JE/NEWS+SPN- "All's Chaos on the Eastern Front" (1/7)
Title: All’s Chaos on the Eastern Front
Universe: JE/NewS+Supernatural
Theme/Topic: N/A
Rating: PG-13 for language and violence
Character/Pairing/s: NEWS, Castiel, Zachariah (with appearances by Johnny and mentions/cameos of/by various SPN characters and J&A personalities)
Warnings/Spoilers: The apocalypse. Some pretty direct spoilers for Supernatural through S5, fudging on Biblical facts and stuff. Yeah.
Word Count: 66,475
Summary: A war is fought on more than one front; this is humanity’s road to the Apocalypse in series of trans-Pacific parallels.
Dedication: originally for myxstorie and the newsficcon exchange! I don’t know if this counts as an AU or a crossover, so I’ll just call it an Improbable Universe an (IU?). Original post here!
A/N: I blame the stair episode of Soukon for this and the fact that when I was looking up angel names I found the most perfect thing EVER. Also because I am lame. Special thanks to pipsqueaks and mousapelli for betaing this monstrosity!
Disclaimer: No harm or infringement intended.
~~*~~
1. Then
Johnny Kitagawa has always been blessed. Ever since he was a child he can remember having the ability to look at a person and look at a person all at the same time, to see beyond a handsome face or a pretty smile and find the light underneath, the truth that exists behind it all. At first it had been strange, knowing he could do this. He’d tried to tell other people- his parents, his siblings, his teachers, his friends- about what he saw, but over time he realized that this was going to be something just for him, something special that only he could understand. Not everyone in this world is meant to see like he sees.
So he kept this knowledge in his heart for years and years. He saw with his second sight and could always, always find the truth.
He knows he is blessed because of it; over his very long life, he has learned to stop questioning it and analyzing it and simply let it be.
It comes to him in a mix of colors and light and feeling. It isn’t just seeing with his eyes so much as seeing with himself, with all of everything. In America they called him psychic. In Japan they call it the sight. In show business, they simply call it a special something, a knack. None of these names is completely wrong, but none of them is completely right either; Johnny simply considers it his own good luck, and has used it to build an empire here in Japan, one that has spanned decades of history, of strife, of change and advancement and stagnation. It is a beacon here in this traditional land of rapid change, something sturdy and lasting and strong, and Johnny knows -even if no one else does-that it is because Johnny and Associates is a company he has built on nothing but the truth, on the things he sees right in front of his own two eyes.
It is a company built to sell.
That all changes unexpectedly one afternoon in the mid-90s, in the midst of a time when the Americans are busy flooding Johnny’s market with their better trained harmonies and good looks and factory efficiency.
Johnny remembers it as one of the first few great surprises in his life when he walks into one of the audition rooms and sees a boy who can’t be any older than eleven standing in the corner, head tilted, eyes looking serenely, impassively on as the senior dance instructors struggle to line up all of the other young candidates in a row, to see if they can be taught to clap in time.
For a moment, Johnny’s breath catches in his throat-oddly, instinctively- as he first lays eyes on that strange boy, and he isn’t sure why. At the exact same time, the boy turns to look right at him, right at him, as Johnny steps through the door, as if he had been the one waiting for him all this time.
“I must speak to you, Johnny Kitagawa,” Johnny feels the boy say rather than hears him say, and in the next breath, in the next second, the boy is striding across the room purposefully and placing two fingers to Johnny’s forehead. It is not something Johnny foresees coming, and he blinks as the floor falls out from under him suddenly; there is a rush of wind in his ears and from there it feels like being whisked away on edges of stray lightning and swirling chaos.
When he opens his eyes again he falls backwards into a familiar black swivel chair and discovers that he is in his office now; the boy stands before him (he is a beautiful boy, Johnny notes), his face still as stone, eyes naturally blank and posture rigid, as if he doesn’t quite fit into his own skin comfortably yet.
Johnny feels like he should know what is happening already, but he doesn’t, not quite. He can see but at the same time, he cannot, as if his sight is trying to block itself, to save him from looking over the edge into some deeply immeasurable, fathomless depth. “You, what are you?” he asks, when he finds his voice again.
The boy blinks once. “I am an angel of the Lord.”
~~*~~
“I am called Perpetiel,” he tells Johnny flatly, emotionless. “I have been sent here by order of heaven, on a mission from God to prepare the East for the things that are to come as the End of Days approaches.”
“Just you alone?” Johnny asks, and it is strange that he has to ask things now, because the boy-the creature-across from him is of a depth truly incomprehensible to his normal human mind. “That seems like a large responsibility for just one angel.”
Perpetiel’s eyes shift slightly. “My brothers and sisters can’t be spared from their work. This place isn’t the main front upon which the battle will be waged,” he explains.
Johnny sighs. “America, then,” he murmurs, knowingly. “It must be America.”
The angel nods once, sharply. “Yes. It has already begun.”
Johnny supposes that explains the strange rumblings in his mind, the inexplicable screams that had echoed in the periphery of his very being almost at random one November evening in 1983. There have been echoes of it in Johnny’s dreams ever since that night, disturbing and dark and foreboding of worse things still to come.
He leans back in his chair and suddenly feels very, very old. “And what would you have me do, Per…” he trails off, frowning. “I feel that name is too long,” he decides, eventually.
The angel does not react visibly. “It is the name my Father in heaven saw fit to bestow upon me.”
“P,” Johnny decides after a moment, with something of a smile on his face. “I will call you P.”
The angel blinks when he hears that, and for a moment, looks as if humans and humanity are truly incomprehensible to him.
Johnny just smiles, because that is a look he recognizes, one that should appear on the faces of eleven-year-old boys naturally. “So then, what can I do for you, P?” he asks, and withdraws some candies from his pocket. He offers them to the angel, but P just eyes him without understanding what they are or what the gesture of Johnny bouncing them around in his open palm in his direction means.
“I was sent to you because you are the closest thing this land has to a universally accepted guardian,” P explains, after a moment. “You have the stable power base and influence inside of this country that your government leaders and your spiritual leaders do not; everyone here who knows you admires you in some shape or form. To complete my mission, I require consensus and absolute trust, as time is of the essence.”
This is the sort of talk Johnny is familiar with now; how many people have come to him in the past, asking for advice, for help, for insight and influence? It’s like another contract, another company alliance, endorsement deal, tacit agreement between rivals. “So you want to use my influence to complete your mission instead of creating your own?”
P’s brow furrows, and for a moment, the gesture is almost human. “I am the only angel heaven can spare to guard this front, my orders are to teach and prepare the humans on this island to fight for themselves should I be called away during the battle. I must also train them to do the things I cannot to save this hemisphere.” Pause. “Angels cannot tread in all places.”
Johnny’s eyebrow darts up. “Save this hemisphere? That is a large responsibility for such a small island.”
P’s eyes betray no emotion. “This is the gateway from America on its western shores. While Japan itself may be inconsequential, its position on this planet is of tactical import in the war to come.”
Johnny snorts. “I see. And what makes you think you can train an old man to save one inconsequential island at the end of the world?”
“Not you,” P states without hesitation. “You are indeed too old and frail for the mission in your current state, and will be even more so when the time to fight is upon us in the years ahead. However, I do require your help in finding and training soldiers for me to lead into the battle.”
“Soldiers? I only create idols here.”
P looks slightly uncomfortable at that. “That is another reason why I am here,” he admits, reluctantly.
Johnny stops. “And what else, besides defending Asia, can an old man like me do that an all-powerful angel of the Lord cannot?”
“My vessel,” P explains, reluctantly. “Tomohisa prayed for this, for divine aid that he may become successful in your industry in order to take care of his family. A mother and a sister. I promised him I would honor that wish should he accept me.” Pause. “Though I am…uncomfortable with the idea of becoming a false idol, I am determined to keep my promises.”
Johnny is vaguely incredulous. “You want to become an idol?”
P nods, mouth set in a grim line even if the idea is distasteful to him. “I must.”
And then, for the first time all afternoon, Johnny feels himself start to laugh. “If that really is the case,” he begins, chuckling from deep in his belly, “you have so much to learn.”
When P gives him another vaguely uncomprehending look, Johnny just laughs even harder.
~~*~~
“We must keep our promises,” P, murmurs tightly to himself as he is forced to don a sparkling silver monstrosity with flowers blossoming out of it at inexplicable, inconsistent angles. “If we fail to keep our promises we are no better than the scourge of hell.”
He thinks determinedly about Tomohisa’s quiet mother and his bubbly little sister, the ones waiting for him at home with no idea that the boy they had known and loved hides within the heavenly, unfathomable veil of an angel’s heavenly might. With them-and his promise-in mind, P unfurls his inky black wings from his back fully, to achieve proper balance. With this, finally, thankfully, he manages the thrice-damned back flip that has, until now, been completely eluding him as he’d fumbled around in Tomohisa’s awkward, clumsy body.
Johnny grunts at him from the back of the room, where he is calmly observing the irate angel. “You, you are too inhuman, too robotic when you move like that,” the aged producer barks. “Didn’t we have a deal that we would do this my way?”
P scowls but remembers that they do; he reluctantly folds his wings back against his shoulders again and pushes the glowing embers of his Grace deep inside of Tomohisa’s fragile, tiny shell, crowding its brilliant glow into the crevices behind the human soul sleeping peacefully inside him. He feels his powers dull correspondingly as he does and it leads P to more keenly feel the incessant pull of muscle, the ache of flesh, the frightening smallness of the humanity that he has bound himself to. It must show on his face, this vulnerability, because soon, Johnny smiles and claps him on the shoulder as if he has come upon a great and pleasing discovery. “That’s it,” the old man tells him. “This is how you become a person.”
P tries not to be annoyed at the tone this insolent human takes with him, because angels are not supposed to become annoyed. “There is no time for this,” he says, anyway. The statement itself is still a fact, even if its utterance is driven by nothing more than his current exasperation.
Johnny has heard it all before and is generally unimpressed by his righteous decrees. “There are some years yet, until the end of the world, as I feel it. How will you expect to lead the fighters you are looking for if you cannot understand the depth of their trials yourself?”
The angel is unconvinced. “They will bow in awe of my heavenly glory and follow the word of my Father into battle,” he says, petulantly.
Johnny smiles, and it is full of mystery. “You don’t understand humans at all. But you must in order to complete your task.” And then he pats P on the head and offers him one of the candies from his pocket. “Either way, a deal is a deal, isn’t it?”
P sighs.
He takes the offered candy with a nod of thanks before obediently folding in his Grace farther still, so that he almost feels and sees and exists only with human limitations. This is the one thing that Johnny Kitagawa had insisted upon when he agreed to help the angel, all those months ago.
“If we are to make you a proper idol,” the old man had said that day, full of both mirth and dead seriousness, “then first we must teach you about humanity. An idol must appeal to humanity. As must a hero.”
The words themselves mean very little, but when the angel Perpetiel thinks of Tomohisa’s quiet mother and his bubbly little sister back at home again, when he thinks of the plaintive, quiet prayers he’d heard from an eleven-year-old boy’s tired voice all the way from heaven, he tells himself that angels must keep their promises no matter what.
With time and many, many back flips, Johnny forces him to learn a little bit about humans, a little bit about humanity.
P isn’t sure if he likes it.
~~*~~
It is nearly eight full years before Johnny decides that it is time to move forward. P’s Grace burns hot at the back of Tomohisa’s body by then, dull with disuse and cramped in its tiny prison, trembling at him, calling him to let it out in all its glory.
He does not let it out, and the proof lies in the gamut of human emotion he sometimes feels when he isn’t careful, the impatience, the confusion, the uncertainty. “Time is running out,” he tells Johnny one afternoon, when he isn’t being careful. He and Johnny sit in his office and the old man offers him the same candy from his pocket as always, offers the same tea and enigmatic smile, like he can finally, finally, see into the angel just like he can see into everyone else.
“You’re right. Now it is time to build your garrison of hunters,” Johnny agrees, for once. “And I have found them. Come with me and see for yourself, Yamapi.”
P frowns at Johnny’s use of the nickname’s nickname, the one given to him by some of Johnny’s more good-humored employees over the years as the angel had struggled to understand the limitations of his new humanity in front of their unknowing eyes. They had laughed indulgently and given him the moniker without his permission out of fondness for his hard work, none of them noticing his indifference to the name as he’d concentrated instead, on figuring out the secrets of flesh and bone, as he’d boggled through the intricacies of dance and song and the overwhelming emotions he evoked in fans even if he had never even spoken directly with a single one of them before. “Yamapi!” they would scream and cry and chant at him, over and over again like the word had some power, even if it isn’t his name, has never been his name.
Even if he feels nothing for it.
He follows Johnny outside faithfully, down the stairs, into the car. Along the way he is greeted by several people who smile and pat his shoulder and say, “How’s it going, Yamapi?” and all he can do is force a smile (mysterious things, smiles) and nod in greeting to them, like he has learned to do during his time here.
He hopes that now this strange charade can end, that Johnny will give him the means with which to fulfill his true mission here, now that he has first fulfilled his promise to Tomohisa.
It is time to work.
~~*~~
They arrive at a photo studio sometime later and it is buzzing with activity, with lights and screens and ticking clocks that remind P of how little time remains until the end.
Johnny senses his agitation and reaches into his pocket for more candy, infinitely patient. “There is time yet. I feel there is time,” he says, with perfect confidence and no real explanation. It makes P long to let his Grace free again, to its fullest glory, so that he may see what Johnny sees as well and be assured.
But he keeps his promises; the promise he made with Tomohisa and the deal he made with Johnny.
“Thirteen is a good number, P. Give me thirteen years. What is that small amount of time to an immortal? ”
At the time it hadn’t seemed like much, not to an immortal. But here, like this, P thinks it feels like much too long, and he is eager to complete his mission.
“This way,” Johnny tells him, and leads him right into the middle of the bright lights and bustle.
Almost eight years after he first arrived on Earth, Johnny finally shows P the hunters he had come to gather.
P hopes they are mighty.
~~*~~
While P is spending his time learning the ins and outs of a complicated humanity, Johnny does not sit idly by; he moves to fulfill his end of the bargain over the course of those eight years, picking P’s hunters exactly like he picks all of his other groups.
The process is not simple; when Johnny creates a unit he looks inside every one of the potential candidates that are brought in front of him and searches for the first connecting string he can find amongst five, six, eight, or however many of them it might exist in at that one time. It is a random line of commonality determined by fate and fate alone, one that will bind individuals together into a single entity and pull them forward throughout their careers. It is hard to explain in concrete terms when it is based on something so intangible, when there is no consistency to his decisions, no real formula to it.
For TOKIO that mystery binding string had been something as simple as the mutual rhythm that had beat within each of the members’ hearts. When one’s soul would call out with a thumpa-thumpa-thump another would answer with a complimentary bump-bump-bumpa, and all the subsequent pieces had joined the song from there, fitting together to build a simple, perfect melody, one only Johnny could properly here.
When he puts V6 together after that it is because he sees a line of familiarity running through each the members’ hearts, one that reminds him of the kind a family naturally creates just by being family. In V6, the way their strings connect are just like how a mother and father, and father and son, and son and daughter, would connect, all different, vastly different, but at the same time, exactly the same when broken down into component parts.
With Arashi it is harmony that he sees that year, within the roiling waves of the members’ varied souls, the splash of contrasting and clashing colors inside each of the boys not quite able to hide the uniform coil of warmth and peace underneath it all that makes them work so well with one another.
Conversely, in KAT-TUN’s year he finds a connection through ambition, through a shared, coldblooded drive to be the best at all costs. It allows the members to cut away other, less important things in light of that goal, the things they hate about each other, the things that they don’t want to do or see, the things that would otherwise strive to pull them to pieces. If it is something-anything-that is of no use in getting them towards their ultimate goal then it is also something that can be burned away from these six individuals without hesitation or remorse. Their differences are obvious and striking at first glance but their uniform ruthlessness is something only Johnny can see in them at any one given moment, an angry flame of take-no-prisoners that will continue to drive them onward even as everything else about them suggests they’d more likely rip each other apart.
What the next binding component will be Johnny doesn’t know. All he does know is that it only takes is a thread. One tiny, common thread can create an entire universe.
This is how Johnny has always made his successes, how he has always brought together individual talents in his company to form coherent units. Idol groups that seem thrown together because of blind luck and chance-to the untrained eye anyway- are really made by finding the one thing inside each of the members that is strong enough to triumph over everything else.
This is also how Johnny makes NEWS.
However, NEWS’s purpose is vastly different than the other groups’ purposes and so he knows their existence will be held to a different standard as well; Johnny does not expect them to be wildly successful or wildly popular as idols, though he senses they will be just successful enough to keep P’s promise to the boy whose body he now wears.
Beyond that, NEWS’s purpose will be to fight, to hunt, to sacrifice. So when Johnny is searching for them over the years, he looks for members that remind him of the angel he’s trained, of the angel he has had to break down and build up again over the course of eight years before he discovered how to understand him, before he discovered that he would never be able to fully understand him.
When Johnny forms NEWS, he picks members that each have something inside them that he can’t quite identify, that he knows he will never be able to understand completely no matter how hard he tries.
In so doing, Johnny makes NEWS as unfathomable to him as the will of heaven is. He binds the members together with that invisible thread of deep and profound mystery, ties them to one another with the unknown and the unknowable and an angel of the Lord who is all those things at once.
As such, NEWS’s sudden existence is as much a mystery to the man who created it as it is to the rest of the country (and to the members themselves).
From there they are destined to begin a journey fraught with strife and peril, with no clue whatsoever about who they are or what it is they are supposed to do.
This-and this alone- is why Johnny is confident that one day, NEWS will help save Japan.
2. The Road So Far
The world, Tegoshi thinks, is a strange and confusing place.
Yesterday he’d had dance lessons just like he always does on Mondays, and Nishikido-kun had reached out and pinched his butt in the middle of his arpeggios just because he’d felt like it. Afterwards, Tegoshi had gone home on the train and had dinner and studied a little bit before his mother had poked her head into his room and made him turn off his video games. She said he had to go to bed early and pointedly reminded him that there was an English test in the morning at school. He’d reluctantly agreed to sleep, kissed her good night, and gone to sleep thinking that when he woke up, he’d could look forward to having another day just like yesterday today.
Yesterday had been a normal day.
The world is really a strange, incomprehensible, and confusing place, Tegoshi realizes, when today, not long after his very normal English test and his very normal dance lessons, he doesn’t find himself in any semblance of normal anymore. There was no train ride home after work this evening, no home cooked meal or high school textbooks or Dragon Quest. Rather, he currently finds himself huddled around the other members of NEWS at the edge of a lake in the after dark hours as they continue to work.
That work being Koyama screaming in Tegoshi’s ear while Massu hugs his legs so tightly he thinks they might have to be amputated at the knee afterwards, due to lack of circulation.
“It’s coming,” Yamashita-kun murmurs in the meantime, in that strange, hypnotically deadpan voice of his. His eyes barely register any sort of emotion as he says it, looking serene and vacant as the wind suddenly picks up around them at the lake’s edge, as the dead tree branches begin rattling in the autumn cold. The sound chills the would-be idols to their very bones.
“Coming? Where? How? What are we supposed to do?!” Uchi sobs, while Kusano twitches nearby, grasping a tire iron two handed while Shige holds the bag of salt and tries to look small and unthreatening behind Koyama.
“Find the remains,” Yamapi answers without inflection, and whirls to his right with some sort of preternatural understanding just as the ghost materializes beside them, long-nailed fingers raised threateningly at his neck. “Then destroy them.”
Kusano manages to swing the tire iron through the ghost’s body, making the restless spirit screech unhappily and disappear-however temporarily- while Shige fumbles the bag of salt one more time and only succeeds in dropping it everywhere.
“B-but there weren’t any remains in the house!!” Koyama yelps, arms tightly wound around Tegoshi’s waist and Tegoshi can’t tell if it’s because the oldest member is trying to protect him or use him as a shield against the horrors this night is filled with.
“They cremated her, like everyone else in Japan,” Shige points out in frustration. “There shouldn’t be any remains! This is a fluke, I call shenanigans. Are we on a hidden camera show?”
“There’s something left,” Yamapi responds calmly. “Otherwise there wouldn’t be a ghost.”
“I don’t want there to be any ghosts ever!” Shige answers hysterically, looking like he really, really hopes this is just one whacked out dream caused by too many movies and the sleepless nights that come with new group debuts.
Tegoshi wants it to be one of those things just as much as Shige does, except then the ghost is there again, swiping with those long, sharp nails. They snare Yamapi’s arm, slicing through his jacket and drawing blood. He doesn’t even flinch.
“Light….give me your light,” she moans at Yamapi in a gross, watery sort of gurgle, before Ryo hits her with a blast of rock salt from his shotgun.
“She drowned, didn’t she?” Ryo snarls, trying to sound tough even as his whole body tenses with each gust of wind. He may or may not have already misfired his shotgun once or twice during the course of the evening, jumpy from the old house’s many creaks and groans. “So if she died in the lake then maybe there’s something that got left in the uh, in the…” he trails off and looks at the water. “You know. Maybe a fish ate something or something. She’s in the fish poop.”
The rest of NEWS slowly turns to look at the water too. It’s black and rolling under the chill of the wind, looking as angry and dangerous as the ghost herself.
“Not it!” they all say suddenly, and Tegoshi realizes that it’s the only thing they’ve thus far managed to do in sync since their surprise unit was formed.
Yamapi frowns when he hears them unified in vehement reluctance, and then, with something almost like a sigh, he strips off his shirt and jumps head first into the water without another word to any of his groupmates.
“Leader is amazing,” Koyama blubbers in horrified admiration, while the ghost makes a bony grab for Massu’s arm and Uchi manages to clumsily fight her off with his crowbar.
Fifteen minutes later, Yamapi comes out of the water, grim as he grasps what looks to be a small satchel with the ghost’s name written on it in smudged katakana. Tegoshi thinks it must be some tribute of hair or bone that a well-meaning relative had undoubtedly put together and thrown into the waters to remember their loved one by, to help ameliorate their grief.
“We need to burn it,” Yamapi says flatly, and Tegoshi hastily bends down to pick up the container of kerosene he’s been holding all night, fingers white-knuckled around its handle like Koyama’s are around his waist. They quickly douse the wet satchel with the entire contents of Tegoshi’s can just as the ghost woman appears again, and sends Kusano flying backwards into the trunk of a nearby tree. He grunts in pain as his tire iron hits the ground with a clatter.
“Hurry,” Yamapi intones, and Tegoshi tells his hands to stop shaking.
They do after a moment, miraculously, and he pulls the matches out of his pocket.
The strike of a match and a veritable fireball of hair later makes the ghost dissolve with a sudden, angry shriek and a smattering of phantom ashes. The satchel and the spirit both cease to exist.
“Done?” Kusano groans, from where he’s slumped against the tree. “Are we done? Was that it?”
Yamapi nods. “She’s gone.”
And then, just like that, the members of Johnny’s new hunting unit collapse to the muddy ground in a heap, breathing in shaky sighs of relief that is occasionally punctuated with barks of hysterical, disbelieving laughter.
“I can’t believe ghosts are really real,” Shige mutters out loud after a moment, and despite everything he’d just seen, Tegoshi can’t help but agree. Moriuchi-kun must have had some sort of miraculous psychic ability when he’d looked at them all after those first few weeks of being NEWS and decided that he wanted the hell out.
Meanwhile, Yamapi seems unimpressed with everyone at the end of this first real hunt; he just stands, dripping wet at the shadow of the lake’s edge for a moment, all rigid posture and judgmental uncertainty. “There are worse things than ghosts that we’ll see,” he informs them after a beat, and Tegoshi wonders if this is supposed to be the world’s most awkward and disheartening encouragement speech or something. If it is, it’s totally working. Yamapi pushes on, not noticing the discomfort he’s creating in his own group. “We have to learn how to deal with all of these things better than we did tonight or Japan is in danger.”
“W-worse things?” Massu trembles, and clutches Koyama’s sleeve in a tight fist, like he’s forgotten how to let go. “Worse things than that?”
Yamapi nods, looking off into some unknowable distance that only he can see. “Yes.”
NEWS’s shoulders slump collectively at the thought.
Yamapi wordlessly stalks off into the night after that, back to the car. Tegoshi watches him go, and for a moment, thinks the moonlight wreathes their leader in a dull, otherworldly glow.
“I guess we’ll just have to learn how to do better,” Kusano says eventually, and slings his tire iron over his shoulder before helping Koyama and Shige to their feet again. “Like P.”
“I just wanted to be an idol,” Uchi laments angrily. “An idol.”
Shige huffs out a breath of mirthless laughter at that, and it reminds Tegoshi of the sound people make in the movies, right after they’ve been punched hard in the gut.
From there, the members all silently follow Yamapi back to the car after, their eyes already unconsciously on the lookout for any more ghosts, any more attacks, any more dangers that might lie waiting in the dark.
In 2003, NEWS has to learn how to hunt.
~~*~~
Maybe he does it because it’s the best way he can think of to logically and constructively deal with all of the horrible things they’ve seen and done over the last few months. Or maybe it’s just something he decides to do because a part of him knows about the importance of preserving information for the future and that out of everyone in NEWS, he’s the only one willing to take the time and trouble to chronicle all of their adventures (admittedly, part of his motivation is that so that one day, when his parents have him committed, he’ll have some sort of documented proof that these things did indeed happen to them, even if no one else believes him).
Either that or he can use his writings as the beginnings of what could be a multimillion dollar franchise; perhaps one day theses stories will be made into a manga series or an anime, maybe even into TV dramas, books and movies.
Whatever the reason behind it, Shige finds himself starting to write things down without knowing what the point behind it is, though whenever one of his groupmates asks, it’s for research and reference purposes. “So if we ever run into the same thing again we’ll know where to start,” he explains, sounding smart and convincing even to himself, as he types up the report of yesterday’s parallel universe incident in the one journal of his he hopes the fans never ever get a chance to see.
In the parallel universe, he writes, somewhat wistfully, the evilest thing we had to deal with was Tanaka-kun’s wedgies and the fact that I could never date a cheerleader because I’m lame.
Too bad they’d had to return through the possessed looking glass before they could explore their new surroundings very thoroughly; apparently destroying two entire universes simply by being in the wrong one alongside your doppelganger is a very real possibility. Something about a balance of matter that has to be maintained, apparently.
Shige writes it all down, with a note to himself to look up the physics behind that whole theory later.
Shige also discovers that beyond just chronicling NEWS’s paranormal exploits, his journal serves as a much needed sounding board for all the unspoken internal frustrations he has regarding his job. It is also a place to gather his thoughts about how much some of his groupmates mystify him.
Which is a lot.
Beginning to think that there is something otherworldly about some of these people, he jots down one evening, hours after the wendigo they were hunting had walked right past a cornered and unarmed Tegoshi in the underground tunnels they’d followed it to. It had tried to eat a flare-holding Massu instead. Indigestion of the burning kind had ensued.
Yamashita-kun is still the most confusing out of everyone; he is someone who has the ability to get from one place to another in minutes, even though the travel time would be twenty or thirty minutes for a normal person. On top of that he eats so little, never seems to sleep, and never looks like he needs to rest. At first it was amazing to see his iron will to become an idol and his work ethic regarding hunting through these superhuman acts, but after however many months we’ve been doing all this I’ve started to really worry for him and his health. I hear these are the types of things that you can do when you’re young but that will come back to haunt you ten times over once you’re older (like going to bed with your hair wet).
Though who knows, at the rate we’re going, we might not make it to see ‘older’ anyway.
He snorts derisively to himself as he finishes typing that one up, then hits save on his phone and snaps it shut again.
As he moves to turn off the light he hears Koyama snoring lightly into his pillow in the other bed, arm freshly cleaned and all bandaged up after Ryo had neatly stitched up the claw marks that had raked their way through the oldest member’s skin earlier.
Koyama snorts and mumbles something strange to himself in his sleep about his father before rolling over with a soft huff of air and murmuring, “cotton candy,” with a gentle, almost nostalgic sort of sigh.
Shige shakes his head in amusement and shuts off the lamp in the nightstand; as he settles into his own bed for the night he thinks that even if everyone else in their new group is giving off weird vibes, at least his best friend is someone who is just weird in the most normal kind of way.
~~*~~
Took out a vampire nest today, Shige will write in his secret diary two days later, typing one-handed on his phone because of a broken index finger on his right hand. No hospital visits this time, and Uchi actually helped with the clean up afterwards. I think we’re getting better. Either that or we’ve just run into a bit of good luck and it will wear off soon.
Yamapi assures them they’re getting better though; at least, enough that he can bother to talk to them for prolonged amounts of time without looking at them like he thinks they’re the ones that are strange and incomprehensible. Maybe it’s because they’re learning how to operate on less sleep now; four hours a night and a can of UFC coffee in the morning is all the juice they need to exorcise spirits, gank werewolves, and still look perfect for that Myojo photoshoots afterwards.
Kusano and Massu killed three vamps apiece today; I guess everyone knows why they’re in NEWS. Still trying to figure out where the rest of us fit in around here.
He finishes the entry just as the food arrives to the table of the run down hole in the wall soba place they’re eating at after a hard night’s work.
The members eagerly move to dig in once the waitress sets it down, hungry and exhausted and covered in bruises. But before they can eat, Koyama nervously clears his throat and raises his glass like he’s firing the first shots at the enemy in some sort of epic war played out entirely in his mind. “Hey,” he says, voice somehow warm and hopeful despite the slight scratchiness to its quality, from all the screaming he’d done earlier. “Let’s have a toast tonight, ne. Since this was probably our most successful…” he trails off for a moment, noting the obaasan behind the counter and the two other tables of patrons, “concert as NEWS so far. We worked well together tonight.”
Yamapi gives him an odd look that everyone can see makes Koyama cringe a little, but after a moment, the leader nods. “But it wasn’t a…”
Ryo smacks him (which seems to hurt Ryo more than it hurts Yamapi). “Right,” Ryo corrects, around a wince and a shake of his hand. “Successful concert. Cheers.”
Everyone dutifully raises their glasses and touches them together, some shyly, some nervously, and after a moment of silence, Koyama manages a small smile and says, “Okay! Let’s eat.”
Afterwards, Shige will amend that night’s entry in his journal to add, Even if we don’t know where everyone fits in yet, it feels like maybe we’re getting there.
~~*~~
In his following entry, Shige feels less need to wax poetic on the adventures of NEWS as hunters.
He writes:
And then the leprechaun took Nishikido-kun’s pants.
~~*~~
Kusano is very angry when he discovers that vampires can’t actually be killed with a stake through the heart.
The fact that pagan gods can offers some consolation, and he demands that they go and smoke one of them right now.
Apparently, he’d spent hours whittling that thing.
~~*~~
Six months and five days into NEWS’s existence is when something earth-shattering finally happens.
Not literally, Shige writes, hastily, because they’ve learned that in their line of work earth-shattering usually means exactly that. But today it feels like something changed.
It had been a routine enough oni hunt (as far as those can be routine anyway), and the moment that had actually shifted the lives of the eight NEWS members had been as the creature had jumped out of the darkness from behind Yamapi, enormous club raised high over its head and ready to strike.
Even if he’s the best at this out of all of us, there’s no way he could have gotten out of the way, Shige notes, hand starting to tremble a bit at the memory of that split second, now forever burned into his mind. He’d thought that Yamapi was going to die. But then, just like that, Kusano the idiot is there and shoving, and he’s lucky he was only brushed by that enormous club. At least the fans can’t see broken ribs from a distance. Hopefully they won’t ask to hug him.
Kusano had been the hero of the night for that, for saving their leader’s life, and Shige won’t ever forget the mystified, disbelieving look on Yamapi’s face as Kusano had crumpled to the floor while Tegoshi had taken advantage of the distraction to write and throw the charms that would seal the oni. It was as if Yamapi didn’t understand what had just happened to them, didn’t comprehend why Kusano was curled up on the floor, half wrapped around the older idol and grinning through the pain of broken bones.
“I don’t understand why you would do that,” Yamapi had said to him sometime later, as he’d effortlessly carried Kusano down the mountainside, back to where they’d left the van. “I would have been fine either way. Endangering your own life like that is pointless.”
Shige remembers Uchi snickering and leaning towards him on the path to whisper, cattily, “I predict sudden chick-flick moments in our future.”
He’d been mostly right.
Kusano didn’t cry or flutter at Yamapi’s declaration or anything particularly chick-flicky in the strictest sense of the word though; he’d just snorted to himself (very manfully) before wincing when the action jostled his tender side. However, he did feel the need to say, “Oi, let me be the one who decides what’s worth endangering my life for, okay?” and the tone of it had been tender enough, at least as far as anyone had been able to comprehend Kusano’s particular brand of man-speak.
Shige remembers how Yamapi had looked at the youngest member then, with a confused head tilt and a mixture of reproach and incomprehension in his eyes, as if wondering what strange creature was presently standing before him. Kusano had simply met that gaze without turning away or flinching. Eventually, Yamapi sighed helplessly and said, “If that’s what you want.”
Kusano’s grin has always been indomitable; it was at that moment as well, flashing bright with mirth in Shige’s memory. “Yeah, well, I never do anything but,” Kusano answered brightly, and patted Yamapi on the head in an exceedingly fond way, like that is something people can just do normally. “And for now, we’ll just say you owe me one. Cool?”
Yamapi hadn’t answered, but Shige is pretty sure that the odd, upward curling at the corner of his mouth had almost, almost been a smile.
For NEWS, it was in that moment when they felt as if the earth itself had moved.
This isn’t a job you can survive doing on your own, Shige writes afterwards. Like soccer or basketball or baseball or even just being a normal Johnny, I think being successful at hunting is the same as being successful as a team. And teamwork is about sacrifice.
I think NEWS is getting stronger.
~~*~~
“NEWS isn’t normal, is it?” Jin asks Ryo and P one night, over drinks and cigarettes and the heady bass beat of the club. It is not the first time he’s said it.
“No,” P answers.
Ryo takes it upon himself to punch Jin in the arm and make him shut his stupid face.
~~*~~
Shige thinks that something is either very wrong or very right when he and Kusano watch horror movies and spend more time critiquing the misinterpretation of the lore than they do being scared.
~~*~~
“We should rest. There’s two shows tomorrow.”
Ryo groans at P’s matter-of-fact statement before scrubbing at his eyes and declaring, “There was a show tonight too, and then we had to go put down those warring kaiju and now I want to watch TV and order room service and remember what it’s like to be a sexy celebrity who doesn’t know the touch of giant tentacles.”
Yamapi gives him a polite, but obviously puzzled expression. “But you do know the touch of…”
Ryo clamps a hand over Yamapi’s mouth, and everyone’s noticed how that’s sort of becoming a thing when it wasn’t before, the possibility of reaching out and touching Yamapi on a whim. “I DON’T RIGHT NOW, okay?” Ryo emphasizes, and looks at Yamapi until Yamapi slowly nods.
Ryo removes his hand. “Good. Now I’m ordering pizza. Anyone who wants the monsters to win can go to sleep. Anyone who isn’t a loser can watch pay per view with me in my room as long as they promise not to get my bed dirty.”
His groupmates all give him a dubious look.
“A movie you perverts,” he growls. “I was talking about watching some cheesy action movie or something tasteless from America. God I hate you all.” He storms off to the elevators, ears flushed red.
“He doesn’t mean that,” Yamapi manages, after a second, and then looks surprised that he knows.
“Ryo-chan is cute,” Uchi coos, and then takes off after his best friend. “C’mon, it’s not like he offers to pay all the time.”
Massu looks reluctant. “I can go wash the slime off first, right?”
“PLEASE,” everyone answers.
P finds himself being dragged along after them.
He doesn’t understand the point behind Kill Bill Vol 2, but he does find he likes the sweet potato crusts on the pizza just fine, and that while Ryo hates other people getting crumbs on his bed, he’s actually the one who drops the most crumbs on it himself.
P sits beside them, feeling a strange sense of contentment.
Humans are odd, bright creatures.
~~*~~
“I’ve got a bad feeling about this,” Uchi mutters warily as he looks up at the abandoned apartment building they’re investigating today, as he feels a shiver of ice run through his veins just from being on the same street as the complex. “I bet it’s not just one ghost. I bet there’s like five.” He hugs his arms around himself and Koyama notices. He offers Uchi his jacket.
“You always have a bad feeling about everything because you’re a whiny bitch,” Ryo snorts, opening the van’s back doors and grabbing supplies. He tosses Kusano a crow bar and passes a few cans of kerosene to Massu.
“Yeah, and I’m always right,” Uchi sniffs back, shrugging Koyama’s jacket over his shoulders. He pauses to adjust his anti-possession charm when the chain gets caught in the jacket’s collar before grudgingly taking the purification satchels Tegoshi is handing out to the members.
“Maybe Uchi-kun is psychic,” Massu states obligingly, smiling even as he is moves to kick in the door.
A cold blast of wind shrieks through the house in response, rattling the floorboards and window shutters in warning.
“Ghost,” seven of the members murmur when they see it.
Uchi smirks. “See?”
Ryo rolls his eyes. “Congrats on being a dumbass. Now can we please find the remains and get this over with? I have a filming in the morning.”
“Bet they’re in the attic,” Uchi tells him, just to be a pain in the ass.
Shige snorts. “They’re always in the attic.”
“Unless they’re in the basement,” Kusano replies. “Like they were last time.”
Shige scowls at him. “Shut up.”
Uchi ignores them both. “Definitely the attic this time,” he reiterates, without knowing why. It earns him an odd look from Yamapi, but their stoic leader doesn’t really say anything about it as he looks around the deserted building cautiously. Eventually, he gives them the okay (because last time he didn’t and they all barged in there had been a wall of floating knives waiting for them and lots of screaming and running in the other direction afterwards).
As usual, Massu is the one who obliges Uchi without giving him any of that judgmental crap first, and when they end up finding the tiny remains of five children stuffed inside the insulation of the attic crawl space less than ten full minutes into the job, Uchi thinks everyone should buy him dinner for making this hunt nice and easy (well, maybe everyone except Shige, who got thrown into the walls a couple of times when the poltergeists got particularly angry at their snooping).
~~*~~
Much to Koyama’s delight, unicorns do in fact exist.
Much to his dismay, they are also not very friendly.
(Also, they will announce to all of your friends that you are a virgin without any discretion or sympathy for your feelings.)
After that particular hunt, Ryo casually asks Koyama if he wants a hooker or something. “Jin knows some people.”
Koyama buries his face in his hands.
~~*~~
P is not sure if he will ever understand humans. As an idol, their love for him is manic, overwhelming, disconcerting. They do not know him; he is not who he says he is. And yet their affection is real, real enough to bruise, and in the giddy drunkenness of that long-distance affection they fool themselves into believing everything he does has meaning he himself did not assign to those actions as he was doing them.
Yamapi’s eyes are so soulful, people write, and Ryo snorts in laughter when he sees the letters and mutters something about deceased fish.
He understands life so well, people comment on his blog, the one that Johnny plans out word for word to him at the end of each night.
I love him so much I can’t sleep, others declare, and while P does not require sleep himself, he learns from his groupmates that humans do need it, very much. Preferably every night. He wonders if he will be the indirect cause of many human deaths.
“This is good,” Johnny chuckles, when P asks if it is morally right to cause these young women so much physical pain. “This is what it means to be a successful idol.”
P is not sure why Tomohisa would wish for such a thing, but he does as he is told because he said he would and because he is a soldier; he acts in television dramas and TV commercials as best he can and learns ridiculous dance moves and wears ridiculous clothing because it makes those far away people who love him so unconditionally happy.
Inside him, Tomohisa’s soul wraps tightly around his essence during those moments, blurring them together so that it can bask in the warmth of the light there, in the knowledge that a dream has finally come true. P feels it alongside him, and wonders if this is happiness.
~~*~~
“Please stop hurting people,” Tegoshi asks a mischievous (and slightly misandrist) fox spirit, who they have discovered is the magical force that has been turning chauvinists into women and then driving them crazy until they either a. learn their lesson, b. kill themselves, or c. start killing other people. So far options b. and c. seem to be the leading results of this little experiment in retribution, because apparently, in this day and age, people are less inclined to learn things than they are to kill things. And while NEWS is all for equality between the sexes and stuff, the rash of women committing violence making the nightly TV report is probably not good for anyone’s cause either way. As such, Tegoshi continues with his politeness pitch. “What you’re doing isn’t nice, and the guys you turned into girls go crazy and kill people and it just makes everyone look bad.”
The fox spirit scoffs, because this is the first time a hunter has just asked her nicely to stop and hoped for the best. “I don’t think…” She trails off abruptly when she looks into those big sad eyes of Tegoshi’s, and from there something weird happens, because suddenly she finds herself saying, “Yeah okay,” like it was what she’d meant to say all along.
“Yay,” Tegoshi cheers when she does, while the rest of NEWS kind of gives him weird looks (except for Ryo, who glares and gestures pointedly at his chest, the chest that Kusano keeps staring at and occasionally reaches out for).
“Oh, and even though he’s really pretty like that, please turn Ryo-kun back,” Tegoshi adds, politely.
The fox sighs and does; it is either their easiest hunt to date or they’re just getting good enough to make it look that way.
Whichever the reason, everyone is just happy to not get beaten up or killed.
~~*~~
After they finish their concert tour that year, Ryo buys everyone dinner and makes them go around the table saying things they don’t like about each other.
It’s awful and kind of nice all at once.
In 2004, NEWS finishes learning how to hunt and starts learning how to be NEWS.
~~*~~
“It’s started,” P tells Johnny in 2005, as autumn approaches. The voices of his brothers and sisters begin to sing again in his ears, despite the human soul wrapped tightly around his Grace. Their song is muffled and dim but there, a familiar comfort after so much time spent in this body, on this earth without it.
“The journey begins,” they murmur, in soft, perfect chorus.
“This journey began a long time ago if I am not mistaken,” Johnny responds glibly, looking well at ease despite everything that looms in the horizon, despite flashing images in his dreams the night before that involved a roof fire and a beautiful, bleeding woman. The visions had been too much like images he’d seen on that cold that November morning, almost twenty-two years earlier.
“Things are also getting stranger,” P adds.
Johnny blinks. “How so?”
“Last week,” P says, “we had a hunt.”
“You often do,” Johnny chuckles, and pours them both tea.
“It went well,” P continues, either not noticing or not acknowledging Johnny’s teasing. “Tegoshi was able to question a tsukumogami that had witnessed the abduction of the children and with its help we found the clues necessary to track the changeling back to her lair.”
Johnny drinks tea peacefully. “How useful,” he replies, and puts a handful of candies on the table in front of P in offering.
P’s brow furrows. “He should not have been able to see the spirits of the tsukumogami in the first place, let alone commune with them. As I am now, I can barely see their shadows with these human eyes.”
“He has always been a very lucky boy,” Johnny says simply. “From what I have seen.”
“Luck is its own power,” P rejoins. “It made me think.”
“Sign of a young man turning into an adult,” Johnny says, and P tilts his head in confusion.
“I am neither young nor a man.”
Johnny pats him on the shoulder gently and makes him take a candy.
“As I was saying,” P continues, around a peppermint, “Tegoshi shouldn’t have been able to see the tsukumogami. Normal humans can’t.”
“But he did, and it helped you. What’s the problem?”
“I don’t know their nature,” P admits. “I can’t see like I once did because of my promise. But you can. What’s happening? Is this tied to the things happening in America?”
“You have two perfectly good eyes to see everything you need to see with,” Johnny reminds him. “You aren’t meant to see what I do.”
P is not moved. “I’m used to looking with four eyes. Why won’t you let me see with them?”
Johnny chuckles. “Two is enough. You promised me, angel, and there is time left to your promise yet, if you remember.”
The angel frowns. He remembers.
Johnny smiles and wordlessly pours them more tea after that, while P wonders what purpose blindfolding him like this has in the grand scheme of things, or if this is just another one of the crazy old man’s ploys to get him to learn about the meaning of being human at the end of human times.
Even more, he wonders if it is actually working despite everything, when he feels something surprisingly dark and heavy start to settle deep inside of him the more he thinks about the end of humanity growing nearer and nearer, something that he thinks must be a lot like worry. Tomohisa’s quiet soul chimes in and tells him it is worry.
He isn’t sure he can protect NEWS unless he is certain about everything he is dealing with. Certainty is what fuels angels, what moves them. They are certain in their love and their duty and their righteous fury. They are never meant to doubt.
As he is now, even with the voices of his brothers and sisters ringing anew inside of him as events come to head, P thinks he is not the angel he once was.
~~*~~
Koyama stumbles into work the following day bleary-eyed and pale, like a person who has seen a ghost for the first time. “I’ve been having strange dreams,” the oldest member explains awkwardly, when his groupmates poke him and ask what the matter is. “I…think.”
“You think you’ve been having dreams?” Shige mutters in disbelief, and reaches out to touch Koyama’s forehead, to feel for fever burning bright delirium into his best friend’s skin. “Shouldn’t you know?”
“Were they about the hell hounds?” Kusano asks, shuddering to himself at the memory of their one run in with the creatures thus far. “Sometimes I still have nightmares about that.”
Koyama blinks, then shakes his head. “No it wasn’t… I mean, I couldn’t see anything in them. I just…heard things.”
The others stare at him. “You had an audio nightmare?” Uchi asks, and looks close to laughing at the absurdity of such a thing.
But Koyama is serious when he nods again. “For the last few days now.”
“Nightmares about scary experiences you’ve had are normal after you’ve been traumatized,” Tegoshi pipes up reassuringly. “And we’ve been traumatized kind of a lot.”
Koyama wrings his hand and looks thoughtful. “But they’re not nightmares, ne. Not exactly. Just…strange dreams.”
“Like what?”
Koyama manages a sheepish smile. “I…I thought I heard people talking.”
“Great, I should have known he’d be the first one to snap,” Ryo mutters to himself, and pays Uchi five thousand yen. He glares at Shige like Shige has betrayed all of his expectations.
Uchi grins and pockets the money and says, “I told you so.”
“It’s probably just stress,” Shige tells Koyama reasonably in the meantime, while Tegoshi pouts Ryo and Uchi into playing nice. “You just need to stop stressing and relax a little. They’ll go away once you do that. And you should probably stop eating sweets before bed too.”
Koyama nods, looking sad-eyed. “Shige, please don’t tell leader I’m crazy.”
“You’re not crazy,” Tegoshi assure him, and squeezes his arm reassuringly. “I mean, most crazy people don’t know they’re crazy, right?”
Koyama laughs a little at that, but not in an entirely mirthful kind of way.
After that everyone ends up promising not to say anything more about it either way, though when Yamapi arrives to work later that afternoon Koyama can’t help it when he starts to stare at the group leader like he’s seeing or hearing something everyone else is not.
“Crazy,” Ryo whispers to Uchi again in the background, and shakes his head.
“Hmmm,” Uchi answers noncommittally.
In the meantime, P listens to the songs of the angels in his head and learns from it that somewhere in America, two brothers have begun the journey that will put the fate of all creation in their hands.
He wonders if NEWS will be able to help them save it.
NEXT
Universe: JE/NewS+Supernatural
Theme/Topic: N/A
Rating: PG-13 for language and violence
Character/Pairing/s: NEWS, Castiel, Zachariah (with appearances by Johnny and mentions/cameos of/by various SPN characters and J&A personalities)
Warnings/Spoilers: The apocalypse. Some pretty direct spoilers for Supernatural through S5, fudging on Biblical facts and stuff. Yeah.
Word Count: 66,475
Summary: A war is fought on more than one front; this is humanity’s road to the Apocalypse in series of trans-Pacific parallels.
Dedication: originally for myxstorie and the newsficcon exchange! I don’t know if this counts as an AU or a crossover, so I’ll just call it an Improbable Universe an (IU?). Original post here!
A/N: I blame the stair episode of Soukon for this and the fact that when I was looking up angel names I found the most perfect thing EVER. Also because I am lame. Special thanks to pipsqueaks and mousapelli for betaing this monstrosity!
Disclaimer: No harm or infringement intended.
~~*~~
1. Then
Johnny Kitagawa has always been blessed. Ever since he was a child he can remember having the ability to look at a person and look at a person all at the same time, to see beyond a handsome face or a pretty smile and find the light underneath, the truth that exists behind it all. At first it had been strange, knowing he could do this. He’d tried to tell other people- his parents, his siblings, his teachers, his friends- about what he saw, but over time he realized that this was going to be something just for him, something special that only he could understand. Not everyone in this world is meant to see like he sees.
So he kept this knowledge in his heart for years and years. He saw with his second sight and could always, always find the truth.
He knows he is blessed because of it; over his very long life, he has learned to stop questioning it and analyzing it and simply let it be.
It comes to him in a mix of colors and light and feeling. It isn’t just seeing with his eyes so much as seeing with himself, with all of everything. In America they called him psychic. In Japan they call it the sight. In show business, they simply call it a special something, a knack. None of these names is completely wrong, but none of them is completely right either; Johnny simply considers it his own good luck, and has used it to build an empire here in Japan, one that has spanned decades of history, of strife, of change and advancement and stagnation. It is a beacon here in this traditional land of rapid change, something sturdy and lasting and strong, and Johnny knows -even if no one else does-that it is because Johnny and Associates is a company he has built on nothing but the truth, on the things he sees right in front of his own two eyes.
It is a company built to sell.
That all changes unexpectedly one afternoon in the mid-90s, in the midst of a time when the Americans are busy flooding Johnny’s market with their better trained harmonies and good looks and factory efficiency.
Johnny remembers it as one of the first few great surprises in his life when he walks into one of the audition rooms and sees a boy who can’t be any older than eleven standing in the corner, head tilted, eyes looking serenely, impassively on as the senior dance instructors struggle to line up all of the other young candidates in a row, to see if they can be taught to clap in time.
For a moment, Johnny’s breath catches in his throat-oddly, instinctively- as he first lays eyes on that strange boy, and he isn’t sure why. At the exact same time, the boy turns to look right at him, right at him, as Johnny steps through the door, as if he had been the one waiting for him all this time.
“I must speak to you, Johnny Kitagawa,” Johnny feels the boy say rather than hears him say, and in the next breath, in the next second, the boy is striding across the room purposefully and placing two fingers to Johnny’s forehead. It is not something Johnny foresees coming, and he blinks as the floor falls out from under him suddenly; there is a rush of wind in his ears and from there it feels like being whisked away on edges of stray lightning and swirling chaos.
When he opens his eyes again he falls backwards into a familiar black swivel chair and discovers that he is in his office now; the boy stands before him (he is a beautiful boy, Johnny notes), his face still as stone, eyes naturally blank and posture rigid, as if he doesn’t quite fit into his own skin comfortably yet.
Johnny feels like he should know what is happening already, but he doesn’t, not quite. He can see but at the same time, he cannot, as if his sight is trying to block itself, to save him from looking over the edge into some deeply immeasurable, fathomless depth. “You, what are you?” he asks, when he finds his voice again.
The boy blinks once. “I am an angel of the Lord.”
~~*~~
“I am called Perpetiel,” he tells Johnny flatly, emotionless. “I have been sent here by order of heaven, on a mission from God to prepare the East for the things that are to come as the End of Days approaches.”
“Just you alone?” Johnny asks, and it is strange that he has to ask things now, because the boy-the creature-across from him is of a depth truly incomprehensible to his normal human mind. “That seems like a large responsibility for just one angel.”
Perpetiel’s eyes shift slightly. “My brothers and sisters can’t be spared from their work. This place isn’t the main front upon which the battle will be waged,” he explains.
Johnny sighs. “America, then,” he murmurs, knowingly. “It must be America.”
The angel nods once, sharply. “Yes. It has already begun.”
Johnny supposes that explains the strange rumblings in his mind, the inexplicable screams that had echoed in the periphery of his very being almost at random one November evening in 1983. There have been echoes of it in Johnny’s dreams ever since that night, disturbing and dark and foreboding of worse things still to come.
He leans back in his chair and suddenly feels very, very old. “And what would you have me do, Per…” he trails off, frowning. “I feel that name is too long,” he decides, eventually.
The angel does not react visibly. “It is the name my Father in heaven saw fit to bestow upon me.”
“P,” Johnny decides after a moment, with something of a smile on his face. “I will call you P.”
The angel blinks when he hears that, and for a moment, looks as if humans and humanity are truly incomprehensible to him.
Johnny just smiles, because that is a look he recognizes, one that should appear on the faces of eleven-year-old boys naturally. “So then, what can I do for you, P?” he asks, and withdraws some candies from his pocket. He offers them to the angel, but P just eyes him without understanding what they are or what the gesture of Johnny bouncing them around in his open palm in his direction means.
“I was sent to you because you are the closest thing this land has to a universally accepted guardian,” P explains, after a moment. “You have the stable power base and influence inside of this country that your government leaders and your spiritual leaders do not; everyone here who knows you admires you in some shape or form. To complete my mission, I require consensus and absolute trust, as time is of the essence.”
This is the sort of talk Johnny is familiar with now; how many people have come to him in the past, asking for advice, for help, for insight and influence? It’s like another contract, another company alliance, endorsement deal, tacit agreement between rivals. “So you want to use my influence to complete your mission instead of creating your own?”
P’s brow furrows, and for a moment, the gesture is almost human. “I am the only angel heaven can spare to guard this front, my orders are to teach and prepare the humans on this island to fight for themselves should I be called away during the battle. I must also train them to do the things I cannot to save this hemisphere.” Pause. “Angels cannot tread in all places.”
Johnny’s eyebrow darts up. “Save this hemisphere? That is a large responsibility for such a small island.”
P’s eyes betray no emotion. “This is the gateway from America on its western shores. While Japan itself may be inconsequential, its position on this planet is of tactical import in the war to come.”
Johnny snorts. “I see. And what makes you think you can train an old man to save one inconsequential island at the end of the world?”
“Not you,” P states without hesitation. “You are indeed too old and frail for the mission in your current state, and will be even more so when the time to fight is upon us in the years ahead. However, I do require your help in finding and training soldiers for me to lead into the battle.”
“Soldiers? I only create idols here.”
P looks slightly uncomfortable at that. “That is another reason why I am here,” he admits, reluctantly.
Johnny stops. “And what else, besides defending Asia, can an old man like me do that an all-powerful angel of the Lord cannot?”
“My vessel,” P explains, reluctantly. “Tomohisa prayed for this, for divine aid that he may become successful in your industry in order to take care of his family. A mother and a sister. I promised him I would honor that wish should he accept me.” Pause. “Though I am…uncomfortable with the idea of becoming a false idol, I am determined to keep my promises.”
Johnny is vaguely incredulous. “You want to become an idol?”
P nods, mouth set in a grim line even if the idea is distasteful to him. “I must.”
And then, for the first time all afternoon, Johnny feels himself start to laugh. “If that really is the case,” he begins, chuckling from deep in his belly, “you have so much to learn.”
When P gives him another vaguely uncomprehending look, Johnny just laughs even harder.
~~*~~
“We must keep our promises,” P, murmurs tightly to himself as he is forced to don a sparkling silver monstrosity with flowers blossoming out of it at inexplicable, inconsistent angles. “If we fail to keep our promises we are no better than the scourge of hell.”
He thinks determinedly about Tomohisa’s quiet mother and his bubbly little sister, the ones waiting for him at home with no idea that the boy they had known and loved hides within the heavenly, unfathomable veil of an angel’s heavenly might. With them-and his promise-in mind, P unfurls his inky black wings from his back fully, to achieve proper balance. With this, finally, thankfully, he manages the thrice-damned back flip that has, until now, been completely eluding him as he’d fumbled around in Tomohisa’s awkward, clumsy body.
Johnny grunts at him from the back of the room, where he is calmly observing the irate angel. “You, you are too inhuman, too robotic when you move like that,” the aged producer barks. “Didn’t we have a deal that we would do this my way?”
P scowls but remembers that they do; he reluctantly folds his wings back against his shoulders again and pushes the glowing embers of his Grace deep inside of Tomohisa’s fragile, tiny shell, crowding its brilliant glow into the crevices behind the human soul sleeping peacefully inside him. He feels his powers dull correspondingly as he does and it leads P to more keenly feel the incessant pull of muscle, the ache of flesh, the frightening smallness of the humanity that he has bound himself to. It must show on his face, this vulnerability, because soon, Johnny smiles and claps him on the shoulder as if he has come upon a great and pleasing discovery. “That’s it,” the old man tells him. “This is how you become a person.”
P tries not to be annoyed at the tone this insolent human takes with him, because angels are not supposed to become annoyed. “There is no time for this,” he says, anyway. The statement itself is still a fact, even if its utterance is driven by nothing more than his current exasperation.
Johnny has heard it all before and is generally unimpressed by his righteous decrees. “There are some years yet, until the end of the world, as I feel it. How will you expect to lead the fighters you are looking for if you cannot understand the depth of their trials yourself?”
The angel is unconvinced. “They will bow in awe of my heavenly glory and follow the word of my Father into battle,” he says, petulantly.
Johnny smiles, and it is full of mystery. “You don’t understand humans at all. But you must in order to complete your task.” And then he pats P on the head and offers him one of the candies from his pocket. “Either way, a deal is a deal, isn’t it?”
P sighs.
He takes the offered candy with a nod of thanks before obediently folding in his Grace farther still, so that he almost feels and sees and exists only with human limitations. This is the one thing that Johnny Kitagawa had insisted upon when he agreed to help the angel, all those months ago.
“If we are to make you a proper idol,” the old man had said that day, full of both mirth and dead seriousness, “then first we must teach you about humanity. An idol must appeal to humanity. As must a hero.”
The words themselves mean very little, but when the angel Perpetiel thinks of Tomohisa’s quiet mother and his bubbly little sister back at home again, when he thinks of the plaintive, quiet prayers he’d heard from an eleven-year-old boy’s tired voice all the way from heaven, he tells himself that angels must keep their promises no matter what.
With time and many, many back flips, Johnny forces him to learn a little bit about humans, a little bit about humanity.
P isn’t sure if he likes it.
~~*~~
It is nearly eight full years before Johnny decides that it is time to move forward. P’s Grace burns hot at the back of Tomohisa’s body by then, dull with disuse and cramped in its tiny prison, trembling at him, calling him to let it out in all its glory.
He does not let it out, and the proof lies in the gamut of human emotion he sometimes feels when he isn’t careful, the impatience, the confusion, the uncertainty. “Time is running out,” he tells Johnny one afternoon, when he isn’t being careful. He and Johnny sit in his office and the old man offers him the same candy from his pocket as always, offers the same tea and enigmatic smile, like he can finally, finally, see into the angel just like he can see into everyone else.
“You’re right. Now it is time to build your garrison of hunters,” Johnny agrees, for once. “And I have found them. Come with me and see for yourself, Yamapi.”
P frowns at Johnny’s use of the nickname’s nickname, the one given to him by some of Johnny’s more good-humored employees over the years as the angel had struggled to understand the limitations of his new humanity in front of their unknowing eyes. They had laughed indulgently and given him the moniker without his permission out of fondness for his hard work, none of them noticing his indifference to the name as he’d concentrated instead, on figuring out the secrets of flesh and bone, as he’d boggled through the intricacies of dance and song and the overwhelming emotions he evoked in fans even if he had never even spoken directly with a single one of them before. “Yamapi!” they would scream and cry and chant at him, over and over again like the word had some power, even if it isn’t his name, has never been his name.
Even if he feels nothing for it.
He follows Johnny outside faithfully, down the stairs, into the car. Along the way he is greeted by several people who smile and pat his shoulder and say, “How’s it going, Yamapi?” and all he can do is force a smile (mysterious things, smiles) and nod in greeting to them, like he has learned to do during his time here.
He hopes that now this strange charade can end, that Johnny will give him the means with which to fulfill his true mission here, now that he has first fulfilled his promise to Tomohisa.
It is time to work.
~~*~~
They arrive at a photo studio sometime later and it is buzzing with activity, with lights and screens and ticking clocks that remind P of how little time remains until the end.
Johnny senses his agitation and reaches into his pocket for more candy, infinitely patient. “There is time yet. I feel there is time,” he says, with perfect confidence and no real explanation. It makes P long to let his Grace free again, to its fullest glory, so that he may see what Johnny sees as well and be assured.
But he keeps his promises; the promise he made with Tomohisa and the deal he made with Johnny.
“Thirteen is a good number, P. Give me thirteen years. What is that small amount of time to an immortal? ”
At the time it hadn’t seemed like much, not to an immortal. But here, like this, P thinks it feels like much too long, and he is eager to complete his mission.
“This way,” Johnny tells him, and leads him right into the middle of the bright lights and bustle.
Almost eight years after he first arrived on Earth, Johnny finally shows P the hunters he had come to gather.
P hopes they are mighty.
~~*~~
While P is spending his time learning the ins and outs of a complicated humanity, Johnny does not sit idly by; he moves to fulfill his end of the bargain over the course of those eight years, picking P’s hunters exactly like he picks all of his other groups.
The process is not simple; when Johnny creates a unit he looks inside every one of the potential candidates that are brought in front of him and searches for the first connecting string he can find amongst five, six, eight, or however many of them it might exist in at that one time. It is a random line of commonality determined by fate and fate alone, one that will bind individuals together into a single entity and pull them forward throughout their careers. It is hard to explain in concrete terms when it is based on something so intangible, when there is no consistency to his decisions, no real formula to it.
For TOKIO that mystery binding string had been something as simple as the mutual rhythm that had beat within each of the members’ hearts. When one’s soul would call out with a thumpa-thumpa-thump another would answer with a complimentary bump-bump-bumpa, and all the subsequent pieces had joined the song from there, fitting together to build a simple, perfect melody, one only Johnny could properly here.
When he puts V6 together after that it is because he sees a line of familiarity running through each the members’ hearts, one that reminds him of the kind a family naturally creates just by being family. In V6, the way their strings connect are just like how a mother and father, and father and son, and son and daughter, would connect, all different, vastly different, but at the same time, exactly the same when broken down into component parts.
With Arashi it is harmony that he sees that year, within the roiling waves of the members’ varied souls, the splash of contrasting and clashing colors inside each of the boys not quite able to hide the uniform coil of warmth and peace underneath it all that makes them work so well with one another.
Conversely, in KAT-TUN’s year he finds a connection through ambition, through a shared, coldblooded drive to be the best at all costs. It allows the members to cut away other, less important things in light of that goal, the things they hate about each other, the things that they don’t want to do or see, the things that would otherwise strive to pull them to pieces. If it is something-anything-that is of no use in getting them towards their ultimate goal then it is also something that can be burned away from these six individuals without hesitation or remorse. Their differences are obvious and striking at first glance but their uniform ruthlessness is something only Johnny can see in them at any one given moment, an angry flame of take-no-prisoners that will continue to drive them onward even as everything else about them suggests they’d more likely rip each other apart.
What the next binding component will be Johnny doesn’t know. All he does know is that it only takes is a thread. One tiny, common thread can create an entire universe.
This is how Johnny has always made his successes, how he has always brought together individual talents in his company to form coherent units. Idol groups that seem thrown together because of blind luck and chance-to the untrained eye anyway- are really made by finding the one thing inside each of the members that is strong enough to triumph over everything else.
This is also how Johnny makes NEWS.
However, NEWS’s purpose is vastly different than the other groups’ purposes and so he knows their existence will be held to a different standard as well; Johnny does not expect them to be wildly successful or wildly popular as idols, though he senses they will be just successful enough to keep P’s promise to the boy whose body he now wears.
Beyond that, NEWS’s purpose will be to fight, to hunt, to sacrifice. So when Johnny is searching for them over the years, he looks for members that remind him of the angel he’s trained, of the angel he has had to break down and build up again over the course of eight years before he discovered how to understand him, before he discovered that he would never be able to fully understand him.
When Johnny forms NEWS, he picks members that each have something inside them that he can’t quite identify, that he knows he will never be able to understand completely no matter how hard he tries.
In so doing, Johnny makes NEWS as unfathomable to him as the will of heaven is. He binds the members together with that invisible thread of deep and profound mystery, ties them to one another with the unknown and the unknowable and an angel of the Lord who is all those things at once.
As such, NEWS’s sudden existence is as much a mystery to the man who created it as it is to the rest of the country (and to the members themselves).
From there they are destined to begin a journey fraught with strife and peril, with no clue whatsoever about who they are or what it is they are supposed to do.
This-and this alone- is why Johnny is confident that one day, NEWS will help save Japan.
2. The Road So Far
The world, Tegoshi thinks, is a strange and confusing place.
Yesterday he’d had dance lessons just like he always does on Mondays, and Nishikido-kun had reached out and pinched his butt in the middle of his arpeggios just because he’d felt like it. Afterwards, Tegoshi had gone home on the train and had dinner and studied a little bit before his mother had poked her head into his room and made him turn off his video games. She said he had to go to bed early and pointedly reminded him that there was an English test in the morning at school. He’d reluctantly agreed to sleep, kissed her good night, and gone to sleep thinking that when he woke up, he’d could look forward to having another day just like yesterday today.
Yesterday had been a normal day.
The world is really a strange, incomprehensible, and confusing place, Tegoshi realizes, when today, not long after his very normal English test and his very normal dance lessons, he doesn’t find himself in any semblance of normal anymore. There was no train ride home after work this evening, no home cooked meal or high school textbooks or Dragon Quest. Rather, he currently finds himself huddled around the other members of NEWS at the edge of a lake in the after dark hours as they continue to work.
That work being Koyama screaming in Tegoshi’s ear while Massu hugs his legs so tightly he thinks they might have to be amputated at the knee afterwards, due to lack of circulation.
“It’s coming,” Yamashita-kun murmurs in the meantime, in that strange, hypnotically deadpan voice of his. His eyes barely register any sort of emotion as he says it, looking serene and vacant as the wind suddenly picks up around them at the lake’s edge, as the dead tree branches begin rattling in the autumn cold. The sound chills the would-be idols to their very bones.
“Coming? Where? How? What are we supposed to do?!” Uchi sobs, while Kusano twitches nearby, grasping a tire iron two handed while Shige holds the bag of salt and tries to look small and unthreatening behind Koyama.
“Find the remains,” Yamapi answers without inflection, and whirls to his right with some sort of preternatural understanding just as the ghost materializes beside them, long-nailed fingers raised threateningly at his neck. “Then destroy them.”
Kusano manages to swing the tire iron through the ghost’s body, making the restless spirit screech unhappily and disappear-however temporarily- while Shige fumbles the bag of salt one more time and only succeeds in dropping it everywhere.
“B-but there weren’t any remains in the house!!” Koyama yelps, arms tightly wound around Tegoshi’s waist and Tegoshi can’t tell if it’s because the oldest member is trying to protect him or use him as a shield against the horrors this night is filled with.
“They cremated her, like everyone else in Japan,” Shige points out in frustration. “There shouldn’t be any remains! This is a fluke, I call shenanigans. Are we on a hidden camera show?”
“There’s something left,” Yamapi responds calmly. “Otherwise there wouldn’t be a ghost.”
“I don’t want there to be any ghosts ever!” Shige answers hysterically, looking like he really, really hopes this is just one whacked out dream caused by too many movies and the sleepless nights that come with new group debuts.
Tegoshi wants it to be one of those things just as much as Shige does, except then the ghost is there again, swiping with those long, sharp nails. They snare Yamapi’s arm, slicing through his jacket and drawing blood. He doesn’t even flinch.
“Light….give me your light,” she moans at Yamapi in a gross, watery sort of gurgle, before Ryo hits her with a blast of rock salt from his shotgun.
“She drowned, didn’t she?” Ryo snarls, trying to sound tough even as his whole body tenses with each gust of wind. He may or may not have already misfired his shotgun once or twice during the course of the evening, jumpy from the old house’s many creaks and groans. “So if she died in the lake then maybe there’s something that got left in the uh, in the…” he trails off and looks at the water. “You know. Maybe a fish ate something or something. She’s in the fish poop.”
The rest of NEWS slowly turns to look at the water too. It’s black and rolling under the chill of the wind, looking as angry and dangerous as the ghost herself.
“Not it!” they all say suddenly, and Tegoshi realizes that it’s the only thing they’ve thus far managed to do in sync since their surprise unit was formed.
Yamapi frowns when he hears them unified in vehement reluctance, and then, with something almost like a sigh, he strips off his shirt and jumps head first into the water without another word to any of his groupmates.
“Leader is amazing,” Koyama blubbers in horrified admiration, while the ghost makes a bony grab for Massu’s arm and Uchi manages to clumsily fight her off with his crowbar.
Fifteen minutes later, Yamapi comes out of the water, grim as he grasps what looks to be a small satchel with the ghost’s name written on it in smudged katakana. Tegoshi thinks it must be some tribute of hair or bone that a well-meaning relative had undoubtedly put together and thrown into the waters to remember their loved one by, to help ameliorate their grief.
“We need to burn it,” Yamapi says flatly, and Tegoshi hastily bends down to pick up the container of kerosene he’s been holding all night, fingers white-knuckled around its handle like Koyama’s are around his waist. They quickly douse the wet satchel with the entire contents of Tegoshi’s can just as the ghost woman appears again, and sends Kusano flying backwards into the trunk of a nearby tree. He grunts in pain as his tire iron hits the ground with a clatter.
“Hurry,” Yamapi intones, and Tegoshi tells his hands to stop shaking.
They do after a moment, miraculously, and he pulls the matches out of his pocket.
The strike of a match and a veritable fireball of hair later makes the ghost dissolve with a sudden, angry shriek and a smattering of phantom ashes. The satchel and the spirit both cease to exist.
“Done?” Kusano groans, from where he’s slumped against the tree. “Are we done? Was that it?”
Yamapi nods. “She’s gone.”
And then, just like that, the members of Johnny’s new hunting unit collapse to the muddy ground in a heap, breathing in shaky sighs of relief that is occasionally punctuated with barks of hysterical, disbelieving laughter.
“I can’t believe ghosts are really real,” Shige mutters out loud after a moment, and despite everything he’d just seen, Tegoshi can’t help but agree. Moriuchi-kun must have had some sort of miraculous psychic ability when he’d looked at them all after those first few weeks of being NEWS and decided that he wanted the hell out.
Meanwhile, Yamapi seems unimpressed with everyone at the end of this first real hunt; he just stands, dripping wet at the shadow of the lake’s edge for a moment, all rigid posture and judgmental uncertainty. “There are worse things than ghosts that we’ll see,” he informs them after a beat, and Tegoshi wonders if this is supposed to be the world’s most awkward and disheartening encouragement speech or something. If it is, it’s totally working. Yamapi pushes on, not noticing the discomfort he’s creating in his own group. “We have to learn how to deal with all of these things better than we did tonight or Japan is in danger.”
“W-worse things?” Massu trembles, and clutches Koyama’s sleeve in a tight fist, like he’s forgotten how to let go. “Worse things than that?”
Yamapi nods, looking off into some unknowable distance that only he can see. “Yes.”
NEWS’s shoulders slump collectively at the thought.
Yamapi wordlessly stalks off into the night after that, back to the car. Tegoshi watches him go, and for a moment, thinks the moonlight wreathes their leader in a dull, otherworldly glow.
“I guess we’ll just have to learn how to do better,” Kusano says eventually, and slings his tire iron over his shoulder before helping Koyama and Shige to their feet again. “Like P.”
“I just wanted to be an idol,” Uchi laments angrily. “An idol.”
Shige huffs out a breath of mirthless laughter at that, and it reminds Tegoshi of the sound people make in the movies, right after they’ve been punched hard in the gut.
From there, the members all silently follow Yamapi back to the car after, their eyes already unconsciously on the lookout for any more ghosts, any more attacks, any more dangers that might lie waiting in the dark.
In 2003, NEWS has to learn how to hunt.
~~*~~
Maybe he does it because it’s the best way he can think of to logically and constructively deal with all of the horrible things they’ve seen and done over the last few months. Or maybe it’s just something he decides to do because a part of him knows about the importance of preserving information for the future and that out of everyone in NEWS, he’s the only one willing to take the time and trouble to chronicle all of their adventures (admittedly, part of his motivation is that so that one day, when his parents have him committed, he’ll have some sort of documented proof that these things did indeed happen to them, even if no one else believes him).
Either that or he can use his writings as the beginnings of what could be a multimillion dollar franchise; perhaps one day theses stories will be made into a manga series or an anime, maybe even into TV dramas, books and movies.
Whatever the reason behind it, Shige finds himself starting to write things down without knowing what the point behind it is, though whenever one of his groupmates asks, it’s for research and reference purposes. “So if we ever run into the same thing again we’ll know where to start,” he explains, sounding smart and convincing even to himself, as he types up the report of yesterday’s parallel universe incident in the one journal of his he hopes the fans never ever get a chance to see.
In the parallel universe, he writes, somewhat wistfully, the evilest thing we had to deal with was Tanaka-kun’s wedgies and the fact that I could never date a cheerleader because I’m lame.
Too bad they’d had to return through the possessed looking glass before they could explore their new surroundings very thoroughly; apparently destroying two entire universes simply by being in the wrong one alongside your doppelganger is a very real possibility. Something about a balance of matter that has to be maintained, apparently.
Shige writes it all down, with a note to himself to look up the physics behind that whole theory later.
Shige also discovers that beyond just chronicling NEWS’s paranormal exploits, his journal serves as a much needed sounding board for all the unspoken internal frustrations he has regarding his job. It is also a place to gather his thoughts about how much some of his groupmates mystify him.
Which is a lot.
Beginning to think that there is something otherworldly about some of these people, he jots down one evening, hours after the wendigo they were hunting had walked right past a cornered and unarmed Tegoshi in the underground tunnels they’d followed it to. It had tried to eat a flare-holding Massu instead. Indigestion of the burning kind had ensued.
Yamashita-kun is still the most confusing out of everyone; he is someone who has the ability to get from one place to another in minutes, even though the travel time would be twenty or thirty minutes for a normal person. On top of that he eats so little, never seems to sleep, and never looks like he needs to rest. At first it was amazing to see his iron will to become an idol and his work ethic regarding hunting through these superhuman acts, but after however many months we’ve been doing all this I’ve started to really worry for him and his health. I hear these are the types of things that you can do when you’re young but that will come back to haunt you ten times over once you’re older (like going to bed with your hair wet).
Though who knows, at the rate we’re going, we might not make it to see ‘older’ anyway.
He snorts derisively to himself as he finishes typing that one up, then hits save on his phone and snaps it shut again.
As he moves to turn off the light he hears Koyama snoring lightly into his pillow in the other bed, arm freshly cleaned and all bandaged up after Ryo had neatly stitched up the claw marks that had raked their way through the oldest member’s skin earlier.
Koyama snorts and mumbles something strange to himself in his sleep about his father before rolling over with a soft huff of air and murmuring, “cotton candy,” with a gentle, almost nostalgic sort of sigh.
Shige shakes his head in amusement and shuts off the lamp in the nightstand; as he settles into his own bed for the night he thinks that even if everyone else in their new group is giving off weird vibes, at least his best friend is someone who is just weird in the most normal kind of way.
~~*~~
Took out a vampire nest today, Shige will write in his secret diary two days later, typing one-handed on his phone because of a broken index finger on his right hand. No hospital visits this time, and Uchi actually helped with the clean up afterwards. I think we’re getting better. Either that or we’ve just run into a bit of good luck and it will wear off soon.
Yamapi assures them they’re getting better though; at least, enough that he can bother to talk to them for prolonged amounts of time without looking at them like he thinks they’re the ones that are strange and incomprehensible. Maybe it’s because they’re learning how to operate on less sleep now; four hours a night and a can of UFC coffee in the morning is all the juice they need to exorcise spirits, gank werewolves, and still look perfect for that Myojo photoshoots afterwards.
Kusano and Massu killed three vamps apiece today; I guess everyone knows why they’re in NEWS. Still trying to figure out where the rest of us fit in around here.
He finishes the entry just as the food arrives to the table of the run down hole in the wall soba place they’re eating at after a hard night’s work.
The members eagerly move to dig in once the waitress sets it down, hungry and exhausted and covered in bruises. But before they can eat, Koyama nervously clears his throat and raises his glass like he’s firing the first shots at the enemy in some sort of epic war played out entirely in his mind. “Hey,” he says, voice somehow warm and hopeful despite the slight scratchiness to its quality, from all the screaming he’d done earlier. “Let’s have a toast tonight, ne. Since this was probably our most successful…” he trails off for a moment, noting the obaasan behind the counter and the two other tables of patrons, “concert as NEWS so far. We worked well together tonight.”
Yamapi gives him an odd look that everyone can see makes Koyama cringe a little, but after a moment, the leader nods. “But it wasn’t a…”
Ryo smacks him (which seems to hurt Ryo more than it hurts Yamapi). “Right,” Ryo corrects, around a wince and a shake of his hand. “Successful concert. Cheers.”
Everyone dutifully raises their glasses and touches them together, some shyly, some nervously, and after a moment of silence, Koyama manages a small smile and says, “Okay! Let’s eat.”
Afterwards, Shige will amend that night’s entry in his journal to add, Even if we don’t know where everyone fits in yet, it feels like maybe we’re getting there.
~~*~~
In his following entry, Shige feels less need to wax poetic on the adventures of NEWS as hunters.
He writes:
And then the leprechaun took Nishikido-kun’s pants.
~~*~~
Kusano is very angry when he discovers that vampires can’t actually be killed with a stake through the heart.
The fact that pagan gods can offers some consolation, and he demands that they go and smoke one of them right now.
Apparently, he’d spent hours whittling that thing.
~~*~~
Six months and five days into NEWS’s existence is when something earth-shattering finally happens.
Not literally, Shige writes, hastily, because they’ve learned that in their line of work earth-shattering usually means exactly that. But today it feels like something changed.
It had been a routine enough oni hunt (as far as those can be routine anyway), and the moment that had actually shifted the lives of the eight NEWS members had been as the creature had jumped out of the darkness from behind Yamapi, enormous club raised high over its head and ready to strike.
Even if he’s the best at this out of all of us, there’s no way he could have gotten out of the way, Shige notes, hand starting to tremble a bit at the memory of that split second, now forever burned into his mind. He’d thought that Yamapi was going to die. But then, just like that, Kusano the idiot is there and shoving, and he’s lucky he was only brushed by that enormous club. At least the fans can’t see broken ribs from a distance. Hopefully they won’t ask to hug him.
Kusano had been the hero of the night for that, for saving their leader’s life, and Shige won’t ever forget the mystified, disbelieving look on Yamapi’s face as Kusano had crumpled to the floor while Tegoshi had taken advantage of the distraction to write and throw the charms that would seal the oni. It was as if Yamapi didn’t understand what had just happened to them, didn’t comprehend why Kusano was curled up on the floor, half wrapped around the older idol and grinning through the pain of broken bones.
“I don’t understand why you would do that,” Yamapi had said to him sometime later, as he’d effortlessly carried Kusano down the mountainside, back to where they’d left the van. “I would have been fine either way. Endangering your own life like that is pointless.”
Shige remembers Uchi snickering and leaning towards him on the path to whisper, cattily, “I predict sudden chick-flick moments in our future.”
He’d been mostly right.
Kusano didn’t cry or flutter at Yamapi’s declaration or anything particularly chick-flicky in the strictest sense of the word though; he’d just snorted to himself (very manfully) before wincing when the action jostled his tender side. However, he did feel the need to say, “Oi, let me be the one who decides what’s worth endangering my life for, okay?” and the tone of it had been tender enough, at least as far as anyone had been able to comprehend Kusano’s particular brand of man-speak.
Shige remembers how Yamapi had looked at the youngest member then, with a confused head tilt and a mixture of reproach and incomprehension in his eyes, as if wondering what strange creature was presently standing before him. Kusano had simply met that gaze without turning away or flinching. Eventually, Yamapi sighed helplessly and said, “If that’s what you want.”
Kusano’s grin has always been indomitable; it was at that moment as well, flashing bright with mirth in Shige’s memory. “Yeah, well, I never do anything but,” Kusano answered brightly, and patted Yamapi on the head in an exceedingly fond way, like that is something people can just do normally. “And for now, we’ll just say you owe me one. Cool?”
Yamapi hadn’t answered, but Shige is pretty sure that the odd, upward curling at the corner of his mouth had almost, almost been a smile.
For NEWS, it was in that moment when they felt as if the earth itself had moved.
This isn’t a job you can survive doing on your own, Shige writes afterwards. Like soccer or basketball or baseball or even just being a normal Johnny, I think being successful at hunting is the same as being successful as a team. And teamwork is about sacrifice.
I think NEWS is getting stronger.
~~*~~
“NEWS isn’t normal, is it?” Jin asks Ryo and P one night, over drinks and cigarettes and the heady bass beat of the club. It is not the first time he’s said it.
“No,” P answers.
Ryo takes it upon himself to punch Jin in the arm and make him shut his stupid face.
~~*~~
Shige thinks that something is either very wrong or very right when he and Kusano watch horror movies and spend more time critiquing the misinterpretation of the lore than they do being scared.
~~*~~
“We should rest. There’s two shows tomorrow.”
Ryo groans at P’s matter-of-fact statement before scrubbing at his eyes and declaring, “There was a show tonight too, and then we had to go put down those warring kaiju and now I want to watch TV and order room service and remember what it’s like to be a sexy celebrity who doesn’t know the touch of giant tentacles.”
Yamapi gives him a polite, but obviously puzzled expression. “But you do know the touch of…”
Ryo clamps a hand over Yamapi’s mouth, and everyone’s noticed how that’s sort of becoming a thing when it wasn’t before, the possibility of reaching out and touching Yamapi on a whim. “I DON’T RIGHT NOW, okay?” Ryo emphasizes, and looks at Yamapi until Yamapi slowly nods.
Ryo removes his hand. “Good. Now I’m ordering pizza. Anyone who wants the monsters to win can go to sleep. Anyone who isn’t a loser can watch pay per view with me in my room as long as they promise not to get my bed dirty.”
His groupmates all give him a dubious look.
“A movie you perverts,” he growls. “I was talking about watching some cheesy action movie or something tasteless from America. God I hate you all.” He storms off to the elevators, ears flushed red.
“He doesn’t mean that,” Yamapi manages, after a second, and then looks surprised that he knows.
“Ryo-chan is cute,” Uchi coos, and then takes off after his best friend. “C’mon, it’s not like he offers to pay all the time.”
Massu looks reluctant. “I can go wash the slime off first, right?”
“PLEASE,” everyone answers.
P finds himself being dragged along after them.
He doesn’t understand the point behind Kill Bill Vol 2, but he does find he likes the sweet potato crusts on the pizza just fine, and that while Ryo hates other people getting crumbs on his bed, he’s actually the one who drops the most crumbs on it himself.
P sits beside them, feeling a strange sense of contentment.
Humans are odd, bright creatures.
~~*~~
“I’ve got a bad feeling about this,” Uchi mutters warily as he looks up at the abandoned apartment building they’re investigating today, as he feels a shiver of ice run through his veins just from being on the same street as the complex. “I bet it’s not just one ghost. I bet there’s like five.” He hugs his arms around himself and Koyama notices. He offers Uchi his jacket.
“You always have a bad feeling about everything because you’re a whiny bitch,” Ryo snorts, opening the van’s back doors and grabbing supplies. He tosses Kusano a crow bar and passes a few cans of kerosene to Massu.
“Yeah, and I’m always right,” Uchi sniffs back, shrugging Koyama’s jacket over his shoulders. He pauses to adjust his anti-possession charm when the chain gets caught in the jacket’s collar before grudgingly taking the purification satchels Tegoshi is handing out to the members.
“Maybe Uchi-kun is psychic,” Massu states obligingly, smiling even as he is moves to kick in the door.
A cold blast of wind shrieks through the house in response, rattling the floorboards and window shutters in warning.
“Ghost,” seven of the members murmur when they see it.
Uchi smirks. “See?”
Ryo rolls his eyes. “Congrats on being a dumbass. Now can we please find the remains and get this over with? I have a filming in the morning.”
“Bet they’re in the attic,” Uchi tells him, just to be a pain in the ass.
Shige snorts. “They’re always in the attic.”
“Unless they’re in the basement,” Kusano replies. “Like they were last time.”
Shige scowls at him. “Shut up.”
Uchi ignores them both. “Definitely the attic this time,” he reiterates, without knowing why. It earns him an odd look from Yamapi, but their stoic leader doesn’t really say anything about it as he looks around the deserted building cautiously. Eventually, he gives them the okay (because last time he didn’t and they all barged in there had been a wall of floating knives waiting for them and lots of screaming and running in the other direction afterwards).
As usual, Massu is the one who obliges Uchi without giving him any of that judgmental crap first, and when they end up finding the tiny remains of five children stuffed inside the insulation of the attic crawl space less than ten full minutes into the job, Uchi thinks everyone should buy him dinner for making this hunt nice and easy (well, maybe everyone except Shige, who got thrown into the walls a couple of times when the poltergeists got particularly angry at their snooping).
~~*~~
Much to Koyama’s delight, unicorns do in fact exist.
Much to his dismay, they are also not very friendly.
(Also, they will announce to all of your friends that you are a virgin without any discretion or sympathy for your feelings.)
After that particular hunt, Ryo casually asks Koyama if he wants a hooker or something. “Jin knows some people.”
Koyama buries his face in his hands.
~~*~~
P is not sure if he will ever understand humans. As an idol, their love for him is manic, overwhelming, disconcerting. They do not know him; he is not who he says he is. And yet their affection is real, real enough to bruise, and in the giddy drunkenness of that long-distance affection they fool themselves into believing everything he does has meaning he himself did not assign to those actions as he was doing them.
Yamapi’s eyes are so soulful, people write, and Ryo snorts in laughter when he sees the letters and mutters something about deceased fish.
He understands life so well, people comment on his blog, the one that Johnny plans out word for word to him at the end of each night.
I love him so much I can’t sleep, others declare, and while P does not require sleep himself, he learns from his groupmates that humans do need it, very much. Preferably every night. He wonders if he will be the indirect cause of many human deaths.
“This is good,” Johnny chuckles, when P asks if it is morally right to cause these young women so much physical pain. “This is what it means to be a successful idol.”
P is not sure why Tomohisa would wish for such a thing, but he does as he is told because he said he would and because he is a soldier; he acts in television dramas and TV commercials as best he can and learns ridiculous dance moves and wears ridiculous clothing because it makes those far away people who love him so unconditionally happy.
Inside him, Tomohisa’s soul wraps tightly around his essence during those moments, blurring them together so that it can bask in the warmth of the light there, in the knowledge that a dream has finally come true. P feels it alongside him, and wonders if this is happiness.
~~*~~
“Please stop hurting people,” Tegoshi asks a mischievous (and slightly misandrist) fox spirit, who they have discovered is the magical force that has been turning chauvinists into women and then driving them crazy until they either a. learn their lesson, b. kill themselves, or c. start killing other people. So far options b. and c. seem to be the leading results of this little experiment in retribution, because apparently, in this day and age, people are less inclined to learn things than they are to kill things. And while NEWS is all for equality between the sexes and stuff, the rash of women committing violence making the nightly TV report is probably not good for anyone’s cause either way. As such, Tegoshi continues with his politeness pitch. “What you’re doing isn’t nice, and the guys you turned into girls go crazy and kill people and it just makes everyone look bad.”
The fox spirit scoffs, because this is the first time a hunter has just asked her nicely to stop and hoped for the best. “I don’t think…” She trails off abruptly when she looks into those big sad eyes of Tegoshi’s, and from there something weird happens, because suddenly she finds herself saying, “Yeah okay,” like it was what she’d meant to say all along.
“Yay,” Tegoshi cheers when she does, while the rest of NEWS kind of gives him weird looks (except for Ryo, who glares and gestures pointedly at his chest, the chest that Kusano keeps staring at and occasionally reaches out for).
“Oh, and even though he’s really pretty like that, please turn Ryo-kun back,” Tegoshi adds, politely.
The fox sighs and does; it is either their easiest hunt to date or they’re just getting good enough to make it look that way.
Whichever the reason, everyone is just happy to not get beaten up or killed.
~~*~~
After they finish their concert tour that year, Ryo buys everyone dinner and makes them go around the table saying things they don’t like about each other.
It’s awful and kind of nice all at once.
In 2004, NEWS finishes learning how to hunt and starts learning how to be NEWS.
~~*~~
“It’s started,” P tells Johnny in 2005, as autumn approaches. The voices of his brothers and sisters begin to sing again in his ears, despite the human soul wrapped tightly around his Grace. Their song is muffled and dim but there, a familiar comfort after so much time spent in this body, on this earth without it.
“The journey begins,” they murmur, in soft, perfect chorus.
“This journey began a long time ago if I am not mistaken,” Johnny responds glibly, looking well at ease despite everything that looms in the horizon, despite flashing images in his dreams the night before that involved a roof fire and a beautiful, bleeding woman. The visions had been too much like images he’d seen on that cold that November morning, almost twenty-two years earlier.
“Things are also getting stranger,” P adds.
Johnny blinks. “How so?”
“Last week,” P says, “we had a hunt.”
“You often do,” Johnny chuckles, and pours them both tea.
“It went well,” P continues, either not noticing or not acknowledging Johnny’s teasing. “Tegoshi was able to question a tsukumogami that had witnessed the abduction of the children and with its help we found the clues necessary to track the changeling back to her lair.”
Johnny drinks tea peacefully. “How useful,” he replies, and puts a handful of candies on the table in front of P in offering.
P’s brow furrows. “He should not have been able to see the spirits of the tsukumogami in the first place, let alone commune with them. As I am now, I can barely see their shadows with these human eyes.”
“He has always been a very lucky boy,” Johnny says simply. “From what I have seen.”
“Luck is its own power,” P rejoins. “It made me think.”
“Sign of a young man turning into an adult,” Johnny says, and P tilts his head in confusion.
“I am neither young nor a man.”
Johnny pats him on the shoulder gently and makes him take a candy.
“As I was saying,” P continues, around a peppermint, “Tegoshi shouldn’t have been able to see the tsukumogami. Normal humans can’t.”
“But he did, and it helped you. What’s the problem?”
“I don’t know their nature,” P admits. “I can’t see like I once did because of my promise. But you can. What’s happening? Is this tied to the things happening in America?”
“You have two perfectly good eyes to see everything you need to see with,” Johnny reminds him. “You aren’t meant to see what I do.”
P is not moved. “I’m used to looking with four eyes. Why won’t you let me see with them?”
Johnny chuckles. “Two is enough. You promised me, angel, and there is time left to your promise yet, if you remember.”
The angel frowns. He remembers.
Johnny smiles and wordlessly pours them more tea after that, while P wonders what purpose blindfolding him like this has in the grand scheme of things, or if this is just another one of the crazy old man’s ploys to get him to learn about the meaning of being human at the end of human times.
Even more, he wonders if it is actually working despite everything, when he feels something surprisingly dark and heavy start to settle deep inside of him the more he thinks about the end of humanity growing nearer and nearer, something that he thinks must be a lot like worry. Tomohisa’s quiet soul chimes in and tells him it is worry.
He isn’t sure he can protect NEWS unless he is certain about everything he is dealing with. Certainty is what fuels angels, what moves them. They are certain in their love and their duty and their righteous fury. They are never meant to doubt.
As he is now, even with the voices of his brothers and sisters ringing anew inside of him as events come to head, P thinks he is not the angel he once was.
~~*~~
Koyama stumbles into work the following day bleary-eyed and pale, like a person who has seen a ghost for the first time. “I’ve been having strange dreams,” the oldest member explains awkwardly, when his groupmates poke him and ask what the matter is. “I…think.”
“You think you’ve been having dreams?” Shige mutters in disbelief, and reaches out to touch Koyama’s forehead, to feel for fever burning bright delirium into his best friend’s skin. “Shouldn’t you know?”
“Were they about the hell hounds?” Kusano asks, shuddering to himself at the memory of their one run in with the creatures thus far. “Sometimes I still have nightmares about that.”
Koyama blinks, then shakes his head. “No it wasn’t… I mean, I couldn’t see anything in them. I just…heard things.”
The others stare at him. “You had an audio nightmare?” Uchi asks, and looks close to laughing at the absurdity of such a thing.
But Koyama is serious when he nods again. “For the last few days now.”
“Nightmares about scary experiences you’ve had are normal after you’ve been traumatized,” Tegoshi pipes up reassuringly. “And we’ve been traumatized kind of a lot.”
Koyama wrings his hand and looks thoughtful. “But they’re not nightmares, ne. Not exactly. Just…strange dreams.”
“Like what?”
Koyama manages a sheepish smile. “I…I thought I heard people talking.”
“Great, I should have known he’d be the first one to snap,” Ryo mutters to himself, and pays Uchi five thousand yen. He glares at Shige like Shige has betrayed all of his expectations.
Uchi grins and pockets the money and says, “I told you so.”
“It’s probably just stress,” Shige tells Koyama reasonably in the meantime, while Tegoshi pouts Ryo and Uchi into playing nice. “You just need to stop stressing and relax a little. They’ll go away once you do that. And you should probably stop eating sweets before bed too.”
Koyama nods, looking sad-eyed. “Shige, please don’t tell leader I’m crazy.”
“You’re not crazy,” Tegoshi assure him, and squeezes his arm reassuringly. “I mean, most crazy people don’t know they’re crazy, right?”
Koyama laughs a little at that, but not in an entirely mirthful kind of way.
After that everyone ends up promising not to say anything more about it either way, though when Yamapi arrives to work later that afternoon Koyama can’t help it when he starts to stare at the group leader like he’s seeing or hearing something everyone else is not.
“Crazy,” Ryo whispers to Uchi again in the background, and shakes his head.
“Hmmm,” Uchi answers noncommittally.
In the meantime, P listens to the songs of the angels in his head and learns from it that somewhere in America, two brothers have begun the journey that will put the fate of all creation in their hands.
He wonders if NEWS will be able to help them save it.
NEXT