JE/KAT-TUN "In These Trying Times"
Title: In These Trying Times
Universe: KAT-TUN (Corporate AU)
Theme/Topic: N/A
Rating: PG-13 for Koki and his girlfriends
Character/Pairing/s: KaT-TUN (mentions of Jin and NEWS)
Warnings/Spoilers: A take on Jin’s leaving. Also I don’t know anything about Ueda. Anything.
Word Count: 3,280
Summary: After their CEO leaves, the remaining members of KAT-TUN LLC copes.
Dedication: Happy birthday, Crys! I am sorry this is lame and so last minute LOL I was working on it yesterday but then I got this awful headache out of nowhere and had to scramble to get it on time today. UH you can probably tell I’m rushed. XD
A/N: This fic references “NEWS Power” in only the briefest way but you don’t need to read it to understand this. I also have no idea how companies are run so it is all made up and/or lies on my part.
Disclaimer: No harm or infringement intended.
Every now and again, Nakamaru entertains the fantasy of looking for a new job.
Not seriously of course, because for one thing, in this economy it’s not worth the gamble. For another, it would kind of be a douche move to suddenly up and leave the company you own a 1/6th share in, that you helped launch with your friends what seems like a lifetime ago and worked to build from the ground up into a successful business.
He’s got a responsibility here, to these people, and he knows that if he left, it wouldn’t just turn the employees’ lives upside down, but the market’s and his friends’ too, and while Nakamaru knows he can be an asshole sometimes, he’s not that big an asshole. Besides, it’s not something the shareholders want to go through with the company again.
Apparently a lack of stability leads to a lack of investor faith, which means less capital, which means falling stock prices, which means the company ultimately filing for bankruptcy and forcing Nakamaru to move back in with his parents in impoverished shame while having to endure the neighborhood gossip chain about their former President and CEO stepping down to take a position overseas while their CFO had been forced to buy him out because Jin had more of a taste for blondes on warm Californian beaches than he did for sticking it out through tough economic times with the company he’d co-founded as a teenager.
Gossip in the financial world puts Jin as last seen in a nightclub in downtown Los Angeles the night before, hamming it up with new friends, new clothes, and a bunch of pretty foreign women who had no idea what he was saying in badly-pronounced English.
Last night, Nakamaru sat in his apartment trying not to feel sick as he’d signed off on the bottom 10% of the company’s employees getting pink slips during the next round of layoffs before the winter holidays.
It sucked. No pretty foreign girls anywhere. Just guilt and alcohol and some pills before bed to calm the roiling acid in his gut, prescribed by his doctor to try and contain the fact that the lining of his stomach suffers in direct proportion to the more work he does.
He’d hated it. He still hates it.
But he does it anyway, the work. He’s not a quitter and he doesn’t abandon ship at the first sign of greener pastures.
It’s just sometimes, he dreams about it.
What he means to say is, when he sits in his swanky office at the head of KAT-TUN LLC.’s Public Relations department during his lunch break, perusing the newspaper want ads and daydreaming about sending in a resume to Power News Group, it’s all really just an impossible indulgence he allows himself during his down time, illusions of some very far off, very impossible fantasies.
Even if PNG seems to have a long list of openings for experienced PR reps.
Even if Nakamaru’s best friend is the head designer at PNG, and could probably get him an interview.
He shakes his head. “I am a founding member of KAT-TUN,” he reminds himself stoically, and grabs the stress ball on his desk and starts squeezing randomly. “I am not like that.”
He’s not bitter or anything, these are just facts.
His cell phone rings.
He jumps a little at the unexpected vibrating coming from his coat pocket and fumbles with the phone, seeing Koki’s name flashing across the screen as he finally drops the stress ball to get both hands wrapped around his cell securely. He sighs and flips it open. “Hello?”
“What do you think would happen if I sold my shares too?” Koki’s voice asks immediately, no hello or how are you in return. Nakamaru notes that the VP sounds hungover. “Then Kame can hold 50% of the stock.”
Nakamaru thinks about his answer. “Kame can’t afford to buy you out too,” he points out, reasonably. “And he’d give you that look if you tried to sell.”
Koki groans. “Christ, that look,” he mutters, and sounds like he’s rubbing at his eyes dimly. “Fuck Jin.”
Nakamaru manages a small smile. “Are you seriously just waking up?”
The sound of rustling sheets answers from the other end, as Koki sits up in bed, presumably. “What, you don’t like my bedroom voice? That hurts.”
Nakamaru doesn’t deign to answer. “You’re not really thinking of selling, are you?”
Koki snorts. “Of course not. I’m hungover. I thought I’d take it out on you by being the biggest dick bag you ever met.” Pause. “Did it work?”
Nakamaru considers this. “Did you sell?”
“No.”
“Then you’re not the biggest dick bag I know.”
Nakamaru can practically hear Koki’s mouth curve upward into a smile as he replies. “You’re good, PR man.”
“Were you calling me for a reason other than trying to out dick-bag the reigning king?”
A beat. “Oh. Just wondering if you’ve got my jacket. I think I left it in your car the other night.”
Nakamaru leans back in his chair. “The jacket you puked on?”
Three seconds of silence greet him.
Then, Koki’s groan of shame and realization. “That was it, huh?”
Nakamaru nods and feels himself smiling wryly at the memory. “It shielded your shoes, at least.”
“Shit,” Koki answers. “That was imported from Italy.”
“Saves you the trouble of having to sell it when the stock prices dip again,” Nakamaru says, as a comfort.
Koki grunts and shifts in bed, the sound of a body getting off a mattress. “Shut up,” he tells Nakamaru, “We’ll get through this.”
Nakamaru huffs in laughter. “Yeah I know. It’s just going to suck for a while.”
“I don’t know. I for one, look forward to having a CEO that doesn’t take six month vacations just because.”
Nakamaru supposes there is that. “You really think we’ll be okay?”
“We’ll be awesome.”
When Koki sounds that sure, Nakamaru finds himself folding up the newspaper in his hands before tucking it under his desk, to be taken out to the recycling bins later.
“The meeting is at three,” Nakamaru manages, before the silence between them on the phone can get awkward. “Think you can make it to one on time this year?”
Koki chuckles. “If I can find my pants.”
They hang up smiling, and in the moments that follow, Nakamaru looks out his 20th floor office window and takes a deep breath.
He tells himself that yeah, it sucks right now, but they’ll all be okay soon enough.
Maybe even awesome.
~~~~~
Taguchi lives in a world of precise numbers. He likes the math, likes doing the grunt work even if he’s the head of the accounting department. Numbers don’t lie or offer platitudes or set out to deceive anyone. They’re straightforward. They’re absolute.
Numbers are easy.
People are complicated; it’s probably why he’s not so good with them, why Nakamaru and Koki keep telling him to be quiet at the company events because he’ll scare off investors with his obtuseness.
He’s okay with that. He crunches numbers in his head, content in their honesty, their consistency, and their quiet companionship.
At the end of each work day he can go home with the knowledge that everything he did was pure and simple and more than anything else, the truth.
It’s why he never worried, not even when everything was happening last spring, when Kame was quietly falling apart and Koki was not-so-quietly seething, when Nakamaru was getting ulcer medication on a weekly basis and Ueda was spending more time than usual in the company gym punching things.
Taguchi always had his numbers in those moments, and they did not lie to him back then, not like people lie.
They had sat in front of him, and as he’d performed the functions and calculations and predictions necessary on a piece of scrap paper with an old, chewed on number two pencil, he’d come to the correct conclusion far quicker than anyone else had.
The numbers told him that they’d be okay, a long, long time ago.
The numbers promised him that KAT-TUN would see this whole series of crises through.
So for the time being, Taguchi sits in his office humming to himself and doing his work.
He waits for the rest of the world to catch up with him.
~~~~~
Koki wakes up with a cute co-ed on either side of him, a pounding headache, and a nasty taste in his mouth that is either being caused by last night’s excessive alcohol or excessive sex (but most likely both).
The clock on the wall over the flatscreen TV reads five minutes before ten when he cranes his head to look at it. When he sees the time he settles back on the hotel sheets with a satisfied sigh as the girls next to him sleepily protest at his movements. There’s a meeting at three (he thinks), which means he can sleep for a little bit longer before calling Nakamaru to confirm (or stall, if the meeting is actually earlier).
The girl to his left curls up closer against his side after a minute and sort of rubs herself a little bit obscenely against his hip in her sleep.
He grins and lets his eyes slide shut again to enjoy it.
Koki almost takes it as a sign to begin round two, but then he remembers that he isn’t the type of person who believes in signs too much and that he can’t let himself start to become one now, no matter how tempting.
Signs are bullshit. He’d learned that from the business community at large, back when they’d been busy pointing out all sorts of cockamamie signs with regards to KAT-TUN LLC’s management issues over the past few years.
The newspapers had loved to harp on the fact that the CEO and the CFO now sat at opposite ends of the meeting tables instead of next to each other in the twelve months leading to the buyout, or how Jin had stopped attending 90% of the charity events that they’d sponsored and ended up falling asleep or sulking through the other 10%.
To the press, these had all been signs. Signs of unhappiness, signs of instability, signs of a pending collapse.
From there, Koki has learned not to believe in signs.
What he does believe in is patterns though, and so he takes this morning as proof that even if some things are in the midst of chaos all around him, all the things that really matter are still the same as ever.
This hotel room, these girls, and the satisfied feeling he wakes up with are all things that won’t change. He won’t let them.
Sometime later, when there’s a breathy moan to his left and some more insistent, more lucid writhing, followed by a curious, questing hand from his left, Koki recognizes it as is a pattern now, as acknowledgement that even with Jin gone things can still be like this day in and day out no matter what. He knows everything is going to be good (if a little bit messy) from here on out, and that in about thirty seconds, he’s going to have a(nother) threesome, followed by a quick shower, followed by breakfast, followed by work.
Lather, rinse, repeat.
The world moves on.
~~~~~
Most of Ueda’s lunch breaks these days consist of punching the sandbag at the gym down in the basement of KAT-TUN LLC with a vicious and methodical steadiness.
He does this because as the head of internal operations he’s learned that he shouldn’t really go around wearing his emotions on his sleeve anymore; it makes people nervous and that’s not good, especially now that he’s working with thousands of employees rather than just the five other people he’d started the company with. And while it might have been okay to out and out punch one of the others back in the days when they were trying to get off the ground, in this stage of his career he’s learned that that sort of thing just leads to needless rumor and speculation and idle gossip that brings stock prices down and Koki’s irritation up.
So he comes down here to punch the sandbag instead, and is grateful that he doesn’t have to hold back.
The walls are soundproofed, he’s locked the door for the next thirty minutes, and here, where no one can see or hear or speculate, Ueda pours himself into his fists and his fury and the feeling of red hot relief he gets when he closes his eyes and hears his gloves impact the bag in a steady stream of angry thwacks.
When he’s done, he feels tired but better-ready- and goes to get cleaned up before spending the last half of his break getting something to eat and calming his heart rate down again.
There is work to do and there are still people depending on him. He refuses to abandon because some days he feels like shit and that everything is going to fall apart.
He uses his midday workouts to school himself to a sort of carefully blank calm and afterwards, goes to the cafeteria to eat.
Whenever any of the others or the staff looks at him, they have no idea what he’s thinking or how he feels. He prefers it that way, because there’s work to do.
And if even anyone notices it, no one says anything about how weird it is that the sandbag Kame had budgeted in for the gym at the beginning of the year already needs to be replaced before the end of autumn.
~~~~~
Kame sits in the board room fifty-five minutes before three o’clock, sitting in the dark alone, going over the presentation slides he and his assistants had prepared regarding their plans for the following fiscal year.
He studies each word and each image methodically, tired and pale in the flickering light as his lunch sits cold and uneaten on the table next to him.
He likes the font they used, he thinks, and the fact that there are imbedded videos, and that he could include a campaign proposal from one of the junior hires that is showing a lot of promise.
Kame does not like the extra work or the extra responsibility that has come to him this year. He doesn’t like that he is worth an entire third of the company on his own and that his actions will be the deciding factor behind thousands of jobs and millions of dollars.
But he does like that he can sit here and enjoy going over the details of this proposal without someone breathing over his shoulder, yawning or fidgeting or outright complaining. He likes that there isn’t a derisive voice groaning, “It’s fine, would you just leave it?” or “Does it really matter what kind of heading font you use?” or worse yet, “I’m bored.”
He likes that a little bit, and when he lets himself acknowledge that he does it makes him feel a little bit like a traitor, a little bit like that person all the gossip accuses of him of being.
The cutthroat CFO who methodically forced his childhood friend out of their shared business. The person who wanted to take control of the company away from the others. The person who showed no remorse or grief when Akanishi left. The guy who tried to make light of it to the reporters.
Koki calls it all the fallout of something like a bad break up; it’s the same when a couple divorces after years and years of festering in a broken marriage. People choose sides and speculate, but that isn’t what matters in the long run.
“You’re a liberated woman, Kame!” Koki tells him with that sideways grin of his, and pats Kame on the back. That’s what matters, apparently.
Kame always scowls at him but it’s ineffectual, because he thinks he’s remembering how to smile now, feeling less and less like that person who’s always trying to fill in the awkward silences with his own voice for the benefit of everyone else and more like just himself, being called a girl by a friend he’s known since he was in high school.
He’s starting to remember why they’d even started this whole thing up in the first place.
There’s a cold, scared feeling in his gut on most days, when he’s wondering if he’s making the right decision, when he’s torn over his ability to carry this much responsibility on his shoulders. He isn’t sure he’s as decisive as Jin, or as confident, or as easy and natural with people. He isn’t sure he can be as brash and bold and dream as big as his old friend.
But despite all that he’s starting to feel like himself again, and that’s something. He thinks the others can feel it too, from the way they respond to him now, how they respond to each other when they sit in this board room and feel at ease in the same way they’d felt at ease in Nakamaru’s house back when they’d been teenagers or when they’d been working together at the shopping centers by the station, tirelessly passing out fliers and coupons during their first year of college.
It feels like going back to their origins in a way, shedding the burden of what they’d forced themselves to become in the last few years.
It’s terrifying. Kame doesn’t know if they can do it.
But Kame is determined simply to do what he can do, and so he is here, in the meeting room alone, an hour early. He’s examining the slides, going over in his mind the things he’s going to say and the timing and the blocking of his movements. He imagines Koki sitting next to him as he talks, the VP sending surreptitious text messages to his long list of girlfriends under the table when he thinks Kame isn’t looking. He imagines Nakamaru’s nervous glances between Koki and himself too, the PR head silently hoping that Kame won’t notice Koki’s messaging. He imagines Ueda’s attempts at looking neutral about everything even though every single one of them understands him well enough by now to know he emotes with the corners of his eyes. He imagines Taguchi’s grin too, imagines the accountant’s awkward words that will invariably make the room go silent, and the way he’ll have numbers and counters and logical arguments to each of Kame’s proposals that Kame already has the answers to because he’s been up all night thinking about every single possibility.
This is what Kame can do, and so he’ll do it, and get better at it, and even if he doesn’t have the confidence and the aura and the presence that their old CEO had, he knows he has this, this ability to work harder than anyone at his job.
It’s just that now, he doesn’t have anyone sitting behind him, telling him it’s all a complete waste of time.
Kame smiles a little wanly to himself and supposes that Koki was a little bit right about that whole being liberated thing.
Now Kame just has to prove that it’s better this way for him and for everyone else to everyone else. That Jin being gone doesn’t mean the rest of them will disappear too.
Kame takes a deep breath, resets the presentation, and at 2:35, begins going over everything one more time.
He’s determined not to let KAT-TUN sink.
He doesn’t know if he can do it exactly, but what he does know is that no one will work harder at it than he does.
END
Universe: KAT-TUN (Corporate AU)
Theme/Topic: N/A
Rating: PG-13 for Koki and his girlfriends
Character/Pairing/s: KaT-TUN (mentions of Jin and NEWS)
Warnings/Spoilers: A take on Jin’s leaving. Also I don’t know anything about Ueda. Anything.
Word Count: 3,280
Summary: After their CEO leaves, the remaining members of KAT-TUN LLC copes.
Dedication: Happy birthday, Crys! I am sorry this is lame and so last minute LOL I was working on it yesterday but then I got this awful headache out of nowhere and had to scramble to get it on time today. UH you can probably tell I’m rushed. XD
A/N: This fic references “NEWS Power” in only the briefest way but you don’t need to read it to understand this. I also have no idea how companies are run so it is all made up and/or lies on my part.
Disclaimer: No harm or infringement intended.
Every now and again, Nakamaru entertains the fantasy of looking for a new job.
Not seriously of course, because for one thing, in this economy it’s not worth the gamble. For another, it would kind of be a douche move to suddenly up and leave the company you own a 1/6th share in, that you helped launch with your friends what seems like a lifetime ago and worked to build from the ground up into a successful business.
He’s got a responsibility here, to these people, and he knows that if he left, it wouldn’t just turn the employees’ lives upside down, but the market’s and his friends’ too, and while Nakamaru knows he can be an asshole sometimes, he’s not that big an asshole. Besides, it’s not something the shareholders want to go through with the company again.
Apparently a lack of stability leads to a lack of investor faith, which means less capital, which means falling stock prices, which means the company ultimately filing for bankruptcy and forcing Nakamaru to move back in with his parents in impoverished shame while having to endure the neighborhood gossip chain about their former President and CEO stepping down to take a position overseas while their CFO had been forced to buy him out because Jin had more of a taste for blondes on warm Californian beaches than he did for sticking it out through tough economic times with the company he’d co-founded as a teenager.
Gossip in the financial world puts Jin as last seen in a nightclub in downtown Los Angeles the night before, hamming it up with new friends, new clothes, and a bunch of pretty foreign women who had no idea what he was saying in badly-pronounced English.
Last night, Nakamaru sat in his apartment trying not to feel sick as he’d signed off on the bottom 10% of the company’s employees getting pink slips during the next round of layoffs before the winter holidays.
It sucked. No pretty foreign girls anywhere. Just guilt and alcohol and some pills before bed to calm the roiling acid in his gut, prescribed by his doctor to try and contain the fact that the lining of his stomach suffers in direct proportion to the more work he does.
He’d hated it. He still hates it.
But he does it anyway, the work. He’s not a quitter and he doesn’t abandon ship at the first sign of greener pastures.
It’s just sometimes, he dreams about it.
What he means to say is, when he sits in his swanky office at the head of KAT-TUN LLC.’s Public Relations department during his lunch break, perusing the newspaper want ads and daydreaming about sending in a resume to Power News Group, it’s all really just an impossible indulgence he allows himself during his down time, illusions of some very far off, very impossible fantasies.
Even if PNG seems to have a long list of openings for experienced PR reps.
Even if Nakamaru’s best friend is the head designer at PNG, and could probably get him an interview.
He shakes his head. “I am a founding member of KAT-TUN,” he reminds himself stoically, and grabs the stress ball on his desk and starts squeezing randomly. “I am not like that.”
He’s not bitter or anything, these are just facts.
His cell phone rings.
He jumps a little at the unexpected vibrating coming from his coat pocket and fumbles with the phone, seeing Koki’s name flashing across the screen as he finally drops the stress ball to get both hands wrapped around his cell securely. He sighs and flips it open. “Hello?”
“What do you think would happen if I sold my shares too?” Koki’s voice asks immediately, no hello or how are you in return. Nakamaru notes that the VP sounds hungover. “Then Kame can hold 50% of the stock.”
Nakamaru thinks about his answer. “Kame can’t afford to buy you out too,” he points out, reasonably. “And he’d give you that look if you tried to sell.”
Koki groans. “Christ, that look,” he mutters, and sounds like he’s rubbing at his eyes dimly. “Fuck Jin.”
Nakamaru manages a small smile. “Are you seriously just waking up?”
The sound of rustling sheets answers from the other end, as Koki sits up in bed, presumably. “What, you don’t like my bedroom voice? That hurts.”
Nakamaru doesn’t deign to answer. “You’re not really thinking of selling, are you?”
Koki snorts. “Of course not. I’m hungover. I thought I’d take it out on you by being the biggest dick bag you ever met.” Pause. “Did it work?”
Nakamaru considers this. “Did you sell?”
“No.”
“Then you’re not the biggest dick bag I know.”
Nakamaru can practically hear Koki’s mouth curve upward into a smile as he replies. “You’re good, PR man.”
“Were you calling me for a reason other than trying to out dick-bag the reigning king?”
A beat. “Oh. Just wondering if you’ve got my jacket. I think I left it in your car the other night.”
Nakamaru leans back in his chair. “The jacket you puked on?”
Three seconds of silence greet him.
Then, Koki’s groan of shame and realization. “That was it, huh?”
Nakamaru nods and feels himself smiling wryly at the memory. “It shielded your shoes, at least.”
“Shit,” Koki answers. “That was imported from Italy.”
“Saves you the trouble of having to sell it when the stock prices dip again,” Nakamaru says, as a comfort.
Koki grunts and shifts in bed, the sound of a body getting off a mattress. “Shut up,” he tells Nakamaru, “We’ll get through this.”
Nakamaru huffs in laughter. “Yeah I know. It’s just going to suck for a while.”
“I don’t know. I for one, look forward to having a CEO that doesn’t take six month vacations just because.”
Nakamaru supposes there is that. “You really think we’ll be okay?”
“We’ll be awesome.”
When Koki sounds that sure, Nakamaru finds himself folding up the newspaper in his hands before tucking it under his desk, to be taken out to the recycling bins later.
“The meeting is at three,” Nakamaru manages, before the silence between them on the phone can get awkward. “Think you can make it to one on time this year?”
Koki chuckles. “If I can find my pants.”
They hang up smiling, and in the moments that follow, Nakamaru looks out his 20th floor office window and takes a deep breath.
He tells himself that yeah, it sucks right now, but they’ll all be okay soon enough.
Maybe even awesome.
~~~~~
Taguchi lives in a world of precise numbers. He likes the math, likes doing the grunt work even if he’s the head of the accounting department. Numbers don’t lie or offer platitudes or set out to deceive anyone. They’re straightforward. They’re absolute.
Numbers are easy.
People are complicated; it’s probably why he’s not so good with them, why Nakamaru and Koki keep telling him to be quiet at the company events because he’ll scare off investors with his obtuseness.
He’s okay with that. He crunches numbers in his head, content in their honesty, their consistency, and their quiet companionship.
At the end of each work day he can go home with the knowledge that everything he did was pure and simple and more than anything else, the truth.
It’s why he never worried, not even when everything was happening last spring, when Kame was quietly falling apart and Koki was not-so-quietly seething, when Nakamaru was getting ulcer medication on a weekly basis and Ueda was spending more time than usual in the company gym punching things.
Taguchi always had his numbers in those moments, and they did not lie to him back then, not like people lie.
They had sat in front of him, and as he’d performed the functions and calculations and predictions necessary on a piece of scrap paper with an old, chewed on number two pencil, he’d come to the correct conclusion far quicker than anyone else had.
The numbers told him that they’d be okay, a long, long time ago.
The numbers promised him that KAT-TUN would see this whole series of crises through.
So for the time being, Taguchi sits in his office humming to himself and doing his work.
He waits for the rest of the world to catch up with him.
~~~~~
Koki wakes up with a cute co-ed on either side of him, a pounding headache, and a nasty taste in his mouth that is either being caused by last night’s excessive alcohol or excessive sex (but most likely both).
The clock on the wall over the flatscreen TV reads five minutes before ten when he cranes his head to look at it. When he sees the time he settles back on the hotel sheets with a satisfied sigh as the girls next to him sleepily protest at his movements. There’s a meeting at three (he thinks), which means he can sleep for a little bit longer before calling Nakamaru to confirm (or stall, if the meeting is actually earlier).
The girl to his left curls up closer against his side after a minute and sort of rubs herself a little bit obscenely against his hip in her sleep.
He grins and lets his eyes slide shut again to enjoy it.
Koki almost takes it as a sign to begin round two, but then he remembers that he isn’t the type of person who believes in signs too much and that he can’t let himself start to become one now, no matter how tempting.
Signs are bullshit. He’d learned that from the business community at large, back when they’d been busy pointing out all sorts of cockamamie signs with regards to KAT-TUN LLC’s management issues over the past few years.
The newspapers had loved to harp on the fact that the CEO and the CFO now sat at opposite ends of the meeting tables instead of next to each other in the twelve months leading to the buyout, or how Jin had stopped attending 90% of the charity events that they’d sponsored and ended up falling asleep or sulking through the other 10%.
To the press, these had all been signs. Signs of unhappiness, signs of instability, signs of a pending collapse.
From there, Koki has learned not to believe in signs.
What he does believe in is patterns though, and so he takes this morning as proof that even if some things are in the midst of chaos all around him, all the things that really matter are still the same as ever.
This hotel room, these girls, and the satisfied feeling he wakes up with are all things that won’t change. He won’t let them.
Sometime later, when there’s a breathy moan to his left and some more insistent, more lucid writhing, followed by a curious, questing hand from his left, Koki recognizes it as is a pattern now, as acknowledgement that even with Jin gone things can still be like this day in and day out no matter what. He knows everything is going to be good (if a little bit messy) from here on out, and that in about thirty seconds, he’s going to have a(nother) threesome, followed by a quick shower, followed by breakfast, followed by work.
Lather, rinse, repeat.
The world moves on.
~~~~~
Most of Ueda’s lunch breaks these days consist of punching the sandbag at the gym down in the basement of KAT-TUN LLC with a vicious and methodical steadiness.
He does this because as the head of internal operations he’s learned that he shouldn’t really go around wearing his emotions on his sleeve anymore; it makes people nervous and that’s not good, especially now that he’s working with thousands of employees rather than just the five other people he’d started the company with. And while it might have been okay to out and out punch one of the others back in the days when they were trying to get off the ground, in this stage of his career he’s learned that that sort of thing just leads to needless rumor and speculation and idle gossip that brings stock prices down and Koki’s irritation up.
So he comes down here to punch the sandbag instead, and is grateful that he doesn’t have to hold back.
The walls are soundproofed, he’s locked the door for the next thirty minutes, and here, where no one can see or hear or speculate, Ueda pours himself into his fists and his fury and the feeling of red hot relief he gets when he closes his eyes and hears his gloves impact the bag in a steady stream of angry thwacks.
When he’s done, he feels tired but better-ready- and goes to get cleaned up before spending the last half of his break getting something to eat and calming his heart rate down again.
There is work to do and there are still people depending on him. He refuses to abandon because some days he feels like shit and that everything is going to fall apart.
He uses his midday workouts to school himself to a sort of carefully blank calm and afterwards, goes to the cafeteria to eat.
Whenever any of the others or the staff looks at him, they have no idea what he’s thinking or how he feels. He prefers it that way, because there’s work to do.
And if even anyone notices it, no one says anything about how weird it is that the sandbag Kame had budgeted in for the gym at the beginning of the year already needs to be replaced before the end of autumn.
~~~~~
Kame sits in the board room fifty-five minutes before three o’clock, sitting in the dark alone, going over the presentation slides he and his assistants had prepared regarding their plans for the following fiscal year.
He studies each word and each image methodically, tired and pale in the flickering light as his lunch sits cold and uneaten on the table next to him.
He likes the font they used, he thinks, and the fact that there are imbedded videos, and that he could include a campaign proposal from one of the junior hires that is showing a lot of promise.
Kame does not like the extra work or the extra responsibility that has come to him this year. He doesn’t like that he is worth an entire third of the company on his own and that his actions will be the deciding factor behind thousands of jobs and millions of dollars.
But he does like that he can sit here and enjoy going over the details of this proposal without someone breathing over his shoulder, yawning or fidgeting or outright complaining. He likes that there isn’t a derisive voice groaning, “It’s fine, would you just leave it?” or “Does it really matter what kind of heading font you use?” or worse yet, “I’m bored.”
He likes that a little bit, and when he lets himself acknowledge that he does it makes him feel a little bit like a traitor, a little bit like that person all the gossip accuses of him of being.
The cutthroat CFO who methodically forced his childhood friend out of their shared business. The person who wanted to take control of the company away from the others. The person who showed no remorse or grief when Akanishi left. The guy who tried to make light of it to the reporters.
Koki calls it all the fallout of something like a bad break up; it’s the same when a couple divorces after years and years of festering in a broken marriage. People choose sides and speculate, but that isn’t what matters in the long run.
“You’re a liberated woman, Kame!” Koki tells him with that sideways grin of his, and pats Kame on the back. That’s what matters, apparently.
Kame always scowls at him but it’s ineffectual, because he thinks he’s remembering how to smile now, feeling less and less like that person who’s always trying to fill in the awkward silences with his own voice for the benefit of everyone else and more like just himself, being called a girl by a friend he’s known since he was in high school.
He’s starting to remember why they’d even started this whole thing up in the first place.
There’s a cold, scared feeling in his gut on most days, when he’s wondering if he’s making the right decision, when he’s torn over his ability to carry this much responsibility on his shoulders. He isn’t sure he’s as decisive as Jin, or as confident, or as easy and natural with people. He isn’t sure he can be as brash and bold and dream as big as his old friend.
But despite all that he’s starting to feel like himself again, and that’s something. He thinks the others can feel it too, from the way they respond to him now, how they respond to each other when they sit in this board room and feel at ease in the same way they’d felt at ease in Nakamaru’s house back when they’d been teenagers or when they’d been working together at the shopping centers by the station, tirelessly passing out fliers and coupons during their first year of college.
It feels like going back to their origins in a way, shedding the burden of what they’d forced themselves to become in the last few years.
It’s terrifying. Kame doesn’t know if they can do it.
But Kame is determined simply to do what he can do, and so he is here, in the meeting room alone, an hour early. He’s examining the slides, going over in his mind the things he’s going to say and the timing and the blocking of his movements. He imagines Koki sitting next to him as he talks, the VP sending surreptitious text messages to his long list of girlfriends under the table when he thinks Kame isn’t looking. He imagines Nakamaru’s nervous glances between Koki and himself too, the PR head silently hoping that Kame won’t notice Koki’s messaging. He imagines Ueda’s attempts at looking neutral about everything even though every single one of them understands him well enough by now to know he emotes with the corners of his eyes. He imagines Taguchi’s grin too, imagines the accountant’s awkward words that will invariably make the room go silent, and the way he’ll have numbers and counters and logical arguments to each of Kame’s proposals that Kame already has the answers to because he’s been up all night thinking about every single possibility.
This is what Kame can do, and so he’ll do it, and get better at it, and even if he doesn’t have the confidence and the aura and the presence that their old CEO had, he knows he has this, this ability to work harder than anyone at his job.
It’s just that now, he doesn’t have anyone sitting behind him, telling him it’s all a complete waste of time.
Kame smiles a little wanly to himself and supposes that Koki was a little bit right about that whole being liberated thing.
Now Kame just has to prove that it’s better this way for him and for everyone else to everyone else. That Jin being gone doesn’t mean the rest of them will disappear too.
Kame takes a deep breath, resets the presentation, and at 2:35, begins going over everything one more time.
He’s determined not to let KAT-TUN sink.
He doesn’t know if he can do it exactly, but what he does know is that no one will work harder at it than he does.
END