JE/NEWS- "A Glass Half Empty"
Title: A Glass Half Empty
Universe: JE/ NewS ( Gov AU)
Theme/Topic: Uchi fic with Yamanade references
Rating: PG
Character/Pairing/s: NEWS (appearances by Tackey and mentions of Kame)
Warnings/Spoilers: More bad procedural stuffs.
Word Count: 5,115
Summary: Following the events of “Still Miles to Go”- A glass half empty is also half full.
Dedication: for ceathair and help_haiti. Thanks again for bidding and donating, dear. I hope this is at least close to what you wanted. ^_^ Also, a huge and very special thanks to pipsqueaks for the edit, listening to me whine, and fixing everything that was wrong.
A/N: Sorry for glossing over Isshun and Osen like I did in regards to the big Uchi comeback, but you know, simplify, simplify. Or something. Yamanade is his most well-merchandised return anyway, right? I don’t know. Also, this was the story that would not end.
Disclaimer: No harm or infringement intended.
He was in a coma for a very long time.
It’s the thing that everyone keeps telling him over and over and over again whenever they see him, as if, because he’s been in a coma all this time, he can no longer understand anything anymore, not even simple words in simple Japanese.
But he does understand.
He was in a coma for a very long time and he’s awake now.
He gets it.
He also gets that he’s forgotten a lot of things in between too. That is the other thing they keep telling him over and over and over again, obviously because they think he doesn’t understand what amnesia means, just like they don’t think he understands what it means to have been in a coma.
But he does.
He suffered a severe head injury. Because of that, he doesn’t remember things, has forgotten them completely.
Amnesia.
It’s a simple enough concept; just because he’s got amnesia doesn’t make him stupid.
The last thing he remembers-really remembers- is the smell of the muddy field full of dead grass back at the Osaka training facility, as he’d been lining up with all of the other cadet trainees in his recruiting class, standing out in the cold and wet so he could learn the basic makeup of his firearm. He remembers exactly how cold and exactly how wet it had been that morning, remembers how he’d whined between chattering teeth to his neighbor about his toes freezing off when his drill master wasn’t listening. He remembers how he’d looked down the scope of his rifle a little while later and felt right at home despite the chill, like the weapon was just another extension of his own arm to control at will.
He remembers the sound of gunfire and the gray skies of one ridiculously cold morning in Osaka, a long time ago. Like it was yesterday.
Everything after that is gone.
He knows the years are in there, somewhere, that he’d lived them and they’d happened to him somehow. He knows this only because every time the TV or the radio or his phone turns on, they say the same thing over and over again. 2010. The year is 2010.
Sometimes he can’t believe his cold gray Osaka morning was more than half a decade ago.
But he understands that it was, and that the only memory that follows that one is the feeling of waking to the steady beeping of his heart monitor and the crackling of tumbling potato chips, of looking up to see a picture full of strangers resting at his bedside like a silent, unknown guardian.
The things between are gone.
All of them.
They keep telling him that over and over again too, like he’ll remember them the minute he fully understands that he’s really forgotten them.
He doesn’t.
He’s tried and tried and tried, but every face that comes in and looks at him with a mixture of loss and pain and concern only serves to frustrate him, because he can’t remember.
He’s blank; those years-as far as he is concerned-are just empty.
And every time they look at him-hopeful and yearning and carefully balanced on the edge of joy and frustration-he only feels the pressure of not being able to say he knows them back.
All he can ever seem to tell them is, “I’m sorry.”
Then there is silence, and disappointment, and Uchi wonders what he did wrong, why he only feels horrible about the years he’s lost when he’s looking at them.
More than anything, he wishes he didn’t have to see their faces when they’re like that.
~~~~~
The person called Koyama tries the hardest; he comes and visits all the time and brings pictures and videos. He tells stories to help Uchi remember them, tries to fill up those empty years that had leaked out of him after all this time.
Uchi smiles at some of the antics he sees; this week it is blurry cell phone footage of Koyama and the-part-of-himself-that-he-lost on a shopping trip in a familiar neighborhood in Osaka. On the screen, Uchi sees the part-of-himself-that-he-lost trying to teach the-Koyama-of-yore how to bargain with fierce obaahans at their stalls as the cell phone camera rolls cheerfully in his hand.
“That was me,” Uchi murmurs, when he sees.
“That is you,” Koyama insists, eyes big and hopeful again, trying so hard to fill up the empty part of Uchi with the things he knows. Like sharing part of the memories that fill his own head will suddenly fill Uchi’s as well.
Uchi just sighs. “I’m sorry,” he says eventually, and shakes his head.
Koyama’s face falls, hopes dashed once more, and he turns to look down at the floor. “It’s not Ucchan’s fault,” he says after a beat, and the way his eyes are at that moment make Uchi feel like half a person. “Maybe next time, right?”
“Maybe,” Uchi answers, even as he feels the fragments of himself that Koyama is so desperately trying to stuff back into him slowly start to leak out again.
On the screen, the Uchi that Uchi doesn’t know and Koyama five years removed eat okonomiyaki and make fun of Kato-kun together.
~~~~~
The person called Masuda-kun tries a different method with him; he always sits down next to Uchi and proudly points out all the numerous scars on his own arms and legs, the ones so small Uchi probably never would have noticed them on his own. “This one was from when I went to Taiwan,” Masuda-kun says, before pointing to another one along his arm and saying, “This is from America.”
Uchi hadn’t understood what the point of it all was at first, at least, not until Masuda-kun had taken Uchi’s hand in his and traced a scar on it that Uchi hadn’t even known he’d had; it’s a long, thin line of pink on the inside of his arm, nearly faded now but not completely, never completely. “You got this in Hawaii.” He traces it with his finger and Uchi flinches instinctively, though he isn’t sure why. Masuda-kun smiles a little when he sees, sadly. “Part of you remembers,” he says.
Uchi doesn’t say anything back, because he thinks that whole “your mind has forgotten but your body remembers” shtick doesn’t do anyone any good, because it’s just instinct; it doesn’t really mean anything.
The knife wound-it looks like a knife wound-is still one of the things that Uchi lost, one that he isn’t sure he’ll ever get back again.
But Masuda-kun doesn’t quite seem to understand that, and as he catalogues the other scrapes and injuries they’d accumulated between the two of them for Uchi, Uchi starts to feel like maybe some things are best forgotten after all.
~~~~~
Yamashita-san thinks that memories lie in the heart of a person, not in the mind. “Your heart was protected,” the team leader insists whenever he has the time to take Uchi out for lunch, eating heartily while Uchi tries to make sense of his vague words (that don’t really mean anything) and his even vaguer facial expressions.
They usually finish their meals in silence, sitting across from each other while Yamashita-san tries to convince Uchi to “listen to his heart” and Uchi wonders if he should say something about being sick of eating yakiniku all the time.
To be honest, he isn’t sure what his heart is trying to tell him, if anything.
Uchi always returns from those outings with Yamashita-san worried that something is wrong with it.
~~~~~
Kato-kun brings Uchi books.
“Since there are all sorts of theories about amnesia,” Kato-kun begins over lunch one afternoon, when Uchi would rather be back upstairs, pretending to relearn his basic agent behavioral protocol while watching old episodes of Chubaw Desuyo instead, to find something to make for dinner tonight. “That also means there are all sorts of theories about curing it as well. I was reading…” He pauses here to flip through the pages of a huge psychology tome which looks tabbed and annotated and dog-eared everywhere, “here! It says that you can try to recreate everything in the moment of trauma that caused the memory loss first and then shock the mind into…”
Uchi clears his throat. “Wasn’t I shot in the head?” He self-consciously brushes his hand over the scar, where the wound is hidden strategically by a new (and very becoming) hairstyle that his mother had recommended he try.
Kato-kun blinks at the interruption. Looks wounded. “I didn’t mean we’d shoot you in the head again!” he protests, hotly. “I meant, we’d go back to the warehouse and set you up with your rifle again and see if it…”
Uchi inexplicably wants to throw something at the undercover agent. But that would be weird, throwing things at a stranger, so he just frowns and says, “No,” instead.
Kato-kun frowns back. “Well, you don’t have to say it like that,” he mutters, and Uchi resists the sudden urge to tell him that he looks like a gorilla with his eyebrows furrowed like that.
He bites his tongue.
“Sorry,” he says eventually, and then, because Kato-kun seems to have done all the reading, asks him, “What if my memory never comes back?”
Kato-kun pauses. “Well…that happens sometimes. But it’s really rare so I don’t think…”
“What if?” Uchi persists, and gets his answer exactly how he’d expected to.
Kato-kun’s expression turns lost and disappointed, all the big words and fancy theories he’d learned from the book resting on his lap suddenly rendered moot as he begins to absently run his finger along the edge of the pages instead.
“I don’t know,” he admits.
Uchi reaches over and closes the book.
~~~~~
Nishikido-kun always seems to have something dark around the edges of his eyes when he looks at Uchi; it’s the kind of heartbreak that makes Uchi wonder-briefly-if what he’d lost had been as vast as a universe after all, even though, no matter what anyone does or says, he doesn’t feel a hole quite that big inside of him when he thinks about all of it.
Today he feels those eyes following him as he runs as fast as he can go for as far as he can go on the agency’s indoor track, while an administrative aide observes his progress in the background, writing down notes about Uchi’s improving physical condition as he trains over the next few weeks, trying to get back into full working form.
“What?” Uchi pants after he can’t stand it anymore, stopping beside Nishikido-kun under the guise of getting a drink of water. “Do I run funny or something?”
Nishikido-kun shakes his head. “Just slow,” he manages, sounding grumpy. “I think you actually gained weight in the hospital.”
Uchi scowls. “Are you calling me fat?”
The other sniper shakes his head at that, looking embarrassed, looking horribly awkward somehow. A conversation between strangers who aren’t, not exactly. “I always thought you could use some extra weight anyway,” he tells Uchi eventually, eyes trained determinedly on the ground.
Uchi finishes his water and goes back to running after that, while Nishikido-kun returns to his work; Uchi wonders if there could possibly be anything more complicated in the world than having a life you can’t remember.
~~~~~
Tegoshi-kun started off the same as everyone else had, with those hopeful, desperate eyes and that naked desire on his face chanting remember the minute he’d come face to face with Uchi; there had even been a moment of desperate physical clinging, but unlike Koyama, the youngest agent had stopped the second that Uchi had raised his voice and asked him who the hell he was, and demanded-in a flurry of embarrassment and confusion- to know how they knew each other well enough for hugs like that when they are both obviously guys.
The hacker had gone silent for a moment after that, and then looked helpless as he’d said, “I’m glad Uchi-kun is finally awake.”
After that he’d become thoughtful and quiet, which to Uchi, had been- for some inexplicable reason- as troubling as the others’ constant fawning and questions, just in a different way.
Nowadays Tegoshi-kun usually tags along with either Koyama or Kato-kun or Masuda-kun when they visit, sitting in the background with his lips pursed and not saying or doing much at all. It’s odd, but Uchi notices that he never asks, “do you remember?” or starts a sentence with, “there was this one time where we…” like everyone else.
All he ever seems to say is, “What’ve you been up to lately?” or “Want to play soccer?” or a combination of both; Uchi wonders if it’s some sneaky tactic to help him remember if he ever enjoyed playing soccer at all (which he’s fairly sure he didn’t).
“Tegoshi is weird,” Uchi finds himself saying one day to Kato-kun over lunch, completely at random.
Kato-kun doesn’t seem to think it’s as random as all that; he simply snorts and says, “You’re telling me.”
~~~~~
After many months of strenuous physical recuperation and psychological evaluation, Nishikido-kun is the one who ends up taking Uchi out one afternoon, to put a rifle in his hands again.
They don’t talk much, but they take turns shooting the crap out of a dented up tin can 100 meters away, on a dry, dead-grass field in the middle of nowhere.
Even if he can’t remember what the other sniper’s face looks like without having to turn and see it first, Uchi does see the little tin can ping with the force of his shot in the distance and can’t help but feel like he can still do this. If nothing else this, the work, has stayed with him somehow.
It starts to rain a little while later, and as the two of them are running as fast as they can back to where they’d parked the car, Uchi whines about the cold and how much he hates Tokyo without thinking. When he does, he catches the ghost of a smile on Nishikido-kun’s brooding features, before it’s smothered by something else again and the older sniper starts loading their weapon cases back into the truck.
On the ride back to the city those shadows slowly return to their place around the edges of Nishikido-kun’s eyes, tired and angry and thankful all at once somehow, a mixture of unfathomable things that Uchi is-admittedly-glad he can’t feel in like.
They look horrible.
“I’m…” he begins, and wants to say sorry again, just like does to all the others, perfunctory and empty.
“Don’t,” Nishikido-kun interrupts, staring straight ahead on the dirt road as they slowly roll back to civilization through the downpour. “If you did alright, Takizawa-san wanted me to tell you to report to him on Monday.”
Uchi closes his mouth and closes his eyes in relief, feeling all out of I’m sorry now anyway. He thinks, at least I still have the work.
“You’re a good shot,” he tells Nishikido-kun instead, after a few minutes, and earns that small, ghost of a smile again in return.
“So are you,” Nishikido-kun says.
In that moment, Uchi realizes that even if everything else from the last five years is gone, it feels like-at the very least- the two of them will always have that.
~~~~~
On Monday morning, Uchi reports to Takizawa-san as requested, bright and early and somehow, incredibly anxious.
Takizawa-san smiles at him, like he knows exactly what Uchi is thinking.
“So,” he begins, conversationally, “are you ready to get back into action?”
Uchi nods. “I think so.” Pause. “I mean, I passed the physical examination last month and I aced all the protocol tests. And…and Dr. Aizawa cleared me mentally.”
Takizawa-san arches an eyebrow. “Even though you still don’t remember anything?”
Uchi looks determined. “I can still do the work.”
Takizawa-san’s smile broadens, but at the same time, feels inscrutable to the young sniper. “I agree,” he answers, leaning back in his chair. “And to be honest, orders came down from on high to put you back on the active roster today regardless of how I feel about it. It’s still on limited rotation for now, but it’s something.”
Uchi feels his shoulders slump in relief. “Thank you.” If they hadn’t given him this back, if they hadn’t given him his job, his dream back, he thinks he really would be completely empty, that there would be nothing left for him to cling to in both his past and his future.
Takizawa-san seems to understand the relief, the importance of the job to men like them above all else. “We’ll start slow,” he says eventually, and holds up an innocuous looking little manila folder with instructions inside. “I want you to do a little backup work with Kamenashi-kun and Tegoshi-kun for the next few weeks. Apparently some rich, important lady’s niece has been targeted by a creepy foreign prince and some diet members interested in this rich, important lady’s land agreed to bring some of our guys in to play security escort to keep her happy.”
Uchi blinks. “That…seems like a strange combination. From what I know, anyway.”
Takizawa-san shrugs. “Well, we don’t know how this shady prince guy operates. We thought it’d be best to cover all the bases.”
He hands Uchi the file. “You can read up on the details here.”
Uchi nods and takes the file.
As he does, he can’t help but feel like this is the start of something somehow, all over again and for the first time both at once.
~~~~~
Two days later, Uchi’s mission begins.
Tegoshi is there, happily sitting at his computer, setting up an advanced motion detection system in the vast mansion they will be staying at over the next few days (or weeks, depending), while in the corner, Kamenashi-kun insistently questions the very rich, very important lady’s terrified niece about why some guy would want to be a creepy jerk to her.
The niece hides her head in her cowl-Uchi can’t believe she’s wearing a cowl- and screams at Kamenashi-kun to stop looking at her and to please leave her alone.
Uchi sits in the background observing it all while wearing an outfit that Kamenashi-kun had apparently borrowed from Nakamaru-kun that gives Uchi the right “college student” type of feel that their cover IDs require. He isn’t sure how he feels about all of this.
“So…what have you been up to lately, Oda-kun?” Tegoshi asks him suddenly, right after he watches Kamenashi-kun gets head-butted in the face by the twitchy niece and is lying on the floor clutching his forehead.
Uchi blinks. “Not much,” he answers, perfunctorily, still staring at Kamenashi-kun and the girl as she tries to get away from his endless interrogation.
Tegoshi beams. “I see,” he replies, not really listening to Uchi anyway as the girl’s yelling gets more and more shrill in the background, “Well, I’m about to test something, so please don’t be surprised when it happens, okay?”
Uchi nods. “Sure.”
A second later, the mansion’s lights all go out.
A second after that, a random bolt of electricity flashes outside with a flash and the sound of thunder, as Uchi’s nostrils fill with the stinging scent of ozone before the lights flicker on again.
“Dammit!” Kamenashi-kun curses, when the electricity returns and he discovers that Sunako-chan has used the brief cover of darkness to make her escape.
“What the hell was that? The motion detection system?” Uchi asks, wide-eyed as he stares at Tegoshi behind his computer.
“The motion detection system’s security system,” Tegoshi chirps back vaguely, and continues to type a few things into his laptop thoughtfully. “It’s hard to pinpoint my aim though; I think I hit a tree just now instead of my test target.”
Uchi chokes. “You have something like that armed to shoot and you can’t aim it right? You’ll kill someone!”
Tegoshi blinks. “Well, it shouldn’t have enough voltage to do that. It’s more like a…tazer.” Pause. “Maybe two.” Pause, frown. “How many volts are in a tazer again? I tweak all of mine so I always forget the default.”
Not comforted very much at all by any of this, Uchi stands and marches over to the hacker, peering over his computer with him. “Why can’t you aim it?”
He sees a complicated mess of programming language on the screen in front of him. Stares.
Tegoshi coughs and switches screens to the actual user interface. On it, a three-dimensional green-grid pops up, marked off with incredibly detailed models of the property, its gardens, walks, and drives. Each X-Y-Z intersection is marked off with a corresponding letter, number, and then Roman numeral. Uchi notices how the models of the trees and plants all shift periodically, with the movement of the wind or when the rest of the security team walks by.
“It has trouble adjusting to the pinpoint accuracy I want,” Tegoshi admits, eventually. “The test target is programmed to move around like a person would so I can try to catch it, but it seems to be too quick for the computer. Once the computer runs the process and takes in all the possible variables, everything in real time is already different. The way the plants and things move seem to confuse it too, but it’s definitely a factor I have to take into account, or the targeting system will just be firing at anything that moves ne.”
Uchi shakes his head at the complexity of Tegoshi’s experiment. “This is the sort of thing only humans can do, isn’t it?” he says, and looks at the on-screen coordinates for the test target, marked by a red circle on the screen. “Switch it to manual.”
Tegoshi eyes him, then shrugs mentally and punches in a few commands on the computer before yielding the mouse to Uchi.
Uchi watches its randomized, unsystematic movements, the way it slips in and out of cover from the building walls, the trees, the statues on the property. After a minute, he clicks the mouse, just as the red dot slides under the cover of some bushes.
The lights flicker again, the sky flashes, and then the screen starts blinking with the words “Target eliminated.”
Uchi looks satisfied. “There’s no way a computer can think like a person,” he concludes, arms crossed.
Tegoshi grins. “Eh, so Uchi must be good at video games,” he says, looking thoughtful.
Uchi blinks. And not for the first time, wonders if that means something else altogether. “Was I?” he asks his former teammate cautiously, after a beat.
Tegoshi’s brow furrows. He doesn’t say anything for a while, before sighing and admitting, “You know… I can’t remember.”
A moment.
And then they both inexplicably start laughing. “Me too,” Uchi admits around a grin, and the two of them stay like that-just cracking up- until Kamenashi-kun asks them what’s so funny.
“Nothing!” they both say in unison, and in a moment of perfect tandem, realize that Kame probably wouldn’t get it anyway.
That night, on their watch, Tegoshi sits at the mansion’s security station with the motion detection system on the computer in front of him while Uchi borrows his DSi and plays Monster Hunter nearby.
In those quiet hours, the both of them learn that yes, Uchi is pretty good at video games.
Whether it’s because he used to be good before doesn’t really matter.
And inexplicably, as the sun starts to come up over the horizon that morning, Uchi feels that empty part of himself starting to fill up for the first time since he woke up, with something that isn’t a fragment of what he lost, but rather, pieces of something completely new.
For a little while, the past is just the past.
~~~~~
After it is established that the creepy prince’s creepy overtures towards Sunako-chan were just the acts of one horribly awkward person trying to ask another horribly awkward person out on a date, the team gratefully returns to the familiar, daily grind of taking real cases and protecting real people.
Tegoshi and Kamenashi do, anyway. For Uchi of course, a return to the office without another task waiting for him simply means that it is time to push the last few weeks of comfort he found in keeping busy alongside Tegoshi and Kamenashi aside, in lieu of facing more pressing questions about the future and being forced to search for more parts of a past he doesn’t want to open up again, not completely.
The first morning back, Takizawa-san calls Uchi into his office again.
“How was it?” he asks, voice friendly but eyes probing.
Uchi coughs. “Fine. I mean, mission complete, right?”
“Right,” Takizawa-san agrees. “But what I mean was… how was it, working with those two?”
Uchi thinks back on it and wants to say comfortable, because it was, though he isn’t sure why. Maybe it was because Kamenashi had no expectations of him, no preconceived notions or ties to his past. All he’d wanted was for Uchi to do his job.
And maybe it was comfortable because Tegoshi doesn’t seem to have the attention span to live in anything but the present moment; he takes what’s right there in front of him and deals with it without lingering on the before or the after.
Maybe it was because Uchi had a complete, welcome moment of not, I’m back, exactly, but perhaps more like, I’m here, as he’d stood in that mansion and figured everything out for the three of them, because Kamenashi had been knocked unconscious from a well-placed kick to the face courtesy of their not-so-distressed damsel and Tegoshi had been frantically trying to fix whatever bug had caused the security system to start randomly shooting down stray bolts of lightening in sync with Sunako-chan’s furious screams.
Or maybe it was a combination of everything and all of that, but when he thinks about the job, Uchi feels satisfied with it. Happy, even.
When he speaks, all he can manage to say to Takizawa-kun- out of all of those thoughts and emotions and memories- is a sheepish, quiet, “It was fun.”
But then again, it looks like that’s all he needed to say anyway.
Takizawa-san’s eyes crinkle a bit at the corners when he hears and he reaches out and pats Uchi on the shoulder. “Welcome back, agent,” he says, and Uchi finally feels himself relaxing in his chair. “I’ll be tagging you for a complete return to active duty immediately.”
Uchi feels something a lot like elation.
And then, as realization hits, something very, very different as well. He swallows. “Complete return? Does that mean… will I… will I also be returning to my…teams?”
Takizawa-san hesitates. Then sighs. “No,” he answers, eventually. “You won’t be. It’s been too long already. They’ve…well, I think they’ve gelled. Throwing you into the mix would just complicate things for everyone at this point.”
Uchi isn’t sure how to respond to that. On the one hand there is some disappointment; he wonders if he is not being allowed back to them because of his own shortcomings, because of his own inability to return to how he used to be, who he was before he forgot everything.
On the other hand, there is also something that can only be called a tremendous feeling of relief.
Because having forgotten, having been so long separated, part of him knows that this new him-the him of right now-would have been crushed somehow, by the weight of all that raw expectation.
He’s learned over the past few months that the incredible faith he sees in their eyes whenever they look at him is too heavy a load for him to bear alone.
“Thank you,” he says to Takizawa-san, eventually.
The older agent nods, and as they shake hands, Uchi takes a deep breath and silently leaves the office.
~~~~~
When he arrives to his old office on NEWS’s floor a few minutes later, all he can do is tell all the hope-filled eyes that are waiting there for him, “I’m sorry.”
Part of him is.
After that there is silence, and disappointment, and though he isn’t quite sure why, Uchi realizes again that he only feels the empty void of the years he’s lost when he’s looking at them.
He thinks that maybe this means it’s time to look somewhere else altogether-perhaps to the future instead- and starts to pack away his desk so he can move away from his place here; he’ll be going downstairs from now on instead, to work with the rest of the junior agents Takizawa-san is placing him with for the time being.
He won’t be returning to NEWS today, and he probably never will.
The members all wordlessly watch him as this slowly starts to sink in, and as he starts to put his files away, each of them- himself included- stands silent, thoughtful as to what exactly, is supposed to come for the seven of them after this.
But then Tegoshi is there beside him, helping him pack. Koyama then too, and then Nishikido-kun and Kato-kun and before long, everyone else eventually, reluctantly, joins in.
“Well, Ucchan will do good wherever he is, right?” Koyama chuckles gently, and smiles encouragingly at Uchi as he helps him empty out his messy desk drawers.
“Well,” Shige corrects automatically, while wrapping up pencils with a rubber band to keep them together during the journey downstairs. “He’ll do well wherever he is.”
“Because his heart is strong,” Yamapi agrees simply, pumping his fist and smiling vaguely. “Right?”
“Right!” Massu agrees, very seriously. “Cardio is important ne.”
“Everyone just shut up for a little while,” Ryo mutters irately when the conversation starts to get more and more stupid, the sniper holding a beat up old pencil sharpener in his hands, eyes determinedly staring straight at it and nowhere else. The others instantly comply, looking sheepish, and when Uchi suddenly feels laughter start to bubble up from somewhere inside of himself, he realizes it’s familiar and warm.
He thanks them once they’re finished putting everything away and heads back to the elevators with his belongings tucked in a box under his arm, thinking that even though he can’t remember exactly what happened in the past, he knows now that he doesn’t have to. From here, he can only fill that empty part of himself up with new things, with the things yet to come.
So far, he has learned that he is pretty good at video games and excellent at his job.
He’s learned that a team called NEWS is full of some pretty good guys.
It’s not a bad start.
END
Seriously guys, sorry for the spam today. ORZ
Universe: JE/ NewS ( Gov AU)
Theme/Topic: Uchi fic with Yamanade references
Rating: PG
Character/Pairing/s: NEWS (appearances by Tackey and mentions of Kame)
Warnings/Spoilers: More bad procedural stuffs.
Word Count: 5,115
Summary: Following the events of “Still Miles to Go”- A glass half empty is also half full.
Dedication: for ceathair and help_haiti. Thanks again for bidding and donating, dear. I hope this is at least close to what you wanted. ^_^ Also, a huge and very special thanks to pipsqueaks for the edit, listening to me whine, and fixing everything that was wrong.
A/N: Sorry for glossing over Isshun and Osen like I did in regards to the big Uchi comeback, but you know, simplify, simplify. Or something. Yamanade is his most well-merchandised return anyway, right? I don’t know. Also, this was the story that would not end.
Disclaimer: No harm or infringement intended.
He was in a coma for a very long time.
It’s the thing that everyone keeps telling him over and over and over again whenever they see him, as if, because he’s been in a coma all this time, he can no longer understand anything anymore, not even simple words in simple Japanese.
But he does understand.
He was in a coma for a very long time and he’s awake now.
He gets it.
He also gets that he’s forgotten a lot of things in between too. That is the other thing they keep telling him over and over and over again, obviously because they think he doesn’t understand what amnesia means, just like they don’t think he understands what it means to have been in a coma.
But he does.
He suffered a severe head injury. Because of that, he doesn’t remember things, has forgotten them completely.
Amnesia.
It’s a simple enough concept; just because he’s got amnesia doesn’t make him stupid.
The last thing he remembers-really remembers- is the smell of the muddy field full of dead grass back at the Osaka training facility, as he’d been lining up with all of the other cadet trainees in his recruiting class, standing out in the cold and wet so he could learn the basic makeup of his firearm. He remembers exactly how cold and exactly how wet it had been that morning, remembers how he’d whined between chattering teeth to his neighbor about his toes freezing off when his drill master wasn’t listening. He remembers how he’d looked down the scope of his rifle a little while later and felt right at home despite the chill, like the weapon was just another extension of his own arm to control at will.
He remembers the sound of gunfire and the gray skies of one ridiculously cold morning in Osaka, a long time ago. Like it was yesterday.
Everything after that is gone.
He knows the years are in there, somewhere, that he’d lived them and they’d happened to him somehow. He knows this only because every time the TV or the radio or his phone turns on, they say the same thing over and over again. 2010. The year is 2010.
Sometimes he can’t believe his cold gray Osaka morning was more than half a decade ago.
But he understands that it was, and that the only memory that follows that one is the feeling of waking to the steady beeping of his heart monitor and the crackling of tumbling potato chips, of looking up to see a picture full of strangers resting at his bedside like a silent, unknown guardian.
The things between are gone.
All of them.
They keep telling him that over and over again too, like he’ll remember them the minute he fully understands that he’s really forgotten them.
He doesn’t.
He’s tried and tried and tried, but every face that comes in and looks at him with a mixture of loss and pain and concern only serves to frustrate him, because he can’t remember.
He’s blank; those years-as far as he is concerned-are just empty.
And every time they look at him-hopeful and yearning and carefully balanced on the edge of joy and frustration-he only feels the pressure of not being able to say he knows them back.
All he can ever seem to tell them is, “I’m sorry.”
Then there is silence, and disappointment, and Uchi wonders what he did wrong, why he only feels horrible about the years he’s lost when he’s looking at them.
More than anything, he wishes he didn’t have to see their faces when they’re like that.
~~~~~
The person called Koyama tries the hardest; he comes and visits all the time and brings pictures and videos. He tells stories to help Uchi remember them, tries to fill up those empty years that had leaked out of him after all this time.
Uchi smiles at some of the antics he sees; this week it is blurry cell phone footage of Koyama and the-part-of-himself-that-he-lost on a shopping trip in a familiar neighborhood in Osaka. On the screen, Uchi sees the part-of-himself-that-he-lost trying to teach the-Koyama-of-yore how to bargain with fierce obaahans at their stalls as the cell phone camera rolls cheerfully in his hand.
“That was me,” Uchi murmurs, when he sees.
“That is you,” Koyama insists, eyes big and hopeful again, trying so hard to fill up the empty part of Uchi with the things he knows. Like sharing part of the memories that fill his own head will suddenly fill Uchi’s as well.
Uchi just sighs. “I’m sorry,” he says eventually, and shakes his head.
Koyama’s face falls, hopes dashed once more, and he turns to look down at the floor. “It’s not Ucchan’s fault,” he says after a beat, and the way his eyes are at that moment make Uchi feel like half a person. “Maybe next time, right?”
“Maybe,” Uchi answers, even as he feels the fragments of himself that Koyama is so desperately trying to stuff back into him slowly start to leak out again.
On the screen, the Uchi that Uchi doesn’t know and Koyama five years removed eat okonomiyaki and make fun of Kato-kun together.
~~~~~
The person called Masuda-kun tries a different method with him; he always sits down next to Uchi and proudly points out all the numerous scars on his own arms and legs, the ones so small Uchi probably never would have noticed them on his own. “This one was from when I went to Taiwan,” Masuda-kun says, before pointing to another one along his arm and saying, “This is from America.”
Uchi hadn’t understood what the point of it all was at first, at least, not until Masuda-kun had taken Uchi’s hand in his and traced a scar on it that Uchi hadn’t even known he’d had; it’s a long, thin line of pink on the inside of his arm, nearly faded now but not completely, never completely. “You got this in Hawaii.” He traces it with his finger and Uchi flinches instinctively, though he isn’t sure why. Masuda-kun smiles a little when he sees, sadly. “Part of you remembers,” he says.
Uchi doesn’t say anything back, because he thinks that whole “your mind has forgotten but your body remembers” shtick doesn’t do anyone any good, because it’s just instinct; it doesn’t really mean anything.
The knife wound-it looks like a knife wound-is still one of the things that Uchi lost, one that he isn’t sure he’ll ever get back again.
But Masuda-kun doesn’t quite seem to understand that, and as he catalogues the other scrapes and injuries they’d accumulated between the two of them for Uchi, Uchi starts to feel like maybe some things are best forgotten after all.
~~~~~
Yamashita-san thinks that memories lie in the heart of a person, not in the mind. “Your heart was protected,” the team leader insists whenever he has the time to take Uchi out for lunch, eating heartily while Uchi tries to make sense of his vague words (that don’t really mean anything) and his even vaguer facial expressions.
They usually finish their meals in silence, sitting across from each other while Yamashita-san tries to convince Uchi to “listen to his heart” and Uchi wonders if he should say something about being sick of eating yakiniku all the time.
To be honest, he isn’t sure what his heart is trying to tell him, if anything.
Uchi always returns from those outings with Yamashita-san worried that something is wrong with it.
~~~~~
Kato-kun brings Uchi books.
“Since there are all sorts of theories about amnesia,” Kato-kun begins over lunch one afternoon, when Uchi would rather be back upstairs, pretending to relearn his basic agent behavioral protocol while watching old episodes of Chubaw Desuyo instead, to find something to make for dinner tonight. “That also means there are all sorts of theories about curing it as well. I was reading…” He pauses here to flip through the pages of a huge psychology tome which looks tabbed and annotated and dog-eared everywhere, “here! It says that you can try to recreate everything in the moment of trauma that caused the memory loss first and then shock the mind into…”
Uchi clears his throat. “Wasn’t I shot in the head?” He self-consciously brushes his hand over the scar, where the wound is hidden strategically by a new (and very becoming) hairstyle that his mother had recommended he try.
Kato-kun blinks at the interruption. Looks wounded. “I didn’t mean we’d shoot you in the head again!” he protests, hotly. “I meant, we’d go back to the warehouse and set you up with your rifle again and see if it…”
Uchi inexplicably wants to throw something at the undercover agent. But that would be weird, throwing things at a stranger, so he just frowns and says, “No,” instead.
Kato-kun frowns back. “Well, you don’t have to say it like that,” he mutters, and Uchi resists the sudden urge to tell him that he looks like a gorilla with his eyebrows furrowed like that.
He bites his tongue.
“Sorry,” he says eventually, and then, because Kato-kun seems to have done all the reading, asks him, “What if my memory never comes back?”
Kato-kun pauses. “Well…that happens sometimes. But it’s really rare so I don’t think…”
“What if?” Uchi persists, and gets his answer exactly how he’d expected to.
Kato-kun’s expression turns lost and disappointed, all the big words and fancy theories he’d learned from the book resting on his lap suddenly rendered moot as he begins to absently run his finger along the edge of the pages instead.
“I don’t know,” he admits.
Uchi reaches over and closes the book.
~~~~~
Nishikido-kun always seems to have something dark around the edges of his eyes when he looks at Uchi; it’s the kind of heartbreak that makes Uchi wonder-briefly-if what he’d lost had been as vast as a universe after all, even though, no matter what anyone does or says, he doesn’t feel a hole quite that big inside of him when he thinks about all of it.
Today he feels those eyes following him as he runs as fast as he can go for as far as he can go on the agency’s indoor track, while an administrative aide observes his progress in the background, writing down notes about Uchi’s improving physical condition as he trains over the next few weeks, trying to get back into full working form.
“What?” Uchi pants after he can’t stand it anymore, stopping beside Nishikido-kun under the guise of getting a drink of water. “Do I run funny or something?”
Nishikido-kun shakes his head. “Just slow,” he manages, sounding grumpy. “I think you actually gained weight in the hospital.”
Uchi scowls. “Are you calling me fat?”
The other sniper shakes his head at that, looking embarrassed, looking horribly awkward somehow. A conversation between strangers who aren’t, not exactly. “I always thought you could use some extra weight anyway,” he tells Uchi eventually, eyes trained determinedly on the ground.
Uchi finishes his water and goes back to running after that, while Nishikido-kun returns to his work; Uchi wonders if there could possibly be anything more complicated in the world than having a life you can’t remember.
~~~~~
Tegoshi-kun started off the same as everyone else had, with those hopeful, desperate eyes and that naked desire on his face chanting remember the minute he’d come face to face with Uchi; there had even been a moment of desperate physical clinging, but unlike Koyama, the youngest agent had stopped the second that Uchi had raised his voice and asked him who the hell he was, and demanded-in a flurry of embarrassment and confusion- to know how they knew each other well enough for hugs like that when they are both obviously guys.
The hacker had gone silent for a moment after that, and then looked helpless as he’d said, “I’m glad Uchi-kun is finally awake.”
After that he’d become thoughtful and quiet, which to Uchi, had been- for some inexplicable reason- as troubling as the others’ constant fawning and questions, just in a different way.
Nowadays Tegoshi-kun usually tags along with either Koyama or Kato-kun or Masuda-kun when they visit, sitting in the background with his lips pursed and not saying or doing much at all. It’s odd, but Uchi notices that he never asks, “do you remember?” or starts a sentence with, “there was this one time where we…” like everyone else.
All he ever seems to say is, “What’ve you been up to lately?” or “Want to play soccer?” or a combination of both; Uchi wonders if it’s some sneaky tactic to help him remember if he ever enjoyed playing soccer at all (which he’s fairly sure he didn’t).
“Tegoshi is weird,” Uchi finds himself saying one day to Kato-kun over lunch, completely at random.
Kato-kun doesn’t seem to think it’s as random as all that; he simply snorts and says, “You’re telling me.”
~~~~~
After many months of strenuous physical recuperation and psychological evaluation, Nishikido-kun is the one who ends up taking Uchi out one afternoon, to put a rifle in his hands again.
They don’t talk much, but they take turns shooting the crap out of a dented up tin can 100 meters away, on a dry, dead-grass field in the middle of nowhere.
Even if he can’t remember what the other sniper’s face looks like without having to turn and see it first, Uchi does see the little tin can ping with the force of his shot in the distance and can’t help but feel like he can still do this. If nothing else this, the work, has stayed with him somehow.
It starts to rain a little while later, and as the two of them are running as fast as they can back to where they’d parked the car, Uchi whines about the cold and how much he hates Tokyo without thinking. When he does, he catches the ghost of a smile on Nishikido-kun’s brooding features, before it’s smothered by something else again and the older sniper starts loading their weapon cases back into the truck.
On the ride back to the city those shadows slowly return to their place around the edges of Nishikido-kun’s eyes, tired and angry and thankful all at once somehow, a mixture of unfathomable things that Uchi is-admittedly-glad he can’t feel in like.
They look horrible.
“I’m…” he begins, and wants to say sorry again, just like does to all the others, perfunctory and empty.
“Don’t,” Nishikido-kun interrupts, staring straight ahead on the dirt road as they slowly roll back to civilization through the downpour. “If you did alright, Takizawa-san wanted me to tell you to report to him on Monday.”
Uchi closes his mouth and closes his eyes in relief, feeling all out of I’m sorry now anyway. He thinks, at least I still have the work.
“You’re a good shot,” he tells Nishikido-kun instead, after a few minutes, and earns that small, ghost of a smile again in return.
“So are you,” Nishikido-kun says.
In that moment, Uchi realizes that even if everything else from the last five years is gone, it feels like-at the very least- the two of them will always have that.
~~~~~
On Monday morning, Uchi reports to Takizawa-san as requested, bright and early and somehow, incredibly anxious.
Takizawa-san smiles at him, like he knows exactly what Uchi is thinking.
“So,” he begins, conversationally, “are you ready to get back into action?”
Uchi nods. “I think so.” Pause. “I mean, I passed the physical examination last month and I aced all the protocol tests. And…and Dr. Aizawa cleared me mentally.”
Takizawa-san arches an eyebrow. “Even though you still don’t remember anything?”
Uchi looks determined. “I can still do the work.”
Takizawa-san’s smile broadens, but at the same time, feels inscrutable to the young sniper. “I agree,” he answers, leaning back in his chair. “And to be honest, orders came down from on high to put you back on the active roster today regardless of how I feel about it. It’s still on limited rotation for now, but it’s something.”
Uchi feels his shoulders slump in relief. “Thank you.” If they hadn’t given him this back, if they hadn’t given him his job, his dream back, he thinks he really would be completely empty, that there would be nothing left for him to cling to in both his past and his future.
Takizawa-san seems to understand the relief, the importance of the job to men like them above all else. “We’ll start slow,” he says eventually, and holds up an innocuous looking little manila folder with instructions inside. “I want you to do a little backup work with Kamenashi-kun and Tegoshi-kun for the next few weeks. Apparently some rich, important lady’s niece has been targeted by a creepy foreign prince and some diet members interested in this rich, important lady’s land agreed to bring some of our guys in to play security escort to keep her happy.”
Uchi blinks. “That…seems like a strange combination. From what I know, anyway.”
Takizawa-san shrugs. “Well, we don’t know how this shady prince guy operates. We thought it’d be best to cover all the bases.”
He hands Uchi the file. “You can read up on the details here.”
Uchi nods and takes the file.
As he does, he can’t help but feel like this is the start of something somehow, all over again and for the first time both at once.
~~~~~
Two days later, Uchi’s mission begins.
Tegoshi is there, happily sitting at his computer, setting up an advanced motion detection system in the vast mansion they will be staying at over the next few days (or weeks, depending), while in the corner, Kamenashi-kun insistently questions the very rich, very important lady’s terrified niece about why some guy would want to be a creepy jerk to her.
The niece hides her head in her cowl-Uchi can’t believe she’s wearing a cowl- and screams at Kamenashi-kun to stop looking at her and to please leave her alone.
Uchi sits in the background observing it all while wearing an outfit that Kamenashi-kun had apparently borrowed from Nakamaru-kun that gives Uchi the right “college student” type of feel that their cover IDs require. He isn’t sure how he feels about all of this.
“So…what have you been up to lately, Oda-kun?” Tegoshi asks him suddenly, right after he watches Kamenashi-kun gets head-butted in the face by the twitchy niece and is lying on the floor clutching his forehead.
Uchi blinks. “Not much,” he answers, perfunctorily, still staring at Kamenashi-kun and the girl as she tries to get away from his endless interrogation.
Tegoshi beams. “I see,” he replies, not really listening to Uchi anyway as the girl’s yelling gets more and more shrill in the background, “Well, I’m about to test something, so please don’t be surprised when it happens, okay?”
Uchi nods. “Sure.”
A second later, the mansion’s lights all go out.
A second after that, a random bolt of electricity flashes outside with a flash and the sound of thunder, as Uchi’s nostrils fill with the stinging scent of ozone before the lights flicker on again.
“Dammit!” Kamenashi-kun curses, when the electricity returns and he discovers that Sunako-chan has used the brief cover of darkness to make her escape.
“What the hell was that? The motion detection system?” Uchi asks, wide-eyed as he stares at Tegoshi behind his computer.
“The motion detection system’s security system,” Tegoshi chirps back vaguely, and continues to type a few things into his laptop thoughtfully. “It’s hard to pinpoint my aim though; I think I hit a tree just now instead of my test target.”
Uchi chokes. “You have something like that armed to shoot and you can’t aim it right? You’ll kill someone!”
Tegoshi blinks. “Well, it shouldn’t have enough voltage to do that. It’s more like a…tazer.” Pause. “Maybe two.” Pause, frown. “How many volts are in a tazer again? I tweak all of mine so I always forget the default.”
Not comforted very much at all by any of this, Uchi stands and marches over to the hacker, peering over his computer with him. “Why can’t you aim it?”
He sees a complicated mess of programming language on the screen in front of him. Stares.
Tegoshi coughs and switches screens to the actual user interface. On it, a three-dimensional green-grid pops up, marked off with incredibly detailed models of the property, its gardens, walks, and drives. Each X-Y-Z intersection is marked off with a corresponding letter, number, and then Roman numeral. Uchi notices how the models of the trees and plants all shift periodically, with the movement of the wind or when the rest of the security team walks by.
“It has trouble adjusting to the pinpoint accuracy I want,” Tegoshi admits, eventually. “The test target is programmed to move around like a person would so I can try to catch it, but it seems to be too quick for the computer. Once the computer runs the process and takes in all the possible variables, everything in real time is already different. The way the plants and things move seem to confuse it too, but it’s definitely a factor I have to take into account, or the targeting system will just be firing at anything that moves ne.”
Uchi shakes his head at the complexity of Tegoshi’s experiment. “This is the sort of thing only humans can do, isn’t it?” he says, and looks at the on-screen coordinates for the test target, marked by a red circle on the screen. “Switch it to manual.”
Tegoshi eyes him, then shrugs mentally and punches in a few commands on the computer before yielding the mouse to Uchi.
Uchi watches its randomized, unsystematic movements, the way it slips in and out of cover from the building walls, the trees, the statues on the property. After a minute, he clicks the mouse, just as the red dot slides under the cover of some bushes.
The lights flicker again, the sky flashes, and then the screen starts blinking with the words “Target eliminated.”
Uchi looks satisfied. “There’s no way a computer can think like a person,” he concludes, arms crossed.
Tegoshi grins. “Eh, so Uchi must be good at video games,” he says, looking thoughtful.
Uchi blinks. And not for the first time, wonders if that means something else altogether. “Was I?” he asks his former teammate cautiously, after a beat.
Tegoshi’s brow furrows. He doesn’t say anything for a while, before sighing and admitting, “You know… I can’t remember.”
A moment.
And then they both inexplicably start laughing. “Me too,” Uchi admits around a grin, and the two of them stay like that-just cracking up- until Kamenashi-kun asks them what’s so funny.
“Nothing!” they both say in unison, and in a moment of perfect tandem, realize that Kame probably wouldn’t get it anyway.
That night, on their watch, Tegoshi sits at the mansion’s security station with the motion detection system on the computer in front of him while Uchi borrows his DSi and plays Monster Hunter nearby.
In those quiet hours, the both of them learn that yes, Uchi is pretty good at video games.
Whether it’s because he used to be good before doesn’t really matter.
And inexplicably, as the sun starts to come up over the horizon that morning, Uchi feels that empty part of himself starting to fill up for the first time since he woke up, with something that isn’t a fragment of what he lost, but rather, pieces of something completely new.
For a little while, the past is just the past.
~~~~~
After it is established that the creepy prince’s creepy overtures towards Sunako-chan were just the acts of one horribly awkward person trying to ask another horribly awkward person out on a date, the team gratefully returns to the familiar, daily grind of taking real cases and protecting real people.
Tegoshi and Kamenashi do, anyway. For Uchi of course, a return to the office without another task waiting for him simply means that it is time to push the last few weeks of comfort he found in keeping busy alongside Tegoshi and Kamenashi aside, in lieu of facing more pressing questions about the future and being forced to search for more parts of a past he doesn’t want to open up again, not completely.
The first morning back, Takizawa-san calls Uchi into his office again.
“How was it?” he asks, voice friendly but eyes probing.
Uchi coughs. “Fine. I mean, mission complete, right?”
“Right,” Takizawa-san agrees. “But what I mean was… how was it, working with those two?”
Uchi thinks back on it and wants to say comfortable, because it was, though he isn’t sure why. Maybe it was because Kamenashi had no expectations of him, no preconceived notions or ties to his past. All he’d wanted was for Uchi to do his job.
And maybe it was comfortable because Tegoshi doesn’t seem to have the attention span to live in anything but the present moment; he takes what’s right there in front of him and deals with it without lingering on the before or the after.
Maybe it was because Uchi had a complete, welcome moment of not, I’m back, exactly, but perhaps more like, I’m here, as he’d stood in that mansion and figured everything out for the three of them, because Kamenashi had been knocked unconscious from a well-placed kick to the face courtesy of their not-so-distressed damsel and Tegoshi had been frantically trying to fix whatever bug had caused the security system to start randomly shooting down stray bolts of lightening in sync with Sunako-chan’s furious screams.
Or maybe it was a combination of everything and all of that, but when he thinks about the job, Uchi feels satisfied with it. Happy, even.
When he speaks, all he can manage to say to Takizawa-kun- out of all of those thoughts and emotions and memories- is a sheepish, quiet, “It was fun.”
But then again, it looks like that’s all he needed to say anyway.
Takizawa-san’s eyes crinkle a bit at the corners when he hears and he reaches out and pats Uchi on the shoulder. “Welcome back, agent,” he says, and Uchi finally feels himself relaxing in his chair. “I’ll be tagging you for a complete return to active duty immediately.”
Uchi feels something a lot like elation.
And then, as realization hits, something very, very different as well. He swallows. “Complete return? Does that mean… will I… will I also be returning to my…teams?”
Takizawa-san hesitates. Then sighs. “No,” he answers, eventually. “You won’t be. It’s been too long already. They’ve…well, I think they’ve gelled. Throwing you into the mix would just complicate things for everyone at this point.”
Uchi isn’t sure how to respond to that. On the one hand there is some disappointment; he wonders if he is not being allowed back to them because of his own shortcomings, because of his own inability to return to how he used to be, who he was before he forgot everything.
On the other hand, there is also something that can only be called a tremendous feeling of relief.
Because having forgotten, having been so long separated, part of him knows that this new him-the him of right now-would have been crushed somehow, by the weight of all that raw expectation.
He’s learned over the past few months that the incredible faith he sees in their eyes whenever they look at him is too heavy a load for him to bear alone.
“Thank you,” he says to Takizawa-san, eventually.
The older agent nods, and as they shake hands, Uchi takes a deep breath and silently leaves the office.
~~~~~
When he arrives to his old office on NEWS’s floor a few minutes later, all he can do is tell all the hope-filled eyes that are waiting there for him, “I’m sorry.”
Part of him is.
After that there is silence, and disappointment, and though he isn’t quite sure why, Uchi realizes again that he only feels the empty void of the years he’s lost when he’s looking at them.
He thinks that maybe this means it’s time to look somewhere else altogether-perhaps to the future instead- and starts to pack away his desk so he can move away from his place here; he’ll be going downstairs from now on instead, to work with the rest of the junior agents Takizawa-san is placing him with for the time being.
He won’t be returning to NEWS today, and he probably never will.
The members all wordlessly watch him as this slowly starts to sink in, and as he starts to put his files away, each of them- himself included- stands silent, thoughtful as to what exactly, is supposed to come for the seven of them after this.
But then Tegoshi is there beside him, helping him pack. Koyama then too, and then Nishikido-kun and Kato-kun and before long, everyone else eventually, reluctantly, joins in.
“Well, Ucchan will do good wherever he is, right?” Koyama chuckles gently, and smiles encouragingly at Uchi as he helps him empty out his messy desk drawers.
“Well,” Shige corrects automatically, while wrapping up pencils with a rubber band to keep them together during the journey downstairs. “He’ll do well wherever he is.”
“Because his heart is strong,” Yamapi agrees simply, pumping his fist and smiling vaguely. “Right?”
“Right!” Massu agrees, very seriously. “Cardio is important ne.”
“Everyone just shut up for a little while,” Ryo mutters irately when the conversation starts to get more and more stupid, the sniper holding a beat up old pencil sharpener in his hands, eyes determinedly staring straight at it and nowhere else. The others instantly comply, looking sheepish, and when Uchi suddenly feels laughter start to bubble up from somewhere inside of himself, he realizes it’s familiar and warm.
He thanks them once they’re finished putting everything away and heads back to the elevators with his belongings tucked in a box under his arm, thinking that even though he can’t remember exactly what happened in the past, he knows now that he doesn’t have to. From here, he can only fill that empty part of himself up with new things, with the things yet to come.
So far, he has learned that he is pretty good at video games and excellent at his job.
He’s learned that a team called NEWS is full of some pretty good guys.
It’s not a bad start.
END
Seriously guys, sorry for the spam today. ORZ