn’t want to end up giving them even more free time than he's already scheduled just because they’re cute when they pout. “You six officially have twenty-four hours of free time. Then we shoot. A lot. With no complaints. Got me?” He tries to sound stern. He may or may not fail.
“Got it!” the members answer him anyway, sounding ecstatic. And then they whoop and are out the door to rent a van as quickly as possible, so they can spend the entire day at the beach together doing everything and nothing at all. Their manager understands their hurry because he knows that after their many years in this grueling line of work, all of them have learned that having one day of freedom means that there isn’t a minute to waste.
For all its ups and downs, their job has taught them to live every moment to the fullest.
And as their manager watches them go, he thinks that it’s not a lesson that many people figure out in entire lifetimes on this earth; for the six of them to grasp something so precious so young is worth more than a hundred goofy tin boxes filled to the brim with one million yen each.
He also thinks that as it stands, they better bring him a nice souvenir at the end of the day as well.
END
EDITS PLZ.
Universe: JE/NewS
Theme/Topic: N/A
Rating: G
Character/Pairing/s: NewS (mentions of various other JE personalities as well)
Warnings/Spoilers: randomness. LOL screwed up timeline? Whatevs. XD
Word Count: 1,360
Summary: NewS works towards bribing their manager.
Dedication: Nicole! Just because it’s been a while.
A/N: A quickie fic inspired by Yamapi’s 2008 December Myojo translation as found here. Figures a porn challenge went up today and I all I manage is to write something G-rated instead. Also, I totally skipped the gym today for this. FAIL.
Disclaimer: No harm is meant by this!
It starts off as some sort of inner-group joke after Yamapi’s interview in the December Myojo gets printed right before their winter concert tour is scheduled to kick off; it’s probably Ryo’s idea or Shige’s idea or it might actually be a combination of everyone feeling a little bit mischievous while waiting for all of the other members and staff to arrive to work that day. Whatever it is, when Yamapi walks into rehearsals promptly at eight that morning, he sees a shiny tin box with a slit cut into the lid resting on top of the coffee table. Across the front of it are the words, NEWS’s One Million Yen Manager-san Bribe Box, handwritten in permanent black marker.
Yamapi laughs at the sight because he can’t help it, because it’s a little bit ridiculous in all the right ways. “Eh, can’t you idiots put a better sounding label there? Like, NEWS’s Vacation Time Charity Fund or something?” he demands gruffly, and fishes around in his pockets for loose change. He comes up with five hundred yen and tosses it decisively into the box while everyone shares a chuckle about it.
After that they don’t think about it at all for the rest of the day, or the rest of the week, or the rest of the month, or even for what’s left of the year.
There are other things to think about instead after all, things that are definitely more urgent and in their own ways, more important as well.
~~~~~
So it isn’t until early January of 2009 when Ryo opens the box again, simply because he wants a soda from the machine and doesn’t have any change of his own currently on him.
“Holy shit,” he breathes after he pries the lid off, and earns a few inquisitive noises from Koyama on the couch.
“Is something the matter, Ryo-chan?” Koyama asks eventually, and sits up, blinking his overworked eyes open.
“There is like 300,000 yen in here,” Ryo counts, and holds fistfuls of messily crumpled bills in both hands.
“Eh, really?” the others murmur, and suddenly everyone is paying more serious attention to the joke box that they’d been dumping all of their spare change and small bills into over the past few months.
“How much have you idiots been putting in here?” Ryo demands, and forgets about his vending machine money altogether.
The others all shrug, but as the random admittances of, “a few bills here and there,” and, “I don’t like carrying coins,” and Tegoshi’s bright, “I saw a staff-san put one thousand yen in there once!” all start coming in one after another, the picture begins to get a little bit clearer.
Yamapi whistles thoughtfully. “Eh,” he breathes, only half joking when he does, “maybe if we get the money we need, I’ll have to pay for that group vacation after all, ne?”
“It could happen, Leader!” Tegoshi and Koyama agree quickly, and seem pleased at the possibility. “We’re almost there, right?”
“No,” Shige begins, and crouches down by the tin to point out why being at 300,000 yen does not actually put them very close to having one million yen at all. Except before he can, he gets elbowed in the stomach by Ryo.
He sighs and proceeds to empty his pockets into the tin instead. They all do.
~~~~~
A week later, Yamapi sees it when Tegoshi and Massu go door to door through the jimusho, knocking on dressing rooms. “Senpai,” they say sweetly, whether it’s to Inohara or Sakamoto or Nagase or Koichi or Sho or Tsubasa, “would you like to donate to our fund?”
At the end of that day, Ryo tallies them just shy of the midway point, but only because Matsumoto is a cheapskate.
~~~~~
The following Monday Shige spends a hellish afternoon tutoring the juniors at one-hundred-yen per question while Koyama sits behind a folding table just outside of the main lobby’s elevators (on his day off), with packages of homemade cookies wrapped in multicolored cellophane at two hundred yen a pop.
“It’s a good idea,” the others all insist, “because Shige is smart and everyone loves Kei-chan.”
They don’t realize that Koki buys all of Koyama’s cookies for the sole purpose of putting them in Jin’s bag so that Jin will be fat for their One Drop PV filming later this week.
In the meantime, NEWS somehow makes it to 650,000 yen.
~~~~~
When Yamapi sees all of that he thinks that he can’t lose to the other members in their resolve for this; he promptly takes all of the money envelopes he received from New Year’s-the ones from Higashiyama and his grandmother and his mother and his senpai from outside of Johnny’s-and slips them in the tin too, bowing his head and thinking that something like this will definitely bring good luck in his animal year, in the beginning of his third twelve-year cycle of life as Yamashita Tomohisa.
Because he believes that only good things can come from hard work and personal sacrifice.
He’s right; at their next count in, Shige announces that they are 250,000 yen from their goal.
~~~~~
The mastermind behind their final push is-unsurprisingly- Ryo.
He takes the box and puts it in the front of the commissary one morning, after pulling along a bleary-eyed Yamapi after him, who is fresh off of his Code Blue SP promotions.
“Everyone who looks this guy in the face and thinks he needs a vacation, please put one thousand yen in here,” Ryo announces loudly, while shaking the tin at all of the managers, choreographers, agents, writers, publicists, stylists, directors, ADs, PAs, cameramen, photographers, and other various crew members present.
Yamapi blinks and yawns.
By the middle of that afternoon, they have easily overshot their mark by two thousand yen.
~~~~~
During their next CM shoot in Hawaii a few months later, Yamapi and the rest of the members all gather very seriously in their manager’s hotel room during the early morning hours of their first day there, before anything is scheduled to begin.
The battered collection tin is clutched tightly in Yamapi’s hands, filled to bursting.
Eventually, he calmly pushes it across the table, towards their manager. “A little something,” he explains calmly, “to look the other way in the next five minutes.”
Their manager blinks at him.
Stares at the box.
And then, after a moment, decisively pushes the tin back to Yamapi.
“Eh, you’re not taking it?” the members fret when they see, and look horribly disappointed at what an honest guy Manager-san is turning out to be.
“Just go,” the beleaguered man mutters eventually, face buried in his hands so he doesn’t have to look them in the eye while they sadface all over the room. He doesn’t want to end up giving them even more free time than he's already scheduled just because they’re cute when they pout. “You six officially have twenty-four hours of free time. Then we shoot. A lot. With no complaints. Got me?” He tries to sound stern. He may or may not fail.
“Got it!” the members answer him anyway, sounding ecstatic. And then they whoop and are out the door to rent a van as quickly as possible, so they can spend the entire day at the beach together doing everything and nothing at all. Their manager understands their hurry because he knows that after their many years in this grueling line of work, all of them have learned that having one day of freedom means that there isn’t a minute to waste.
For all its ups and downs, their job has taught them to live every moment to the fullest.
And as their manager watches them go, he thinks that it’s not a lesson that many people figure out in entire lifetimes on this earth; for the six of them to grasp something so precious so young is worth more than a hundred goofy tin boxes filled to the brim with one million yen each.
He also thinks that as it stands, they better bring him a nice souvenir at the end of the day as well.
END
EDITS PLZ.