JE/KAT-TUN- "Panic at the Disco (Stayin' Alive)"
FAIL ME.
Title: Panic at the Disco (Stayin' Alive)
Universe: JE ( Gov AU)
Theme/Topic: N/A
Rating: PG
Character/Pairing/s: Jin, Nakamaru (appearances by Yamapi, Tackey and Tsubasa, and mentions of other KT members)
Warnings/Spoilers: ooc, random, bad police procedural, the usual.
Word Count: 4,510
Summary: After Jin’s return from America, he works on reintegrating.
Dedication: happy birthday jackoweskla! Two out of six members still works, right? >> And this is what I meant about being LATE. Though technically it is still the sixth in CA time. HA.
A/N: LOL I am way behind on planning for the seven billion birthdays that occur in April. Forgive me if everything is a bit random and the timeline is really confusing. Clearly this title is all about my love of NEWS and nothing else.
Disclaimer: No harm or infringement intended.
July, 2007- Present
“I push on it, right? Right on it? Or…that will hurt? Around it? Do I push around it instead? Somehow that seems like it might squeeze more blood out…”
Jin grunts in annoyance and rolls onto his right side a little bit, so that he can get some leverage and put pressure on the bullet wound himself. “Have you never been shot before at all?” he grinds out, while Nakamaru panics uselessly all around him.
Nakamaru blinks and pauses in his pacing to look thoughtful. “Once,” he says, eventually. “Kind of. Taguchi pushed me out of the way so it kind of just…brushed me. My arm. I have a scar.”
Jin snorts, and then winces when it hurts to because yeah, maybe he’s been shot, and not just in the arm a little bit either.
Nakamaru sees it and starts to panic again. “We’re trapped.”
Jin knows that too. “Don’t you have things that explode hidden on you somewhere?” he asks, because that sure would be nice right about now.
This time, Nakamaru is the one to give him the vaguely judgmental look. “Have you ever paid attention to my work at all?” he asks.
Jin blinks. “Sometimes,” he answers. “Kind of.” Not really.
Nakamaru goes back to pacing. “Our next check in time isn’t for ten hours. They’ll worry when we don’t check in after that and then they’ll send people to save us, right? That’s how this deep undercover thing works, isn’t it? I might be wrong because this isn’t what I normally do.” He points to himself. “Bomb guy. Not undercover guy. Why am I here again?”
Jin almost wants to make another snide comment about how Nakamaru’s assumptions about check in times and backup obviously means that the explosives expert hasn’t paid any attention to any of Jin’s work either, but it’s starting to hurt (more) to breathe and it just doesn’t seem like it’s worth the effort to try and confirm or disprove Nakamaru’s babbling either way because Nakamaru has the kind of personality that thrives on fear and speculation anyway.
So Jin just says “Sure,” instead, and doesn’t feel the need to clarify that for long term undercover situations like this one, check in times are plus or minus a day depending on the situation with the targets. It’s not like crime will conveniently work on the agents’ schedules, after all.
Nakamaru isn’t calmed at all by his answer, as evidenced by his voice pitching up an octave when he hears. “What do you mean sure? Do you even know?”
Jin really doesn’t want to talk anymore, so he shrugs. Then winces when that is not so good for him either.
Nakamaru notices, and takes a deep breath. Tries to gather himself. “Okay,” he says, voice only slightly shaking, “they’ll figure out something went wrong when they don’t see us on camera. We just…have to wait.”
“Are you trying to comfort me or yourself?” Jin asks, because the noise is starting to give him a headache. His vision swims around the edges and he blinks a few times, trying to stay awake.
“Both! Why can’t it be both?” Nakamaru rejoins, sounding defensive. His brow knits when he looks his teammate over. “Stop talking. I’m the one talking here, aren’t I? Can’t you just listen for once?”
Jin snorts. “Don’t tell me what to do,” he wheezes, and makes the older agent scowl at him.
“Just…just shut up for a while, okay?” Nakamaru asks, slightly nicer this time as he crouches next to the undercover agent awkwardly.
Jin wants to respond with something mature and witty like, “No you shut up,” but it definitely isn’t worth the effort anymore; he concentrates on breathing steadily instead, unconsciously in time to the thumping beat of the bass he can hear through the walls from the dance club on the other side, where gangsters are still peddling their wares to druggies and delinquents because two government agents haven’t been able to stop the music for them quite yet.
In a haze of regret, Jin feels it when Nakamaru pries his own hand off of his injured side and replaces it with both of his own, a warm, firm pressure to stem the flow of blood.
“Just…rest for a bit,” the explosives expert tells him, still sounding horrible and terrified somehow. “I’ll wake you in a few hours.” Pause. Grimace. “Don’t die.”
Jin laughs a little when he hears, and for the first time since this job began, he’s almost, almost glad he isn’t alone right now. Dying alone is probably the worst thing in the world.
When he closes his eyes it’s because he can’t keep them open anymore; he drifts off to the thumping bass and the sound of Nakamaru telling himself (or the both of them) that everything is going to be okay.
Jin wonders if this is how he is going to die.
~~~~~
May, 2007
“Why do I have to do this?” Nakamaru complains, as one of the agency tailors scrambles dutifully around his legs and takes measurements of places where no other man has gone before.
Jin shrugs from the back of the room, hat low over his eyes as he half snoozes and half listens to the sound of traffic outside. It reminds him a little of Los Angeles, and quiet nights spent falling asleep to the bustle of a city that never stopped. He feels a little bit drowsy at the memory.
“I am an explosives expert! I can’t even lie to Massu when I’m trying to tell him that purple and yellow do make a good jacket and pants combination when he wears it like that. My nose sweats! Why are they making me go with you? Isn’t this your job?”
Jin agrees with every one of the points Nakamaru is making, but it’s written plainly on the mission statement that their objective is to land employment in the target’s drug manufacturing lab. To do that means dealing with weights and percentages and actions and equal and opposite reactions, and the last time Jin checked, the only person on the team with any substantive knowledge of things that have to do with chemistry is their resident explosives expert.
Which is why Nakamaru is going with him.
He doesn’t feel the need to say the obvious out loud just to assuage Nakamaru’s reluctance, just like he doesn’t feel the need to vocalize the fact that he’s as unhappy with the assignment as his teammate is.
After the months of being away he's more used to working alone than on the team, and it’s not in his nature to be patient when amateurs are sent in to do his job with him. Especially when it means more weight on his shoulders than there already is, when it means keeping an eye out for someone else’s safety when his own is being threatened at every waking moment.
“I bet Kame can learn chemistry. Or he can pretend like he knows all the answers, just like he does during those budget meetings with Tsubasa when Tsubasa asks him why we spent more than 100,000 yen in a month under the various and sundry category. Or how about Taguchi? I bet he’s secretly smart. Very, very secretly.”
Jin yawns and tells him straight up, “You’ll be fine as long as you stay quiet and stay out of my way.”
Nakamaru gives him an odd look when he says that, but thankfully decides to shut up and let himself get measured for his suit properly from there on out.
Jin just turns back out to face the window and sees the Japanese signs and the Japanese people on the streets below; he’s been home for weeks now but he wonders why he still feels like he’s a million miles away.
He thinks that maybe he’s forgotten what it’s like to be on a team.
~~~~~
June, 2007
“He sure seems nervous,” the target says when he sees Nakamaru for the first time. Nakamaru’s nose is already sweating profusely and it is barely six pm.
Jin grits his teeth but manages to make it look like a sneer. “Straight-laced kind of guy, I suppose.”
The target sneers back. “How’d you end up picking up a straight-and-narrow for a job like this?”
Jin lights a cigarette for himself and leans back in the chair before answering, blowing rings of smoke into Nakamaru’s face and letting himself fall more deeply into character. “That’s what happens when you borrow money from me that you can’t pay back. I find a way for you to work it off.”
A laugh. “You’re a nice guy,” the target decides. “A guy owes me money and can’t pay, I rip out his insides.”
Nakamaru goes paler, somehow.
Jin laughs back and toasts his companion. “Probably why you make more money than I do,” he acquiesces. “This mean drinks on you?”
“I like your boldness,” is the reply, and the target raises his glass in return while Nakamaru sits between them and looks like he’s going to vomit at any second now.
Jin feels more and more irritated every time he sees Nakamaru’s face, every time he has to cover for his older teammate’s awkward nervousness, for his inability to answer the target’s questions by himself.
His half year with the Americans had been very different from this; the smoothness of their operations and the general wide-range capabilities of their agents had been second to none. At times he’d felt like a small child in the presence of their resources and talents, like he’d had so much to learn and not nearly enough time to learn it in.
More than anything else, he remembers how each of the agents he’d met in his time overseas had been able to perfectly stand on his or her own.
It had been a powerful thing to witness and an even more powerful thing to realize about himself and his own weaknesses; that he wasn’t strong enough to stand up by himself had made him want to work towards being able to one day.
And so, as lonely and trying and frustrating as it had all been, Jin thinks he should have stayed in America longer to study it all, to take it all in and better himself somehow.
He’d already gotten used to the solitude by the end of his time there anyway, had learned to bear the trying times and the frustration and the general disconnect from life as he’d known it.
Part of him feels like he’d actually prefer all of that right now, because as Nakamaru sits next to him with shaking hands while drinking expensive champagne that he might throw up at any second, all it feels like to Jin is that there is an extra burden, heavier on his back than any loneliness could have been.
He thinks that coming back to Japan has done nothing but remind him of what it feels like to carry the weight of someone else on your shoulders.
It feels like a shackle.
It makes the champagne tasteless.
~~~~~
April, 2007
It’s weird watching them like this now; there are jokes he doesn’t know about and missions he wasn’t a part of. There are new annoyances that have bubbled up between them and new bonds; the way Koki is laughing with Kame isn’t something he remembers ever happening before he’d left, and how Ueda and Nakamaru casually converse about their next coinciding weekends off and if they should go somewhere together is very nearly terrifying to him.
“What’s wrong with you?” Nakamaru asks him when Jin gets caught staring over the conference table.
Jin feigns disinterest. “Nothing.”
Nakamaru looks like he wants to press the issue, but after a minute decides against it and goes back to Ueda and says something about lavender instead.
Later that afternoon, during a routine arrest, it seems that Jin is the only one who doesn’t get what Kame means when he says, “Tanaka express go,” into their headsets.
He figures it out a few seconds later, when Koki takes the shot that makes all the bad guys realize he’s got better position than them and can kill them at any second.
They all silently drop their weapons, while Jin wonders when this team started using lame code language to do their jobs.
In the meantime, the rest of KAT-TUN begin breaking out the handcuffs and gathering the discarded firearms; Nakamaru brings up traveling and lavender again to Ueda in the background.
Looking at it all, Jin suddenly feels like he’s in his Los Angeles apartment all over again, watching TV in a language he can only barely understand.
~~~~~
May 2007
“Do you think it’s a good idea to send him out on an undercover case this dangerous after just getting back from his mission overseas?” Tackey asks Tsubasa in his office that morning, when he hears the news. “And with Nakamaru?”
Tsubasa looks relaxed as he sips coffee and avoids paperwork by infecting his computer with worms and other viruses until it gets a flashing blue screen that means his files can’t be salvaged anymore. “He seems disconnected recently,” the older administrator admits eventually, when his mouse finally freezes.
He leans back and studies his handiwork with satisfaction.
“Well he did spend half a year abroad on a secret assignment,” Tackey reminds his friend patiently. “It’s understandable if he needs some time to readjust. To reintegrate with his team. Their whole dynamic changed while he was away you know.”
Tsubasa yawns, because it’s just like Tackey to over-mother like this because sometimes he’s a coddler, sometimes he loves his kids just a little too much. “Teamwork is built during missions,” he promises eventually, and gives Tackey his best trust me look.
Tackey still seems wary about the whole thing but lets Tsubasa do as he pleases without anymore questions, because despite how shady that trust me look of his is, Tackey supposes that yes, in the long run, he does.
Though he can’t help but wonder how danger and Nakamaru translate to reconnecting with teammates in his partner’s head.
~~~~~
July, 2007- Present
“Hey, wake up,” Jin hears faintly in his ears, as someone slaps at his cheeks, first softly and then a little harder than necessary.
He groans and tries to swat at whoever’s hitting him, but the moment he tries to move there is a blinding, burning pain in his side that knocks the wind out of him.
“Oh god, wake up but don’t move,” Nakamaru’s voice clarifies a moment later, like it’s not too late for that already.
Jin hisses between his teeth and stills himself, riding out the waves of shock until they subside into a dull, throbbing ache. “What happened?” he asks reflexively when he can, voice hoarse.
Nakamaru looks down at him, face red from where he must have scratched at his nose while his fingers were covered in Jin’s blood. “Nothing.” Pause. “Well I mean, you were shot.” Another pause. “Okay you’re going to have to clarify what you mean when you ask what happened. Give me a timeframe.”
Jin fights the urge to roll his eyes. “What happened since I passed out,” he grits out.
Nakamaru looks pained. “Nothing.”
“How long?”
“Um… five hours?”
Jin sighs. “Okay.” He struggles a little into a sitting position, so that his back is propped up by the wall, facing the door. When he looks at his wound he realizes that Nakamaru’s shirt is tied tight around it and that despite all that, he’s still bleeding through. He thinks that if it keeps going like this, he’ll probably die tonight. The fact that the room feels like it’s freezing while Nakamaru is sitting next to him without his shirt on and still sweating profusely only confirms it.
“Sorry,” the older agent tells him automatically, and gets the wrong idea entirely when he notices Jin’s eyes on his shirt. “It was the best I could do. My hands just got really tired. I was just resting for a little bit.”
“Shut up for a second,” Jin tells him, when he feels that headache from earlier starting to come back. “Just…relax a little. There’s nothing we can do right now.”
Nakamaru looks like he’s going to protest, but eventually sighs and plops down next to Jin against the wall. “I’m sorry I got you shot,” he says after a moment, when the thumping of the club music gets to be too much.
“Then do better next time,” Jin rejoins instantly, and almost doesn’t realize what he means by that until it’s too late.
Silence.
Then, “Does this mean we’re actually going to do this again one day?” Nakamaru croaks, weakly.
Jin almost laughs and wonders why he finds that funny.
~~~~~
May, 2007
“I can do this myself,” Jin tells Tsubasa when he sees his superior a few hours after he gets the assignment. “I don’t need Nakamaru’s back up. Give me a few weeks… I’ll learn the chemistry on my own. Or I’ll learn to bullshit it. I at least learned how to do that much in America.”
“This isn’t America. And it’s too dangerous to go alone,” Tsubasa tells him simply, as he fiddles with a rubix cube that he stole off of Shige’s desk last week. He peels off the stickers and switches them around with one another to make it impossible to solve again.
“It’s even more dangerous to bring that nervous guy with me,” Jin counters. “I can work it alone. I’m used to that at least.”
Tsubasa’s eyebrows jump a little. “But you don’t have to.”
“It’s better that way.”
“Is it?”
Jin looks frustrated. “I can’t watch out for myself and watch out for him at the same time.”
Tsubasa’s reply is simple, but weighed down by years of experience on this particular matter. “Then watch out for each other,” he says, unconsciously flashing back to years ago in an underground jungle prison and Tackey’s eyes telling him the exact same words through his mold encrusted cell grates.
Jin looks frustrated.
Tsubasa does the only thing he can to comfort him; he offers the younger agent some candy from the dish on his desk.
Jin leaves the office a few minutes later feeling like he is missing something that everyone else already seems to understand.
~~~~~
July, 2007
“I don’t think this guy is as good at chemistry as he thinks he is,” Jin gets told three weeks into the mission, when a slightly beaten Nakamaru is thrown at his feet on a routine meeting at the target’s biggest nightclub.
The undercover agent almost freezes for a moment when he sees his teammate stumble forward-slightly bloodied and bruised- but manages to hide it and say, “Oh?” instead.
“Fucked up the last two batches something fierce,” the target informs him, and there’s a glint in his eyes that tell Jin he’s suspicious, that he’s on edge now, far earlier than he’s supposed to be in the game.
“Stupid fuck,” Jin growls, and glares down at Nakamaru. Part of him feels like he might actually mean it when he says it, the part that had disagreed-and still does disagree- with Tsubasa about making this a two man mission.
“Cost me some money,” the target explains.
“He’ll do better now that he’s scared,” Jin moves to assure him.
The target doesn’t look so forgiving. “Remember what I told you I do to people who owe me money and can’t pay?”
Jin feels his heart stop for a moment when he does in fact remember; when the gun appears out of the target’s jacket a moment later he can’t believe how stupid he was for not bringing his own too.
The nozzle points at Nakamaru’s head and for the seconds that immediately follow, Jin realizes what it feels like to be as fast and stupid as Taguchi.
He moves without thinking, and the bullet ends up hitting him in the ribs instead of Nakamaru in the face.
“Huh,” the target says a beat later, when Jin groans on the floor and Nakamaru sits in a dazed sort of surprise beside him. “That was unexpected.”
No kidding, Jin thinks, before the two of them are hauled off to the club’s backroom and told that they’ll be dealt with after business hours have ended.
He wonders if this pain in his chest is what it feels like to reconnect with his teammates again, whether he wants to or not.
~~~~~
May, 2007
“No one believes me when I say I don’t need him there for this,” Jin complains to Yamapi one night, over drinks at his apartment. “It’s like they stopped trusting me completely since I left.”
Yamapi is thoughtful. “That’s not it. They wouldn’t let you go at all if they didn’t trust you, right?”
Jin eyes him. “Stop being optimistic. I’m trying to whine here.”
Yamapi laughs. “Think of it as a way to show them what you learned while you were gone, ne.” Pause. “Besides, isn’t it more comfortable to have someone else there? It’s lonely, isn’t it? I think sometimes, Shige gets lonely. I wish I could be there.”
“Lonely is better than dead,” Jin snorts, and decides that tonight he is going to get very, very drunk. “Lonely I can take.”
“I think we’re on teams,” Yamapi theorizes absently around his drink, “because this isn’t a weight any of us can carry all by ourselves, ne.” He manages a small smile. “Maybe because our shoulders aren’t as broad as the Americans’ it means we have to rely on each other more to become stronger.”
Jin wonders how his friend got to become so random in the months that he was gone.
~~~~~
July, 2007- Present
Jin wakes up to Nakamaru slapping at his cheeks again, for the second time since he’d been shot. “Why do you have to keep hitting me?” the irate undercover agent demands, and winces when he unintentionally jostles his wound again in the process.
“Because you don’t wake up when I say your name,” Nakamaru replies, looking helpless. “It makes me think you’re dead.”
Jin ignores the second part of that comment because the look on Nakamaru’s face when he says it makes him uncomfortable for some reason, like his chest is pinching in on itself and that he’s not as ready to be dead as he thought he was. So instead he asks, “How long?” again, and notes that the makeshift shirt bandage the explosives expert put on him earlier has since been swapped out for a slightly less comfortable pair of slacks.
“Eleven hours,” Nakamaru tells him in his underwear, with a glimmer of hope in his voice. “We’re late for check in.”
For some reason, Jin doesn’t have the energy to tell him that that probably doesn’t mean a thing. The odds of him dying are probably better than anyone from the agency breaking down that door in the next day, especially since he’s already halfway gone as it is.
Nakamaru starts slapping his face again.
“What the hell?” Jin croaks, and manages a glare at his teammate.
Nakamaru looks relieved. “Your eyes glazed over just now,” the explosives expert explains lamely. “I thought you were dead.”
“So slapping me back to life was your answer?”
“Well…you don’t look dead anymore.”
Jin somehow finds the energy to roll his eyes this time, but for the time being, he stops thinking about dying and more about how he is going to repay Nakamaru for every slap to the face with double the interest later.
From there, he stays conscious for as long as he can, before inevitably falling asleep to the sound of Nakamaru silently counting down the minutes remaining until the rest of their team bursts in through those doors to save them.
Jin thinks he hears Nakamaru murmur, “Don’t die,” to him one more time before he drifts off.
He may or may not respond with an absent, “Shut up,” as he does.
~~~~~
July, 2007- Present
When Jin wakes up again it is several days later than the date when he lasts remembers falling asleep; he opens his eyes because he can hear the steady beat of his own heart through the monitor the hospital has hooked up to it. It is a little bit annoying.
Maybe a little more annoying than that is the sound of Nakamaru snoring in the chair at his bedside, bandaged up from his encounter with the target’s men and looking-for the most part-none the worse for wear after their encounter.
Jin isn’t patient (or magnanimous) enough to wait for him to wake up on his own.
He reaches out and flicks Nakamaru on the nose.
Nakamaru starts. “What? No I wasn’t going to eat that,” he says when he wakes up, very randomly.
Jin blinks at him.
Nakamaru blinks back.
“Hi,” the older agent manages eventually, sounding awkward. “Do you feel okay?”
Jin supposes that he does, but mostly because there are probably meds being pumped into him in a steady stream, since all he really feels is a dull ache where before, there had been burning pain. “Yeah,” he manages eventually. “I feel okay. I’ve been better, though.”
Nakamaru’s brow furrows guiltily. “Sorry,” he says again. “I nearly got you killed.”
And even though part of Jin agrees with that assessment-because it’s true- he also realizes that he should feel more angry about it than he actually does right now, all things considered.
Maybe it’s because another part of him knows that he’s still alive because of Nakamaru too, knows that if he’d been alone, he’d probably be dead right now.
Or maybe it’s the just meds working their brain-chemistry magic on him, but either way nothing about being here right now hurts too badly, at least not for the moment.
So instead of being irritated, he very plainly instructs Nakamaru to “Stop apologizing over and over again and just thank me properly, stupid.”
Nakamaru’s jaw dutifully snaps shut mid-apology. He seems surprised.
Jin just looks expectant.
Then, after a moment, Nakamaru sighs and smiles a little helplessly. He sincerely tells Jin, “Thanks.”
And then he promises to take the undercover out to lunch once he’s discharged from the hospital later this week, along with the rest of the team (since he’s the one who ultimately lost the group bet about how long it would take for Jin to regain consciousness).
Jin scowls. “All of you are assholes.”
Nakamaru laughs a little, and then stops abruptly. “Speaking of assholes,” he remembers randomly, “there’s this story I’ve been meaning to tell you about Taguchi and the team’s cavity search duty at Narita while you were gone.”
Approximately seven minutes later, Jin very nearly rips his stitches laughing; it’s equal parts unexpected but familiar at the same time, like that first whiff of Japanese air after stepping off the plane from somewhere far away.
In the back of his mind, Jin thinks that maybe this is why he came back.
END
EDITS? SO RUSHED.
Title: Panic at the Disco (Stayin' Alive)
Universe: JE ( Gov AU)
Theme/Topic: N/A
Rating: PG
Character/Pairing/s: Jin, Nakamaru (appearances by Yamapi, Tackey and Tsubasa, and mentions of other KT members)
Warnings/Spoilers: ooc, random, bad police procedural, the usual.
Word Count: 4,510
Summary: After Jin’s return from America, he works on reintegrating.
Dedication: happy birthday jackoweskla! Two out of six members still works, right? >> And this is what I meant about being LATE. Though technically it is still the sixth in CA time. HA.
A/N: LOL I am way behind on planning for the seven billion birthdays that occur in April. Forgive me if everything is a bit random and the timeline is really confusing. Clearly this title is all about my love of NEWS and nothing else.
Disclaimer: No harm or infringement intended.
July, 2007- Present
“I push on it, right? Right on it? Or…that will hurt? Around it? Do I push around it instead? Somehow that seems like it might squeeze more blood out…”
Jin grunts in annoyance and rolls onto his right side a little bit, so that he can get some leverage and put pressure on the bullet wound himself. “Have you never been shot before at all?” he grinds out, while Nakamaru panics uselessly all around him.
Nakamaru blinks and pauses in his pacing to look thoughtful. “Once,” he says, eventually. “Kind of. Taguchi pushed me out of the way so it kind of just…brushed me. My arm. I have a scar.”
Jin snorts, and then winces when it hurts to because yeah, maybe he’s been shot, and not just in the arm a little bit either.
Nakamaru sees it and starts to panic again. “We’re trapped.”
Jin knows that too. “Don’t you have things that explode hidden on you somewhere?” he asks, because that sure would be nice right about now.
This time, Nakamaru is the one to give him the vaguely judgmental look. “Have you ever paid attention to my work at all?” he asks.
Jin blinks. “Sometimes,” he answers. “Kind of.” Not really.
Nakamaru goes back to pacing. “Our next check in time isn’t for ten hours. They’ll worry when we don’t check in after that and then they’ll send people to save us, right? That’s how this deep undercover thing works, isn’t it? I might be wrong because this isn’t what I normally do.” He points to himself. “Bomb guy. Not undercover guy. Why am I here again?”
Jin almost wants to make another snide comment about how Nakamaru’s assumptions about check in times and backup obviously means that the explosives expert hasn’t paid any attention to any of Jin’s work either, but it’s starting to hurt (more) to breathe and it just doesn’t seem like it’s worth the effort to try and confirm or disprove Nakamaru’s babbling either way because Nakamaru has the kind of personality that thrives on fear and speculation anyway.
So Jin just says “Sure,” instead, and doesn’t feel the need to clarify that for long term undercover situations like this one, check in times are plus or minus a day depending on the situation with the targets. It’s not like crime will conveniently work on the agents’ schedules, after all.
Nakamaru isn’t calmed at all by his answer, as evidenced by his voice pitching up an octave when he hears. “What do you mean sure? Do you even know?”
Jin really doesn’t want to talk anymore, so he shrugs. Then winces when that is not so good for him either.
Nakamaru notices, and takes a deep breath. Tries to gather himself. “Okay,” he says, voice only slightly shaking, “they’ll figure out something went wrong when they don’t see us on camera. We just…have to wait.”
“Are you trying to comfort me or yourself?” Jin asks, because the noise is starting to give him a headache. His vision swims around the edges and he blinks a few times, trying to stay awake.
“Both! Why can’t it be both?” Nakamaru rejoins, sounding defensive. His brow knits when he looks his teammate over. “Stop talking. I’m the one talking here, aren’t I? Can’t you just listen for once?”
Jin snorts. “Don’t tell me what to do,” he wheezes, and makes the older agent scowl at him.
“Just…just shut up for a while, okay?” Nakamaru asks, slightly nicer this time as he crouches next to the undercover agent awkwardly.
Jin wants to respond with something mature and witty like, “No you shut up,” but it definitely isn’t worth the effort anymore; he concentrates on breathing steadily instead, unconsciously in time to the thumping beat of the bass he can hear through the walls from the dance club on the other side, where gangsters are still peddling their wares to druggies and delinquents because two government agents haven’t been able to stop the music for them quite yet.
In a haze of regret, Jin feels it when Nakamaru pries his own hand off of his injured side and replaces it with both of his own, a warm, firm pressure to stem the flow of blood.
“Just…rest for a bit,” the explosives expert tells him, still sounding horrible and terrified somehow. “I’ll wake you in a few hours.” Pause. Grimace. “Don’t die.”
Jin laughs a little when he hears, and for the first time since this job began, he’s almost, almost glad he isn’t alone right now. Dying alone is probably the worst thing in the world.
When he closes his eyes it’s because he can’t keep them open anymore; he drifts off to the thumping bass and the sound of Nakamaru telling himself (or the both of them) that everything is going to be okay.
Jin wonders if this is how he is going to die.
~~~~~
May, 2007
“Why do I have to do this?” Nakamaru complains, as one of the agency tailors scrambles dutifully around his legs and takes measurements of places where no other man has gone before.
Jin shrugs from the back of the room, hat low over his eyes as he half snoozes and half listens to the sound of traffic outside. It reminds him a little of Los Angeles, and quiet nights spent falling asleep to the bustle of a city that never stopped. He feels a little bit drowsy at the memory.
“I am an explosives expert! I can’t even lie to Massu when I’m trying to tell him that purple and yellow do make a good jacket and pants combination when he wears it like that. My nose sweats! Why are they making me go with you? Isn’t this your job?”
Jin agrees with every one of the points Nakamaru is making, but it’s written plainly on the mission statement that their objective is to land employment in the target’s drug manufacturing lab. To do that means dealing with weights and percentages and actions and equal and opposite reactions, and the last time Jin checked, the only person on the team with any substantive knowledge of things that have to do with chemistry is their resident explosives expert.
Which is why Nakamaru is going with him.
He doesn’t feel the need to say the obvious out loud just to assuage Nakamaru’s reluctance, just like he doesn’t feel the need to vocalize the fact that he’s as unhappy with the assignment as his teammate is.
After the months of being away he's more used to working alone than on the team, and it’s not in his nature to be patient when amateurs are sent in to do his job with him. Especially when it means more weight on his shoulders than there already is, when it means keeping an eye out for someone else’s safety when his own is being threatened at every waking moment.
“I bet Kame can learn chemistry. Or he can pretend like he knows all the answers, just like he does during those budget meetings with Tsubasa when Tsubasa asks him why we spent more than 100,000 yen in a month under the various and sundry category. Or how about Taguchi? I bet he’s secretly smart. Very, very secretly.”
Jin yawns and tells him straight up, “You’ll be fine as long as you stay quiet and stay out of my way.”
Nakamaru gives him an odd look when he says that, but thankfully decides to shut up and let himself get measured for his suit properly from there on out.
Jin just turns back out to face the window and sees the Japanese signs and the Japanese people on the streets below; he’s been home for weeks now but he wonders why he still feels like he’s a million miles away.
He thinks that maybe he’s forgotten what it’s like to be on a team.
~~~~~
June, 2007
“He sure seems nervous,” the target says when he sees Nakamaru for the first time. Nakamaru’s nose is already sweating profusely and it is barely six pm.
Jin grits his teeth but manages to make it look like a sneer. “Straight-laced kind of guy, I suppose.”
The target sneers back. “How’d you end up picking up a straight-and-narrow for a job like this?”
Jin lights a cigarette for himself and leans back in the chair before answering, blowing rings of smoke into Nakamaru’s face and letting himself fall more deeply into character. “That’s what happens when you borrow money from me that you can’t pay back. I find a way for you to work it off.”
A laugh. “You’re a nice guy,” the target decides. “A guy owes me money and can’t pay, I rip out his insides.”
Nakamaru goes paler, somehow.
Jin laughs back and toasts his companion. “Probably why you make more money than I do,” he acquiesces. “This mean drinks on you?”
“I like your boldness,” is the reply, and the target raises his glass in return while Nakamaru sits between them and looks like he’s going to vomit at any second now.
Jin feels more and more irritated every time he sees Nakamaru’s face, every time he has to cover for his older teammate’s awkward nervousness, for his inability to answer the target’s questions by himself.
His half year with the Americans had been very different from this; the smoothness of their operations and the general wide-range capabilities of their agents had been second to none. At times he’d felt like a small child in the presence of their resources and talents, like he’d had so much to learn and not nearly enough time to learn it in.
More than anything else, he remembers how each of the agents he’d met in his time overseas had been able to perfectly stand on his or her own.
It had been a powerful thing to witness and an even more powerful thing to realize about himself and his own weaknesses; that he wasn’t strong enough to stand up by himself had made him want to work towards being able to one day.
And so, as lonely and trying and frustrating as it had all been, Jin thinks he should have stayed in America longer to study it all, to take it all in and better himself somehow.
He’d already gotten used to the solitude by the end of his time there anyway, had learned to bear the trying times and the frustration and the general disconnect from life as he’d known it.
Part of him feels like he’d actually prefer all of that right now, because as Nakamaru sits next to him with shaking hands while drinking expensive champagne that he might throw up at any second, all it feels like to Jin is that there is an extra burden, heavier on his back than any loneliness could have been.
He thinks that coming back to Japan has done nothing but remind him of what it feels like to carry the weight of someone else on your shoulders.
It feels like a shackle.
It makes the champagne tasteless.
~~~~~
April, 2007
It’s weird watching them like this now; there are jokes he doesn’t know about and missions he wasn’t a part of. There are new annoyances that have bubbled up between them and new bonds; the way Koki is laughing with Kame isn’t something he remembers ever happening before he’d left, and how Ueda and Nakamaru casually converse about their next coinciding weekends off and if they should go somewhere together is very nearly terrifying to him.
“What’s wrong with you?” Nakamaru asks him when Jin gets caught staring over the conference table.
Jin feigns disinterest. “Nothing.”
Nakamaru looks like he wants to press the issue, but after a minute decides against it and goes back to Ueda and says something about lavender instead.
Later that afternoon, during a routine arrest, it seems that Jin is the only one who doesn’t get what Kame means when he says, “Tanaka express go,” into their headsets.
He figures it out a few seconds later, when Koki takes the shot that makes all the bad guys realize he’s got better position than them and can kill them at any second.
They all silently drop their weapons, while Jin wonders when this team started using lame code language to do their jobs.
In the meantime, the rest of KAT-TUN begin breaking out the handcuffs and gathering the discarded firearms; Nakamaru brings up traveling and lavender again to Ueda in the background.
Looking at it all, Jin suddenly feels like he’s in his Los Angeles apartment all over again, watching TV in a language he can only barely understand.
~~~~~
May 2007
“Do you think it’s a good idea to send him out on an undercover case this dangerous after just getting back from his mission overseas?” Tackey asks Tsubasa in his office that morning, when he hears the news. “And with Nakamaru?”
Tsubasa looks relaxed as he sips coffee and avoids paperwork by infecting his computer with worms and other viruses until it gets a flashing blue screen that means his files can’t be salvaged anymore. “He seems disconnected recently,” the older administrator admits eventually, when his mouse finally freezes.
He leans back and studies his handiwork with satisfaction.
“Well he did spend half a year abroad on a secret assignment,” Tackey reminds his friend patiently. “It’s understandable if he needs some time to readjust. To reintegrate with his team. Their whole dynamic changed while he was away you know.”
Tsubasa yawns, because it’s just like Tackey to over-mother like this because sometimes he’s a coddler, sometimes he loves his kids just a little too much. “Teamwork is built during missions,” he promises eventually, and gives Tackey his best trust me look.
Tackey still seems wary about the whole thing but lets Tsubasa do as he pleases without anymore questions, because despite how shady that trust me look of his is, Tackey supposes that yes, in the long run, he does.
Though he can’t help but wonder how danger and Nakamaru translate to reconnecting with teammates in his partner’s head.
~~~~~
July, 2007- Present
“Hey, wake up,” Jin hears faintly in his ears, as someone slaps at his cheeks, first softly and then a little harder than necessary.
He groans and tries to swat at whoever’s hitting him, but the moment he tries to move there is a blinding, burning pain in his side that knocks the wind out of him.
“Oh god, wake up but don’t move,” Nakamaru’s voice clarifies a moment later, like it’s not too late for that already.
Jin hisses between his teeth and stills himself, riding out the waves of shock until they subside into a dull, throbbing ache. “What happened?” he asks reflexively when he can, voice hoarse.
Nakamaru looks down at him, face red from where he must have scratched at his nose while his fingers were covered in Jin’s blood. “Nothing.” Pause. “Well I mean, you were shot.” Another pause. “Okay you’re going to have to clarify what you mean when you ask what happened. Give me a timeframe.”
Jin fights the urge to roll his eyes. “What happened since I passed out,” he grits out.
Nakamaru looks pained. “Nothing.”
“How long?”
“Um… five hours?”
Jin sighs. “Okay.” He struggles a little into a sitting position, so that his back is propped up by the wall, facing the door. When he looks at his wound he realizes that Nakamaru’s shirt is tied tight around it and that despite all that, he’s still bleeding through. He thinks that if it keeps going like this, he’ll probably die tonight. The fact that the room feels like it’s freezing while Nakamaru is sitting next to him without his shirt on and still sweating profusely only confirms it.
“Sorry,” the older agent tells him automatically, and gets the wrong idea entirely when he notices Jin’s eyes on his shirt. “It was the best I could do. My hands just got really tired. I was just resting for a little bit.”
“Shut up for a second,” Jin tells him, when he feels that headache from earlier starting to come back. “Just…relax a little. There’s nothing we can do right now.”
Nakamaru looks like he’s going to protest, but eventually sighs and plops down next to Jin against the wall. “I’m sorry I got you shot,” he says after a moment, when the thumping of the club music gets to be too much.
“Then do better next time,” Jin rejoins instantly, and almost doesn’t realize what he means by that until it’s too late.
Silence.
Then, “Does this mean we’re actually going to do this again one day?” Nakamaru croaks, weakly.
Jin almost laughs and wonders why he finds that funny.
~~~~~
May, 2007
“I can do this myself,” Jin tells Tsubasa when he sees his superior a few hours after he gets the assignment. “I don’t need Nakamaru’s back up. Give me a few weeks… I’ll learn the chemistry on my own. Or I’ll learn to bullshit it. I at least learned how to do that much in America.”
“This isn’t America. And it’s too dangerous to go alone,” Tsubasa tells him simply, as he fiddles with a rubix cube that he stole off of Shige’s desk last week. He peels off the stickers and switches them around with one another to make it impossible to solve again.
“It’s even more dangerous to bring that nervous guy with me,” Jin counters. “I can work it alone. I’m used to that at least.”
Tsubasa’s eyebrows jump a little. “But you don’t have to.”
“It’s better that way.”
“Is it?”
Jin looks frustrated. “I can’t watch out for myself and watch out for him at the same time.”
Tsubasa’s reply is simple, but weighed down by years of experience on this particular matter. “Then watch out for each other,” he says, unconsciously flashing back to years ago in an underground jungle prison and Tackey’s eyes telling him the exact same words through his mold encrusted cell grates.
Jin looks frustrated.
Tsubasa does the only thing he can to comfort him; he offers the younger agent some candy from the dish on his desk.
Jin leaves the office a few minutes later feeling like he is missing something that everyone else already seems to understand.
~~~~~
July, 2007
“I don’t think this guy is as good at chemistry as he thinks he is,” Jin gets told three weeks into the mission, when a slightly beaten Nakamaru is thrown at his feet on a routine meeting at the target’s biggest nightclub.
The undercover agent almost freezes for a moment when he sees his teammate stumble forward-slightly bloodied and bruised- but manages to hide it and say, “Oh?” instead.
“Fucked up the last two batches something fierce,” the target informs him, and there’s a glint in his eyes that tell Jin he’s suspicious, that he’s on edge now, far earlier than he’s supposed to be in the game.
“Stupid fuck,” Jin growls, and glares down at Nakamaru. Part of him feels like he might actually mean it when he says it, the part that had disagreed-and still does disagree- with Tsubasa about making this a two man mission.
“Cost me some money,” the target explains.
“He’ll do better now that he’s scared,” Jin moves to assure him.
The target doesn’t look so forgiving. “Remember what I told you I do to people who owe me money and can’t pay?”
Jin feels his heart stop for a moment when he does in fact remember; when the gun appears out of the target’s jacket a moment later he can’t believe how stupid he was for not bringing his own too.
The nozzle points at Nakamaru’s head and for the seconds that immediately follow, Jin realizes what it feels like to be as fast and stupid as Taguchi.
He moves without thinking, and the bullet ends up hitting him in the ribs instead of Nakamaru in the face.
“Huh,” the target says a beat later, when Jin groans on the floor and Nakamaru sits in a dazed sort of surprise beside him. “That was unexpected.”
No kidding, Jin thinks, before the two of them are hauled off to the club’s backroom and told that they’ll be dealt with after business hours have ended.
He wonders if this pain in his chest is what it feels like to reconnect with his teammates again, whether he wants to or not.
~~~~~
May, 2007
“No one believes me when I say I don’t need him there for this,” Jin complains to Yamapi one night, over drinks at his apartment. “It’s like they stopped trusting me completely since I left.”
Yamapi is thoughtful. “That’s not it. They wouldn’t let you go at all if they didn’t trust you, right?”
Jin eyes him. “Stop being optimistic. I’m trying to whine here.”
Yamapi laughs. “Think of it as a way to show them what you learned while you were gone, ne.” Pause. “Besides, isn’t it more comfortable to have someone else there? It’s lonely, isn’t it? I think sometimes, Shige gets lonely. I wish I could be there.”
“Lonely is better than dead,” Jin snorts, and decides that tonight he is going to get very, very drunk. “Lonely I can take.”
“I think we’re on teams,” Yamapi theorizes absently around his drink, “because this isn’t a weight any of us can carry all by ourselves, ne.” He manages a small smile. “Maybe because our shoulders aren’t as broad as the Americans’ it means we have to rely on each other more to become stronger.”
Jin wonders how his friend got to become so random in the months that he was gone.
~~~~~
July, 2007- Present
Jin wakes up to Nakamaru slapping at his cheeks again, for the second time since he’d been shot. “Why do you have to keep hitting me?” the irate undercover agent demands, and winces when he unintentionally jostles his wound again in the process.
“Because you don’t wake up when I say your name,” Nakamaru replies, looking helpless. “It makes me think you’re dead.”
Jin ignores the second part of that comment because the look on Nakamaru’s face when he says it makes him uncomfortable for some reason, like his chest is pinching in on itself and that he’s not as ready to be dead as he thought he was. So instead he asks, “How long?” again, and notes that the makeshift shirt bandage the explosives expert put on him earlier has since been swapped out for a slightly less comfortable pair of slacks.
“Eleven hours,” Nakamaru tells him in his underwear, with a glimmer of hope in his voice. “We’re late for check in.”
For some reason, Jin doesn’t have the energy to tell him that that probably doesn’t mean a thing. The odds of him dying are probably better than anyone from the agency breaking down that door in the next day, especially since he’s already halfway gone as it is.
Nakamaru starts slapping his face again.
“What the hell?” Jin croaks, and manages a glare at his teammate.
Nakamaru looks relieved. “Your eyes glazed over just now,” the explosives expert explains lamely. “I thought you were dead.”
“So slapping me back to life was your answer?”
“Well…you don’t look dead anymore.”
Jin somehow finds the energy to roll his eyes this time, but for the time being, he stops thinking about dying and more about how he is going to repay Nakamaru for every slap to the face with double the interest later.
From there, he stays conscious for as long as he can, before inevitably falling asleep to the sound of Nakamaru silently counting down the minutes remaining until the rest of their team bursts in through those doors to save them.
Jin thinks he hears Nakamaru murmur, “Don’t die,” to him one more time before he drifts off.
He may or may not respond with an absent, “Shut up,” as he does.
~~~~~
July, 2007- Present
When Jin wakes up again it is several days later than the date when he lasts remembers falling asleep; he opens his eyes because he can hear the steady beat of his own heart through the monitor the hospital has hooked up to it. It is a little bit annoying.
Maybe a little more annoying than that is the sound of Nakamaru snoring in the chair at his bedside, bandaged up from his encounter with the target’s men and looking-for the most part-none the worse for wear after their encounter.
Jin isn’t patient (or magnanimous) enough to wait for him to wake up on his own.
He reaches out and flicks Nakamaru on the nose.
Nakamaru starts. “What? No I wasn’t going to eat that,” he says when he wakes up, very randomly.
Jin blinks at him.
Nakamaru blinks back.
“Hi,” the older agent manages eventually, sounding awkward. “Do you feel okay?”
Jin supposes that he does, but mostly because there are probably meds being pumped into him in a steady stream, since all he really feels is a dull ache where before, there had been burning pain. “Yeah,” he manages eventually. “I feel okay. I’ve been better, though.”
Nakamaru’s brow furrows guiltily. “Sorry,” he says again. “I nearly got you killed.”
And even though part of Jin agrees with that assessment-because it’s true- he also realizes that he should feel more angry about it than he actually does right now, all things considered.
Maybe it’s because another part of him knows that he’s still alive because of Nakamaru too, knows that if he’d been alone, he’d probably be dead right now.
Or maybe it’s the just meds working their brain-chemistry magic on him, but either way nothing about being here right now hurts too badly, at least not for the moment.
So instead of being irritated, he very plainly instructs Nakamaru to “Stop apologizing over and over again and just thank me properly, stupid.”
Nakamaru’s jaw dutifully snaps shut mid-apology. He seems surprised.
Jin just looks expectant.
Then, after a moment, Nakamaru sighs and smiles a little helplessly. He sincerely tells Jin, “Thanks.”
And then he promises to take the undercover out to lunch once he’s discharged from the hospital later this week, along with the rest of the team (since he’s the one who ultimately lost the group bet about how long it would take for Jin to regain consciousness).
Jin scowls. “All of you are assholes.”
Nakamaru laughs a little, and then stops abruptly. “Speaking of assholes,” he remembers randomly, “there’s this story I’ve been meaning to tell you about Taguchi and the team’s cavity search duty at Narita while you were gone.”
Approximately seven minutes later, Jin very nearly rips his stitches laughing; it’s equal parts unexpected but familiar at the same time, like that first whiff of Japanese air after stepping off the plane from somewhere far away.
In the back of his mind, Jin thinks that maybe this is why he came back.
END
EDITS? SO RUSHED.