NEWS- "Small Surprises"
Fail fic is fail, but I sacrificed my homework time today to do it, so I am throwing it up goddammit. I think Ryo's b-day is probably over tho. OTL
Title: Small Surprises
Universe: NEWS ( Gov AU)
Theme/Topic: None
Rating: PG
Character/Pairing/s: NEWS
Warnings/Spoilers: bad procedural, obviously. LOL
Word Count: 3,670
Summary: Ryo and Tegoshi succumb to everyone else’s plans.
Dedication: YAY this is b-day fic. Mostly for Ryo right now, as I hope to have something better for Tegoshi later, but we shall see.
A/N: With help from the WPD DVD, as well as posts about last winter’s concert tour from Koyama, Ryo, Tegoshi, and Shige’s nikki entries.
Disclaimer: No harm or infringement is meant by this!
Yamapi’s face is grimmer than usual as he outlines the mission plan on the projector screen of the meeting room this afternoon, with Tegoshi sitting behind the control console and obediently changing between the presentation’s slides and views and stats with each word the team leader utters.
Currently, a picture of their latest target looms on the screen behind Yamapi; Ryo stares at it and gets the strange feeling that he’s seen that guy, somewhere before. But he can’t quite place it, and before he can ask, Yamapi is talking, that excessively grim slant to his face demanding everyone’s full attention.
“The minute we leave the building, all radio contact between units will be cut off,” Yamapi explains carefully. “So we have to get all our facts straight now, ne. This enemy is known to have possible insider information, so we have to proceed with caution in our planning.”
On the other side of the conference table, Koyama shakes his head sadly at the news, as he and the rest of NEWS is reminded of what had nearly destroyed them over three years ago. It still exists; it’s still a very real threat.
Ryo doesn’t like it at all when he hears that there won’t be any group communication once the mission begins; he doesn’t mind shooting in the dark when he knows one hundred percent that his teammates aren’t in the line of fire, or when he can have one of them act as his eyes instead.
Right now it feels like everyone is going in blindfolded. So many things can change suddenly in a mission; to not be able to communicate one’s observations of those kinds of little surprises to one another at the moment when they occur is exactly what gets people killed in this line of work.
Yamapi knows exactly how his sniper must feel right now, but pushes on after only a quick look of sympathy. Then he’s nodding to Tegoshi, who automatically switches the image on the screen from the face of the target to a schematic of the building they will all be storming come tomorrow evening.
“We’ve scouted three entrances to his hideout,” Yamapi points out, while behind him, the schematic rotates and becomes three dimensional under Tegoshi’s effortless ministrations. “The north side entrance is in an alleyway. The door is heavily guarded and there is outside surveillance across the street around the clock. But according to our initial surveillance they change the guards at the same time every night and every morning; once at 9pm sharp and then again at 9am.”
The screen dutifully switches to the agency’s video surveillance of said changing of the guard, in which two shady looking men slip out of the building’s alleyway entrance and meet with two fresh replacements, before all four of them slip up the alley and around the building corner to confer about the day’s events and share news about any possible problems that may have been encountered or should be looked out for over the next shift. It leaves only one man guarding two sides of the building from his perch across the street for the five minutes it takes for the earlier shift of guards to debrief the new arrivals. “The man at this exterior post is the only one left for that entire time,” Yamapi points out. “If we can cause a distraction towards the front that he has to investigate during the changeover, the door should be unguarded and we can slip in.”
His team already knows that Ryo and Massu are the two best candidates for that point of attack.
As such, Ryo is about to turn and tell Massu that he’ll take the point as the better shooter of the two, even if Massu has the quicker reaction time.
But before he can, Yamapi surprises them by designating the alleyway entrance as Koyama and Shige’s responsibility this time around.
What surprises Ryo even more is that the two clumsy stooges readily accept the assignment to sneak into that door without the armed guards noticing, during that very narrow window of opportunity. “Right, leader!” Koyama agrees, with a little salute and more confidence than expected. “We’ll do our best, ne.”
“Five minutes is plenty of time,” Shige chimes in, and Ryo wants to remind him that yesterday, at Ryo’s impromptu birthday lunch, it clearly hadn’t been enough time, because Shige had ended up choking on that soba trying to finish it before they had to be back at the office for their meeting with Takizawa.
Logically, Ryo supposes it can only mean that the next two entrances are even worse options than the first; it’s the only reason the sniper can fathom Yamapi putting Koyama and Shige right in the line of fire without either he or Massu there beside them to pull them to cover should things go awry.
“Entrance two,” Yamapi continues dutifully, without pausing to take in Ryo’s obvious objection to the plan, “is the roof entrance.”
Ryo supposes that yes, that’s probably harder than the alleyway.
“There’s a laser grid, ne. It’ll require some maneuvering to get to the door. Then the door uses an electronic keypad to open, but a small explosive charge should take care of it well enough.”
Ryo nods as he studies the three-dimensional schematic. He knows he can slip through a laser grid as long as he can see the lines. He’s small enough, after all. As for the door, it’s not a problem blowing it up, but the question is, will it be noticed? He’s about to ask, given that this is clearly his and Massu’s actual assignment, but for the second time that day, Yamapi throws his expectations completely off target.
“Massu and I will go for this one,” the team leader declares, and nearly has the sniper sputtering in his seat.
Even Tegoshi seems a little bit reluctant when he hears that. Massu he can understand, but even if their leader is graceful in his own way, he seems entirely too large to undertake that sort of flexibility test under pressure. “Leader,” the hacker begins, carefully, “maybe Ryo-tan or I should do that with Massu instead?”
Yamapi shakes his head. “It’s going to take some muscle to get through that door,” he says, vaguely.
Tegoshi blinks. “Oh. Okay.” Ryo can tell the kid isn’t entirely convinced either; knowing that is enough for the sniper to finally raise his hand.
Yamapi nods. “Ryo-chan?”
“Are you drunk?” Ryo asks his old friend, flatly.
A beat.
Then Yamapi shakes his head. “No.”
“Sick?”
“I feel fine, ne.”
Ryo leans back in his chair. “Oh. Then you’re just crazy.”
Yamapi frowns. “You haven’t even heard my whole plan yet,” he points out.
Ryo is skeptical anyway. “Imagining your enormous body limbo-dancing through laser beams is the biggest red flag to a plan in the history of all plans.”
“Leader is very limber,” Koyama feels the need to point out, and earns himself a snort from the sniper because yes, compared to Koyama, Leader is very limber.
Yamapi hastily moves on. “Entrance three,” he says, “is a first-story window. It has motion sensors that will have to be disabled from a distance.” Pause. “And it’s really narrow,” he adds, as if to tell Ryo I told you so.
“Something about that whole security set up seems fishy to me,” Ryo says when he hears, because what the hell kind of building changes their security outline for each individual entrance and exit and window? For the lowest common denominator of thug usually employed in these outfits, the complexity of having to remember how to operate various security protocols under each different system would probably prove too much before too long. Heck, even in the agency itself it isn’t unheard of for a junior agent to forget his own security clearance. They’ve had quite a few occasions where a newbie fresh out of the academy accidentally thinks he has access to a floor which he definitely doesn’t have access to. Everyone eventually hears about how that unfortunate kid had ended up getting stuck in an elevator when his pass card scanned in that wrong floor number and the agency’s security system ended up freezing the elevator doors with alarms blaring.
But Yamapi just looks at the sniper calmly and nods. “Everything about this is fishy, ne,” he says, again vaguely. “But it’s why we have to take care of it as soon as possible.”
Ryo hates to admit it but he knows that even when Yamapi is being vague like that he’s usually right; when the sniper looks more closely at the schematic of the window entrance he realizes that it’s going to end up dropping he and Tegoshi right in the middle of the building’s biggest danger zone. That, in addition to Koyama and Shige trying to be sneaky in an alleyway and not trip over something loud and clanging and metal while Massu and Yamapi do rooftop gymnastics to blow up a door that won’t alert anyone to their presence makes Ryo more and more doubtful about this strange, last-minute mission from Takizawa as a whole.
In other words, sometimes he wonders why KAT-TUN can’t be the ones to take care of things like this instead.
~~~~~
The day of the mission, Ryo’s reservations intensify with each hour.
As he and Tegoshi are practicing with the equipment to disable the motion sensors set up on either side of the window, Koyama and Shige walk by the room and invite them out for lunch, like tonight’s sting isn’t dangerous at all, like the most important thing is gyuudon and tea.
“We still have to practice ne,” Tegoshi says, frowning as he fiddles with the scrambler that Ryo will be firing from his rifle to hit the motion sensors. Once they make contact they’ll give him exactly twenty seconds to hack the individual computers in each sensor to and put them on a feedback loop to whatever mainframe they are reporting to.
That is, if Ryo manages not to miss in the dark and send the scrambler through the window instead.
After issuing the invitation to lunch, Koyama and Shige take one look at Ryo’s scowling countenance and both decide in perfect unison that they’ll just go and pick up some takeout for their teammates instead.
In the meantime, Tegoshi sets up at his laptop; when he tells Ryo “Go,” Ryo fires, hits the targets, and the counters begin from there.
By about the twentieth (or thirtieth, he loses count) try, they can finally say they’ve done it five times in a row without messing up. Tegoshi smiles in weary triumph and says now they just need to practice doing it in the dark.
He turns off the lights.
Lunch at that point, is very, very cold.
~~~~~
Massu interrupts them next, peeking his head into the doorway around six and looking like he has a dilemma on his hands.
“What is it?” Ryo grits out eventually, when he sees the conflicted emotions on Massu’s face in addition to his food-loving heart on his slightly food-stained sleeve.
Massu sighs. “I can’t decide between chocolate and vanilla,” he explains, worriedly. “What do you think is better for a pre-mission snack?”
Tegoshi blinks. “Um, either is fine, I think,” he manages, after a beat. Then, because it’s Massu, adds, “Just have both if you can’t decide.”
Ryo has less patience than Tegoshi does right now; when he hears Massu’s forlorn inquiry he just storms over to the door and shuts it, just as Massu looks like he is about to ask them another useless question. “Stop bothering us.”
Massu wanders off, still looking troubled in his indecision.
Ryo proposes he and Tegoshi take a short break, while he goes to his locker to get his aspirin.
~~~~~
When they finally manage to nail it five times in a row only by the light of Tegoshi’s laptop and the laser on the top of Ryo’s rifle, the office is eerily quiet and the sun has since set over the horizon. It’s still officially three and a half hours before the operation at that point though, which is enough to go over the strategy one more time before the team is deployed under the ominous orders to maintain radio silence.
It’s a small comfort, but one Ryo supposes he’ll take over nothing.
Except that while Ryo is on his way to Yamapi’s office to report his and Tegoshi’s successes, he is forced to stop at his desk because he notices that his rifle is already packed and waiting on top of it, while on top of that is a bright pink piece of glittery Hello Kitty paper, with a note written to both the sniper and the hacker stating that the rest of the team has already gone to the site in advance to prepare for tonight’s raid.
The final paragraph reads:
“Once you’re done practicing, head to the east side of the building where the window is. The mission begins on the dot at nine. Remember to maintain radio silence!”
Ryo nearly screams in frustration at finding a note telling them about these very important last minute changes to the mission plan. A handwritten note on his desk on a pink piece of Koyama’s girly stationary. “What is with everyone this week?!” he demands, turning to Tegoshi like maybe Tegoshi has the answers because something odd has happened while Ryo was off backing Takizawa up on his own big undercover mission over the past few weeks.
The young hacker shrugs and holds the note up for closer inspection. “Well, you did tell them to stop bothering us earlier, ne,” he suggests, pragmatically. “Maybe they just didn’t want to disrupt our practice again.”
Ryo glares and looks like he wants to say something, but eventually snaps his mouth shut and picks the rifle case off of his desk. He decides Tegoshi gets a free pass today because his birthday is coming up, even if he is being singularly unhelpful with his smart-alecky observations.
Ryo comforts himself a little bit in the knowledge that he’s going to punch everyone else in the teeth the minute this mission is over and done with.
He can’t believe the other four just left them behind like this.
~~~~~
When they arrive to the location later that night it is after parking two miles away and walking the rest of the distance towards the easternmost side of the target building towards the shipyard, They take extra care not to be seen moving in that direction, ducking through the shadows of alleyways and storage warehouses and having to stop several times upon hearing the footfalls of other human beings nearby.
It takes them longer than it should, and when they finally arrive, they hastily have to set up to keep to Yamapi’s schedule.
Ryo surveys the best position to shoot from after a quick assessment of the area in front of the targets, and before long Tegoshi is set up at his small notebook computer, ready to go.
The countdown begins.
In the meantime, Ryo studies the building; it’s well kept and small and looks surprisingly innocuous for all the horrors Yamapi had talked about in terms of its security, as if it is somehow hiding all the contraband in the world. There’s movement inside from what he can see through that first story window, flashes of forms bustling past it again and again, as if in some sort of great, secretive hurry.
The shapes of the people are distorted through the old, textured glass, but Ryo is suddenly pinged by a sense of familiarity again, much like he’d felt when he’d first seen the picture of their target on the screen in the meeting room yesterday, big and sinister and larger than life on the projector behind Yamapi.
“Something’s wrong,” Ryo whispers to Tegoshi.
Tegoshi blinks, looks worried. “What?”
“I don’t know,” Ryo admits, “but it feels like something is off.”
Tegoshi frowns. “We can’t call anyone or we’ll risk the whole thing. Leader said they might have infiltrated our encrypted channels.”
Ryo scowls and hunkers lower in the bushes. “Yeah,” he says, but still doesn’t like this one bit. He has good instincts after years of doing this kind of work, and right now, his instincts say this isn’t right.
Through the glass he sees someone move carrying a large box or case; the way they walk as graceful as a dancer.
When Ryo checks his watch, it’s thirty minutes until go time.
~~~~~
At nine pm on the dot, Ryo flips on his laser scope and takes aim at the two small motion sensors set up on either side of the window. He focuses on the tiny red lights in their centers that mean they’re operational, and with a silent thwip, thwip, his specially equipped rifle deploys the scramblers with their adhesive bottoms.
They hit perfectly, and the moment Tegoshi has signal, his fingertips are flying over the keys with practiced ease, as he switches these wires with those wires and feeds whoever is watching inside readings from his computer rather than the actual detectors themselves.
It goes so well and so smoothly that for a second Ryo forgets about how annoyed he is with the rest of his team, about the bad feeling he’d had a little while ago, watching the strangely familiar silhouettes of those people in the interior of the building.
He puts down his specially fitted rifle and swaps it out with the one that had been waiting on his desk earlier, with Koyama’s stupid, girly pink note sitting on top of it.
He scowls at the memory, and with Tegoshi behind him, the two of them creep towards the window.
~~~~~
Jimmying the window open is more difficult than either Ryo or Tegoshi first anticipate; in the line of complicated things they’ve done in their lives this shouldn’t be one of the most complicated, but for a moment Ryo has trouble working his pick through the lock and working the window open. Miraculously, it seems that Koyama and Shige slipped through alright as well, because the lights inside are off and no alarms have sounded.
Eventually Ryo does get the window open and nods to Tegoshi that he’ll take point; the portal is as narrow as Yamapi had described and he has to turn sideways to go in, and when he drops into the room, the floor is further away from him than he expects.
He manages to land in a crouch however, and with a silent curse, turns back up towards the window to help Tegoshi down so that he doesn’t have the same disorienting fall into the darkness.
It is when his arms are full of Tegoshi (and not his rifle) that the lights suddenly turn on.
There is a moment in which Ryo experiences nothing but a freezing, all encompassing fear, the instant thought that we’re dead.
It lasts up until the moment he hears four very familiar, very excited voices all simultaneously shout, “SURPRISE!!!”
Then Ryo nearly drops Tegoshi.
“Fucking assholes!!” is the first thing he shouts, while Tegoshi stumbles beside him but luckily manages to find his balance and keep from landing flat on his ass in front of everyone.
His teammates grin back at him from the middle of the room, where they are gathered around a large table that has been set with a sumptuous dinner and two enormous cakes, complete with icing messages and tall, elegant candles.
Yamapi, unfazed by Ryo’s cursing surprise, calmly pops open the bottle of champagne he’s holding, while Koyama starts everyone off singing “Happy Birthday,” completely off key because they’re trying not to laugh at the looks on Ryo and Tegoshi’s faces.
Once they’re done, Ryo groans and buries his face in his hands. “What if I’d shot you morons?!” he demands, because the possibility had been very real just a moment ago.
Yamapi peacefully takes him by the shoulders and steers him towards the table. “That rifle is special!” he supplies happily, before parking Ryo in front of the chocolate cake. “Make a wish, ne.”
Part of Ryo still wants to be annoyed, because it had been dangerous and embarrassing and embarrassing to do something like this under the pretenses that they had, but when he looks at the faces of his teammates and sees the warmth of Koyama’s glee, the broadness of Massu’s smile, the fondness in Shige’s amusement, and the warmth in Yamapi’s satisfaction, he sighs and eventually decides that maybe he’ll forgive them this time, if the presents are really good and they never do anything like that ever again.
Meanwhile, Tegoshi just laughs at the absurdity of the whole situation, and also because the indignation he’d experienced just a second ago has now apparently become second fiddle to the merriment he is taking from seeing the embarrassed, exasperated expression on Ryo’s face. He gamely stands behind the part of the table with the vanilla frosted cake on it without needing the same kind of prompting as Ryo, and at the insistence of the others, the two of them prepare to blow out their candles and make a wish.
Ryo extinguishes all of his in two big puffs, and as the tiny flames flicker out and die before his eyes, he wishes for another safe year with these people by his side, so that 365 days from now, he will be able to find himself in another day exactly like this one.
He watches the elegantly curling lines of light gray smoke spiral up from the extinguished wicks towards the ceiling and thinks they feel a lot like a promise.
After that Yamapi pours the champagne, and as they all sit down to eat dinner together, he asks the two birthday boys what it is they wished for today.
“All the happiness in the world,” Tegoshi responds without hesitation, because it’s what he wishes for every year.
Ryo nods and simply says, “Same.”
END
EDITS? I only had a few hours today SOB.
Title: Small Surprises
Universe: NEWS ( Gov AU)
Theme/Topic: None
Rating: PG
Character/Pairing/s: NEWS
Warnings/Spoilers: bad procedural, obviously. LOL
Word Count: 3,670
Summary: Ryo and Tegoshi succumb to everyone else’s plans.
Dedication: YAY this is b-day fic. Mostly for Ryo right now, as I hope to have something better for Tegoshi later, but we shall see.
A/N: With help from the WPD DVD, as well as posts about last winter’s concert tour from Koyama, Ryo, Tegoshi, and Shige’s nikki entries.
Disclaimer: No harm or infringement is meant by this!
Yamapi’s face is grimmer than usual as he outlines the mission plan on the projector screen of the meeting room this afternoon, with Tegoshi sitting behind the control console and obediently changing between the presentation’s slides and views and stats with each word the team leader utters.
Currently, a picture of their latest target looms on the screen behind Yamapi; Ryo stares at it and gets the strange feeling that he’s seen that guy, somewhere before. But he can’t quite place it, and before he can ask, Yamapi is talking, that excessively grim slant to his face demanding everyone’s full attention.
“The minute we leave the building, all radio contact between units will be cut off,” Yamapi explains carefully. “So we have to get all our facts straight now, ne. This enemy is known to have possible insider information, so we have to proceed with caution in our planning.”
On the other side of the conference table, Koyama shakes his head sadly at the news, as he and the rest of NEWS is reminded of what had nearly destroyed them over three years ago. It still exists; it’s still a very real threat.
Ryo doesn’t like it at all when he hears that there won’t be any group communication once the mission begins; he doesn’t mind shooting in the dark when he knows one hundred percent that his teammates aren’t in the line of fire, or when he can have one of them act as his eyes instead.
Right now it feels like everyone is going in blindfolded. So many things can change suddenly in a mission; to not be able to communicate one’s observations of those kinds of little surprises to one another at the moment when they occur is exactly what gets people killed in this line of work.
Yamapi knows exactly how his sniper must feel right now, but pushes on after only a quick look of sympathy. Then he’s nodding to Tegoshi, who automatically switches the image on the screen from the face of the target to a schematic of the building they will all be storming come tomorrow evening.
“We’ve scouted three entrances to his hideout,” Yamapi points out, while behind him, the schematic rotates and becomes three dimensional under Tegoshi’s effortless ministrations. “The north side entrance is in an alleyway. The door is heavily guarded and there is outside surveillance across the street around the clock. But according to our initial surveillance they change the guards at the same time every night and every morning; once at 9pm sharp and then again at 9am.”
The screen dutifully switches to the agency’s video surveillance of said changing of the guard, in which two shady looking men slip out of the building’s alleyway entrance and meet with two fresh replacements, before all four of them slip up the alley and around the building corner to confer about the day’s events and share news about any possible problems that may have been encountered or should be looked out for over the next shift. It leaves only one man guarding two sides of the building from his perch across the street for the five minutes it takes for the earlier shift of guards to debrief the new arrivals. “The man at this exterior post is the only one left for that entire time,” Yamapi points out. “If we can cause a distraction towards the front that he has to investigate during the changeover, the door should be unguarded and we can slip in.”
His team already knows that Ryo and Massu are the two best candidates for that point of attack.
As such, Ryo is about to turn and tell Massu that he’ll take the point as the better shooter of the two, even if Massu has the quicker reaction time.
But before he can, Yamapi surprises them by designating the alleyway entrance as Koyama and Shige’s responsibility this time around.
What surprises Ryo even more is that the two clumsy stooges readily accept the assignment to sneak into that door without the armed guards noticing, during that very narrow window of opportunity. “Right, leader!” Koyama agrees, with a little salute and more confidence than expected. “We’ll do our best, ne.”
“Five minutes is plenty of time,” Shige chimes in, and Ryo wants to remind him that yesterday, at Ryo’s impromptu birthday lunch, it clearly hadn’t been enough time, because Shige had ended up choking on that soba trying to finish it before they had to be back at the office for their meeting with Takizawa.
Logically, Ryo supposes it can only mean that the next two entrances are even worse options than the first; it’s the only reason the sniper can fathom Yamapi putting Koyama and Shige right in the line of fire without either he or Massu there beside them to pull them to cover should things go awry.
“Entrance two,” Yamapi continues dutifully, without pausing to take in Ryo’s obvious objection to the plan, “is the roof entrance.”
Ryo supposes that yes, that’s probably harder than the alleyway.
“There’s a laser grid, ne. It’ll require some maneuvering to get to the door. Then the door uses an electronic keypad to open, but a small explosive charge should take care of it well enough.”
Ryo nods as he studies the three-dimensional schematic. He knows he can slip through a laser grid as long as he can see the lines. He’s small enough, after all. As for the door, it’s not a problem blowing it up, but the question is, will it be noticed? He’s about to ask, given that this is clearly his and Massu’s actual assignment, but for the second time that day, Yamapi throws his expectations completely off target.
“Massu and I will go for this one,” the team leader declares, and nearly has the sniper sputtering in his seat.
Even Tegoshi seems a little bit reluctant when he hears that. Massu he can understand, but even if their leader is graceful in his own way, he seems entirely too large to undertake that sort of flexibility test under pressure. “Leader,” the hacker begins, carefully, “maybe Ryo-tan or I should do that with Massu instead?”
Yamapi shakes his head. “It’s going to take some muscle to get through that door,” he says, vaguely.
Tegoshi blinks. “Oh. Okay.” Ryo can tell the kid isn’t entirely convinced either; knowing that is enough for the sniper to finally raise his hand.
Yamapi nods. “Ryo-chan?”
“Are you drunk?” Ryo asks his old friend, flatly.
A beat.
Then Yamapi shakes his head. “No.”
“Sick?”
“I feel fine, ne.”
Ryo leans back in his chair. “Oh. Then you’re just crazy.”
Yamapi frowns. “You haven’t even heard my whole plan yet,” he points out.
Ryo is skeptical anyway. “Imagining your enormous body limbo-dancing through laser beams is the biggest red flag to a plan in the history of all plans.”
“Leader is very limber,” Koyama feels the need to point out, and earns himself a snort from the sniper because yes, compared to Koyama, Leader is very limber.
Yamapi hastily moves on. “Entrance three,” he says, “is a first-story window. It has motion sensors that will have to be disabled from a distance.” Pause. “And it’s really narrow,” he adds, as if to tell Ryo I told you so.
“Something about that whole security set up seems fishy to me,” Ryo says when he hears, because what the hell kind of building changes their security outline for each individual entrance and exit and window? For the lowest common denominator of thug usually employed in these outfits, the complexity of having to remember how to operate various security protocols under each different system would probably prove too much before too long. Heck, even in the agency itself it isn’t unheard of for a junior agent to forget his own security clearance. They’ve had quite a few occasions where a newbie fresh out of the academy accidentally thinks he has access to a floor which he definitely doesn’t have access to. Everyone eventually hears about how that unfortunate kid had ended up getting stuck in an elevator when his pass card scanned in that wrong floor number and the agency’s security system ended up freezing the elevator doors with alarms blaring.
But Yamapi just looks at the sniper calmly and nods. “Everything about this is fishy, ne,” he says, again vaguely. “But it’s why we have to take care of it as soon as possible.”
Ryo hates to admit it but he knows that even when Yamapi is being vague like that he’s usually right; when the sniper looks more closely at the schematic of the window entrance he realizes that it’s going to end up dropping he and Tegoshi right in the middle of the building’s biggest danger zone. That, in addition to Koyama and Shige trying to be sneaky in an alleyway and not trip over something loud and clanging and metal while Massu and Yamapi do rooftop gymnastics to blow up a door that won’t alert anyone to their presence makes Ryo more and more doubtful about this strange, last-minute mission from Takizawa as a whole.
In other words, sometimes he wonders why KAT-TUN can’t be the ones to take care of things like this instead.
~~~~~
The day of the mission, Ryo’s reservations intensify with each hour.
As he and Tegoshi are practicing with the equipment to disable the motion sensors set up on either side of the window, Koyama and Shige walk by the room and invite them out for lunch, like tonight’s sting isn’t dangerous at all, like the most important thing is gyuudon and tea.
“We still have to practice ne,” Tegoshi says, frowning as he fiddles with the scrambler that Ryo will be firing from his rifle to hit the motion sensors. Once they make contact they’ll give him exactly twenty seconds to hack the individual computers in each sensor to and put them on a feedback loop to whatever mainframe they are reporting to.
That is, if Ryo manages not to miss in the dark and send the scrambler through the window instead.
After issuing the invitation to lunch, Koyama and Shige take one look at Ryo’s scowling countenance and both decide in perfect unison that they’ll just go and pick up some takeout for their teammates instead.
In the meantime, Tegoshi sets up at his laptop; when he tells Ryo “Go,” Ryo fires, hits the targets, and the counters begin from there.
By about the twentieth (or thirtieth, he loses count) try, they can finally say they’ve done it five times in a row without messing up. Tegoshi smiles in weary triumph and says now they just need to practice doing it in the dark.
He turns off the lights.
Lunch at that point, is very, very cold.
~~~~~
Massu interrupts them next, peeking his head into the doorway around six and looking like he has a dilemma on his hands.
“What is it?” Ryo grits out eventually, when he sees the conflicted emotions on Massu’s face in addition to his food-loving heart on his slightly food-stained sleeve.
Massu sighs. “I can’t decide between chocolate and vanilla,” he explains, worriedly. “What do you think is better for a pre-mission snack?”
Tegoshi blinks. “Um, either is fine, I think,” he manages, after a beat. Then, because it’s Massu, adds, “Just have both if you can’t decide.”
Ryo has less patience than Tegoshi does right now; when he hears Massu’s forlorn inquiry he just storms over to the door and shuts it, just as Massu looks like he is about to ask them another useless question. “Stop bothering us.”
Massu wanders off, still looking troubled in his indecision.
Ryo proposes he and Tegoshi take a short break, while he goes to his locker to get his aspirin.
~~~~~
When they finally manage to nail it five times in a row only by the light of Tegoshi’s laptop and the laser on the top of Ryo’s rifle, the office is eerily quiet and the sun has since set over the horizon. It’s still officially three and a half hours before the operation at that point though, which is enough to go over the strategy one more time before the team is deployed under the ominous orders to maintain radio silence.
It’s a small comfort, but one Ryo supposes he’ll take over nothing.
Except that while Ryo is on his way to Yamapi’s office to report his and Tegoshi’s successes, he is forced to stop at his desk because he notices that his rifle is already packed and waiting on top of it, while on top of that is a bright pink piece of glittery Hello Kitty paper, with a note written to both the sniper and the hacker stating that the rest of the team has already gone to the site in advance to prepare for tonight’s raid.
The final paragraph reads:
“Once you’re done practicing, head to the east side of the building where the window is. The mission begins on the dot at nine. Remember to maintain radio silence!”
Ryo nearly screams in frustration at finding a note telling them about these very important last minute changes to the mission plan. A handwritten note on his desk on a pink piece of Koyama’s girly stationary. “What is with everyone this week?!” he demands, turning to Tegoshi like maybe Tegoshi has the answers because something odd has happened while Ryo was off backing Takizawa up on his own big undercover mission over the past few weeks.
The young hacker shrugs and holds the note up for closer inspection. “Well, you did tell them to stop bothering us earlier, ne,” he suggests, pragmatically. “Maybe they just didn’t want to disrupt our practice again.”
Ryo glares and looks like he wants to say something, but eventually snaps his mouth shut and picks the rifle case off of his desk. He decides Tegoshi gets a free pass today because his birthday is coming up, even if he is being singularly unhelpful with his smart-alecky observations.
Ryo comforts himself a little bit in the knowledge that he’s going to punch everyone else in the teeth the minute this mission is over and done with.
He can’t believe the other four just left them behind like this.
~~~~~
When they arrive to the location later that night it is after parking two miles away and walking the rest of the distance towards the easternmost side of the target building towards the shipyard, They take extra care not to be seen moving in that direction, ducking through the shadows of alleyways and storage warehouses and having to stop several times upon hearing the footfalls of other human beings nearby.
It takes them longer than it should, and when they finally arrive, they hastily have to set up to keep to Yamapi’s schedule.
Ryo surveys the best position to shoot from after a quick assessment of the area in front of the targets, and before long Tegoshi is set up at his small notebook computer, ready to go.
The countdown begins.
In the meantime, Ryo studies the building; it’s well kept and small and looks surprisingly innocuous for all the horrors Yamapi had talked about in terms of its security, as if it is somehow hiding all the contraband in the world. There’s movement inside from what he can see through that first story window, flashes of forms bustling past it again and again, as if in some sort of great, secretive hurry.
The shapes of the people are distorted through the old, textured glass, but Ryo is suddenly pinged by a sense of familiarity again, much like he’d felt when he’d first seen the picture of their target on the screen in the meeting room yesterday, big and sinister and larger than life on the projector behind Yamapi.
“Something’s wrong,” Ryo whispers to Tegoshi.
Tegoshi blinks, looks worried. “What?”
“I don’t know,” Ryo admits, “but it feels like something is off.”
Tegoshi frowns. “We can’t call anyone or we’ll risk the whole thing. Leader said they might have infiltrated our encrypted channels.”
Ryo scowls and hunkers lower in the bushes. “Yeah,” he says, but still doesn’t like this one bit. He has good instincts after years of doing this kind of work, and right now, his instincts say this isn’t right.
Through the glass he sees someone move carrying a large box or case; the way they walk as graceful as a dancer.
When Ryo checks his watch, it’s thirty minutes until go time.
~~~~~
At nine pm on the dot, Ryo flips on his laser scope and takes aim at the two small motion sensors set up on either side of the window. He focuses on the tiny red lights in their centers that mean they’re operational, and with a silent thwip, thwip, his specially equipped rifle deploys the scramblers with their adhesive bottoms.
They hit perfectly, and the moment Tegoshi has signal, his fingertips are flying over the keys with practiced ease, as he switches these wires with those wires and feeds whoever is watching inside readings from his computer rather than the actual detectors themselves.
It goes so well and so smoothly that for a second Ryo forgets about how annoyed he is with the rest of his team, about the bad feeling he’d had a little while ago, watching the strangely familiar silhouettes of those people in the interior of the building.
He puts down his specially fitted rifle and swaps it out with the one that had been waiting on his desk earlier, with Koyama’s stupid, girly pink note sitting on top of it.
He scowls at the memory, and with Tegoshi behind him, the two of them creep towards the window.
~~~~~
Jimmying the window open is more difficult than either Ryo or Tegoshi first anticipate; in the line of complicated things they’ve done in their lives this shouldn’t be one of the most complicated, but for a moment Ryo has trouble working his pick through the lock and working the window open. Miraculously, it seems that Koyama and Shige slipped through alright as well, because the lights inside are off and no alarms have sounded.
Eventually Ryo does get the window open and nods to Tegoshi that he’ll take point; the portal is as narrow as Yamapi had described and he has to turn sideways to go in, and when he drops into the room, the floor is further away from him than he expects.
He manages to land in a crouch however, and with a silent curse, turns back up towards the window to help Tegoshi down so that he doesn’t have the same disorienting fall into the darkness.
It is when his arms are full of Tegoshi (and not his rifle) that the lights suddenly turn on.
There is a moment in which Ryo experiences nothing but a freezing, all encompassing fear, the instant thought that we’re dead.
It lasts up until the moment he hears four very familiar, very excited voices all simultaneously shout, “SURPRISE!!!”
Then Ryo nearly drops Tegoshi.
“Fucking assholes!!” is the first thing he shouts, while Tegoshi stumbles beside him but luckily manages to find his balance and keep from landing flat on his ass in front of everyone.
His teammates grin back at him from the middle of the room, where they are gathered around a large table that has been set with a sumptuous dinner and two enormous cakes, complete with icing messages and tall, elegant candles.
Yamapi, unfazed by Ryo’s cursing surprise, calmly pops open the bottle of champagne he’s holding, while Koyama starts everyone off singing “Happy Birthday,” completely off key because they’re trying not to laugh at the looks on Ryo and Tegoshi’s faces.
Once they’re done, Ryo groans and buries his face in his hands. “What if I’d shot you morons?!” he demands, because the possibility had been very real just a moment ago.
Yamapi peacefully takes him by the shoulders and steers him towards the table. “That rifle is special!” he supplies happily, before parking Ryo in front of the chocolate cake. “Make a wish, ne.”
Part of Ryo still wants to be annoyed, because it had been dangerous and embarrassing and embarrassing to do something like this under the pretenses that they had, but when he looks at the faces of his teammates and sees the warmth of Koyama’s glee, the broadness of Massu’s smile, the fondness in Shige’s amusement, and the warmth in Yamapi’s satisfaction, he sighs and eventually decides that maybe he’ll forgive them this time, if the presents are really good and they never do anything like that ever again.
Meanwhile, Tegoshi just laughs at the absurdity of the whole situation, and also because the indignation he’d experienced just a second ago has now apparently become second fiddle to the merriment he is taking from seeing the embarrassed, exasperated expression on Ryo’s face. He gamely stands behind the part of the table with the vanilla frosted cake on it without needing the same kind of prompting as Ryo, and at the insistence of the others, the two of them prepare to blow out their candles and make a wish.
Ryo extinguishes all of his in two big puffs, and as the tiny flames flicker out and die before his eyes, he wishes for another safe year with these people by his side, so that 365 days from now, he will be able to find himself in another day exactly like this one.
He watches the elegantly curling lines of light gray smoke spiral up from the extinguished wicks towards the ceiling and thinks they feel a lot like a promise.
After that Yamapi pours the champagne, and as they all sit down to eat dinner together, he asks the two birthday boys what it is they wished for today.
“All the happiness in the world,” Tegoshi responds without hesitation, because it’s what he wishes for every year.
Ryo nods and simply says, “Same.”
END
EDITS? I only had a few hours today SOB.