JE/KAT-TUN/NEWS- "You Can’t See Me (Because I’m a Ninja)"
Title: You Can’t See Me (Because I’m a Ninja)
Universe: JE/ KAT-TUN/NEWS
Theme/Topic: N/A
Rating: PG-13 for language and mentions of you know, date rape.
Character/Pairing/s: Jin focus (KAT-TUN and NEWS appearances)
Warnings/Spoilers: crack, randomness, stupidity
Word Count: 5,610
Summary: Jin gets roofied.
Dedication: pixisticks’s very late birthday present! But see how I am slowly catching up? My love is obviously not very punctual, but it is still strong, I promise. Also, special thanks to pipsqueaks for letting me run this by her when I was busy banging my head to the keyboard trying to figure out a point.
A/N: I don’t even know.
Disclaimer: No harm or infringement intended.
Jin thinks there must have been something in his drink last night that was not alcohol or ice or a piece of fruit.
Not that he’s saying he was roofied or anything, but rather, he’s saying there was something inside of his drink that was equally as dastardly and sinister as a roofie, the only difference is that it turned him invisible instead of unconscious.
Jin thinks that last night he got roofied by the invisible pill.
Because right now, he is invisible.
Well kind of. He can see the clothes he’s wearing in the mirror; they look like they are floating around in mid-air and that he is a ghost with exceptional urban fashion sense.
He sulks (but he can’t see it). The bartender at that club definitely, definitely gave him something weird.
He just isn’t sure why. Maybe he made the guy mad last night, when he’d gotten a little tipsy at the bar with Yamapi; he gets kind of loud when he gets drunk and earlier that night some girls had come up to him with a tabloid magazine with his picture in it and asked him to please sign, which was really annoying. He may have complained about it more and more the drunker he got, muttering about how he hates looking at that shit and how they’ve got to go to places that make girls check that at the door from now on. Places with standards.
Maybe the bartender had given him the invisible pill to get him to go away, or to stop him from badmouthing his club in front of all the other patrons.
Jin blinks and stops himself from going into hysterics. First of all, when did they invent an invisible pill anyway? Somehow he thinks he would have heard on the news if they did. Do they even exist yet?
Curious, he marches into his bedroom and picks up his cell phone so that he can text message Nakamaru, because Nakamaru is the smartest person whose number he allows himself to keep on his contact list.
His message to his groupmate says, “Is there something you can take that will make you disappear?”
Five minutes later, Nakamaru’s response is, “Ha, ha. Very funny.”
Jin stares at it. “That didn’t answer my question at all!” he says, and in a fit of pique, deletes Nakamaru’s contact information from his phone out of spite. Clearly keeping a smart person’s number in his phonebook did not pay off in this case. He should have used the memory on a model instead.
His stomach rumbles a little while after that, and even though he is still invisible, he decides that he has more important things to deal with at the moment than trying to figure out why his bartender would roofie him with a disappearing drug.
~~~~~
The housekeeping lady is vacuuming the living room when he emerges from his bedroom in search of food.
She’s a nice, older Brazilian woman and Jin is fond of her because she doesn’t care who he is or how many movies he’s been in or what his hair looks like at any one given moment. On the days when she comes in to clean and Jin is still at home, he asks her to teach him Spanish (except she keeps saying it’s not Spanish even though Koki assures Jin that it is).
“Good morning, Yaritza,” he starts, as he stumbles into the room. “Do I look a little invisible to you?”
She doesn’t seem to hear him. He asks again, only louder this time. The vacuum is very noisy, after all.
She still doesn’t hear him.
Jin wonders if that means his voice is invisible too. He tries shouting and waving his hands up and down.
And that is precisely when she looks up from the rug and sees him.
Well, she sees the floating t-shirt and the moving jeans.
To which her response is to scream, make the sign for the cross, and run out of the house even though the vacuum cleaner is still on and being very noisy.
She doesn’t even close the door after her.
Jin blinks. “But you didn’t do the bathroom!” he shouts.
Again, she doesn’t hear him. The vacuum cleaner roars on.
He sighs and goes to nuke himself some breakfast.
~~~~~
Later, when the bellboy, the security guard, and the front desk lady at his building all have the exact same reaction to his floating t-shirt and jeans act that Yaritza had, Jin decides that maybe it is time to ditch the clothes.
No one’s ever screamed and run away from him while he was naked, after all. The only downside is that now he can’t take his phone either, because no pockets.
But if that’s what it takes to get them to stop running away and screaming he’ll just have to do it; right now what he needs is communication.
So he grabs a pen from the front desk, takes a memo pad, and writes down, “I am not a ghost, I promise. I am just invisible today.”
He waits for someone brave to come back into the lobby and read it.
But that doesn’t happen until a little while after lunchtime, when the front desk lady returns to her station, still looking pale and freaked out. She has a monk with her now, one who begins performing an elaborate exorcism ceremony with incense and beads once he sees the floating pen that Jin is still holding. At that point, Jin decides that he should probably stop moving stuff around in his attempts to get some attention, because it might get him sent into the next world instead, if this monk guy is actually up to snuff. He certainly looks bald enough.
Jin sighs and trudges back upstairs to his apartment instead.
“I wonder if I can call out sick from work,” he muses to himself when he looks at the time and remembers that he has to be in sometime this afternoon (he forgets when, exactly).
He texts his manager to see. “I might be sick.”
His manager texts back. “You might be sick?”
“Yes.”
“…you’re not lying to me are you?”
Jin thinks about that and realizes that he’s not actually sick, as far as he knows. Just invisible. That might be a disease, but it might not be at the same time. Does it count as lying if you don’t know you’re doing it?
In the meantime, his manager takes his failure to respond immediately as a bad sign and sends him several more messages in rapid succession:
“Please don’t lie to me. Is it because you don’t like doing the paperwork?”
“All you need to do is sign your name on a few new contracts before five today. I’ll do the rest.”
“Oh god just please come to work.”
“Was Kamenashi-kun rude to you again? I apologize on his behalf.”
“…was it Koki? If it was Koki I apologize on his behalf too.”
“…if it was Ueda I also apologize.”
And so forth and so on.
Jin frowns and hates it when the poor guy grovels. He answers, “Okay, I’m coming in. Just don’t freak out when you see me.”
“Thank you thank you thank you,” is the response, followed by a less grateful, “Remember! By five! Please don’t be drunk.”
Jin rolls his eyes; his first thought on the matter is that this is probably why his manager is already going bald even though he’s not even thirty yet. His second thought is that he should probably take the train to work today, because if the general reaction of the public is to run and scream when they see one measly floating t-shirt and a pair of jeans, then their reaction to seeing the same floating t-shirt and jeans operating a Mercedes Benz will probably be worse somehow (and Jin isn’t a member of NEWS, and therefore would like to refrain from causing more traffic accidents, thanks). He’s so considerate.
But he realizes that his considerateness in taking the train to work also means that he should probably leave now, because public transportation, while convenient for the naked and invisible, is no where near as quick as a really hot foreign car with a big back seat.
“By five,” Jin mutters, and puts his phone down before he leaves his apartment.
He rides the elevator back down, blithely sidesteps the chanting exorcist at the front desk, and heads to the nearest subway station.
~~~~~
Being naked on a train in the middle of the afternoon is a very strange experience for Jin. He has been on the train in the middle of the day before of course, and he has been naked in the middle of the day before as well, but he has never been all three at the same time until today.
He supposes that it is good that it is so crowded right now, and that the high school girl who is currently sitting in his lap is too busy bobbing her head along to the new Lady Gaga song to notice that she’s actually floating about six inches off of the actual seat.
It’s kind of nice that no one is screaming and snapping pictures of him or demanding autographs though.
“Weird day,” Jin says to himself, and starts to bob along with Lady Gaga too.
He wishes it wasn’t so drafty.
~~~~~
When Jin gets to the jimusho he still has a good while before five o’clock. All of his groupmates are already there before him, which he finds strangely unbelievable. He wonders if their manager had groveled to them a lot too (or gotten the assistants to do it).
“I’m here!” he says when he walks into the room, and no one hears him. “I’m early!” he adds, just because.
Koki is eating his lunch and Nakamaru is taking a mock exam online while Kame is reading lines and Ueda stares into space. Taguchi is busy writing down every one of his expenditures for the week in his little checkbook like he doesn’t make more money than the lower echelons of NEWS combined.
Jin finds this all very boring, so he pours extra salt into Koki’s soup when he isn’t looking to see if things get interesting. He always told himself when he was young that if he ever had the power to become invisible, he would use it to pull some awesome pranks and then go peep in the girl’s shower (unfortunately there is no girl’s shower at J&A, only girl’s toilets, and that would be weird and probably unpleasant for everyone).
After the salt in Koki’s miso he goes to hold down the power button on Nakamaru’s laptop so that it shuts down unexpectedly in the middle of his mock exam, then unties Ueda’s shoelaces, then pours another packet of salt down the back of Kame’s pants. For the grand finale, he flicks Taguchi’s head while it’s bent over the coffee table like it is.
“Ugh, too salty,” is all Koki says about his soup when he tastes it again, and then throws the rest away.
“Stupid computer,” Nakamaru mutters to his laptop, and restarts it.
Ueda blinks and wordlessly ties his shoelaces when he notices that they’re untied, while Kame doesn’t stop focusing on his lines even for a second. As for Taguchi, he just smiles and randomly asks, “Did someone throw something at me just now? Was it you, Koki?”
Koki gives him a strange look and then picks up his lunch tray so he can go finish his food next to Nakamaru instead.
Jin sighs. “Boring!” he says, pouting. And he’s supposed to wait around with these chuckleheads until their new sponsors show? Clearly being invisible at 25 is not nearly as cool as it had been in his head, back when he was 15.
He gets up and goes to NEWS’s dressing room.
~~~~~
When he gets there NEWS is in the middle of rehearsing the dance steps for their new song. Jin slips into the room all quiet and stealthy like a ninja and no one sees him (the invisibility probably helps). He thinks he’ll start by messing around with Masuda’s bag; Nakamaru is always complaining about how Masuda hates that.
“And then we’ll switch to a two-three formation and then a cir…”
Ryo gets cut off when Tegoshi inexplicably starts laughing like crazy.
“Is something funny, Tego-nyan?” Koyama asks the youngest member patiently, looking around the room to see if someone’s punking Shige again. No one is, as far as anyone can tell.
Tegoshi, mid-hysterics, just continues to guffaw inexplicably, bracing his cheek against Ryo’s shoulder as he does and unable to actually form words to explain what the heck is so hilarious.
Everyone gives him a weird look.
Jin isn’t sure why, but at that moment, he decides to very quickly leave the room.
~~~~~
“It’s lonely being invisible,” Jin complains to himself ten minutes later because there is no one else to complain to that will hear him. He lingers listlessly around the water fountain and wonders if Nakamaru will notice it if he hijacks his computer and types “HELP ME” on the screen. Nakamaru is still the smartest person he has to talk to on a regular basis; maybe if Nakamaru knows he’s in trouble then he can help him get out of it again.
Jin remembers Nakamaru prattling on one day about how global warming causes habitat loss and habitat loss causes all sorts of species to disappear from the earth. “Like the golden toad!” he’d said, looking as passionate and depressed over a bunch of dead yellow frogs as Jin has ever seen him. Maybe global warming is why Jin has disappeared today too. Like an endangered species only less yellow.
Thoughtful, he asks himself if anyone will be sad if he disappears from the earth forever; at least as sad as Nakamaru was when he found out about the toads.
In the hallway, the clock ticks to five.
~~~~~
At one minute past five, Yamapi pads into the hallway to get a drink of water.
“Pi!” Jin yells, because he can’t help it. If his best friend in the world can’t see him while he’s invisible, then no one can (which makes perfect sense to him somehow).
Yamapi gets a drink of water.
Jin mutters a quick prayer and then kicks him in the butt.
Yamapi yelps and grabs his butt with both hands. “Cut it out, Bakanishi!” he shouts, instinctively, without thinking.
Jin stops. “Pi!!” he exclaims, and feels truly touched that his friend knows it’s him without having to see it.
But then Yamapi stops too. Looks around. “…Jin?” he asks. He peeks cautiously around the other side of the fountain, in case Jin kicked him in the ass and then hid there to try to escape his retaliatory wrath.
Nothing. Yamapi’s brow furrows.
“I’m here!” Jin insists, and kicks Yamapi again. “Here!”
Yamapi hits his head on the fountain spout as a result. “Ow.”
Jin is instantly contrite. “Sorry.”
Yamapi looks weirded out. “Am I on a hidden camera show?” he asks, eventually.
Jin scowls. “NO. I am naked and late for an important meeting with some big corporate guys even though I’m here and I was on time and did you see if that bartender from last night roofied me? I know I was being loud but those girls were really obnoxious and no one can see me.”
Yamapi doesn’t hear him either apparently; he warily turns to leave, still looking for hidden cameras.
Jin, in a fit of desperation, reaches out to grab his shoulder, hoping there won’t be any more screaming and signs of the cross and running away. He shakes Yamapi a little too, like he sometimes does when he’s drunk and crazy.
Yamapi does scream a little, but to his credit, he doesn’t become Christian or flee.
After he’s done screaming he even stops and blinks when he recognizes the shaking. “…Jin?”
Jin forgets that he is naked and hugs his best friend in relief.
~~~~~
At five minutes past five, Jin is sitting in a chair in the middle of NEWS’s dressing room holding Koyama’s cell phone and texting Yamapi messages as fast as his invisible fingers can move (which isn’t very fast because he keeps making mistakes).
NEWS is staring at the floating cell phone across from them and trying very hard to be obedient and do what Leader told them to do (don’t scream or run away or yell about ghosts).
Massu is, however, curled up in the corner with his knees against his chest and rocking.
Tegoshi’s eating a sandwich.
Jin’s message says, “I think I was roofied by the bartender last night.”
Shige reads it over Yamapi’s shoulder. “Roofies don’t work like that,” he snorts, derisively. Apparently he can get over his fear pretty quickly as long as he can say things that make him sound smarter than everyone else in the meantime.
Jin glares (but Shige can’t see it); he texts: “Invisible roofies do.”
Shige makes a noise in the back of his throat like he is going to say something else, but Ryo pinches him in the ribs and makes him shut up.
“How do we fix this, dumbass?” Ryo demands instead, and has those little worry lines at the corners of his eyes that everyone who knows him has already figured out the meaning of.
Jin writes, “I don’t know.”
Tegoshi picks the tomato bits out of his sandwich. “Roofies wear off eventually, don’t they?”
Shige rolls his eyes. “This is not a roofie! Roofies don’t make people invisible.”
“What’re you, a roofie expert?” Ryo asks, irritated.
Shige scowls. “No! I just… never mind. We need to concentrate.”
Koyama is eying the floating cell phone in concern. “Aren’t you cold?” he asks, eventually.
“Yes,” Jin texts, and is glad someone finally noticed.
Koyama goes off to buy him some hot tea.
~~~~~
“Have you seen Akanishi?” an irritated Kame asks, poking his head into NEWS’s dressing room a few minutes later.
Tegoshi waves at him happily; Kame pauses to smile and wave back before his face gets all serious again.
“He’s here,” Yamapi explains.
Kame blinks. “He is?” he looks around. Sees nothing. “Where?”
Yamapi’s brow furrows. “He’s invisible.” He gestures to the chair in front of him.
Kame stares. “Um.”
He notices how the NEWS members present all look very, very troubled.
“Sorry to bother you,” Kame tells them quickly, and ducks out again.
“Found it!” Ryo exclaims, coming back from behind the wardrobe just as Kame shuts the door behind him; Ryo is holding up his cell phone in triumph, and exchanges it with Koyama’s, which Jin had dumped on the table when it ran out of battery just now.
Shige buries his face in his hands. “You have got to be kidding me.”
~~~~~
“Run us through every single moment of last night,” Ryo instructs once Koyama is back with tea and a blanket.
Jin squirms in the chair, and for a second, is actually glad he is invisible right now. He texts, “Went to dinner with Pi. Went to club afterwards. Danced. Drank. Signed some autographs for some really annoying girls. Annoyed the bartender?”
NEWS reads the text, then gives Jin (or the general vicinity of Jin) a long, frustrated look.
They turn to Yamapi instead. “What happened last night?”
Yamapi gets thoughtful. “Everything was pretty normal ne. Though, he did get madder than normal about the girls.”
Jin furiously texts, “Who makes you sign a TABLOID picture of yourself?!”
NEWS reads that understandingly. Koyama tentatively reaches out to pat Jin’s shoulder (he kind of smacks Jin in the arm a little instead, but the gesture is still nice).
Yamapi continues. “Then I bought him some drinks and told him he handled it very well, and that maybe the tabloid was all those girls could afford to buy this week, and that I think he’s really cool looking in every photo he takes no matter what.”
Shige holds up a hand. “Key phrase after a nonlinear segue,” he declares, when he hears.
Everyone else looks confused.
Tegoshi absently says, “Shige wants to know why Yamashita-kun needed to say that last part after all those other parts.”
Yamapi thinks. “Because…” he pauses to snap his fingers, “he said he hated having to look at his own face like that.”
Shige turns triumphant. “Possible cause discovered.”
Jin finds himself clapping on instinct. NEWS really is the smart group.
~~~~~
Several seconds later, Jin realizes something else.
“Do you all live in a world where magical wishes come true all the time and what you just said to me actually seems likely to you?!” he demands.
NEWS members twiddle their thumbs and look anywhere that isn’t Jin’s chair.
~~~~~
“Whatever it is, we don’t know how to fix it still, huh?” Koyama asks nervously a few minutes later.
Jin texts Yamapi an angry message that Yamapi does not deign to read out loud to his members.
Tegoshi kicks his feet in boredom. “But roofies wear off eventually, right?”
“IT WAS NOT A ROOFIE,” the others shout, just as KAT-TUN’s manager throws open the door demanding to know where they’re hiding Jin.
He stares at them after he hears the passionate roofie declaration. “Never mind,” he says, and closes the door again.
~~~~~
At half past five, Jin is looking into a mirror (which he still cannot see himself in) while Shige holds it up in front of his chair and looks expectantly in his direction. “Just say it three times,” the smart member instructs. “Like in the Wizard of Oz.”
“I’m pretty sure she says it more than three times, Shige,” Tegoshi chirps.
Shige scowls. “I meant in the same style.”
Tegoshi laughs. “Oh.”
Jin closes his eyes and takes a deep breath. “I want to see my own face again, I want to see my own face again, I want to see my own face again…”
He opens his eyes.
Still invisible.
“Maybe he actually needs to see himself, Shige,” Yamapi surmises, though he still pats his groupmate on the shoulder for trying hard anyway.
Shige blinks. “But he can’t. Isn’t that the point?”
Koyama whips out a magazine from his bag and flips through it. He finds Jin’s page and puts it in front of him. “There.”
“Please tell me someone gave that to you earlier and you don’t just carry it around with you,” Ryo tells him.
Koyama pouts. “I show them to the juniors and talk about the importance of preparing for photoshoots. They’re visual aids, ne.”
Jin notices that they are; there are notes along the side of his picture that say: “good angle for people with nice necks and double-eyelids,” and “KAT-TUN is good at looking cool so study them if you ever get put in a group marketed the same way.”
It’s kind of flattering and creepy at the same time.
Jin stares at himself.
Cringes a little.
He puts the magazine down and texts, “This is stupid. It definitely won’t work.”
Yamapi texts back, “That was a good picture of you. ^_^” Then he looks expectantly at the chair and the magazine.
Once Yamapi uses that face, Jin sighs and helplessly picks up the magazine again.
~~~~~
“I don’t get it,” Shige mutters sometime later. “If I had that face I’d get in as many pictures as I possibly could. Even the ones the tourists take all over the city! Unbelievable.”
Koyama nods knowingly.
Jin texts Yamapi again feeling strangely mortified. “I can hear them.”
Yamapi smiles peacefully and responds, “They know.”
~~~~~
At forty minutes past the hour, KAT-TUN’s manager bursts into the room again, looking much more manic this time. “Okay look, pretend I’m not here. I don’t care about your date rape discussions I just really, really need to look for Akanishi-kun. I told him to be here at five because the meeting’s really at six and that means we have twenty minutes to find him before the suits show up and he’s not answering his phone.”
He stops when he sees the floating magazine. Asks, “Is that magazine floating?”
He goes completely white as a sheet after that, and Jin braces himself, waiting for the screaming and signs of the cross and running away that inevitably follow.
But then, “Abrakadabra!” Tegoshi blurts suddenly, waving his arms mystically in the direction of the magazine.
Ryo elbows Jin in the arm then, and makes him drop it.
The magazine hits the ground.
The rest of NEWS moves to applaud Tegoshi obligingly. “Neat magic trick, Tego-nyan!” Koyama exclaims, a bit too shrilly. “It looked really real, ne! Right?”
“Really real!” Yamapi echoes.
Tegoshi bows. “Thank you, thank you. I’ve been practicing. For my next trick, I will cut Shige in half.”
“Oi!” Shige shouts.
KAT-TUN’s manager stares at them from the doorway. “Yeah looks like Akanishi-kun isn’t here after all,” he says, and backs out again.
Jin scowls and crosses his arms once he’s gone. “I knew he lied to me to get me places on time.”
~~~~~
At five minutes until six, Jin throws down the magazine again, this time by his own volition. “I still hate looking at it!” he shouts, and no one hears him. He grudgingly grabs Ryo’s phone again and tells them exactly that.
Yamapi frowns at him and starts flipping through the menu of his phone to respond. “This is my favorite picture in the world,” he says after a moment, and turns his phone towards the chair.
Jin blinks. It’s kind of a fuzzy photo of a photo; he recognizes it as the one at Yamapi’s mother’s house from when they were twelve. They’re in Jin’s backyard and there’s a kiddie pool set up in the background that Riina and Reio are obliviously splashing around in. Jin’s got Yamapi in a headlock but they’re both laughing and Jin’s hair is horrible and he’s awkward and gangly and Yamapi is in the process of pulling down his swim trunks because he used to fight dirty like that.
“What does that have to do with anything?” he texts Pi after a beat, hoping it reads as unimpressed even though his heart is suddenly beating kind of fast.
Yamapi chuckles wistfully. “Because even if you hate pictures or looking at yourself, I really like being able to see my best friend’s face in front of me, no matter what he’s doing or what kind of expression he’s showing. I’ll be very mad at you if you wished it away forever!”
Jin sits back and sighs. “When you put it like that, I kind of do want to see myself again. Even in a stupid tabloid,” he texts.
Yamapi smiles. “Good.”
Overhead, the wall clock strikes two minutes before six.
“We’re running out of time,” Ryo mutters in a surly voice. No one comments when he surreptitiously wipes at the corner of his eye with one hand as he shouts at Yamapi to put that retarded photograph away and concentrate on what matters here.
“Maybe he should go to his meeting,” Tegoshi suggests. “I mean, it sounded important.”
“He’s invisible,” Ryo reminds him, in case he forgot while he’d been busy making dinner plans on his phone just now.
Tegoshi shrugs. “That doesn’t mean he should miss it. Besides, I’m sure Kame-chan and Koki won’t mind covering for him.”
“He obviously doesn’t know them at all!!!” Jin mutters.
“Aren’t we in the middle of figuring out an important and touching life lesson?” Shige asks. “It would suck if it all amounted to nothing and it really was just a roofie after all.”
Tegoshi laughs, then reaches out and puts his hand on Jin’s shoulder. He doesn’t hit him in the arm or the face when he does, like Koyama’s been doing the entire time. “But if it was a roofie, at least we know that they wear off eventually, right?”
Jin sighs and goes to his meeting.
~~~~~
At six o’clock, KT-TUN is in the conference room with their manager, sitting across from some very serious looking business suits who want to offer them a lot of money to be in their commercials and use their products in public.
“Where’s Akanishi-san?” one of the suits asks. “He should be here as well.”
Jin winces. “I am here!” he shouts, sitting in the extra chair in the corner. “I was early even!”
Kamenashi looks back at the suit very calmly. “He’s on his way. Apparently there were some issues with traffic in his neighborhood,” he answers. “He definitely wouldn’t miss something this important to the group if he could help it.”
Jin blinks. “Kame?”
The manager smiles and nods. “Yes, he’ll be here any minute! Definitely. So uh, so why don’t we get started? We can fill him in on any important details when he gets here.”
“Everything,” Nakamaru interjects. “We’ll fill him in on everything once he gets here, because all the details are important.”
The manager blinks in horror. “Right! Right, that’s what I meant.” He looks apologetically at the suits.
Jin tells himself he’s going to put Nakamaru’s phone number back into his phone the moment he becomes visible again.
The suits stare for a moment, before shrugging. “If you say so.”
They start handing out contracts for an ad campaign entitled “Face Time,” which apparently involves a bunch of glamour shots of each member from different angles in a six-commercial series where they advertise six different types of magical face-purifying cream cleansers (for women, go figure).
“A fifteen second spot for Nakamaru-kun, Ueda-kun, and Taguchi-kun each, while the thirty second spots will be for Kamenashi-kun, Akanishi-kun, and Tanaka-kun,” the suit explains.
Jin stands in his chair. “Fifteen second! I want the fifteen second!”
Koki raises his hand. “Akanishi probably wants the fifteen second,” he says, and makes Jin sort of touched that he’d know. “Plus he’s got some pore issues so you could have him tote the pore shrinking stuff and give Taguchi then white-glow stuff instead, since he likes to sparkle like a moron.”
Jin is slightly less touched at that, but feels magnanimous enough to keep Koki’s contact info in his phone anyway.
The suits make a note. “We’ll discuss that once Akanishi-kun is here.” Pause. “Any word yet?”
Their manager wrings his hands. “Not yet… he’s still um, stuck.”
The suits look unimpressed.
Negotiations about a new TV show open up after that, and when Jin eventually realizes (with some surprise) that his groupmates essentially know exactly what he’d want and how he’d want it he stops paying attention and starts thinking about how he’s invisible still, and that he doesn’t want to stay this way, and that he’s sorry for saying that he hated looking at his own face last night when homely (but admittedly nice) guys like Shige and Koyama could only wish to look half as good as he does.
He falls asleep thinking about playing in his backyard with Yamapi when he was twelve, and wonders if there will ever be another picture of him with his nose scrunched up in laughter and victory like that ever again.
~~~~~
Jin wakes up when he hears shouting.
Uh oh, he thinks, and wonders if he sleep-walked and made something float again. He opens his eyes and looks around.
There are the business suits again, except they don’t look as stern or snobby as they had earlier; they look downright boggled now, like there isn’t enough air in the room and they want to hide their heads in the dirt and cry.
KT-TUN is there too, T-UN forming a wall around Jin in the corner while K-T grabs him by the arm and starts to drag him out of the room. In the meantime, their manager is on his hands and knees in front of the wide-eyed suits, begging for forgiveness and a five minute bathroom break.
Jin blinks groggily as he is pulled into KAT-TUN’s dressing room. “What’s…”
“What is wrong with you!?” Kame exclaims, before Jin can finish.
Jin looks at him.
More importantly, Kame looks back.
Jin throws his hands up in the air in relief. “The roofie wore off!” he shouts.
Nakamaru stares. “Roofie? You were…”
Jin isn’t listening; he’s too busy remembering what it’s like to be listened to. “You can hear me!” he exclaims. “You can see me.”
“Yes.” Nakamaru and even though they can see and hear him, Jin realizes that they are all looking very pointedly at the ground instead.
No one says anything for a very long time.
“What?” Jin demands, and finds himself crossing his arms and feeling oddly self-conscious now that he’s no longer invisible. “I’m finally here, right? I made it for the meeting, right?”
“True,” the others murmur.
“Then why are you acting so weird?!” Jin shouts.
More silence.
Then, eventually, Kame clears his throat. “Why are you naked?” he asks.
That is when Jin suddenly remembers that he is naked. And that everyone can see him again. While he is naked.
Everyone is also waiting for an answer (still staring at the ground though, because clearly they are big babies).
So Jin gives them the only response he can think of.
“At least I’m not drunk?”
The rest of his group groans and exits the room.
Before he leaves, Kame pauses to tell Jin to please put on some clothes before they go back to the big meeting.
Jin happily does, and on his way out after them, stops to grin and fix his hair in the mirror first.
All things considered, he thinks he looks pretty damn good right now.
END
EDITS?
Universe: JE/ KAT-TUN/NEWS
Theme/Topic: N/A
Rating: PG-13 for language and mentions of you know, date rape.
Character/Pairing/s: Jin focus (KAT-TUN and NEWS appearances)
Warnings/Spoilers: crack, randomness, stupidity
Word Count: 5,610
Summary: Jin gets roofied.
Dedication: pixisticks’s very late birthday present! But see how I am slowly catching up? My love is obviously not very punctual, but it is still strong, I promise. Also, special thanks to pipsqueaks for letting me run this by her when I was busy banging my head to the keyboard trying to figure out a point.
A/N: I don’t even know.
Disclaimer: No harm or infringement intended.
Jin thinks there must have been something in his drink last night that was not alcohol or ice or a piece of fruit.
Not that he’s saying he was roofied or anything, but rather, he’s saying there was something inside of his drink that was equally as dastardly and sinister as a roofie, the only difference is that it turned him invisible instead of unconscious.
Jin thinks that last night he got roofied by the invisible pill.
Because right now, he is invisible.
Well kind of. He can see the clothes he’s wearing in the mirror; they look like they are floating around in mid-air and that he is a ghost with exceptional urban fashion sense.
He sulks (but he can’t see it). The bartender at that club definitely, definitely gave him something weird.
He just isn’t sure why. Maybe he made the guy mad last night, when he’d gotten a little tipsy at the bar with Yamapi; he gets kind of loud when he gets drunk and earlier that night some girls had come up to him with a tabloid magazine with his picture in it and asked him to please sign, which was really annoying. He may have complained about it more and more the drunker he got, muttering about how he hates looking at that shit and how they’ve got to go to places that make girls check that at the door from now on. Places with standards.
Maybe the bartender had given him the invisible pill to get him to go away, or to stop him from badmouthing his club in front of all the other patrons.
Jin blinks and stops himself from going into hysterics. First of all, when did they invent an invisible pill anyway? Somehow he thinks he would have heard on the news if they did. Do they even exist yet?
Curious, he marches into his bedroom and picks up his cell phone so that he can text message Nakamaru, because Nakamaru is the smartest person whose number he allows himself to keep on his contact list.
His message to his groupmate says, “Is there something you can take that will make you disappear?”
Five minutes later, Nakamaru’s response is, “Ha, ha. Very funny.”
Jin stares at it. “That didn’t answer my question at all!” he says, and in a fit of pique, deletes Nakamaru’s contact information from his phone out of spite. Clearly keeping a smart person’s number in his phonebook did not pay off in this case. He should have used the memory on a model instead.
His stomach rumbles a little while after that, and even though he is still invisible, he decides that he has more important things to deal with at the moment than trying to figure out why his bartender would roofie him with a disappearing drug.
~~~~~
The housekeeping lady is vacuuming the living room when he emerges from his bedroom in search of food.
She’s a nice, older Brazilian woman and Jin is fond of her because she doesn’t care who he is or how many movies he’s been in or what his hair looks like at any one given moment. On the days when she comes in to clean and Jin is still at home, he asks her to teach him Spanish (except she keeps saying it’s not Spanish even though Koki assures Jin that it is).
“Good morning, Yaritza,” he starts, as he stumbles into the room. “Do I look a little invisible to you?”
She doesn’t seem to hear him. He asks again, only louder this time. The vacuum is very noisy, after all.
She still doesn’t hear him.
Jin wonders if that means his voice is invisible too. He tries shouting and waving his hands up and down.
And that is precisely when she looks up from the rug and sees him.
Well, she sees the floating t-shirt and the moving jeans.
To which her response is to scream, make the sign for the cross, and run out of the house even though the vacuum cleaner is still on and being very noisy.
She doesn’t even close the door after her.
Jin blinks. “But you didn’t do the bathroom!” he shouts.
Again, she doesn’t hear him. The vacuum cleaner roars on.
He sighs and goes to nuke himself some breakfast.
~~~~~
Later, when the bellboy, the security guard, and the front desk lady at his building all have the exact same reaction to his floating t-shirt and jeans act that Yaritza had, Jin decides that maybe it is time to ditch the clothes.
No one’s ever screamed and run away from him while he was naked, after all. The only downside is that now he can’t take his phone either, because no pockets.
But if that’s what it takes to get them to stop running away and screaming he’ll just have to do it; right now what he needs is communication.
So he grabs a pen from the front desk, takes a memo pad, and writes down, “I am not a ghost, I promise. I am just invisible today.”
He waits for someone brave to come back into the lobby and read it.
But that doesn’t happen until a little while after lunchtime, when the front desk lady returns to her station, still looking pale and freaked out. She has a monk with her now, one who begins performing an elaborate exorcism ceremony with incense and beads once he sees the floating pen that Jin is still holding. At that point, Jin decides that he should probably stop moving stuff around in his attempts to get some attention, because it might get him sent into the next world instead, if this monk guy is actually up to snuff. He certainly looks bald enough.
Jin sighs and trudges back upstairs to his apartment instead.
“I wonder if I can call out sick from work,” he muses to himself when he looks at the time and remembers that he has to be in sometime this afternoon (he forgets when, exactly).
He texts his manager to see. “I might be sick.”
His manager texts back. “You might be sick?”
“Yes.”
“…you’re not lying to me are you?”
Jin thinks about that and realizes that he’s not actually sick, as far as he knows. Just invisible. That might be a disease, but it might not be at the same time. Does it count as lying if you don’t know you’re doing it?
In the meantime, his manager takes his failure to respond immediately as a bad sign and sends him several more messages in rapid succession:
“Please don’t lie to me. Is it because you don’t like doing the paperwork?”
“All you need to do is sign your name on a few new contracts before five today. I’ll do the rest.”
“Oh god just please come to work.”
“Was Kamenashi-kun rude to you again? I apologize on his behalf.”
“…was it Koki? If it was Koki I apologize on his behalf too.”
“…if it was Ueda I also apologize.”
And so forth and so on.
Jin frowns and hates it when the poor guy grovels. He answers, “Okay, I’m coming in. Just don’t freak out when you see me.”
“Thank you thank you thank you,” is the response, followed by a less grateful, “Remember! By five! Please don’t be drunk.”
Jin rolls his eyes; his first thought on the matter is that this is probably why his manager is already going bald even though he’s not even thirty yet. His second thought is that he should probably take the train to work today, because if the general reaction of the public is to run and scream when they see one measly floating t-shirt and a pair of jeans, then their reaction to seeing the same floating t-shirt and jeans operating a Mercedes Benz will probably be worse somehow (and Jin isn’t a member of NEWS, and therefore would like to refrain from causing more traffic accidents, thanks). He’s so considerate.
But he realizes that his considerateness in taking the train to work also means that he should probably leave now, because public transportation, while convenient for the naked and invisible, is no where near as quick as a really hot foreign car with a big back seat.
“By five,” Jin mutters, and puts his phone down before he leaves his apartment.
He rides the elevator back down, blithely sidesteps the chanting exorcist at the front desk, and heads to the nearest subway station.
~~~~~
Being naked on a train in the middle of the afternoon is a very strange experience for Jin. He has been on the train in the middle of the day before of course, and he has been naked in the middle of the day before as well, but he has never been all three at the same time until today.
He supposes that it is good that it is so crowded right now, and that the high school girl who is currently sitting in his lap is too busy bobbing her head along to the new Lady Gaga song to notice that she’s actually floating about six inches off of the actual seat.
It’s kind of nice that no one is screaming and snapping pictures of him or demanding autographs though.
“Weird day,” Jin says to himself, and starts to bob along with Lady Gaga too.
He wishes it wasn’t so drafty.
~~~~~
When Jin gets to the jimusho he still has a good while before five o’clock. All of his groupmates are already there before him, which he finds strangely unbelievable. He wonders if their manager had groveled to them a lot too (or gotten the assistants to do it).
“I’m here!” he says when he walks into the room, and no one hears him. “I’m early!” he adds, just because.
Koki is eating his lunch and Nakamaru is taking a mock exam online while Kame is reading lines and Ueda stares into space. Taguchi is busy writing down every one of his expenditures for the week in his little checkbook like he doesn’t make more money than the lower echelons of NEWS combined.
Jin finds this all very boring, so he pours extra salt into Koki’s soup when he isn’t looking to see if things get interesting. He always told himself when he was young that if he ever had the power to become invisible, he would use it to pull some awesome pranks and then go peep in the girl’s shower (unfortunately there is no girl’s shower at J&A, only girl’s toilets, and that would be weird and probably unpleasant for everyone).
After the salt in Koki’s miso he goes to hold down the power button on Nakamaru’s laptop so that it shuts down unexpectedly in the middle of his mock exam, then unties Ueda’s shoelaces, then pours another packet of salt down the back of Kame’s pants. For the grand finale, he flicks Taguchi’s head while it’s bent over the coffee table like it is.
“Ugh, too salty,” is all Koki says about his soup when he tastes it again, and then throws the rest away.
“Stupid computer,” Nakamaru mutters to his laptop, and restarts it.
Ueda blinks and wordlessly ties his shoelaces when he notices that they’re untied, while Kame doesn’t stop focusing on his lines even for a second. As for Taguchi, he just smiles and randomly asks, “Did someone throw something at me just now? Was it you, Koki?”
Koki gives him a strange look and then picks up his lunch tray so he can go finish his food next to Nakamaru instead.
Jin sighs. “Boring!” he says, pouting. And he’s supposed to wait around with these chuckleheads until their new sponsors show? Clearly being invisible at 25 is not nearly as cool as it had been in his head, back when he was 15.
He gets up and goes to NEWS’s dressing room.
~~~~~
When he gets there NEWS is in the middle of rehearsing the dance steps for their new song. Jin slips into the room all quiet and stealthy like a ninja and no one sees him (the invisibility probably helps). He thinks he’ll start by messing around with Masuda’s bag; Nakamaru is always complaining about how Masuda hates that.
“And then we’ll switch to a two-three formation and then a cir…”
Ryo gets cut off when Tegoshi inexplicably starts laughing like crazy.
“Is something funny, Tego-nyan?” Koyama asks the youngest member patiently, looking around the room to see if someone’s punking Shige again. No one is, as far as anyone can tell.
Tegoshi, mid-hysterics, just continues to guffaw inexplicably, bracing his cheek against Ryo’s shoulder as he does and unable to actually form words to explain what the heck is so hilarious.
Everyone gives him a weird look.
Jin isn’t sure why, but at that moment, he decides to very quickly leave the room.
~~~~~
“It’s lonely being invisible,” Jin complains to himself ten minutes later because there is no one else to complain to that will hear him. He lingers listlessly around the water fountain and wonders if Nakamaru will notice it if he hijacks his computer and types “HELP ME” on the screen. Nakamaru is still the smartest person he has to talk to on a regular basis; maybe if Nakamaru knows he’s in trouble then he can help him get out of it again.
Jin remembers Nakamaru prattling on one day about how global warming causes habitat loss and habitat loss causes all sorts of species to disappear from the earth. “Like the golden toad!” he’d said, looking as passionate and depressed over a bunch of dead yellow frogs as Jin has ever seen him. Maybe global warming is why Jin has disappeared today too. Like an endangered species only less yellow.
Thoughtful, he asks himself if anyone will be sad if he disappears from the earth forever; at least as sad as Nakamaru was when he found out about the toads.
In the hallway, the clock ticks to five.
~~~~~
At one minute past five, Yamapi pads into the hallway to get a drink of water.
“Pi!” Jin yells, because he can’t help it. If his best friend in the world can’t see him while he’s invisible, then no one can (which makes perfect sense to him somehow).
Yamapi gets a drink of water.
Jin mutters a quick prayer and then kicks him in the butt.
Yamapi yelps and grabs his butt with both hands. “Cut it out, Bakanishi!” he shouts, instinctively, without thinking.
Jin stops. “Pi!!” he exclaims, and feels truly touched that his friend knows it’s him without having to see it.
But then Yamapi stops too. Looks around. “…Jin?” he asks. He peeks cautiously around the other side of the fountain, in case Jin kicked him in the ass and then hid there to try to escape his retaliatory wrath.
Nothing. Yamapi’s brow furrows.
“I’m here!” Jin insists, and kicks Yamapi again. “Here!”
Yamapi hits his head on the fountain spout as a result. “Ow.”
Jin is instantly contrite. “Sorry.”
Yamapi looks weirded out. “Am I on a hidden camera show?” he asks, eventually.
Jin scowls. “NO. I am naked and late for an important meeting with some big corporate guys even though I’m here and I was on time and did you see if that bartender from last night roofied me? I know I was being loud but those girls were really obnoxious and no one can see me.”
Yamapi doesn’t hear him either apparently; he warily turns to leave, still looking for hidden cameras.
Jin, in a fit of desperation, reaches out to grab his shoulder, hoping there won’t be any more screaming and signs of the cross and running away. He shakes Yamapi a little too, like he sometimes does when he’s drunk and crazy.
Yamapi does scream a little, but to his credit, he doesn’t become Christian or flee.
After he’s done screaming he even stops and blinks when he recognizes the shaking. “…Jin?”
Jin forgets that he is naked and hugs his best friend in relief.
~~~~~
At five minutes past five, Jin is sitting in a chair in the middle of NEWS’s dressing room holding Koyama’s cell phone and texting Yamapi messages as fast as his invisible fingers can move (which isn’t very fast because he keeps making mistakes).
NEWS is staring at the floating cell phone across from them and trying very hard to be obedient and do what Leader told them to do (don’t scream or run away or yell about ghosts).
Massu is, however, curled up in the corner with his knees against his chest and rocking.
Tegoshi’s eating a sandwich.
Jin’s message says, “I think I was roofied by the bartender last night.”
Shige reads it over Yamapi’s shoulder. “Roofies don’t work like that,” he snorts, derisively. Apparently he can get over his fear pretty quickly as long as he can say things that make him sound smarter than everyone else in the meantime.
Jin glares (but Shige can’t see it); he texts: “Invisible roofies do.”
Shige makes a noise in the back of his throat like he is going to say something else, but Ryo pinches him in the ribs and makes him shut up.
“How do we fix this, dumbass?” Ryo demands instead, and has those little worry lines at the corners of his eyes that everyone who knows him has already figured out the meaning of.
Jin writes, “I don’t know.”
Tegoshi picks the tomato bits out of his sandwich. “Roofies wear off eventually, don’t they?”
Shige rolls his eyes. “This is not a roofie! Roofies don’t make people invisible.”
“What’re you, a roofie expert?” Ryo asks, irritated.
Shige scowls. “No! I just… never mind. We need to concentrate.”
Koyama is eying the floating cell phone in concern. “Aren’t you cold?” he asks, eventually.
“Yes,” Jin texts, and is glad someone finally noticed.
Koyama goes off to buy him some hot tea.
~~~~~
“Have you seen Akanishi?” an irritated Kame asks, poking his head into NEWS’s dressing room a few minutes later.
Tegoshi waves at him happily; Kame pauses to smile and wave back before his face gets all serious again.
“He’s here,” Yamapi explains.
Kame blinks. “He is?” he looks around. Sees nothing. “Where?”
Yamapi’s brow furrows. “He’s invisible.” He gestures to the chair in front of him.
Kame stares. “Um.”
He notices how the NEWS members present all look very, very troubled.
“Sorry to bother you,” Kame tells them quickly, and ducks out again.
“Found it!” Ryo exclaims, coming back from behind the wardrobe just as Kame shuts the door behind him; Ryo is holding up his cell phone in triumph, and exchanges it with Koyama’s, which Jin had dumped on the table when it ran out of battery just now.
Shige buries his face in his hands. “You have got to be kidding me.”
~~~~~
“Run us through every single moment of last night,” Ryo instructs once Koyama is back with tea and a blanket.
Jin squirms in the chair, and for a second, is actually glad he is invisible right now. He texts, “Went to dinner with Pi. Went to club afterwards. Danced. Drank. Signed some autographs for some really annoying girls. Annoyed the bartender?”
NEWS reads the text, then gives Jin (or the general vicinity of Jin) a long, frustrated look.
They turn to Yamapi instead. “What happened last night?”
Yamapi gets thoughtful. “Everything was pretty normal ne. Though, he did get madder than normal about the girls.”
Jin furiously texts, “Who makes you sign a TABLOID picture of yourself?!”
NEWS reads that understandingly. Koyama tentatively reaches out to pat Jin’s shoulder (he kind of smacks Jin in the arm a little instead, but the gesture is still nice).
Yamapi continues. “Then I bought him some drinks and told him he handled it very well, and that maybe the tabloid was all those girls could afford to buy this week, and that I think he’s really cool looking in every photo he takes no matter what.”
Shige holds up a hand. “Key phrase after a nonlinear segue,” he declares, when he hears.
Everyone else looks confused.
Tegoshi absently says, “Shige wants to know why Yamashita-kun needed to say that last part after all those other parts.”
Yamapi thinks. “Because…” he pauses to snap his fingers, “he said he hated having to look at his own face like that.”
Shige turns triumphant. “Possible cause discovered.”
Jin finds himself clapping on instinct. NEWS really is the smart group.
~~~~~
Several seconds later, Jin realizes something else.
“Do you all live in a world where magical wishes come true all the time and what you just said to me actually seems likely to you?!” he demands.
NEWS members twiddle their thumbs and look anywhere that isn’t Jin’s chair.
~~~~~
“Whatever it is, we don’t know how to fix it still, huh?” Koyama asks nervously a few minutes later.
Jin texts Yamapi an angry message that Yamapi does not deign to read out loud to his members.
Tegoshi kicks his feet in boredom. “But roofies wear off eventually, right?”
“IT WAS NOT A ROOFIE,” the others shout, just as KAT-TUN’s manager throws open the door demanding to know where they’re hiding Jin.
He stares at them after he hears the passionate roofie declaration. “Never mind,” he says, and closes the door again.
~~~~~
At half past five, Jin is looking into a mirror (which he still cannot see himself in) while Shige holds it up in front of his chair and looks expectantly in his direction. “Just say it three times,” the smart member instructs. “Like in the Wizard of Oz.”
“I’m pretty sure she says it more than three times, Shige,” Tegoshi chirps.
Shige scowls. “I meant in the same style.”
Tegoshi laughs. “Oh.”
Jin closes his eyes and takes a deep breath. “I want to see my own face again, I want to see my own face again, I want to see my own face again…”
He opens his eyes.
Still invisible.
“Maybe he actually needs to see himself, Shige,” Yamapi surmises, though he still pats his groupmate on the shoulder for trying hard anyway.
Shige blinks. “But he can’t. Isn’t that the point?”
Koyama whips out a magazine from his bag and flips through it. He finds Jin’s page and puts it in front of him. “There.”
“Please tell me someone gave that to you earlier and you don’t just carry it around with you,” Ryo tells him.
Koyama pouts. “I show them to the juniors and talk about the importance of preparing for photoshoots. They’re visual aids, ne.”
Jin notices that they are; there are notes along the side of his picture that say: “good angle for people with nice necks and double-eyelids,” and “KAT-TUN is good at looking cool so study them if you ever get put in a group marketed the same way.”
It’s kind of flattering and creepy at the same time.
Jin stares at himself.
Cringes a little.
He puts the magazine down and texts, “This is stupid. It definitely won’t work.”
Yamapi texts back, “That was a good picture of you. ^_^” Then he looks expectantly at the chair and the magazine.
Once Yamapi uses that face, Jin sighs and helplessly picks up the magazine again.
~~~~~
“I don’t get it,” Shige mutters sometime later. “If I had that face I’d get in as many pictures as I possibly could. Even the ones the tourists take all over the city! Unbelievable.”
Koyama nods knowingly.
Jin texts Yamapi again feeling strangely mortified. “I can hear them.”
Yamapi smiles peacefully and responds, “They know.”
~~~~~
At forty minutes past the hour, KAT-TUN’s manager bursts into the room again, looking much more manic this time. “Okay look, pretend I’m not here. I don’t care about your date rape discussions I just really, really need to look for Akanishi-kun. I told him to be here at five because the meeting’s really at six and that means we have twenty minutes to find him before the suits show up and he’s not answering his phone.”
He stops when he sees the floating magazine. Asks, “Is that magazine floating?”
He goes completely white as a sheet after that, and Jin braces himself, waiting for the screaming and signs of the cross and running away that inevitably follow.
But then, “Abrakadabra!” Tegoshi blurts suddenly, waving his arms mystically in the direction of the magazine.
Ryo elbows Jin in the arm then, and makes him drop it.
The magazine hits the ground.
The rest of NEWS moves to applaud Tegoshi obligingly. “Neat magic trick, Tego-nyan!” Koyama exclaims, a bit too shrilly. “It looked really real, ne! Right?”
“Really real!” Yamapi echoes.
Tegoshi bows. “Thank you, thank you. I’ve been practicing. For my next trick, I will cut Shige in half.”
“Oi!” Shige shouts.
KAT-TUN’s manager stares at them from the doorway. “Yeah looks like Akanishi-kun isn’t here after all,” he says, and backs out again.
Jin scowls and crosses his arms once he’s gone. “I knew he lied to me to get me places on time.”
~~~~~
At five minutes until six, Jin throws down the magazine again, this time by his own volition. “I still hate looking at it!” he shouts, and no one hears him. He grudgingly grabs Ryo’s phone again and tells them exactly that.
Yamapi frowns at him and starts flipping through the menu of his phone to respond. “This is my favorite picture in the world,” he says after a moment, and turns his phone towards the chair.
Jin blinks. It’s kind of a fuzzy photo of a photo; he recognizes it as the one at Yamapi’s mother’s house from when they were twelve. They’re in Jin’s backyard and there’s a kiddie pool set up in the background that Riina and Reio are obliviously splashing around in. Jin’s got Yamapi in a headlock but they’re both laughing and Jin’s hair is horrible and he’s awkward and gangly and Yamapi is in the process of pulling down his swim trunks because he used to fight dirty like that.
“What does that have to do with anything?” he texts Pi after a beat, hoping it reads as unimpressed even though his heart is suddenly beating kind of fast.
Yamapi chuckles wistfully. “Because even if you hate pictures or looking at yourself, I really like being able to see my best friend’s face in front of me, no matter what he’s doing or what kind of expression he’s showing. I’ll be very mad at you if you wished it away forever!”
Jin sits back and sighs. “When you put it like that, I kind of do want to see myself again. Even in a stupid tabloid,” he texts.
Yamapi smiles. “Good.”
Overhead, the wall clock strikes two minutes before six.
“We’re running out of time,” Ryo mutters in a surly voice. No one comments when he surreptitiously wipes at the corner of his eye with one hand as he shouts at Yamapi to put that retarded photograph away and concentrate on what matters here.
“Maybe he should go to his meeting,” Tegoshi suggests. “I mean, it sounded important.”
“He’s invisible,” Ryo reminds him, in case he forgot while he’d been busy making dinner plans on his phone just now.
Tegoshi shrugs. “That doesn’t mean he should miss it. Besides, I’m sure Kame-chan and Koki won’t mind covering for him.”
“He obviously doesn’t know them at all!!!” Jin mutters.
“Aren’t we in the middle of figuring out an important and touching life lesson?” Shige asks. “It would suck if it all amounted to nothing and it really was just a roofie after all.”
Tegoshi laughs, then reaches out and puts his hand on Jin’s shoulder. He doesn’t hit him in the arm or the face when he does, like Koyama’s been doing the entire time. “But if it was a roofie, at least we know that they wear off eventually, right?”
Jin sighs and goes to his meeting.
~~~~~
At six o’clock, KT-TUN is in the conference room with their manager, sitting across from some very serious looking business suits who want to offer them a lot of money to be in their commercials and use their products in public.
“Where’s Akanishi-san?” one of the suits asks. “He should be here as well.”
Jin winces. “I am here!” he shouts, sitting in the extra chair in the corner. “I was early even!”
Kamenashi looks back at the suit very calmly. “He’s on his way. Apparently there were some issues with traffic in his neighborhood,” he answers. “He definitely wouldn’t miss something this important to the group if he could help it.”
Jin blinks. “Kame?”
The manager smiles and nods. “Yes, he’ll be here any minute! Definitely. So uh, so why don’t we get started? We can fill him in on any important details when he gets here.”
“Everything,” Nakamaru interjects. “We’ll fill him in on everything once he gets here, because all the details are important.”
The manager blinks in horror. “Right! Right, that’s what I meant.” He looks apologetically at the suits.
Jin tells himself he’s going to put Nakamaru’s phone number back into his phone the moment he becomes visible again.
The suits stare for a moment, before shrugging. “If you say so.”
They start handing out contracts for an ad campaign entitled “Face Time,” which apparently involves a bunch of glamour shots of each member from different angles in a six-commercial series where they advertise six different types of magical face-purifying cream cleansers (for women, go figure).
“A fifteen second spot for Nakamaru-kun, Ueda-kun, and Taguchi-kun each, while the thirty second spots will be for Kamenashi-kun, Akanishi-kun, and Tanaka-kun,” the suit explains.
Jin stands in his chair. “Fifteen second! I want the fifteen second!”
Koki raises his hand. “Akanishi probably wants the fifteen second,” he says, and makes Jin sort of touched that he’d know. “Plus he’s got some pore issues so you could have him tote the pore shrinking stuff and give Taguchi then white-glow stuff instead, since he likes to sparkle like a moron.”
Jin is slightly less touched at that, but feels magnanimous enough to keep Koki’s contact info in his phone anyway.
The suits make a note. “We’ll discuss that once Akanishi-kun is here.” Pause. “Any word yet?”
Their manager wrings his hands. “Not yet… he’s still um, stuck.”
The suits look unimpressed.
Negotiations about a new TV show open up after that, and when Jin eventually realizes (with some surprise) that his groupmates essentially know exactly what he’d want and how he’d want it he stops paying attention and starts thinking about how he’s invisible still, and that he doesn’t want to stay this way, and that he’s sorry for saying that he hated looking at his own face last night when homely (but admittedly nice) guys like Shige and Koyama could only wish to look half as good as he does.
He falls asleep thinking about playing in his backyard with Yamapi when he was twelve, and wonders if there will ever be another picture of him with his nose scrunched up in laughter and victory like that ever again.
~~~~~
Jin wakes up when he hears shouting.
Uh oh, he thinks, and wonders if he sleep-walked and made something float again. He opens his eyes and looks around.
There are the business suits again, except they don’t look as stern or snobby as they had earlier; they look downright boggled now, like there isn’t enough air in the room and they want to hide their heads in the dirt and cry.
KT-TUN is there too, T-UN forming a wall around Jin in the corner while K-T grabs him by the arm and starts to drag him out of the room. In the meantime, their manager is on his hands and knees in front of the wide-eyed suits, begging for forgiveness and a five minute bathroom break.
Jin blinks groggily as he is pulled into KAT-TUN’s dressing room. “What’s…”
“What is wrong with you!?” Kame exclaims, before Jin can finish.
Jin looks at him.
More importantly, Kame looks back.
Jin throws his hands up in the air in relief. “The roofie wore off!” he shouts.
Nakamaru stares. “Roofie? You were…”
Jin isn’t listening; he’s too busy remembering what it’s like to be listened to. “You can hear me!” he exclaims. “You can see me.”
“Yes.” Nakamaru and even though they can see and hear him, Jin realizes that they are all looking very pointedly at the ground instead.
No one says anything for a very long time.
“What?” Jin demands, and finds himself crossing his arms and feeling oddly self-conscious now that he’s no longer invisible. “I’m finally here, right? I made it for the meeting, right?”
“True,” the others murmur.
“Then why are you acting so weird?!” Jin shouts.
More silence.
Then, eventually, Kame clears his throat. “Why are you naked?” he asks.
That is when Jin suddenly remembers that he is naked. And that everyone can see him again. While he is naked.
Everyone is also waiting for an answer (still staring at the ground though, because clearly they are big babies).
So Jin gives them the only response he can think of.
“At least I’m not drunk?”
The rest of his group groans and exits the room.
Before he leaves, Kame pauses to tell Jin to please put on some clothes before they go back to the big meeting.
Jin happily does, and on his way out after them, stops to grin and fix his hair in the mirror first.
All things considered, he thinks he looks pretty damn good right now.
END
EDITS?