JE/NEWS- "One Thousand and One NEWS Nippon Nights" (1/8)
*****
Prologue
Somewhere in all the hectic concert planning activity-the meetings, the rehearsals, catering, costuming, stage design, prop design, choreography, musical arrangement, equipment check, personnel check, interviews, documentary filming, staff recruitment, photoshoots, and band practice-it gets misplaced, or mislabeled (or both) and is packed up, shipped off, and no one is the wiser until Ryo comes back from having his lunch outside and can’t find his favorite acoustic guitar.
As a veteran of these things he understands that things get moved or packed up or taken out of the way all the time, so that other things can get moved or packed up or taken out or stored in their proper place. What he expects is that the things getting moved-particularly the things that are the members personal belongings, especially given how anal Massu gets about anyone touching his bag-will get put back where they were once everything is properly said and done.
But the instrument is gone, the case is gone, and all that’s left in the general vicinity is one of FiVe’s many stage guitars, sitting pretty in its case, right next to where Ryo had put his own guitar before he’d gone to take his hour lunch break outside and eat his karaage.
The first question he asks is logical. “Where’s my guitar?”
He’s pretty calm about it too, despite that guitar being the very first he’d ever bought with his own money, saving up for months and months to get a nice one, one that would last and bear all the markings of his years as an idol. It’s the one he writes all his songs on, that he rehearses on, that he sits down with at the end of the day and plucks absently just because it soothes him.
One of the staffers blinks at him, a production assistant from the looks of it (Koyama is the only one who ever learns all of their names and then remembers them afterwards), and he pauses to remove his headset when he sees Ryo’s mouth move. “What was that, Nishikido-san?” he asks, politely.
Ryo’s brow furrows and this time, he points to the empty space where his worn guitar case should be. “Where’s my guitar?” he repeats, slightly less patient at having to say it again.
The PA stares down at the guitar on the floor. “That’s… your guitar?”
Ryo gives him an even less patient look that plainly asks, are you a moron?
The PA folds in a defeated, kind of terrified way. He points to the guitar with one hand and buries his face into the palm of the other. “That’s not your guitar.”
Ryo shakes his head. “No.”
“Your guitar was the other guitar.”
Ryo looks at him like he’s something scraped off the bottom of Shige’s shoe after spending 24-hours on a fishing boat gutting Maguro. “Yes.”
Look aside, Ryo is willing to forget the entire incident so long as someone brings him his guitar back right the fuck now. He’s magnanimous like that, and not all that into getting people fired even though idols apparently have some sort of super uptight image to maintain or something. He waits for the apology, the sniveling, and then his guitar.
The PA does two of three. For one he even falls to the ground bowing until his nose touches the floor and stammers that someone had told him to go and get the ruined guitar sitting by the door so that it can be disposed of properly, before it gets mixed back in with FiVe’s good ones and holy shit he is so sorry, but he thought that the damaged one meant the less shiny one and the case was all fucked up too so naturally he just assumed that was the one that the stage manager had meant and now it’s been trucked off and dumped and he’s pretty sure the guys who were in charge of tossing things weren’t being particularly careful with anything as they had been throwing things onto the back of their truck like Frisbees before hauling it away and he will definitely buy a replacement for Nishikido-kun, he can pick whatever one he wants, even if he has to move back in with his parents in Hokkaido he will pay for a brand new guitar.
Then he breaks down sobbing about how he really hates living in the middle of buttfuck nowhere and how his parents always told him he’d be a failure, and now he’ll have to take over the family bathhouse and help tiny, naked old men wash their backs, along with all the wrinkly other bits they can’t quite reach by themselves anymore.
Ryo stares at the PA without really seeing him, feeling instead, something cold and dead settle into the pit of his stomach at the thought of his first guitar, abused and broken and hauled off to the dumpster with the rest of the trash. In the background, all the details of the young man’s pathetic life up north with his elderly parents and three younger sisters are divulged to him in a torrent of unmanly crying and slightly hysterical whimpers that he’s not really paying particular attention to.
It is in the middle of a particularly harrowing story about the PA fighting through the wind and the freezing temperatures in the middle of December that Ryo abruptly turns around without a word and walks away.
The PA, stunned back into silence himself, wonders what that is supposed to mean; maybe Nishikido-kun has forgiven him, or has been moved by his stories or, on the other hand, is planning to take a baseball bat to his car and then kill his cat and make it so he can never work in this town again.
In all actuality, it’s neither.
But what it is, as Shige will later tell everyone who wants to hear the tale, is the moment when Ryo’s coldhearted reign of blood and terror first descends upon the NEWS Live, Live, Live! fall concert rehearsals.
*****
After the incident with the guitar, the rest of NEWS notices the black aura of death and destruction that follows Ryo around, even though outwardly, he seems calm in his own way for most of the afternoon, only blowing up at random intervals that no one can foresee.
There is an incident with a junior where Ryo practically takes the kid’s head off when he spills a cup of water on the floor. After that, there is one with a staff member who asks “What’s wrong with Nishikido-san?” a little bit too loudly during a blocking meeting, and that guy gets sent home early after being glowered at so balefully that he stumbles backwards, trips on a folding chair, and ends up injuring his neck on the edge of the rehearsal stage.
Before long staffers and juniors alike are starting to physically tense and/or jump every time Ryo moves, and during the blocking meeting later that evening, Koyama feels the need to bring everyone’s attention to the situation, in case they hadn’t noticed it for themselves yet. He waits until Ryo is in the bathroom of course, before leaning forward to the other members and saying, in a whisper that is far too loud to still be considered a whisper, “I think we need to do something to get Ryo-chan in a good mood again.”
The other members share an understanding look.
“But how?” Massu asks, when no one actually comes forward with a solution right away.
Silence.
Around the outer edges of the room, the remaining staffers are all holding their breath in anticipation, hope, and still, admittedly, a little bit of fear, because Ryo could return from the bathroom any second now.
Eventually, when no ideas are offered, all of the members’ eyes slowly turn to Shige in expectant unison.
Shige, naturally, balks at the responsibility of being the one to fix this for everyone. “What the hell, guys? Stop looking at me like that,” he says, and breaks eye-contact with his groupmates.
Yamapi, undaunted, reaches out to pat Shige’s shoulder. Yamapi’s face is as open and reassuring as he knows how to make it, and when he speaks, his voice is so certain and commanding that everyone can’t help but be drawn towards him. As one, the NEWS members present and the rest of the staff lean closer, towards Yamapi and Shige. “Shige is so clever, ne,” Yamapi declares, with perfect sincerity, “I’m sure he can think of something.”
Shige frowns when his naturally sharp mind sees where this is going. “I’m pretty sure that’s emotional blackmail, Yamashita-kun,” he points out.
“Some of us don’t even know what that means,” Koyama points out. “Shige is definitely the smart one, ne! And he’s good at making Ryo-chan laugh.”
Tegoshi and Massu nod in agreement. “Ryo-kun laughs at Shige all the time,” Tegoshi agrees, and smiles broadly in an attempt to look optimistic and convincing. Shige just glares at him.
“So what you’re basically all saying,” Shige begins, and crosses his arms, “is that you want me to direct Nishikido-kun’s fire onto myself instead of everyone else because, for some reason, you think I’m impervious to Nishikido-kun’s bullying.”
The other members look away innocently, all except for Yamapi, who still has his hand on Shige’s shoulder and that open and reassuring look on his face. “We think you’re clever and funny, Shige,” he says again, and it’s with such sincerity that Shige gives a visible sort of sigh and the edges of his indignation deflate a little when he hears it.
“I still don’t understand what you want me to do,” he mutters.
“Just cheer him up!” Koyama urges, pushing forward as he sees Shige’s ire waning in the face of their leader’s great charisma. The oldest member’s eyes are bright and hopeful and saying that, as per usual, he’s eager to help his best friend with this task in any way he can. The fact that most of the staffers on the outlying edges also have the exact same look in their eyes speaks volumes about the sheer amount of terror Ryo’s black mood has caused today, as if Ryo had ordered them all publicly decapitated for their crimes against the kingdom or something, and somehow, in this alternate reality of strangeness and misplaced expectations, Shige has inexplicably become their one and only hope for survival.
“You made Ryo-kun laugh with that story about the fish slapping you in the face with its tail yesterday,” Tegoshi prompts after a moment, and then smiles a little to himself at the memory as well. “That was a good story, and he happily teased Shige about it all day.”
Shige scowls. “Oh great. Oh yeah. So what you’re telling me is, the best way to counteract the emotional trauma Nishikido-kun experienced today is to sit him down like he’s a five-year-old and tell him stupid stories until he forgets everything that happened and stops trying to murder people with his eyes?” Let it be noted that as Shige says this, the tone he uses has sarcasm rolling off of it in waves.
None of which NEWS manages to catch, of course, because their eyes all just light up as one when they hear this idea, as if Shige has just touched down on the answer that will save them all from Ryo’s unspeakable reign of despotic tyranny.
“We knew Shige would figure it out!” they exclaim happily, and sit back looking satisfied with themselves for having come up with such a brilliant solution so quickly. Ryo isn’t even back from the bathroom yet.
Around them, the staff members aren’t nearly as optimistic as the idols at the formation of this master plan; they sigh to themselves and quietly give up all hope of making it through this concert series with their lives and their careers intact.
Shige, in the meantime, thinks he’s already heard this story somewhere before.
*****
When Ryo returns from the bathroom, still glaring at anything stupid enough to meet his eyes and thinking about how he would very much like today to be over so he can go home and sulk to himself and hate the world instead of have to work through whatever it is he’s feeling so they can figure out where everyone is going to be standing on stage during the Dome concert, he finds no one actually working on figuring out where everyone is going to be standing on the stage during the Dome concert.
This, of course, makes him even more annoyed, because seriously? No one could get any work done without him here? He is just about to open his mouth and rip into the idiots who he calls groupmates when he’s interrupted by the sound of their laughter.
“Eh, that’s a good one, Shige,” he hears Yamapi exclaim in a rumbling laugh that sounds a little too enthusiastic. Koyama giggles right along next to him like a moron, and in the middle of everything, Shige looks kind of sheepish and pleased.
“What the hell?” Ryo asks, when he remembers to talk.
Koyama sees him and quickly waves him over. “Ryo-chan,” he wheezes, in-between laughter, “Ryo-chan come sit down with us. Shige’s telling us a great story.”
Ryo scowls. “I thought we were working.”
“Break!” Tegoshi exclaims, knees tucked up against his chest as he faces Shige, looking like an excited kindergartener at the local library’s read-aloud story time. “The director said we should take a thirty minute break so we don’t wear ourselves out, since it will probably be a long night, ne.”
Ryo gives them all a strange look, his doom and gloom momentarily forgotten in the light of the bizarreness of what is going on; it’s like he stepped into the bathroom and came back into a weird alternate universe where a break means gathering in a semi-circle around Shige instead of stretching their legs or updating their nikkis. Brow furrowed, Ryo turns to Shige, because instinctively, when things are weird, you blame Shige or Tegoshi, but mostly Shige.
“What the hell?” he asks again, slower this time.
Shige clears his throat and motions to an empty spot on the ground in-between Yamapi and Massu. “As I was saying,” he repeats again, “there was this one time when Massu was running down the hallway at full speed-and you know how fast he can run-when he accidentally ran into Matsumoto-san.”
Ryo blinks when he hears Matsumoto’s name, instinctively moving to sit in the open space on the floor so he can hear better. “When did this happen?” he asks, looking at Massu.
“A while ago,” Shige answers for Massu, when Massu just looks kind of panicked. “Just be quiet and listen to the story. We only have thirty minutes.”
Ryo crosses his legs, and much to everyone’s surprise, does exactly as he’s told.
Shige takes a deep breath and keeps talking.
NEXT// MASTERPOST