Now and Forever...Itsumademo... - Chapter 16B
Title: Now and Forever…いつまでも…
Author: Mayonaka no Taiyou/Unare Haineko
Pairing: [Juntoshi] Matsumoto Jun x Ohno Satoshi
Rating: R-ish, but NC-17 this chapter.
Summary: This story follows Ayumu, a more or less normal child born in 2012, three years after the ending of ‘Kodoku kara Umareta Ai’ (which you can read here). His parents, Jun and ( Read more... )
Jun narrowed his eyes at his therapist. “What’s that supposed to mean?”
“You couldn’t even stand to be in the same room as Mr Ohno. You spoke no more than a handful of words to him before your temper exploded, and you were in your sullen, silent fume before Mr Ohno molested you with the importune demand for sex. You and I know that you only sink into the silent treatment when you’re inordinately livid. So, inform me, were you more disgusted with yourself for entrusting Ayumu to Mr Ohno, or were you more disgusted with Mr Ohno’s incapability to think with anything but his penis?” ventured the devil as she adjusted her glasses and sipped at the tea.
“I am disgusted with Leader’s total lack of responsibility for the house and for Ayumu, but I can’t say I’m disgusted with myself over Leader. Somehow, it’s more of a disappointment, you know what I mean - when I fell in love with Leader, he was like a kid I could love and pamper. I trusted him to look after Ayumu and keep the house in working order, but he disappointed me by not meeting that trust,” blurted out Jun with a long, deep sigh. “I wonder whether it’s my fault for spoiling him and doing things for him that he hasn’t a shred of responsibility in him. If I hadn’t spoiled him and given him everything on a platter, Leader would not have left Ayumu to…”
Aware that Jun was about to slip into a woeful contemplation on the wrongs he had indirectly inflicted on his son, Lady Strange interrupted him with a stern, “Do you want my honest take on this?”
“Yes, please.”
“It is in your nature to be generous to a fault. It may be a failing because it leaves you open to exploitation by others. However, up to this point in time, only two individuals have exploited that part of you - Old Man Kitagawa and Mr Ohno. Now, I don’t want to hear talk about how you think Mr Ohno didn’t exploit that part of your character. The truth is that he did exploit your generosity and affection in the exact same manner he exploited Mr Ninomiya’s willingness to constantly forgive him for all his past sexual transgressions he kicked up outside the relationship. Let’s face the truth about Mr Ohno, shall we? The man hasn’t an ounce of responsibility at all. He thoughtlessly takes what he can from others without thinking of giving anything in return. It’s all about what’s convenient for him. Surely, you’ve notice, my boy - whenever Mr Ohno is told to do something he dislikes or is reluctant to do, he always says ‘It’s so troublesome’. He wouldn’t bestir himself to do anything because he believes things and situations should be convenient for him. He doesn’t want to acknowledge the reality that he has get off his arse and do something for himself. It doesn’t help that you’ve pampered him rotten. That pampering has further cosseted him, yes. But it has also driven him further away from reality so much so that he probably thinks he’s living in a dream where everything serves to be convenient for him. When you took off on your ‘self-reflection’ journey, reality socked Mr Ohno squarely in the jaw and he couldn’t take it. So, he responds negatively. It’s troublesome to clean the house when he normally doesn’t, so he leaves the house to rot. It’s troublesome to take care of Ayumu when he normally doesn’t, so he leaves the boy to rot.”
“That’s not true!” Jun shot back in a holler as he stood up.
Unfazed by that vaguely threatening gesture, her ladyship went on, “Ah, but that’s what you’ve been thinking. That’s why you’ve been giving Mr Ohno a wide berth and the cld shoulder. You know that Mr Ohno probably thinks it’s troublesome to keep Ayumu in check when he normally doesn’t, and you suspect that’s why he fed capsicums to the lad to keep the lad quiet permanently.”
“No, it’s not that like that at all! It’s not true!” bellowed Jun hotly, colouring rapidly.
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“No, that’s not what I think!”
“Then why do you think Mr Ohno has done other things to Ayumu other than feeding him capsicum laced food?” chortled her ladyship softly.
“I don’t know!” shouted Jun, glaring at his therapist.
“Your dirty looks of scorn are wasted on a hardened devil. Let me tell you something, Mr Matsumoto, you do know that there are only three things Mr Ohno doesn’t see as chores, videlicit, art, fishing, and sex,” the devil continued unrelentingly.
“No, that’s not true!”
“Then name me one other thing that Mr Ohno does on his own volition without thinking how troublesome it is.”
“Well…”
A short and pregnant pause fell wherein Jun was rendered mute and her ladyship had a triumphant curl on her upper lip. “What’s the matter, Mr Matsumoto? Did a cat catch your tongue?”
“Damn you, sensei!” cussed Jun as he balled his fists angrily and returned himself to the chair.
“Merci du compliment,” acknowledged her ladyship with a coquettish giggle as though someone had praised her beauty. “Have you wondered - don’t you wonder - why your son equates Kazu-chan with you?”
“What the devil are you talking about?” snapped the man whilst folding his arms.
“Kazu-chan the Apatosaurus was on your chair. Very symbolic, isn’t it.” On catching the black scowl on the former celebrity’s brow, she smirked scornfully and went on, “Still don’t get it? The kanji for Kazu stands for ‘peace’ and ‘harmony’, n’est-ce pas? Peace and harmony on your seat. What does that tell you, hmm? Simple - that Ayumu associates peace and harmony with you.”
Jun seemed to digest this piece of information slowly and when he lifted his eyes to his therapist’s, he asked quietly, “What about Leader? What does Ayumu associate with him?”
“Death,” replied her ladyship without any hesitation, her lips curling devilishly in delight as Jun paled rapidly in shock. “Why else could he ask the ‘who would you save - Satoshi-papa or me’ question?”
“No, Ayumu can’t associate Leader with death,” Jun gasped, shaking his head.
“Then why did Ayumu ask you whether you missed Mr Ohno more than him?”
“Sensei, I don’t see…”
Without allowing him to continue, Lady Strange continued her verbal assault, “Why did Ayumu ask you whether you wanted to see Mr Ohno more than him?”
“How is this relevant to…”
“Why did Ayumu tell you that he knows Mr Ohno would rather save you than him?”
“Damn you, what are you getting at?” snarled the ex-celebrity.
“Your son either believes or knows that Mr Ohno views him as expendable.”
“What!?! What the fuck are you talking about?” Jun exclaimed in disbelief.
“You bring the benefits of order, money and sex to Mr Ohno - a cock with a wallet as you so indelicately put it. Of course Mr Ohno has many uses for you. What use does Ayumu have for Mr Ohno other than being a troublesome kid who has to be watched and looked after 24 hours a day, 7 days a week? None. That’s why Ayumu thinks, nay, KNOWS, he is expendable to Mr Ohno,” drawled her ladyship in a slow, deliberate tone.
“That’s fucked up!” Jun bellowed, thumping a fist on the desk as her ladyship poured herself more earl grey tea. “It’s Leader whose fucking priorities are screwed up!”
“Ah, you see, your Leader’s priorities are screwing and fucking,” she said placidly, taking a deep drink of tea. “Come now, from the pointed questions Ayumu has posed, it is obvious that your son knows Mr Ohno wanted to see you more than that wanker cared or him. Ayumu knows Mr Ohno missed you more than that wanker cared for him. the lad just wanted to know whether it was the same with you. He’s still too young to know that there are as many kinds of love as moments in time, but he does know you love him more than Satoshi-papa loves him. Who knows, perhaps deep in his little heart, he thinks Satoshi-papa doesn’t love him? Do you have the balls to find out if that’s so? Don’t you want to know why that is so?”
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“Please contain yourself. You’re spilling the tea,” her ladyship chided.
“Damn you, tell me what happened or I’ll…”
“Threats have never worked on me, I advise you to shut your trap before I do it for you,” she warned coldly. “You want to know what happened? Then ask the boy and judge for yourself.”
Sinking further in dejection into the chair, Jun sighed and glowered mightily at the devil. “Why do you give me so many things to deal with at once? Finding myself, understanding myself, worrying about Ayumu, fretting over Leader and now this infernal contract, can’t you ever stop?”
“The Wheel of Fortune is like a perpetual motion machine, I’m afraid,” she replied with a careless wave of her wrist. “Ayumu will be all right after you sound him out. Worse to worse, you can leave Mrs Ohno to beat the crap out of Satoshi. As for your contract, now this is interesting.”
“What is?” Jun questioned, watching her ladyship flip open the document Miyazono had conveniently left on the desk.
“30 pages in all,” she remarked, tracing the handwriting of the lawyer that he had scribbled between the margins. “Did you know that 30 is a sphenic number?”
“What has that to do…”
Tossing the hot contents of her teacup into Jun’s chest with a swift flick of her wrist, she hissed lowly, “Do not interrupt me, my boy, or Miyazono will find it impossible to scrub your blood from his desk.” As MatsuJun sulkily saw to his tea stained clothes, her ladyship continued, Sphenic number means a positive integer that is the product of three different prime numbers. 30 is the smallest possible Sphenic number. Sphen is the ancient Greek word for ‘wedge’. These 30 pages are meant to drive a wedge between every person in Arashi, surely you must have noticed?”
“What? You can tell from the number of pages?”
“I am a devil, it comes with the territory,” she said with an ironic edge to her voice. “Did you know that all Sphenic numbers have a Mobius function of -1? A Mobius function is like Mobius strip, it repeats numbers in a certain sequence. There are three types of Mobius functions defining integers, -1, 0 and 1. We need only concern ourselves with -1 here because this reminds us of the number 11. You don’t know this because I generally don’t talk strategy with you, but the number 11 comes from the medieval German word ‘ainlif’, which means ‘one leftover’. The mathematical definition of ‘one left over’ is -1. So, the question you should ask yourself is this, namely, who is the ‘one leftover’ in this 30 page contract? Who is the one leftover in the whole process following the dissolution of Arashi?”
“Sensei, I don’t want to do there. You know I’m the one who’s been ‘left over’!”
“Not the Apatosaurus?”
“What has a plastic dinosaur got to do with the infernal contract?”
“I’m not talking about the plastic toy. I’m taking about the wanker, I mean, Mr Ohno. He’s the true ‘deceitful lizard’. Every single one of you is thinking - maybe the Cherry Blossom needs a few knocks to its head before that happens - but I digress. Every one of you is thinking save Mr Ohno. He’s the ‘one left over’ and that’s his own funeral, so to speak because he’s deceiving everyone including himself,” said her ladyship with an unpleasant lilt in her voice.
“Has Leader been deceiving me?”
“Wouldn’t you like to know?” she sneered. “It is no coincidence that he is the ‘one left over’ when he lives with you on the eleventh floor. Number 11 in numerology is the number of synchronisation. In numerology, when ‘11’ appears, the events occurring at the ‘11’ are neither chance nor coincidence.”
“Leader’s deliberately deceiving me? Is that what you’re saying?”
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“What crap! Aiba’s a natural idiot, Nino’s a gamer, Leader spaces out, Sho’s a dork, and I’m an OCD princess. What threat can we pose to the old man?” Jun practically shouted his frustration.
“Let’s see,” her ladyship drawled whilst running a finger around the rim of the teacup. “We have Mr Sakurai, an economics graduate who could (if he had enough observational skills) tell what’s wrong with the financial auditing processes of the jimusho. Then we have Mr Ninomiya, a master bastard who observes everything silently and sizes both situations and people alike quietly. Then we have Mr Aiba, a Shakespearean fool who looks and acts stupid but is actually the only one capable of seeing and telling the truth regardless as to how black and bloody it is. Then we have Mr Ohno, someone who recoils from everything the jimusho works for because it’s troublesome to be involved with an agency that controls everything. Then we have you, Mr Matsumoto. You know the inner machinations of the jimusho and you must have seen something or know of something that has given Kitagawa a bone to pick with you. That’s why the Old Goat keeps showing you what he does to people who go against the jimusho. He knows that collectively, the five of you could bring down the whole mountain side. Ergo, before you lot can play against him, he made a pre-emptive strike against you.”
“That’s just sick,” Jun hurled out at his therapist.
“Look at it from Kitagawa’s point of view, hein,” advised the devil, rapping Jun on the knuckles with a teaspoon. “He wanted Mr Ninomiya to be the dissolving the group so that he wouldn’t get his grubby-old-goat-paws dirty. He wanted to still ‘look’ like a good guy to people like Messrs Sakurai and Aiba, and the rest of the impressionable youngsters. That’s why in all honesty, that Old Bugger can honestly say that he didn’t dissolve Arashi because it was Mr Ninomiya who did it with some help from Mr Ohno and your good self. No one can ask you or Mr Ohno what happened so it is just as well for him.”
“How low can he get?” Jun spat in revulsion.
“Oh, he kills, maims, fornicates and corrupts - the usual,” answered her ladyship blandly. “So, knowing all this - do you want to keep hiding in your idyll as a housewife-father on your cushy 11th floor executive flat or do you fight back?”
“Trying to find myself was already painful enough. Do you expect me to go through the pain of fighting the Old Man and that infernal contract?” Jun tiredly threw out at his therapist.
Fixing him with a look of supreme indifference, her ladyship informed him: “You’re already in pain, what’s a little more added to it?”
“What about the rest of the guys? Wouldn’t I be screwing them over?”
“Mr Miyazono said there is a way out for everyone, I would trust him on that.”
“A devil telling me to trust a lawyer? That’s rich,” he laughed hollowly. “No one in the right mind would trust either of you especially when you both want to dredge up painful memories and inner demons.”
Having heard enough, Lady Strange reached across the desk and seized Jun’s chin in an iron grip. “Like you’re in your right mind, Mr Matsumoto?” she hissed, digging her fingers into his cheeks. “I don’t give two figs over what you think of me, but don’t you ever disparage Mr Miyazono. Yuuichi doesn’t make promises he doesn’t intend to keep.”
Those with the last words she spoke to the errant Mr Matsumoto, for as soon as finished, she snapped the fingers of her free hand and disappeared in a crack of blackish blue flames.
[NB: This concludes the therapy sessions for CH 16. Post-mortems to come.]
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Once again Ayumu sheds light on something! Admit it, the boy is growing on you like a fungus. That section was written especially for the purposes of our therapy sessions. Now who shall we punish for this *little* piece of information that has come to the surface...?
A piece of inside information for you: In regards to your indirect question of Iago's pre-emptive strike against Arashi...what would you say if I told you that maybe Iago is paranoid? And that after gaining all that power through less than honorable means, he seeks the advice of an 'oracle' to ensure that he is many steps ahead of everyone he's had to step on to be on top. Perhaps this oracle offers him advice/a prophesy in the form of an ambiguous poem...
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Iago, paranoid? Typical of the overly power hungry. Seeks the advice of an Oracle, you say? My word, he is a superstitious bloke. And then he interprets the poem wrongly and sets all this nonsense into being. Typical Iago, but fun for us.
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Is this making sense? Say for example, Iago, the paranoid, superstitious bloke that he is, consults the oracle, who tells him indirectly that Arashi will bring about his demise. So he takes all these steps to try to avoid that and stay many steps ahead of the game, but ends up fulfilling the prophesy because of his pride and desire to be invincible? So perhaps had he not sought the advice of the 'Oracle' and just continued doing dirty business, he might have ended differently--but the fact is that he was destined to ask and he did...*ahem* sorry, does what I'm trying to do make sense or am I just WAAAY out in left field on this one? I wanted to pay my own little quiet tribute to Greek theatre and tragedy...
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Out of a desire to consolidate his power and have even more, he consults the Oracle. Since the Oracle always says such cryptic things, they are open to various interpretations. Iago, being a chloeric sort of fellow, gives the prophesy a negative and perverse spin (as per the symptoms of megalomaniac paranoia which I discuss in the Jun section of the commentary). This spin involves him interpreting something for Arashi (or the members) and he takes it into his head that they (the Arashi lads) will bite the feed them. This in turn sets in chain Iago's means to safeguard his empire by demolishing Arashi.
See, it makes perfect sense.
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Let's go through the choices of dying logically:
(a) Death by fire means everything he's worked for will go up in smoke and he will have nothing, not even a recognisable corse.
(b) Death by exsanguination means he bleeds to death. Unless he's a haemophiliac or suffers from von Willedebrand Disease (I have type 1 bordering on to Type 2B because I bleed easily and take ages to clot and when the period hits, I'm out due to blood loss), he doesn't have to worry. The only way he would genuinely fear death by exsanguination is if an artery is cut. Of if he watches himself bleed to death - now that's something could be interesting. In the Middle Ages, there was this very novel iron maiden, you could pull a lever as you closed the scargophagus and as you shut the door, the spikes would unwind and pierce your intended victim. There would be a funnel like thing that catches the blood and a hole at the bottom of the scargophagus where the victim would literally see his blood drain away as he died. Death is not instant and takes between 2-3 days for healthy, adult males.
(c) Shameful death for someone who has done shameful things all his career without considering those things shameful is tricky to carry out. What would constitute a shameful and ignominious end for Iago? A "death" of his reputation when his true "business interests" are outed? That is a metaphorical death and could ruin him leading him to seek a more physical death.
All these options are viable. It's up to you to play it - outright physical death or metaphorical death leading to eventual physical death.
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Perhaps I should send you the prophesy...or would you prefer that it be a surprise when I unveil it?
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Knowing that he'll die but not knowing when it'll strike or how it would strike would be frightening for someone like Iago because he likes to control everything. Not knowing when or how means he doesnt have any control. That could drive him mad and is a kind a death in itself.
Sudden instantaneous death isn't as frightening because you're alive one moment and at the next, you drop dead. There is no agonising or anything.
I'll wait for the prophesy and have a good snigger over it (and Iago's panic).
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