JE/NEWS+SPN- "All's Chaos on the Eastern Front" (2/7)
Uchi disappears right as the chill of winter begins to set into Japan.
“He’s not picking up his phone,” Massu frets when he reports it first, because he and Uchi had a shopping date today that Uchi hadn’t shown up for. “He was going to show me how to bargain like an Obaahan,” Massu says over the phone, frown evident in his voice, even over the rush of the trains and the buzz of the station announcer overhead.
“He probably just forgot because he’s a moron. He gets that way whenever he gets more than four days in a row off for vacation,” Ryo snorts reasonably, the older member berating his worried Tokyo friend for being a girl over something so stupid, even as he weaves hastily through the heavy afternoon traffic on his first day off in a long time, in order to pick Massu up from the station platform before the evening rush hits.
They go looking for their groupmate together after that, and it isn’t until it’s dark and freezing and ice crystals start to form on their lips and noses that they are forced to give up.
~~*~~
Uchi goes missing as the world becomes cold and dark in the midst of winter, and the only clue anyone seems to have is a cell phone with a dead battery and the shattered, slightly bloody remnants of an anti-possession charm that a bartender hands them when Ryo and Massu show up at his place asking questions; he shrugs noncommittally at them and says it’s from a young man that came in two days ago who fits the description of the person they’re looking for. He left with one of the reporters for Fuji TV right after he paid his tab that night and he hasn’t been back since, not even to pick up his dead cell phone. “I was going to take it to the police station today, but since you two are his friends you can take it instead. Looks like the necklace is broken, though.” He offers to throw it away, but Ryo shakes his head and says it’s fixable.
He grimly tucks the cell phone and the broken charm into his pocket and thanks the bartender before he and Massu walk out the door, the looks on their faces saying that each of them knows this isn’t going to end well.
Once they’re outside, Ryo calls Yamapi.
~~*~~
It is strange to be hunting for Uchi but not at the same time; they practice the words to the exorcism over and over again in their heads as they search for their groupmate, for the thing that must be wearing his skin.
They follow a trail of bodies, mostly animals and in some cases spiritual creatures that only Tegoshi can see; their blood is often smeared in messy offering, desecrating sacred grounds as if trying to turn them into something else.
There is anxiety in NEWS, in every one of them that winter, and it hums under the skin of each of the members every time they are close but not close enough.
“I wish he’d find his way back to us,” Tegoshi murmurs in frustration one cold, windy day, when it starts to snow, but in that way that isn’t snow falling so much as ice crystals pelting you mercilessly from above.
“We’ll find him,” Massu promises, ever optimistic as he burns the remains of the cat they had found, its throat slit and corpse near frozen.
They say a small prayer over the body together and hope for peace.
~~*~~
In the ten days that Uchi is possessed, Kusano and Koyama are the first to see him again.
They manage to track him down to a small Kumano shrine in Kurashiki in the dead of night, where the demon inside him is busy pouring the blood of a pig over the gate.
Kusano takes off at a sprint up the sando at top speed and manages to tackle Uchi before he can complete his task. For his efforts, Kusano ends up covered in the warm blood himself and narrowly avoids the angry swipe of his groupmate’s closed fist.
“I’ll kill you!” the demon inside Uchi screams hotly, and throws Kusano off of him while Koyama runs to catch up to his faster friend, fumbling for the bottle of holy water in his bag.
“Let him go!” Kusano demands, and punches Uchi in the stomach, though the demon seems largely unfazed. “Exorcizamus te,” the shorter idol begins through gritted teeth, arms locked tightly around Uchi’s shoulders, “omnis immundus spiritus, omnis satanica potestas, omnis incursio infernalis adversarii, omnis legio, omnis congregatio et secta diabolica, in nomine et…”
He is cut off abruptly when the demon throws its head back and screams, eyes flickering black to brown for a moment, and then he’s looking at Uchi, Uchi who looks tired and scared and determined. “Kill me,” Uchi manages, the words stopping Kusano’s heart before the black inks over Uchi’s gaze again.
And then his head is slamming forward, right into Kusano’s face.
Kusano staggers backward instinctively, letting go, and before he can do or say anything else he’s being launched backwards into the statue of the komainu; he slams his head on the edge of the stone statue and for a moment, his vision goes black and blurry around the edges.
The splash of holy water is the only thing that keeps Uchi from following through on the attack when Kusano is down; he shrieks and clutches at his burning skin as Koyama finally catches up, out of breath and pale as he begs, “Uchi, stop!”
The demon’s answer is to use grab the oldest NEWS member by the throat and toss him into the ema display beside them, before taking off running down the stone stairs.
“Kusano,” Koyama breathes, dazed and nose bloody as he crawls over to his friend, “Kusano!”
Kusano blinks his eyes open in the winter cold and sees the fierce countenance of the lion dog above him as it sits, dutifully guarding the shrine at all costs. Its surface is scratched and weathered after hundreds of years of service.
“Are you okay?” Koyama demands, lightly slapping at Kusano’s cheeks.
“No,” Kusano mutters when he can, and lets Koyama help him back onto shaky legs. “I don’t think so.”
They take off down the stairs after Uchi as quickly as they can, but aren’t surprised when they can’t find a trace of their friend again for the rest of the night.
~~*~~
Six days later, when Uchi is seen again, Massu gets knocked out and dragged away after a truck slams into Ryo’s car on an abandoned highway in the middle of nowhere.
Tegoshi and Ryo are trapped by the crunch of metal in the front seat, but they both manage to hear the words “blood sacrifice,” before the wail of sirens fills the air and everything goes black.
~~*~~
In the hospital hours later, Yamapi stands over the sleeping forms of his groupmates and wonders why he hasn’t been able to protect anyone.
Kusano stands beside him and radiates the same feeling except angrier.
Shige calls later that night and says a human sacrifice can disrupt the sanctity of Enryaku-ji on Mount Hiei and break the wards that keep the kimon closed there. “The mountain’s demon gate will be open then. I mean, from what I’ve been able to tell about the other places he’s been going… it’s like they’re trying to open up some sort of unholy road across the country. I…”
Kusano doesn’t wait for the rest of the theories. He punches the wall before storming out of the doors.
~~*~~
That night, Kusano steals a random car from the hospital parking lot for a little bit; he drives far out to the countryside until he doesn’t have the energy to be angry anymore, once he’s away from the bright lights and sharp sounds of the overcrowded city.
He stops at a quiet crossroads, made up of dirt and gravel, and stops to murmur a prayer at the Ojizo-sama statue there, as it watches over the roadside. “Sorry, man,” he tells it, and bows his head a little longer.
Then he gets to work.
He takes out battered tin box from the inside of his jacket pocket, inside of which is an old picture of himself, a handful of graveyard dirt, and the bone of a black cat.
Then he marches to the center of the crossroads, and starts to dig.
~~*~~
It’s barely five minutes after the box is buried when Kusano hears a voice.
“Hello there, Hiro,” it says appreciatively, and Kusano takes a shaky breath before turning around and coming face to face with a beautiful woman, looking at him with amused red eyes. “And what can I do for you?”
He manages to keep his voice steady as he tells her, “I want to make a deal.”
~~*~~
The demon snarls as P pins it to the wall by the throat, one-handed. From beside him, Koyama worriedly warns the older boy to mind the lines on the devil’s trap, they’re easy to smudge.
“Where are they,” P growls, low in his throat. “Return them. Alive.”
The demon grins. “I don’t think I know who you’re talking about, angel.”
Koyama blinks. “I’ve never heard a demon flirt like that before,” he murmurs a bit uncomfortably, and draws those ink black eyes towards him.
The demon laughs. “What, you don’t kn…”
P’s grip tightens around the demon’s neck, cutting him off with a pained gurgle. “Why take them, when you know what the consequences would be? Why alert us like this? Possessing a hunter is incredibly stupid.”
A snort. “Why take him? Of course take him. What, you think we’d let you dangle that cute psychic in front of us for all these years and not take advantage of it? He’s got the sight, and we’re going to use it to lay the “path in this holy land for our general. You’re little friend’s been honored with the rank of captain. He’s got the task of preparation.”
P’s eyes widen. “Psychic. No, Uchi isn’t…” he trails off, surprised, mind racing a mile a minute.
The demon just tsks. “Little angel’s shrunk so much there’s barely a lick of you left, is there? All this time, all this preparation, and you’re saying you didn’t even notice? Great leadership there.”
And just like that, the angel does notice, instances and moments that had been of no consequence slamming back into him suddenly, with the chilling rush of realization.
“I told you so.”
“I predict sudden chick-flick moments in our future.”
“I’ve got a bad feeling about this.”
“I bet it’s not just one ghost. I bet there’s like five.”
“Yeah and I’m always right.”
“He had the sight,” P mutters to himself, and for a moment, his grip on the demon loosens. It tenses and tries to strike him, but the devil’s trap Koyama had drawn is strong.
“He’s crazy,” Koyama replies, holy water in hand. “Don’t you think Uchi would have told us if he was psychic? He would have told us…right?”
P’s voice is hard-edged when he answers. “Not if he didn’t know. There’s only one person that could have known.” His eyes narrow, before he turns to Koyama. “Question him. Use the holy water.”
Koyama tries to look resolute. “Sure.”
P clasps the younger idol on the shoulder and strides past him. Koyama’s eyes widen. “Wait, where are you…”
But when he turns around, P is already gone.
The demon in the circle chortles in amusement. “You idiots are so screwed,” he says.
Koyama uses the holy water.
~~*~~
“You knew,” P growls, when he appears in Johnny’s home in the dead of night, livid enough that some of his Grace bursts outward and makes the light bulbs and windows explode. Tomohisa’s soul burns with similar feeling inside him and it’s like fuel, and he doesn’t stop to think what it means that they can feel this kind of anger together.
Johnny is unfazed. “I know many things. You’ll have to be specific.” He reaches into his nightstand and offers P some peppermints.
The offering is ignored. “Uchi,” the angel clarifies, fists clenched at his side. “He has the sight. Like you.”
Johnny looks at him for a very long time. “So, that’s what it was,” the old man manages eventually, and the surprise is genuine.
“You weren’t certain?”
Johnny smiles ruefully. “What in this life is ever certain? I just saw…potential. That is all I can really ever see.”
Silence.
Eventually, P’s shoulders fall slightly, the righteous fury dissipating in the air. “I might break my promise to you,” he says, and Johnny wordlessly pats his arm and goes to make tea.
~~*~~
“You understand,” she breathes, sweet and hot against his ear, “this is a big deal for me. I mean, right now he’s not just some Joe Schmoe demon. He’s somebody. He’s doing some important leg work for our side.”
Kusano swallows. “A year. For both of them to come out of this, I’ll take one year.”
“Oh honey,” she laughs, eyes flickering blood before fading back to the round, soft features of the most lovely foreigner he’s ever seen, “If you want both of them, I can give you… two months?”
Kusano glares. “That’s…”
She shrugs. “It’s what’s on the table, cutie. Take it or leave it.”
No answer.
She grins and starts to walk away.
Kusano grabs her arm. “Wait,” he says.
Her eyes flash red as she kisses him.
~~*~~
Massu watches himself die and thinks he’s dreaming.
That’s the only way a person can look at himself like this, from across the room while his body hangs, suspended from a crossbeam in the ceiling, slowly, slowly dripping blood into a bowl while Uchi hums nearby.
“You’re not dreaming,” a voice says, and Massu turns to his left, where a pretty foreign girl sits, looking impassively next to him. Something about her reminds him a little bit of Yamapi, the way her eyes betray nothing, the way something inside of him senses strength anyway. “All of that is real.” Her Japanese is perfect.
“Then I need to get back,” Massu answers simply, and stands, reaching out for his own body and thinking it must work like in the movies; all he has to do is jump back in.
She stops him, hand on his wrist and it feels like ice, like time is slowing to a trickle. “You don’t have any time left,” she tells him. “You need to come with me.”
“Who are you?” he asks, then remembers himself and his manners. “I’m Takahisa.”
She smiles a little bit at that, amused but not really. “I have many. Pick the one you like the best.”
He decides against calling her Gyoza, even if it’s the first thing that pops into his head. “Are you an angel?” he asks.
She shakes her head. “Not really.”
He frowns and hopes she’s not a demon.
“I’m not,” she assures him, without having to hear him. “I’m here to give you peace.”
Massu accepts that, perhaps a little bit too easily. “If you’re here to help then we need to fix Uchi.”
The grip she has on his arm tightens, enough to make him wince a little. “You don’t understand.”
“Ow,” he replies.
“Takahisa,” she tells him, gently, “it’s time to move on. It’s time to die. I’m here to guide your soul to the other side.”
He scowls. “No. I’m the only one who knows where Uchi is right now. I need to get the monster out of him. Everyone’s worried. His family is worried.”
“That isn’t your concern anymore,” she says.
He shakes his head. “You’re wrong. I’m sorry. I can’t go with you right now.”
“It’s now or never.”
He blinks. “Well, then I guess it’s never.”
“If you don’t come with me… if you stay,” she warns him, “you’ll become a monster too. It’ll eat at you and eat at you and eventually, you’ll be the one killing innocent people.”
Massu stops, just for a moment. “A ghost.”
She nods. “An angry spirit most likely, from a death as awful as this one.”
He smiles. “But it wouldn’t be right away. There’d be time.”
She falters. “No, not right away. But it would be inevit…”
“If it’s not right away, then right now, I can still help Uchi, right?” He gently reaches out and removes her hand from his arm. “Thanks.”
She seems confused. “You’d do that? Become the very thing you hunted on the offhand chance that it will make a difference?”
Massu nods. “After. Maybe you can come get me again after.”
“That’s not how it works,” she begins, but gets cut off when the world around them flickers suddenly, when the blue-gray tones of the place they’re standing suddenly flash into full color again before her shadow blurs around the edges. “What…”
He ignores it, stopping in front of his body.
“No,” she says, as the walls begin to shake. “It’s not… this is my…”
Massu reaches out and touches his fingertips against the curve of his own cheek.
From there, the Reaper covers her eyes as a brilliant flash of light floods the room.
~~*~~
Massu groans and aches all over; the floor is cold but his head feels hot somehow, muggy and full of cotton. “Nnngh,” he manages, and tries to open his eyes.
“Hey, buddy,” Kusano’s voice answers, warm and gentle in his ear. “Just….just relax for a little bit, okay? Help’s on the way.”
Massu doesn’t relax; he manages to open his eyes. “Uchi is... Uchi was…”
“Fine,” Kusano says, and gestures towards the floor beside Massu, where Uchi definitely is, looking calm and fast asleep and the picture of peace. “Everything’s okay now.”
Massu’s head throbs some more, as he tries to make sense of it. “How…what…”
Kusano shushes him. “Don’t worry about it,” he assures his friend with a rueful kind of smile. “Looks like we ran into a little bit of good luck, is all.”
Massu manages a tired, relieved smile. “Oh. Okay. Good.”
He closes his eyes again, and before he falls into unconsciousness, he thinks that Kusano might be crying.
He wonders why.
~~*~~
When Uchi wakes up in his bed a few hours later and can’t remember anything.
The reports remember though; public indecency, general rudeness, disrespect, drunkenness, and property damage.
The press is up in arms about behavior, Johnny makes some calls, and in the end, Uchi really, really doesn’t remember anything.
“I didn’t mean to get so drunk,” he promises to his groupmates, in tears. “It’s just one of the reporters offered to buy me some and I thought I could handle it and…”
Ryo makes a disbelieving sound in the back of his throat and steps in, while the others just share confused looks. “The demon,” Ryo says. “Don’t you remember the demon?”
Uchi blinks. “Is that like… a euphemism for the, you know…” He trails off and makes a drinking motion with one hand.
“Hunters,” Shige steps in, speaking slowly. Who knows what kind of trauma the demon might have inflicted on Uchi’s brain? Maybe this is some sort of selective amnesia or something. “Remember how we’re hunters?’
Uchi stares at him like he has two heads. “Idols,” he answers instead, just as deliberately. “We’re idols.”
The other members share another concerned look, everyone but Kusano, who sits with his back to Uchi’s door and seems as nonchalant as ever. “It’s true,” he agrees. “We’re idols.”
Uchi smiles at him, like he’s glad at least one of his groupmates has got any brains.
Shige just frowns at Kusano. “Shouldn’t you be more worried about this?” he asks. “We need him to tell us…”
Kusano cuts him off by jumping to his feet abruptly, movements fluid and powerful like a coiled spring. “Nope. Not worried at all,” he declares. “He’s fine now. So shouldn’t we be celebrating?”
The others grudgingly agree that it is something positive worth noting, but no one can bring themselves to feel the need to celebrate, not exactly.
Kusano seems like the only one who is certain that everything will work out.
~~*~~
Two days later, Uchi sits before Johnny nervously, promising to do better, promising to be more careful with his image as an idol.
The old man stares across the table at him thoughtfully, silent for a very long while as he looks at the NEWS member intently, over every bit of him there is to see.
And then, eventually, Johnny sighs and shakes his head.
“You,” he says gently, and reaches into his pocket for some candies, “you will need some time to rest.”
Uchi’s face falters. “No… no I don’t… I can, if you’ll let me it’ll be okay. I just want to be the best idol I can be. I’ll work hard.”
Johnny smiles reassuringly. “An idol. Yes, you’ll just be an idol.”
And then, on Uchi’s confused, stricken expression, Johnny stands and heads to the door.
In the hallway, P waits impatiently.
“Well?” the angel asks.
Johnny shakes his head. “Whatever was there is not there anymore,” he says. “He has been scrubbed clean of everything.”
P frowns. “How?”
Johnny shrugs. “Perhaps the demons were done with him.”
“No,” P says. “It doesn’t make sense, not after what I was told.”
The old man blinks. “Maybe what you were told wasn’t entirely true.”
“I think you’re right,” P agrees darkly, and with a rustle of air, disappears from the building.
~~*~~
“What did you do?” Are the first words out of P’s mouth when he appears behind Kusano suddenly, in the gym. The younger idol doesn’t jump anymore; he’s kind of used to it by now really, and breaks his rhythm against the punching bag to turn and smile at his friend.
“You sound grumpy,” he assesses, and then goes back to hitting the sand bag with all his might. “I woke up, ate breakfast, read some manga, and helped my sister with the groceries. What did you do?”
Yamapi frowns. “That’s not what I meant.”
Kusano grins. “It’s hard to tell with you.”
“I meant, how did you find them? What happened?”
Kusano’s grin disappears. “Didn’t we go over this already? We got lucky, is all. I found them and the demon was already gone. Just walked in and picked them up.”
Yamapi is unconvinced. “We aren’t that lucky.”
Kusano shrugs and punches the sandbag again, harder this time without meaning to. “Sometimes you make your own luck,” he says, and sets his jaw.
“How did you do that, then?”
“When you want something enough, you go out and get it.”
Yamapi looks perplexed now, head tilted slightly as he studies Kusano with those unreadable eyes. “I don’t understand.”
Kusano huffs his bangs out of his face and wipes sweat from his brow. “Maybe no one’s asking you to.”
Yamapi stares at him a little while longer, like he’s trying to look inside of him somehow, to find the real answers he’s looking for. For a terrible moment, Kusano feels like maybe Yamapi will be able to do it too; Yamapi has always seemed to pull off the impossible pretty well.
But then Yamapi frowns and takes a step back, out of Kusano’s bubble. “Something isn’t right,” he declares, and Kusano tries to think of something smart to say in response to that. But he only ends up jabbing at the bag a few more times, restlessly.
When he turns around again, Yamapi is already gone.
~~*~~
Uchi leaves NEWS. The group is part relieved that he won’t have to do this anymore, and part broken-hearted that he doesn’t remember half of the things they’d done together before.
At the end of 2005, NEWS suffers casualties.
There are more to come.
~~*~~
Sometimes Ryo dreams.
Has nightmares, actually. They’re more nightmares than dreams. He thinks they come from the fact that he sees nightmarish things more often than non-nightmarish things lately; he’s had vampire teeth inches from his throat, has had ghosts slam him into walls and a kitsune give him PMS. Once a gorgon even turned him into stone. He’s smelled the sour breath of hell hounds and the sulfur stench of demons, has fallen into a tub full of virgin blood and held an elderly woman down while his groupmates stuffed salt and holy water down her throat until she’d choked the black smoke out. Then she’d vomited rock salt and her lunch all over the front of his shirt.
These are the things nightmares are made of, and so he doesn’t question it too much, when his nightmares come and they aren’t memories exactly, when they start to become the faces and names of people he’s never seen before, sometimes in languages he barely knows the sounds of.
“It’s probably a mixture of watching foreign films and living our lives. Dreams are just your mind’s way of defragmenting at the end of the day, so it can consolidate the important things and throw out the unimportant ones,” Ryo overhears Shige say to Koyama one day, because apparently Koyama still has those weird-ass dreams of his from time to time as well.
It makes sense when he thinks they’re just another byproduct of their stupid crazy lives, and so he doesn’t say anything the night after the worst one yet, the one where he smells that rancid hell hound breath again, the one where he sees himself and all the others standing helplessly by as the hounds’ teeth snap around Kusano’s arms, as they claw him open and pull out his guts and drag his soul to hell.
Ryo doesn’t say anything about his nightmares or how much they scare him when he wakes up, drenched in cold sweat and breathing hard. Because they’re just stupid dreams and he and Yamapi are supposed to be the strong ones, the ones who aren’t afraid of anything. They’re the leaders, and Ryo isn’t going to let something as insignificant as a dream shake him when there are so many worse things out there to be afraid of, so many other things he has to worry about.
It isn’t until he has that same dream again, for the third or fourth time, and wakes up in bed with the sting of tears in his eyes, that he considers talking to someone about it.
“Sometimes Ryo-kun has nightmares, huh?” a soft voice asks from the other side of the room, and Ryo startles a bit at it, because he’d thought Tegoshi might be able to sleep through these things without noticing, considering how he insists on listening to music through his iPod all through the night.
Ryo doesn’t answer him for a while, not until he has his breath back and knows his voice is going to be steady. “Sometimes, yeah,” he admits, gruffly. “Don’t you?”
There’s a quiet rustling as Tegoshi turns on his side, to face the older idol in the dark. “No,” Tegoshi admits, softly. “I thought I would by now, but it hasn’t happened yet.”
Ryo snorts in laughter, strangely, incredibly relieved to hear that. “Not once?”
“Nope.”
“Good. I guess that’s good. Keep it that way.”
Tegoshi hmmms softly, in sleepy, thoughtful response. “Do you want me to wake you next time?” he asks, after a minute.
Ryo thinks about it. “Only if I get too loud.”
A rustling nod. “Okay.”
“Now get some sleep.”
“Night, Ryo-kun.”
Ryo sighs. “Yeah.”
But despite telling himself not to worry about something as stupid as a nightmare, Ryo finds that he can’t fall asleep again for the rest of the night.
~~*~~
The worry becomes very real one afternoon, when Ryo and Shige infiltrate the city morgue while the others cause a celebrity commotion outside.
When Shige makes a face and rolls the body of the victim out, Ryo stumbles backwards three steps, almost crashing into a cart holding bone saws and scalpels.
Shige blinks. “Haha, yeah right. You don’t actually think you’re going to make me believe that you of all people is still squeamish about this stuff,” he says, dryly, because that’s what Massu does whenever it’s the two of them plus bodies on a mission like this, probably just so that Massu can get out of autopsy work and leave Shige with all the hard stuff.
When Ryo doesn’t respond either way Shige pauses in his examination and looks up; when he sees the look on Ryo’s face he realizes that the horror is real, far beyond any acting any of them is currently capable of. “Nishikido-kun?” he asks, in concern. “What’s the matter?”
“I saw this woman die,” Ryo mutters, pale as the victim. “Last week, I dreamed about her.”
Shige doesn’t hesitate in pulling the older boy out of the morgue with him as quickly as they can move, autopsy results be damned.
It’s the first time he’s seen Ryo this genuinely petrified, and inexplicable as it is, Shige decides not to take any risks.
Outside, Ryo vomits in the alleyway.
~~*~~
“A fluke? Maybe it was a fluke,” Kusano offers, when they’re back at the jimusho, Ryo sitting with his head between his knees on the couch. “Like, maybe you saw the newspaper article first and then dreamed about it…”
Shige shakes his head. “As logical as that sounds, the full article with the victim’s photo wasn’t actually printed until yesterday. If Nishikido-kun says it was last week…” he pauses, to look at the older idol carefully. “You’re sure it was last week?”
“I’m sure,” Ryo growls, starting to sound annoyed as he puts the self-pity on hold to glare up at Shige. “She’s got some kind of cursed tapestry… I saw something crawl out of it, and then the next thing I see is this woman getting…” he trails off and finishes with a slicing motion across his neck.
Everyone looks unsure as to how to respond to that, except for Yamapi, whose brow furrows severely as he asks, “How long has this been happening?”
Ryo shrugs. “I don’t know.”
“What do you mean you don’t know? Seeing random strangers die in your sleep is kind of memorable,” Shige points out, because he is the king of logic in an illogical world.
“You don’t always remember everything you dream, Shige,” Tegoshi chirps in Ryo’s defense. “Sometimes you wake up knowing you had a dream but you can’t remember what it was about.”
Shige falters. “Shut up.”
Yamapi, luckily, has an uncanny ability to stay on topic. “How long can you remember having them?” he asks Ryo next.
Ryo shrugs again. “Since our first ghost, probably. I mean, I had nightmares about it afterwards, but it was still weird.” He makes a vague gesture with his hand. “I dreamed about when she was alive. How her neighbor had been watching her from the window of his house since she was just a kid, and how one night, when he couldn’t take it anymore, he hid in the alleyway and as she was coming home from a jog, he’d just reached out and…” he looks kind of sick for having to remember it again, before swallowing and moving on. “Anyway, after he was done with…stuff… he knocked her out, weighed her down, threw her in the lake. She drowned unconscious.”
The others look vaguely sick too. “Wow,” Kusano whistles.
“I thought I was just having a really weird dream,” Ryo sighs.
Koyama looks intensely sympathetic. “And since then you’ve…”
Ryo shakes his head. “I mean, I’ve had dreams here and there, but today was the first time I saw someone die and then saw… you know. After. I thought I was just going crazy.”
“You might be,” Shige mutters, looking thoughtful.
Koyama smacks his best friend in the arm and gives him an imploring look that tells him be sensitive.
“He’s not crazy,” Yamapi assures them. “Prophetic dreams are possible amongst humans.”
His groupmates blink. “What, really? Like, some psychics are real and stuff?” Shige asks, wide-eyed.
“I’m not psychic,” Ryo barks at him.
“Just psycho,” Kusano quips, because he can’t help it. Koyama smacks him this time, but Kusano just kind of grins sheepishly.
In the background, Tegoshi looks carefully thoughtful.
After a minute, he raises his hand. “Ryo-kun,” he asks, and says things very carefully for once, “what do you keep dreaming about Kusano?”
All sets of eyes suddenly turn to Kusano.
Ryo remembers.
He promptly vomits again.
~~*~~
“Why are you all looking at me?” Kusano mutters, strangely defensive. “I’m not the one having dreams about me.” Pause. Grin. Eyebrow waggle. “Though I am kind of flattered. I hope you at least wake up satisfied, babe.”
Ryo pinches the bridge of his nose between his thumb and forefinger, like he has a full blown headache now, sprung on him in the span of five minutes. “Look,” he says, and sounds like he wants to believe himself more than anyone else, “I have plenty of regular dreams too. Maybe I just dream about that idiot dying because sometimes I want to kill him.”
Koyama looks horrified. “He dies in your dreams?”
Ryo blinks and realized he’d just revealed that. “Yeah, er, sometimes.”
Tegoshi looks worried, chubby cheeks intensifying his frown somehow. Ryo sighs. “Okay, all the time. But again, we don’t know these are prophetic. He might just be annoying.” He doesn’t sound like he believes it either, as logical as it seems.
Koyama on the other hand, seems like he’s on the verge of a coronary; Shige gives him a brown paper bag to breathe in.
Kusano just looks amused, but in a forced kind of way, in the kind of way he does sometimes when they have to do embarrassing things on TV that he absolutely hates but can’t say he does out loud, because audiences are watching them.
It’s almost like he’s got his performance face on.
Ryo remembers the way he screams in his nightmares, the way the flesh is pulled from his body and his bones are snapped in enormous, invisible jaws. He manages to resist the urge to purge this time, but only barely. “Look,” he snaps, getting impatient with the scrutiny and the possibility that he’s right, “we don’t know anything for sure until we do, right? How the hell do we prove something like this anyway?”
Shige speaks next, because of course he does. “Easy,” the resident smartypants says. “We go investigate our case like we were supposed to and see if Nishikido-kun’s dream was right. If it was…” he trails off, looking meaningfully at Kusano.
Kusano glares at him and reaches out to flicks his nose.
“Alright then,” Yamapi agrees, though he looks like he’s already made his mind up about it.
They go to solve the case, and for once, everyone hopes that they don’t have the answers already, that it isn’t a cursed tapestry that comes to life and kills its owners in the dead of the night.
~~*~~
Seven hours later, as Massu stands over the remains of the burning tapestry, trying to stem the bleeding in his arm from where he’d been sliced open, he turns sad, determined eyes on Kusano. “If we’re warned ahead of time,” he whispers, “that means we can stop it, right?”
Kusano smiles crookedly and watches the fire slowly fizzle out at their feet. “Sure,” he answers, a little too jovially. “Yeah.”
~~*~~
P grabs Kusano by the collar and slams him up against the nearest wall. “What did you do?” he demands, and the other members almost swear that the lights start to flicker overhead.
“Didn’t we already do this song and dance?” Kusano gasps, and it takes Koyama jumping in and begging with his eyes for P to put the younger member down again.
“Hell hounds,” P says, more furious than he’s ever remembered being, “are not often used in every day demon routine.”
Kusano shrugs, rubbing his neck sorely. “Maybe something big comes along. You always tell us we’re preparing for a real battle, don’t you? Why wouldn’t the other side break out their invisible death traps?”
Half of the group looks on the verge of being convinced. P is anything but. “Why are you lying?” he asks, after a moment, truly confused now. “You would die for me; you almost have so many times already, but it’s hard for you to tell me the truth.”
Kusano shrugs. “Maybe you just need to learn to have some faith in me.”
P feels himself physically recoil for a moment at that; he’s always understood the concept of words hurting, but this is the first time he has experienced it. “Give me a reason.”
A smirk. “Is it really that hard just to believe?”
Behind them, their groupmates start to get impatient. It’s Tegoshi who steps forward.
“Kusano, just tell us what’s going on,” he demands, pout in full effect, starting to look more angry than scared.
And that’s when Kusano blurts, “I needed to save them, okay?!” before he knows what he’s doing, and the minute it’s out he claps his own hands over his mouth, wide-eyed like he can’t believe he just did that.
Silence.
P feels like punching him again, but somehow lacks the strength. He closes his eyes again and takes a shuddering breath. “How long?” he asks.
“How long what? What’s going on?” Koyama asks, voice shrill and panicky.
“A deal,” P informs him, when the rest of the group is too shocked to answer, when Shige buries his head in his hands and Massu’s knees give out from under him. “He made a deal at the crossroads.”
Kusano’s eyes are full of steel when he looks back at P. “My life, my choices. I’d do the same all over again.”
“How long?” Massu asks after a long moment of silence between them, voice shaking. “How long do you ha…”
Kusano sighs. “Does it matter?”
Massu’s eyes narrow. “It matters.”
“Ten years,” he says, eventually. “Standard deal.”
And then, before anyone can say anything else, Kusano walks out of the room.
~~*~~
“You lied,” Ryo says later, when he finds Kusano sitting alone on a park bench with a beer he’s too young to be drinking.
“Says who,” Kusano asks, around a mouthful of convenience store bread.
“You’re not ten years older in my dream.”
Kusano snorts. “Maybe I just age well. Asian and all that.”
Ryo punches him under his chin, hard. It’ll leave a bruise, but one that’s easier to cover up with makeup than any blow to the face would be. Kusano reels, cursing and spitting bread.
“What the hell?” Kusano demands, and tastes blood from where he’d bit the inside of his cheek just now.
Ryo’s whole body is shaking when he plops down onto the bench next to Kusano and takes a swig of his beer without asking. “Thanks,” Ryo manages, eventually.
Kusano gives him a look like he’s insane. “Um, what?”
“For Uchi,” Ryo clarifies. “For Massu.”
Kusano grins. “Didn’t do it for you,” he replies, and snatches his beer back.
“Yeah, well now we have to stop it for you, moron,” Ryo shoots back.
Kusano scowls at him. “Don’t you dare,” he says. “You do and the deal’s off. Then Uchi and Massu are both gone.”
Ryo looks pained. “What the hell do you want us to do then?”
Kusano shrugs. “Nothing. It’s two for one. In the long run, that’s a bargain.”
“You’re an idiotic little shit,” Ryo snaps.
Kusano just laughs and finishes off his beer.
They sit in silence like that for a while, before Ryo’s back loses some of its rigidity, its righteous Yamapi-esque set.
“How long?” Ryo asks, eyes trained on the starry night sky.
Kusano just says, “Long enough,” and offers Ryo a bite of his bread.
They sit in the cold of early January and watch snowflakes start to fall in the park around them for a few hours after that, and Kusano sighs like it’s the most beautiful night he’s ever seen, like he’s determined to enjoy every minute of it despite the slight swelling in his jaw and the fact that his damned bread tastes a little bit like blood now.
Ryo knows Kusano’s never been this patient in nature, that he’s never this still and content. He adds it up with the images in his dreams and manages to hold back tears when he thinks they have a lot less time than Kusano wants them to believe.
He goes and buys Kusano another beer, and has to make himself leave before he breaks down sobbing in the middle of the street.
Kusano tells him to go ahead. “I’m gonna just sit here for a little bit longer.”
~~*~~
A few days later, when the Japanese press is throwing a shit fit about images they’ve seen of Kusano drinking underage and in public, the rest of NEWS is apologizing on camera, some of them are sobbing their eyes out.
None of the reporters know that of their tears aren’t because they’re sorry about the alcohol.
The press conference means nothing to them right now, not after earlier, when P had walked into the room and gravely told them that a fellow hunter-that their friend- is gone.
Sometime afterward, a continent away, the same thing will happen again to someone else with the exact same results.
Hell hounds are the worst.
~~*~~
“I didn’t think that we would become our own greatest weaknesses,” P says, into his tea.
Johnny looks on kindly, knowingly. “You did not expect to care this much.”
Hesitation. Then, a sigh. “No.”
Johnny squeezes the angel’s shoulder. “Perhaps it is not a weakness.”
P disagrees; he’s never felt so weak in countless millennia until this moment. He tells himself this can’t be the purpose of his mission.
~~*~~
Some months later, when it feels just like going through the motions and hoping not to burn, Johnny takes the battered, broken remnants of NEWS aside and tells them, “I think you boys need some rest.”
P wants to protest because his orders are absolute, but he finds that when he looks at the sad eyes and hunched shoulders of his groupmates (of these boys), he can’t help but agree with Johnny, perhaps a bit selfishly. He finds that he would give anything for them to not be the ones who have to do this.
Perhaps they don’t have to be.
“We’ll stop for now,” he says eventually, when the thought attaches to himself and won’t let go; he thinks that maybe there’s still time yet, to save them from this fate. That decided, he turns and walks out the door before anyone else can speak.
From there he flies to the edge of the Pegasus Galaxy and stands in the midst of a vast and empty nothingness, trying to remind himself that a single human life is nothing in the face of God’s awesome power, in the context of His ineffable plan.
In the early part of 2006, NEWS is pulled apart and tired.
~~*~~
Meanwhile, in hell, the years and the years and the years pass, and Kusano thinks that it’s nothing he expected it to be.
If he could tell anyone-he doesn’t know who, because he doesn’t remember much-he would let them know that they were right about the fires, but wrong about the temperature.
Hell burns bright and fearsome and eternal, but it is no inferno.
It burns cold.
His soul sits, waiting on the rack for the fortieth year in a row, for the fortieth year of being ripped apart and split open and bled and stretched and burned and resurrected just so they can do it all again.
“Well?” the demon asks kindly, like he does every day, hand like claws almost gentle against Kusano’s shredded essence, the feel of it warm and inviting. “Would you like to get off that rack and come stand beside me? All you have to do is pick up the blade.”
Kusano’s soul flutters and it is full of want, full of an exhausted, twisted desire to stop all the pain no matter what.
He smiles into Alastair’s hand, turns his cheek into it and nuzzles. “Die in a fire,” he answers sweetly, and doesn’t say yes. He isn’t sure why, but part of him knows he can’t say it, as much as he wants to. It would mean everything was for nothing.
Alastair frowns. “How noble,” he murmurs, and turns to his instruments again, humming softly to himself. “But don’t worry. We’ve got time, Hiro. And plenty of other opportunities. New arrivals, in fact.”
Kusano starts singing TEPPEN in response, and his voice breaks only once, when Alastair cuts him in half straight down the middle.
The new arrivals come after that as promised, and Kusano watches, bloody and broken, as they are tied up on the rack beside him, fresh and new and so, so bright.
The one beside his seems brighter than all the others.
“Name’s Hiro,” he tells it conversational, after it’s tied up and waiting its turn.
The soul looks back at him grimly. “John.”
Kusano chuckles. “Know any good songs?”
John does, as it turns out.
~~*~~
This is the time to just be idols, Koyama supposes, as he wallows in hiatus, grateful only because it means the whispers that have been plaguing his dreams stop for a while, as if they know that the great swell that had brought them to him is over now, now that he can be a student again, a performer, a brother, a son.
He tells himself he’d never been cut out for hunting after all; he’d never been as strong as the others, or as determined as the others, definitely not as special. His dreams are just crazy and nonsensical even to himself; they don’t foresee things like Ryo’s.
On the days he has free-he has them again-he helps out at his mother’s ramen shop, chatting with regulars, wiping down tables, posing with the occasional tourists that come in, looking for Koyama from that group that isn’t there anymore, NEWS was it?
That sends pangs of regret through him whenever he hears it, that he isn’t with NEWS anymore, but he tells himself it’s for the best; NEWS and hunting are one in the same as far as anyone is concerned, and without NEWS that means he and the others are out of danger now, means they won’t end up like Kusano and they can work to become more like Uchi.
He tells himself over and over again that he isn’t meant to be a hunter.
He has to tell himself again when the news reports come in a few days later, while he’s helping his mom clean up after closing, about a mysterious string of murders where the victims are completely drained of blood.
He drops the tray of bowls he’s carrying when it happens, and his mother frowns at him from behind the register, where she’s balancing the till. “Is something wrong, Kei?” she asks, gently, and knows her son has been on edge lately because of everything happening at work.
“Nothing,” he croaks back, and bends down to pick up the bowls, as the news report switches from images of the mourning victims’ families to a cheery animation about the five day weather forecast.
After he finishes cleaning up, he tells his mother he’s going to his room for the rest of the night to do some homework.
It isn’t exactly a lie.
~~*~~
When Koyama calls Shige, Shige is already way ahead of him. “Based on the times of death, the locations where each of the bodies were found, and how quickly we know vampires can move, I’ve managed to triangulate the location of the nest,” his best friend says quickly, and it’s in a slightly sheepish way, like he knows they don’t have to do this but that they do all the same, and please don’t say anything about it.
Koyama picks Shige up in the morning; he remembers the faces of the grief stricken survivors from last night’s news report as they leave and thinks that maybe it’s not a matter of being cut out for this life or not, so much as it’s a matter of knowing you can do something to help someone and doing it.
~~*~~
Tegoshi and Massu are already up to their ankles in vampire corpses when Shige and Koyama burst onto the scene.
It seems like they should be surprised to all be meeting up like this so suddenly again, but no one is, not really, and all they can do from there is swing their axes until every vampire head has been separated from its vampire body.
Just after noon, after the last syringe of dead man’s blood is gone and there is a mess of blood and gore everywhere, the four NEWS members sit in a heap in the middle of the room, breathing hard and not knowing what to say right off the bat.
Shige breaks the ice. “How’d you find the nest?” he manages to croak, after a beat.
Tegoshi laughs a little bit, sore and satisfied. “Lucky guess.”
Shige scowls, and after that, they all manage to laugh, at least a little bit.
~~*~~
“You’ve been hunting,” P says, when he sees them again at work.
“Yeah,” Koyama admits, looking a little bit sheepish.
P frowns. “Why? You don’t have to.”
“But we do,” the eldest answers, quickly. “People could die.”
“People will die either way,” P points out, not to be cruel, just to be honest. They have a chance to free themselves of this.
“Saving someone is better than not doing anything,” Massu pipes up. “Helping someone still counts as something.”
P’s face is impassive, but he feels something move inside of him then, and it is monumental enough of a shift that it makes him take one small step backwards.
Koyama smiles, like he can feel that shift too, and after a minute, asks P what it’s been like, out on the road performing by himself these last few months.
“It’s… alone,” P answers, and somehow it feels like more than just being honest.
The others smile shyly at that, and P realizes they probably understand.
~~*~~
In a place outside of space and time, the angel Perpetiel is suddenly summoned to heaven again, forcibly ripped from the earthly plane the middle of the day and flung through eons back home.
When he arrives he feels his Grace explode outward from the tiny coil he’s kept it in all this time; it rolls over him like a storm and everything heightens in that moment, expands and contracts and becomes clearer somehow, realer.
He can suddenly see again, in every direction, in north, east, west, and south. The irony of that errant thought makes him smile and he sighs and stretches his wings fully, like one who has been woken from a long hibernation.
He had almost forgotten what it is like to exist like this, on such an immense scale.
“Quite the busy little angel, aren’t we, Perpetiel?” a familiar voice asks, and P stares curiously as Zachariah enters his office, holding up a magazine with Tomohisa’s face on it. He seems all amusement at the existence of such a pathetic thing, and flips through it briefly, like it is the most interesting blasphemy he’s seen in the name of false idols in a very long time. “Very busy indeed.”
“Yes,” P answers, because it is the truth.
Zachariah’s smirk dissolves at P’s apparent lack of humor and he puts the magazine down. “You haven’t reported back to us in a while. We were worried.”
“There has been nothing of import to report,” P answers, carefully.
Zachariah’s eyes narrow then, that friendly demeanor becoming something else entirely, something that makes P feel the edge of lightning as it crackles in the air. “Nothing important to report?” Zachariah repeats, incredulous.
“Yes.”
Zachariah snorts. “That’s what I hate about foot soldiers,” he mutters to himself in disgust. “They think they know things.”
P doesn’t respond.
Zachariah doesn’t need him to. “A righteous man in hell,” Zachariah murmurs, leaning in close to P and glaring, “is very important.”
P’s blinks. “A righteous… who?”
Zachariah sneers. “Who do you think?”
P’s eyes widen. “Kusano wasn’t…”
“Oh but he was,” Zachariah interrupts, almost gleeful at his subordinate’s clear surprise. “He is. And now John Winchester is there too, and don’t you think… don’t you think that having two of them in hell improves the odds of the end of the world? Just a little bit?”
P manages to school his features again, after the initial surprise wears off (which thankfully, for angels, it does rather quickly). “I don’t know about John Winchester,” he admits, “beyond what I have been told and what has been foretold. But I know Kusano won’t break the first seal.”
Zachariah gives him an expression that says aren’t you precious and pats his shoulder patronizingly. “I suppose you would be the authority on them, your little band of child hunters, wouldn’t you, Perpetiel?”
P nods. “I know more than most. But I haven’t learned everything,” he says, fairly.
Zachariah scowls. “It’s not our place to learn. It’s our place to act,” he says. “Our orders are clear.”
P stands a little straighter instinctively, and it is almost disturbing to know that even at his full glory, he still finds the need to revert to the things he has learned at Johnny’s, the stupid little human customs that mean communication with one’s physical form. “How should I act, then?” he asks, without intonation.
Zachariah waves a hand breezily in the air. “What you’ve been doing is fine, I suppose. Preparing the east for defense of the seals. Just try to be a little more communicative. You know how Michael gets.” Pause. “Oh, and we’ve some additional information to brief you on; a few addendums that have since been discovered since you were last home.”
P’s eyebrow arches. “Addendums?”
Zachariah huffs in annoyance. “You know, stuff that would have been easy in the good old days, when that slacker Gabriel was still around to do his job.” He doesn’t elaborate before reaching out and touching P’s head.
P feels the promise of lighting from before again, but this time it turns into full reality, slamming full force into his brain, making him gasp, making his eyes glow and wings unfurl in pain and joy.
When everything finally refocuses he is suddenly very small again, back on earth inside of Tomohisa’s fragile human body, where the smell of ozone and sounds of chaos and fury are only far off memories. He takes a moment to readjust, to find his bearings and rediscover where and when he is.
As he does, the new information finally hits him, the sear of characters in his brain familiar and horrific and somehow, somehow, not at all unexpected given everything he has seen here, in his time amongst humanity and with NEWS.
He hastily balls his Grace back up inside of himself (promises, angels always keep their promises), and takes flight.
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