fic - Johnny's & Associates - The Question of Nobuta - Week 3: Mariko
Title: The Question of Nobuta; Chapter 3: Mariko
Author: virdant
Length: 5153/25530 words (3/5)
Rating: PG-13 / R
Genre: AU, Dystopia, sci-fi.
Pairing: implied Pikame, implied Shuji/Akira
Summary: Story Summary: NOBUTA; the program's name is NOBUTA. In a world where people spend the majority of their time online playing roles, a rogue program named NOBUTA tries to be happy. But what is NOBUTA, and why does it exist?
Chapter Summary: “Avatar Uehara Mariko was wandering around sever 520 today. She obstructed vital Maintenance investigation. Regarding NOBUTA.”
Warning: Drug use.
Notes: I use various names and nicknames very extensively in this story for the purpose of differentiating between various settings. Please keep that in mind. For more information regarding this story, including the posting schedule, please check the Masterpost and Pre-reading Notes
The Question of Nobuta
Masterpost | Week 1: NOBUTA | Week 2: Kouji | Week 3: Mariko | Week 4: Nobuko | Week 5: Shuji to Akira | Post-Completion Meta
Week 3: NOBUTA
“Don’t go,” Akanishi said, leaning over the projector. His head was bathed in the blue light of the projection. Kamenashi thought he looked even more tired than usual like this.
Kamenashi gathered the printouts of the whole week, shuffling them into appropriate folders. He eyed Akanishi over the manilla folders, lips pursed in distrust.
“Don’t go,” Akanishi repeated.
“Why?” Kamenashi demanded. It was Friday again. Nakajima Yuto had gotten away, as Kamenashi had expected, and he had been saddled with assignments after assignments. Not in retribution-he was surprised, but not really, that Nakajima had managed to evade other Johnnies without getting caught, but he was walking on tenterhooks all week, just waiting for Upper Management to deliver a slap on the wrist. Ueda, Taguchi, and Akanishi were still off on a personal project, and he had been forced to pick up the slack for the past week. Kamenashi was ready to go to the bar and drug himself to oblivion. He was tired-each week dragged on and on, with work and more work, and his only solace were the biweekly drug doses where he no longer was Kamenashi or Kame or even Kazuya, when his mother called him on orders from Upper Management.
“Just don’t.” Akanishi said.
“That’s not an answer.” Kamenashi snapped. He slammed the folders down on the table-what was the point of hardcopies when everything was locked tightly in wires that spanned the entire world? “If this is about Yamashita again...”
“It’s not him,” Akanishi said, even though it clearly was. There had been no problem until Yamashita had contacted the others, and Kamenashi didn’t understand everybody’s insistence that “it’s not your halluc buddy, Kamenashi, really” was true. It wasn’t Yamashita. It was Kamenashi and his insistence on going every two weeks to the same dingy bar and ordering a dose of cheap hallucinogenics despite what the rest of the group felt.
Kamenashi rolled his eyes. He swiped his finger along the projector, and the projection turned off. Akanishi stared at him without the sheen of blue light, and Kamenashi said, “Please go away.”’
Akanishi looked up. Kamenashi followed his gaze; the blinking red light of a recording spy-cam met his gaze. Kamenashi turned back to Akanishi.
Akanishi nodded. “Junno,” he said.
Kamenashi hissed a little, tapping the projector and turning it back on again. “Taguchi?”
“Junno right now, actually,” Junno said cheerfully. “I’m in the Network.”
Kamenashi nodded tersely. “Junno. What?”
Akanishi leaned forward and tapped a pattern into the projector. Junno’s face-this avatar’s hair was bright blond-materialized stared out into the empty space between Kamenashi and Akanishi. He was watching from the camera then, and not from the projector. Junno asked, a little mournfully, “Are you really going to go?”
“Yes.” Kamenashi scowled. “Look, this doesn’t matter if you agree or not. My time’s my time.”
“Kame,” Junno began.
“I’m not Kame.” Kamenashi turned to Akanishi. “Turn off my projector before you leave.” Then he stalked out of the cubicle.
*
“Didn’t work,” Akanishi said.
“That’s fine. I got what I needed to get,” Junno said. He smiled, and Akanishi rolled his eyes. Junno reached somewhere off-screen, and a file opened in a window parallel to Junno’s face. “Looks familiar?”
It was a picture file of a girl smiling politely at the camera. “Yeah. Who is she?”
“Mariko. Uehara Mariko”
Akanishi tapped the screen-the picture expanded and shifted from a 2D flat picture to a hologram. “Never heard of her.”
“Ever hear of Ariake Shizuna? Or Amane Misa?” Junno again reached off-screen and two more picture files opened up on the projector.
Akanishi nodded. Ariake Shizuna had been a fairly well known online swindler in several servers, and Amane Misa was a big name pop sensation in another. Seeing the two side by side, Akanishi could pick out the similarities between the avatars; all three of them.
“See the similarities?”
Akanishi nodded. “They’re either related, or the same person.”
“I suspect they’re the same person. It’s not common, but it’s not unheard of to have so many active avatars on different servers.” Junno sighed. “Unlike us, who work in Network Maintenance, the average person can only register for maybe two different avatars.”
“What does this have to do with Kamenashi though?”
“Uehara Mariko sent a mail to Kamenashi’s inbox-spam filters intercepted it, but I managed to hack that. Kamenashi’s been getting mail sent to a separate spam inbox, and Kamenashi’s been checking that mail. Guess who’s the subject of this mail?”
Akanishi understood. “NOBUTA.”
Junno nodded. He tapped his screen and Akanishi studied the email that appeared.
I know that you probably don’t want to hear from me, even though when we parted, it was peacefully enough. Sometimes, I wonder if it was the right choice for me to wait for you for so long, but I’m sure it was.
I’m writing this message to you in part to simply update you on life here, but mostly in hopes that maybe we can repair what little friendship we had before we started living that charade. You’re a good person, despite what you believe are your flaws, and I don’t regret the time I spent with you. Not now. You gave me many precious moments.
No doubt you’ve already heard of Kusano’s disappearance, probably from Kusano himself. Knowing him, he’s by your side as always. Everybody misses you. I hope that you and Kusano are doing well.
Kotani’s doing fine, even in your absence. Even in both of your absences.
I attached a picture of us. Isn’t Kotani beautiful, smiling at the sky like that?
“Kotani?” Akanishi asked, turning the word around in his mouth. “I thought you said that NOBUTA was the subject of this mail.” He nodded towards the picture attached to the mail. “That’s just Uehara and some classmate.”
“That’s NOBUTA. Ueda confirmed it, the girl next to Uehara is the same girl that he saw in the program. Ueda sees programs, but he’s not going to make a mistake about what he sees. Not usually, at least.”
Akanishi didn’t laugh. Sometimes they wondered if he still could. “Kotani Nobuta?” Akanishi frowned. “You ran a search for that name already, didn’t you?”
“No hits in the official database. Ueda said that it could be possible that the program was based off of this Kotani girl, but that still doesn’t help us that much. There’s who knows how many Kotani’s registered.”
“You checked?”
“Nakamaru ran a search for me.”
“Is Nobuta registered?”
“To somebody named Shiraiwa Gen.” Junno shrugged a little. “Koki already got in contact with that Apparently it’s a portmanteau of Nobuko and pig. They found it funny when they made it.”
“They?”
“He registered it with a group of friends, according to what Koki said.”
Akanishi nodded. “What did you get from Kamenashi?” He nodded towards the projector. “Are you hacked into his account?”
“I don’t need Kamenashi to hack into his account, I have a backdoor.” Junno eyed the empty air thoughtfully, and Akanishi remembered that Junno was watching through the camera in the corner, not actually talking to him through a simple projection-to-projection connection.
“Then?”
“It’s interesting.” Junno said. “On most days, Kamenashi will respond to Kame, even when he’s not connected to the Network. Even when he’s not on duty, we’ve all contacted him when he’s in his hostel, and he’s responded to Kame. He identifies completely with Kame-even though he has half a dozen other avatars registered under his name, he identifies completely with Kame, even going by that outside of the Network.”
Akanishi nodded slowly.
“But just now? You heard him. Junno touched something off the screen, and Kame’s voice replayed in perfect clarity, “’I’m not Kame.’” Junno echoed. “’I’m not Kame.’ Not when he’s about to take his drug. Interesting, isn’t it?”
“Complete Dissociation,” Akanishi said.
Junno beamed, as if Akanishi was a schoolboy getting a question right. “Exactly.”
*
Yamashita was already sitting in the underground bar, a cup of alcohol between his hands as he slowly sipped it. The dim lights cast shadows over his face, his hair hung in lank strands around his face, and Kamenashi wouldn’t have recognized him if he didn’t already know that only Yamashita sat in that seat. Around them, men and woman sprawled out in soft chairs, pupils dilated as they stared at dreams of their own making. The air hummed with cooling fans for the hook-ups in the far corner of the room dispersing the stench of drugs mixed with too many people in too small a space.
“Is that drugged?” Kamenashi asked as he sat down beside him.
Yamashita lifted his head from the cup, tilting his head to the side as he contemplated Kamenashi. “Depends. You’re late.”
“You need to stop contacting the rest of my group when I’m out,” Kamenashi thought of saying, but then he simply shrugged. He didn’t want to push Yamashita, not when he was possibly drugged. “Akanishi told me not to come.”
Yamashita was quiet. “Jin?”
Kamenashi nodded.
“He would.”
Kamenashi shrugged again. “What’s in that?” he asked. He didn’t want to talk about how the rest of KAT-TUN were trying to stop him from spending his hard-earned time the way he wanted to. They could live alternate lives within the Network if they wanted, but he wasn’t allowed to go to mostly illegal bars and take hallucinogenic drugs.
Yamashita lifted the cup, as if giving the air before him a toast. His movements were grand. Controlled. Perhaps he wasn’t drugged yet. “Beer,” he said. “The poor man’s drug.”
“And?”
Yamashita laughed. “Beer.” He sipped the drink, making a face. “I was waiting for you. There’s a new drug on the market, want to try it?”
Kamenashi shrugged. The bartender placed a napkin before him, covered with numbers written in black ink, a list of drugs and their prices scrawled messily on the paper. He recognized almost all of the drug serial numbers on the paper, having taken them at one point or the other. He couldn’t tell you what they each did-others claimed that different drugs gave different sensations, but all the hallucinogens he took showed him the same life.
The two of us were always one.
“Which one’s the new one?” Kamenashi asked.
The bartender pointed silently to the number on the top, before turning to the side and handing Yamashita another glass of beer. In all the times Kamenashi had been here, the bartender had never talked. Sometimes, Kame wondered if the bartender was drugged too.
The price was extortionate, but the prices of all hallucinogens were. They weren’t legal after all-the drugs let people escape into a world not nearly as highly monitored as the Network.
Yamashita gulped the beer. “Want it?”
“Do you?”
Yamashita looked at Kamenashi, something soft and fond in his eyes. “Do you? Shuji?”
Kamenashi found himself smiling back, not protesting the name. What difference did it make if Yamashita called him Shuji now, before they were under the influence of drugs to make their lie all the more real? “Yes, I do.”
Yamashita pushed the beer towards him. “Cheers, Shuji,” he sang, bringing a fox hand to Kamenashi’s nose and pushing gently.
Kamenashi smiled, and downed the beer. The sweet taste of the new drug curled around his tongue before he gave in to the pressure tugging at his mind to let go, Shuji.
“You know I don’t like sweet things, Akira,” Kamenashi murmured as he let go.
*
“It’s been two weeks and we have nothing,” Koki said. He scanned the streets of the server where Ueda and Junno had first sighted the rogue, but beyond the few avatars wandering the streets-it wasn’t a popular server, but that didn’t stop people from living out alternate lives here.
“Keep looking,” Ueda said from where he sat before his Terminal, trying to trace the program as code for the server cycled by. “She’ll show up.”
“You’re crazy, Tat-chan,” Koki said. “Why are we looking for some random program when...” A flash of long dark hair caught his eyes, and he turned to follow it.
“Koki?” Ueda asked.
Koki stared at the girl who looked uncannily like Ariake Shizuna walked by, laughing with a group of other girls. “That’s Ariake from the 54th server. Who the hell is she swindling in here?”
“Ariake? Wait, Koki!”
Koki ignored Ueda’s voice in his ears. “Hey!” He shouted, leaving the alleyway he had been scanning the streets from and heading towards the crowd of girl. “Hey, Ariake.”
The girls glanced among themselves. Ariake stepped forward. “You must have the wrong person. None of us are called Ariake.” Her voice was calm and collected.
Koki leaned forward, stepping into her personal space the way they had learned to when conducting such interrogations. “You can’t fool me, Ariake. What name are you going by now?”
“Mariko?” a girl from the back whispered.
“Koki, step back from Uehara,” Ueda snapped in his ear.
Koki ignored Ueda. “Uehara Mariko. Is that what you’re going by here?”
“I don’t know what you’re talking about,” Ariake said, but she was mad, and mad people were more likely to confess. Kamenashi had whispered that to Koki once when they were still in training after he had riled Ueda up and had been clutching a cold-pack to his face.
“So who’s your target?” Koki demanded. “What rich boy have you seduced in this sever? Where’s your rich boy toy now?”
Ariake tossed her head and laughed. “I don’t know what you’re talking about. Shuji and I broke up weeks before he moved away. I didn’t get anything from him other than one date in...” she looked away and shrugged. “One date on the beach.”
“Koki, stop,” Ueda insisted. “That avatar might be licensed by the same person who has Ariake Shizuna licensed, but it’s a separate avatar. Ariake’s crimes can’t be pinned on this avatar. Back away, apologize for making a mistake, and back away.”
Koki hissed between his teeth, but stepped back.
“Apologize,” Ueda ordered.
Koki bowed his head, muttering apologies.
“Now turn around and....”
Koki pressed a hand to his ear. “Ueda?” He ignored the girls whispering behind him. So he had fucked up. They had all screwed up at one point or another, no big deal. There was no reason for Ueda to just cut him off like that.
Ueda’s voice came back into his ear, clipped and panicked. “Inconsistency in the code. Two streets down. Take a left at the intersection in front of you, I’m going to try to isolate this problem.”
“Right.”
“Damn it, where’s Taguchi when you need him?”
*
Nakamaru fingered the caffeine patch he had stolen from Kamenashi’s desk, sitting in his hostel quietly. It was dark, and Taguchi was to contact him any moment. He was tempted to slide the patch onto the nape of his neck and let the drugs slide through his system, but he didn’t feel that tired yet.
“Problem,” Ueda’s voice filtered in through the porternal sitting in his hands. “NOBUTA, we think.”
Nakamaru slid the patch onto his neck, turning to the terminal that took up most of his hostel room and syncing his porternal to the machine. “What do you need me to do?”
“Catch her when we push her out. Get all the registry information. Treat it like an avatar.”
“Got it.”
“Don’t tell Kamenashi.”
Nakamaru blinked but nodded, focusing on the code. “Why?”
Ueda laughed shortly. “He’s with Yamashita now.”
*
“Do you really need to ask why?” Jin demanded as he leaned back in the chair, kicking his feet back and watching as Ryo downed another glass of beer.
“Considering that I haven’t used the Ariake avatar since my undercover mission at least a year ago, yes.”
“I just need to know who Ariake Shizuna’s registered to.”
“And I want to know why.” Ryo leaned forward. “Look Jin. You’re fat and an asshole, but you’re my friend, so I’ll tell it to you straight. The Ariake thing was an embarrassment to us. Yes, I got in. Yes, I got Shizuna’s information, but the mastermind behind the whole thing? Ariake Koichi? We still don’t know anything about him, and the guy in charge of the investigation, Ninomiya in Group A. ra. shi? The one who managed to get me in? He ended up calling the whole thing off because we got nowhere. All the information for that swindling case’s locked tighter than the files on your ‘hiatus.’”
“I’m not asking for file access.” Jin pushed another glass towards Ryo, smirking. “You can’t blame what comes out of your mouth when you’re drunk.”
Ryo laughed, tossing his head back as he downed the beer. “It doesn’t work like this on the Network. Not on this avatar. It’s a working avatar, and you know that. I can’t get drunk with this.”
“People don’t need to know that,” Jin replied. He sipped his drink, watching Ryo.
Ryo studied Jin thoughtfully. “Why are you doing this? I thought Management fixed you to just watch.”
“I have enough of my personality left to care, Ryo.”
“This has to do with Yamashita and Kamenashi doesn’t it? Your side of work’s been buzzing with activity lately, and the two people who don’t care are those two. Yamashita even left work early last week, and you know he doesn’t do that.”
“Maybe. Are you going to tell me?”
Ryo drank the beer, chugging down the liquid. As he placed the cup back down on the polished wood surface of the bar, he said in a slurred drawl, “Toda Erika. Good luck with her, she’s a Network actress. Ariake Koichi hired her to do the work. She’s completely innocent. Ninomiya hated admitting it though, we lost our lead when we found out her innocence.”
“I don’t want her for her crimes as Ariake,” Jin said, pushing another drink to Ryo in thanks. “I want to know her involvement in NOBUTA as Uehara Mariko.”
*
“There,” Taguchi said, leaning over Ueda as he pointed out a patch of code. “What do you see?”
“A girl. Short hair. NOBUTA.” Ueda swiped his finger over the sensor, tapping it twice. “I’m going to try to isolate it.”
“It looks like she’s built into the server.” Taguchi laughed. “NOBUTA is the server. That would be a joke.”
“Is that possible?”
“I didn’t think so. Have you isolated the code?”
“Almost. I recognize this coding. It feels like Kamenashi.”
“But not quite,” Taguchi agreed. “There’s other stuff mixed in. Do you have anything?” He watched the numbers scroll slowly, and then faster and faster. “Ueda, she’s moving!”
“Shit. Koki, get your ass to NOBUTA and stop her from moving, she’s doing something to the servers.”
*
“Who’re you?” Koki demanded, rounding the corner and coming face to face with the girl that Ueda had labeled as Nobuta.
The girl stared at the ground in front of her.
“Look, I’m not out to get you or anything. I just want to know who you are. What your name is. Who you’re registered to.” He tried to keep his voice cajoling. “I’m in Maintenance. It’s cool, alright?”
The girl didn’t say anything.
“Is your name Nobuta?”
The girl looked up a little, before turning her face down again.
Koki cursed under his breath. “Look...”
“Kotani.”
Koki breathed out harshly through his nose. “Kotani. Is that all you go by? Do you have a first name with this avatar or anything?”
The girl shook her head a little. “You aren’t Shuji.”
“No.” Koki shook his head. Shuji. That’s what people were calling Kamenashi, but when did he pick up that avatar, and how often did he use it, if people knew him by that name? “I’m Koki.”
“You aren’t Akira.”
“No. Look, do you have a first name? Kotani something? Kotani Nobuta? Nobu...”
“That’s none of your business,” Ariake said fiercely from behind him.
Koki turned. “Ariake. Uehara. Whoever you are. This is an investigation...”
“And you’re picking on Kotani.”
Koki hissed between his teeth. “I’m not picking on her. I’m just trying to get her information because we suspect that she might be involved in rogue programs in this area.”
Ariake stepped between Koki and Kotani Nobuta. “I looked up stuff like this before. You don’t have any right to harass us. Not unless you have proof.”
“Look,” Koki began. “I just want her name.”
Ariake tilted her head up and faced Koki firmly. “Her name is Kotani. Kotani Nobuko. Now leave her alone.”
Koki sighed. “Thanks. That’s all I wanted, kay? I’m going to go now? Is that okay with you, little miss perfect?” He scowled at Ariake.
Ariake stared back. “I’m not perfect,” she said quietly but clearly, tugging Nobuta after her and walking away.
Koki tapped his ear. “Ueda? Hey. Did you get what you needed?”
Ueda’s voice was quiet. “No, but what we got is good. Nakamaru?”
Maru’s voice was low and quiet. “I’m running searches on Kotani Nobuko. No hits so far, but that just means more hacking to do. Taguchi, are you up to it?”
Taguchi hummed a little. “Go in, go out, that’s what I’m here for,” he said cheerfully. Then he sobered up. “The program was doing a hit and run. It was trying to leave the server when you showed up. That means that it’s done with whatever it was doing in the server. We need to find what it did.”
Koki nodded, even if the others couldn’t see him. “And fix it.”
*
“Do you remember Mariko?” Shuji asked thoughtfully as the two of them laid out on the sand, listening to the waves crash against the shore.
“Yes,” Akira replied, legs and arms akimbo as he made a sand angel. “Look, Shuji, Look,” he sang, sitting up and promptly destroying his creation.
“Idiot,” Shuji said, sitting up as well. “Don’t sit up so quickly.”
Akira moved a bit to the left, a bit closer to Shuji, and began to make his second sand angel. “What about Mariko? Do you miss her?”
Shuji shook his head. “No. I just wonder...”
“Shuji has Akira and Nobuta.” Akira sat up, leaving his sand angel incomplete and crumbling in. He twisted around, pressing a finger to Shuji’s cheek. “Except Nobuta is far away.”
“She’s still with us,” Shuji muttered, having grown used to this conversation. “At heart.”
Akira nodded in satisfaction, poking Shuji’s cheek gently.
“Are you all in my head?” Shuji asked suddenly
“What does Shuji think?” Akira replied.
“I think,” Kamenashi found himself saying as he opened his eyes to his hostel, Yamashita lying beside him. “Good morning,” he said instead.
“Morning,” Yamashita grumbled, yawning. “I personally prefer sleeping for longer.”
“Who is Mariko?” Kamenashi asked, sliding out of bed and heading to brush his teeth. It wasn’t often that his drug-induced dreams mentioned other people, but he usually didn’t remember them. He remembered Mariko in frightening detail even after he woke up: long dark hair and smiling eyes. Popular. Different from Nobuta.
“Shuji’s girlfriend,” Yamashita replied in a mumble, eyes still closed even though his voice was Akira’s voice. Kamenashi hadn’t intended for Yamashita to answer, but he supposed it wasn’t that much of a surprise. They shared drug-dreams, they had discovered that the first time they had met. “You dated her for a while.”
“Shuji dated her,” Kamenashi said, even though it felt weird to be referring to somebody he identified with as himself. He watched Yamashita’s eyelids flutter as Yamashita woke up.
Yamashita opened his eyes and blinked.
“Good morning,” Kamenashi said again, clearly.
Yamashita reached out, as if trying to grasp a hold of something he saw in his dreams. Then he blinked again, focused on Kamenashi, and smiled back. “Good morning, Shuji.”
“Kamenashi,” he corrected.
“Kamenashi,” Yamashita repeated agreeably. He sat up, quickly, the same way Akira did in Kamenashi’s dreams. The sheets rumpled, but Yamashita simply smiled. “Breakfast at that cafeteria by Koyama’s place?”
*
“Toda Erika? My name is Nakamaru Yuichi. I work in Network Maintenance. I’m here to under official duty.”
The young women in the projector sighed. “Is this about the Ariake thing?” She reached behind her and felt for the cords trailing from her input jack. So she had just come from the Network. “Ninomiya said that that case was closed.”
Nakamaru shook his head uncomfortably. “I’m here to investigate your association with rogue program NOBUTA on server 520.”
Toda Erika blinked and frowned. “Well, that’s new. Usually I just get questions about Ariake. If I had known that taking the Ariake would have led to this, I wouldn’t have taken that role to begin with. But what do you want with NOBUTA?” She frowned. “Server 520? I don’t remember taking any roles there.”
“Does the avatar label Uehara Mariko mean anything to you?” Nakamaru asked.
“Sure. I played that role once. Do you want my contract proving it? You’ll have to talk to my management company, I’m not allowed to give that information out.”
“Avatar Uehara Mariko was wandering around sever 520 today. She obstructed vital Maintenance investigation. Regarding NOBUTA.” Nakamaru avoided looking at her eyes, instead focusing on the air just beside her ear.
She laughed a little, and then smiled ruefully. “I know better than to do that. You must have been mistaken, it couldn’t have been me. If you need proof, I was in server 335 working with my Misa Misa avatar. She had a photoshoot.”
Nakamaru sighed. “The avatar in question was labeled and answered to Uehara Mariko.”
Toda frowned. “It wasn’t me,” she said clearly.
Nakamaru ducked his head. “Is there anybody who could have accessed that avatar?”
“Not that I know of. I can put you in contact with my management, but seeing as you work in Maintenance, I imagine you already know all of that information.” Her face was set in placid calm, but her voice was firm.
Nakamaru avoided looking at Toda; she wouldn’t have anything to say to him like this. “Thank you very much for your cooperation,” he muttered. He reached over to cut the connection.
Toda said softly, “I’ll be on my Motomiya Yuko avatar tonight if you’d like to talk about this case unofficially.”
Nakamaru buried his face in his hands. “Can’t we just talk like this?”
“Are you working?”
Nakamaru reached for the microphone nestled as his throat, projecting his words to the others. He peeled it off, switched it off, and set it down in front of him. “Not anymore.”
“I suppose you’ll still tell your friends about this though.”
Nakamaru didn’t say anything.
Toda laughed a little. It was a quiet, soft laugh, but then she continued. “You know what Network Actors and Actresses do. We walk around the Network to make the populace’s experience more real. We give them a chance to experience seeing pop stars on the streets. We let them see crime in action. You and I all know about this, I’m sure you’ve done your part, working in Maintenance.
“I was hired once to act in a series of situations. I had a boyfriend, I had a group of friends, and I played a high school student who had what amounted to a perfect life. But then they had the boyfriend break up with me. They had that boy leave. They told me that their work had been done.” She sighed and stared at her hands.
Nakamaru asked quietly, “What was this project called?”
Toda laughed. She stared straight Nakamaru and said clearly, “Producing NOBUTA.”
*
Yamashita slouched in one of the stiff chairs in the cafeteria, flicking his fingers around Kamenashi’s porternal while Kamenashi ate. Sometimes he wondered what it would take to break through all the built-in (and modified, Yamashita knew that Taguchi and Tanaka had their hands on everybody in KAT-TUN’s porternals) security procedures that surrounded Kamenashi’s porternal. Then he thought of the last time he tried hacking and decided that it wasn’t worth the trouble.
“Yamashita?” Kamenashi asked politely.
“Kamenashi,” Yamashita replied cheerfully. Kamenashi had barely touched his food. “What did you dream of last night?”
Kamenashi’s hands trembled, but he faced Yamashita’s eyes steadily. “You don’t remember?” he asked coolly.
“I remember what I dreamed of,” Yamashita said. “I want to know what you dreamed of though.”
Kamenashi shrugged. “What did you dream of?” he asked in reply.
“A beach,” Yamashita said calmly.
“I dreamed of a beach too,” Kamenashi replied, quickly.
“Did you dream of Nobuta?” Yamashita asked, pushing the boundaries. They never talked about their dreams, not after they shared the first one and learned that they dreamed in the same world, and nobody else did.
Kamenashi’s hands trembled.
“I wish I dreamed of Nobuta. I wish I dreamed of her smiling. Or maybe I don’t wish that, but Akira does.”
Kamenashi carefully adjusted the rations on his plate with his chopsticks. He didn’t say anything.
“Did you dream of Mariko instead?”
Kamenashi looked away. “I never cared for Mariko,” he said quietly; the words were Shuji's words, echoing strangely in Kamenashi's mouth.
Yamashita wanted to reach forward with a fox hand and kiss Kamenashi’s nose, but he knew that Kamenashi wouldn’t appreciate that here, outside the safety of drug-induced relaxation. “Of course you did,” he said honestly. “You just didn’t care for Mariko enough.”
*
It’ll be okay. Nobody will hate you.
Sometimes, saying something that you know is a lie isn’t a comfort.
It’s just a lie.
Because even if Akira and I loved you too much to hate you, Mariko wasn’t us. And neither was the rest of the world.
To Week 2: Kouji | To Week 4: Nobuko
Masterpost of Chapters here
Masterlist of fandoms here
Masterlist of Jpop fanfiction here
Author: virdant
Length: 5153/25530 words (3/5)
Rating: PG-13 / R
Genre: AU, Dystopia, sci-fi.
Pairing: implied Pikame, implied Shuji/Akira
Summary: Story Summary: NOBUTA; the program's name is NOBUTA. In a world where people spend the majority of their time online playing roles, a rogue program named NOBUTA tries to be happy. But what is NOBUTA, and why does it exist?
Chapter Summary: “Avatar Uehara Mariko was wandering around sever 520 today. She obstructed vital Maintenance investigation. Regarding NOBUTA.”
Warning: Drug use.
Notes: I use various names and nicknames very extensively in this story for the purpose of differentiating between various settings. Please keep that in mind. For more information regarding this story, including the posting schedule, please check the Masterpost and Pre-reading Notes
The Question of Nobuta
Masterpost | Week 1: NOBUTA | Week 2: Kouji | Week 3: Mariko | Week 4: Nobuko | Week 5: Shuji to Akira | Post-Completion Meta
Week 3: NOBUTA
“Don’t go,” Akanishi said, leaning over the projector. His head was bathed in the blue light of the projection. Kamenashi thought he looked even more tired than usual like this.
Kamenashi gathered the printouts of the whole week, shuffling them into appropriate folders. He eyed Akanishi over the manilla folders, lips pursed in distrust.
“Don’t go,” Akanishi repeated.
“Why?” Kamenashi demanded. It was Friday again. Nakajima Yuto had gotten away, as Kamenashi had expected, and he had been saddled with assignments after assignments. Not in retribution-he was surprised, but not really, that Nakajima had managed to evade other Johnnies without getting caught, but he was walking on tenterhooks all week, just waiting for Upper Management to deliver a slap on the wrist. Ueda, Taguchi, and Akanishi were still off on a personal project, and he had been forced to pick up the slack for the past week. Kamenashi was ready to go to the bar and drug himself to oblivion. He was tired-each week dragged on and on, with work and more work, and his only solace were the biweekly drug doses where he no longer was Kamenashi or Kame or even Kazuya, when his mother called him on orders from Upper Management.
“Just don’t.” Akanishi said.
“That’s not an answer.” Kamenashi snapped. He slammed the folders down on the table-what was the point of hardcopies when everything was locked tightly in wires that spanned the entire world? “If this is about Yamashita again...”
“It’s not him,” Akanishi said, even though it clearly was. There had been no problem until Yamashita had contacted the others, and Kamenashi didn’t understand everybody’s insistence that “it’s not your halluc buddy, Kamenashi, really” was true. It wasn’t Yamashita. It was Kamenashi and his insistence on going every two weeks to the same dingy bar and ordering a dose of cheap hallucinogenics despite what the rest of the group felt.
Kamenashi rolled his eyes. He swiped his finger along the projector, and the projection turned off. Akanishi stared at him without the sheen of blue light, and Kamenashi said, “Please go away.”’
Akanishi looked up. Kamenashi followed his gaze; the blinking red light of a recording spy-cam met his gaze. Kamenashi turned back to Akanishi.
Akanishi nodded. “Junno,” he said.
Kamenashi hissed a little, tapping the projector and turning it back on again. “Taguchi?”
“Junno right now, actually,” Junno said cheerfully. “I’m in the Network.”
Kamenashi nodded tersely. “Junno. What?”
Akanishi leaned forward and tapped a pattern into the projector. Junno’s face-this avatar’s hair was bright blond-materialized stared out into the empty space between Kamenashi and Akanishi. He was watching from the camera then, and not from the projector. Junno asked, a little mournfully, “Are you really going to go?”
“Yes.” Kamenashi scowled. “Look, this doesn’t matter if you agree or not. My time’s my time.”
“Kame,” Junno began.
“I’m not Kame.” Kamenashi turned to Akanishi. “Turn off my projector before you leave.” Then he stalked out of the cubicle.
*
“Didn’t work,” Akanishi said.
“That’s fine. I got what I needed to get,” Junno said. He smiled, and Akanishi rolled his eyes. Junno reached somewhere off-screen, and a file opened in a window parallel to Junno’s face. “Looks familiar?”
It was a picture file of a girl smiling politely at the camera. “Yeah. Who is she?”
“Mariko. Uehara Mariko”
Akanishi tapped the screen-the picture expanded and shifted from a 2D flat picture to a hologram. “Never heard of her.”
“Ever hear of Ariake Shizuna? Or Amane Misa?” Junno again reached off-screen and two more picture files opened up on the projector.
Akanishi nodded. Ariake Shizuna had been a fairly well known online swindler in several servers, and Amane Misa was a big name pop sensation in another. Seeing the two side by side, Akanishi could pick out the similarities between the avatars; all three of them.
“See the similarities?”
Akanishi nodded. “They’re either related, or the same person.”
“I suspect they’re the same person. It’s not common, but it’s not unheard of to have so many active avatars on different servers.” Junno sighed. “Unlike us, who work in Network Maintenance, the average person can only register for maybe two different avatars.”
“What does this have to do with Kamenashi though?”
“Uehara Mariko sent a mail to Kamenashi’s inbox-spam filters intercepted it, but I managed to hack that. Kamenashi’s been getting mail sent to a separate spam inbox, and Kamenashi’s been checking that mail. Guess who’s the subject of this mail?”
Akanishi understood. “NOBUTA.”
Junno nodded. He tapped his screen and Akanishi studied the email that appeared.
I know that you probably don’t want to hear from me, even though when we parted, it was peacefully enough. Sometimes, I wonder if it was the right choice for me to wait for you for so long, but I’m sure it was.
I’m writing this message to you in part to simply update you on life here, but mostly in hopes that maybe we can repair what little friendship we had before we started living that charade. You’re a good person, despite what you believe are your flaws, and I don’t regret the time I spent with you. Not now. You gave me many precious moments.
No doubt you’ve already heard of Kusano’s disappearance, probably from Kusano himself. Knowing him, he’s by your side as always. Everybody misses you. I hope that you and Kusano are doing well.
Kotani’s doing fine, even in your absence. Even in both of your absences.
I attached a picture of us. Isn’t Kotani beautiful, smiling at the sky like that?
“Kotani?” Akanishi asked, turning the word around in his mouth. “I thought you said that NOBUTA was the subject of this mail.” He nodded towards the picture attached to the mail. “That’s just Uehara and some classmate.”
“That’s NOBUTA. Ueda confirmed it, the girl next to Uehara is the same girl that he saw in the program. Ueda sees programs, but he’s not going to make a mistake about what he sees. Not usually, at least.”
Akanishi didn’t laugh. Sometimes they wondered if he still could. “Kotani Nobuta?” Akanishi frowned. “You ran a search for that name already, didn’t you?”
“No hits in the official database. Ueda said that it could be possible that the program was based off of this Kotani girl, but that still doesn’t help us that much. There’s who knows how many Kotani’s registered.”
“You checked?”
“Nakamaru ran a search for me.”
“Is Nobuta registered?”
“To somebody named Shiraiwa Gen.” Junno shrugged a little. “Koki already got in contact with that Apparently it’s a portmanteau of Nobuko and pig. They found it funny when they made it.”
“They?”
“He registered it with a group of friends, according to what Koki said.”
Akanishi nodded. “What did you get from Kamenashi?” He nodded towards the projector. “Are you hacked into his account?”
“I don’t need Kamenashi to hack into his account, I have a backdoor.” Junno eyed the empty air thoughtfully, and Akanishi remembered that Junno was watching through the camera in the corner, not actually talking to him through a simple projection-to-projection connection.
“Then?”
“It’s interesting.” Junno said. “On most days, Kamenashi will respond to Kame, even when he’s not connected to the Network. Even when he’s not on duty, we’ve all contacted him when he’s in his hostel, and he’s responded to Kame. He identifies completely with Kame-even though he has half a dozen other avatars registered under his name, he identifies completely with Kame, even going by that outside of the Network.”
Akanishi nodded slowly.
“But just now? You heard him. Junno touched something off the screen, and Kame’s voice replayed in perfect clarity, “’I’m not Kame.’” Junno echoed. “’I’m not Kame.’ Not when he’s about to take his drug. Interesting, isn’t it?”
“Complete Dissociation,” Akanishi said.
Junno beamed, as if Akanishi was a schoolboy getting a question right. “Exactly.”
*
Yamashita was already sitting in the underground bar, a cup of alcohol between his hands as he slowly sipped it. The dim lights cast shadows over his face, his hair hung in lank strands around his face, and Kamenashi wouldn’t have recognized him if he didn’t already know that only Yamashita sat in that seat. Around them, men and woman sprawled out in soft chairs, pupils dilated as they stared at dreams of their own making. The air hummed with cooling fans for the hook-ups in the far corner of the room dispersing the stench of drugs mixed with too many people in too small a space.
“Is that drugged?” Kamenashi asked as he sat down beside him.
Yamashita lifted his head from the cup, tilting his head to the side as he contemplated Kamenashi. “Depends. You’re late.”
“You need to stop contacting the rest of my group when I’m out,” Kamenashi thought of saying, but then he simply shrugged. He didn’t want to push Yamashita, not when he was possibly drugged. “Akanishi told me not to come.”
Yamashita was quiet. “Jin?”
Kamenashi nodded.
“He would.”
Kamenashi shrugged again. “What’s in that?” he asked. He didn’t want to talk about how the rest of KAT-TUN were trying to stop him from spending his hard-earned time the way he wanted to. They could live alternate lives within the Network if they wanted, but he wasn’t allowed to go to mostly illegal bars and take hallucinogenic drugs.
Yamashita lifted the cup, as if giving the air before him a toast. His movements were grand. Controlled. Perhaps he wasn’t drugged yet. “Beer,” he said. “The poor man’s drug.”
“And?”
Yamashita laughed. “Beer.” He sipped the drink, making a face. “I was waiting for you. There’s a new drug on the market, want to try it?”
Kamenashi shrugged. The bartender placed a napkin before him, covered with numbers written in black ink, a list of drugs and their prices scrawled messily on the paper. He recognized almost all of the drug serial numbers on the paper, having taken them at one point or the other. He couldn’t tell you what they each did-others claimed that different drugs gave different sensations, but all the hallucinogens he took showed him the same life.
The two of us were always one.
“Which one’s the new one?” Kamenashi asked.
The bartender pointed silently to the number on the top, before turning to the side and handing Yamashita another glass of beer. In all the times Kamenashi had been here, the bartender had never talked. Sometimes, Kame wondered if the bartender was drugged too.
The price was extortionate, but the prices of all hallucinogens were. They weren’t legal after all-the drugs let people escape into a world not nearly as highly monitored as the Network.
Yamashita gulped the beer. “Want it?”
“Do you?”
Yamashita looked at Kamenashi, something soft and fond in his eyes. “Do you? Shuji?”
Kamenashi found himself smiling back, not protesting the name. What difference did it make if Yamashita called him Shuji now, before they were under the influence of drugs to make their lie all the more real? “Yes, I do.”
Yamashita pushed the beer towards him. “Cheers, Shuji,” he sang, bringing a fox hand to Kamenashi’s nose and pushing gently.
Kamenashi smiled, and downed the beer. The sweet taste of the new drug curled around his tongue before he gave in to the pressure tugging at his mind to let go, Shuji.
“You know I don’t like sweet things, Akira,” Kamenashi murmured as he let go.
*
“It’s been two weeks and we have nothing,” Koki said. He scanned the streets of the server where Ueda and Junno had first sighted the rogue, but beyond the few avatars wandering the streets-it wasn’t a popular server, but that didn’t stop people from living out alternate lives here.
“Keep looking,” Ueda said from where he sat before his Terminal, trying to trace the program as code for the server cycled by. “She’ll show up.”
“You’re crazy, Tat-chan,” Koki said. “Why are we looking for some random program when...” A flash of long dark hair caught his eyes, and he turned to follow it.
“Koki?” Ueda asked.
Koki stared at the girl who looked uncannily like Ariake Shizuna walked by, laughing with a group of other girls. “That’s Ariake from the 54th server. Who the hell is she swindling in here?”
“Ariake? Wait, Koki!”
Koki ignored Ueda’s voice in his ears. “Hey!” He shouted, leaving the alleyway he had been scanning the streets from and heading towards the crowd of girl. “Hey, Ariake.”
The girls glanced among themselves. Ariake stepped forward. “You must have the wrong person. None of us are called Ariake.” Her voice was calm and collected.
Koki leaned forward, stepping into her personal space the way they had learned to when conducting such interrogations. “You can’t fool me, Ariake. What name are you going by now?”
“Mariko?” a girl from the back whispered.
“Koki, step back from Uehara,” Ueda snapped in his ear.
Koki ignored Ueda. “Uehara Mariko. Is that what you’re going by here?”
“I don’t know what you’re talking about,” Ariake said, but she was mad, and mad people were more likely to confess. Kamenashi had whispered that to Koki once when they were still in training after he had riled Ueda up and had been clutching a cold-pack to his face.
“So who’s your target?” Koki demanded. “What rich boy have you seduced in this sever? Where’s your rich boy toy now?”
Ariake tossed her head and laughed. “I don’t know what you’re talking about. Shuji and I broke up weeks before he moved away. I didn’t get anything from him other than one date in...” she looked away and shrugged. “One date on the beach.”
“Koki, stop,” Ueda insisted. “That avatar might be licensed by the same person who has Ariake Shizuna licensed, but it’s a separate avatar. Ariake’s crimes can’t be pinned on this avatar. Back away, apologize for making a mistake, and back away.”
Koki hissed between his teeth, but stepped back.
“Apologize,” Ueda ordered.
Koki bowed his head, muttering apologies.
“Now turn around and....”
Koki pressed a hand to his ear. “Ueda?” He ignored the girls whispering behind him. So he had fucked up. They had all screwed up at one point or another, no big deal. There was no reason for Ueda to just cut him off like that.
Ueda’s voice came back into his ear, clipped and panicked. “Inconsistency in the code. Two streets down. Take a left at the intersection in front of you, I’m going to try to isolate this problem.”
“Right.”
“Damn it, where’s Taguchi when you need him?”
*
Nakamaru fingered the caffeine patch he had stolen from Kamenashi’s desk, sitting in his hostel quietly. It was dark, and Taguchi was to contact him any moment. He was tempted to slide the patch onto the nape of his neck and let the drugs slide through his system, but he didn’t feel that tired yet.
“Problem,” Ueda’s voice filtered in through the porternal sitting in his hands. “NOBUTA, we think.”
Nakamaru slid the patch onto his neck, turning to the terminal that took up most of his hostel room and syncing his porternal to the machine. “What do you need me to do?”
“Catch her when we push her out. Get all the registry information. Treat it like an avatar.”
“Got it.”
“Don’t tell Kamenashi.”
Nakamaru blinked but nodded, focusing on the code. “Why?”
Ueda laughed shortly. “He’s with Yamashita now.”
*
“Do you really need to ask why?” Jin demanded as he leaned back in the chair, kicking his feet back and watching as Ryo downed another glass of beer.
“Considering that I haven’t used the Ariake avatar since my undercover mission at least a year ago, yes.”
“I just need to know who Ariake Shizuna’s registered to.”
“And I want to know why.” Ryo leaned forward. “Look Jin. You’re fat and an asshole, but you’re my friend, so I’ll tell it to you straight. The Ariake thing was an embarrassment to us. Yes, I got in. Yes, I got Shizuna’s information, but the mastermind behind the whole thing? Ariake Koichi? We still don’t know anything about him, and the guy in charge of the investigation, Ninomiya in Group A. ra. shi? The one who managed to get me in? He ended up calling the whole thing off because we got nowhere. All the information for that swindling case’s locked tighter than the files on your ‘hiatus.’”
“I’m not asking for file access.” Jin pushed another glass towards Ryo, smirking. “You can’t blame what comes out of your mouth when you’re drunk.”
Ryo laughed, tossing his head back as he downed the beer. “It doesn’t work like this on the Network. Not on this avatar. It’s a working avatar, and you know that. I can’t get drunk with this.”
“People don’t need to know that,” Jin replied. He sipped his drink, watching Ryo.
Ryo studied Jin thoughtfully. “Why are you doing this? I thought Management fixed you to just watch.”
“I have enough of my personality left to care, Ryo.”
“This has to do with Yamashita and Kamenashi doesn’t it? Your side of work’s been buzzing with activity lately, and the two people who don’t care are those two. Yamashita even left work early last week, and you know he doesn’t do that.”
“Maybe. Are you going to tell me?”
Ryo drank the beer, chugging down the liquid. As he placed the cup back down on the polished wood surface of the bar, he said in a slurred drawl, “Toda Erika. Good luck with her, she’s a Network actress. Ariake Koichi hired her to do the work. She’s completely innocent. Ninomiya hated admitting it though, we lost our lead when we found out her innocence.”
“I don’t want her for her crimes as Ariake,” Jin said, pushing another drink to Ryo in thanks. “I want to know her involvement in NOBUTA as Uehara Mariko.”
*
“There,” Taguchi said, leaning over Ueda as he pointed out a patch of code. “What do you see?”
“A girl. Short hair. NOBUTA.” Ueda swiped his finger over the sensor, tapping it twice. “I’m going to try to isolate it.”
“It looks like she’s built into the server.” Taguchi laughed. “NOBUTA is the server. That would be a joke.”
“Is that possible?”
“I didn’t think so. Have you isolated the code?”
“Almost. I recognize this coding. It feels like Kamenashi.”
“But not quite,” Taguchi agreed. “There’s other stuff mixed in. Do you have anything?” He watched the numbers scroll slowly, and then faster and faster. “Ueda, she’s moving!”
“Shit. Koki, get your ass to NOBUTA and stop her from moving, she’s doing something to the servers.”
*
“Who’re you?” Koki demanded, rounding the corner and coming face to face with the girl that Ueda had labeled as Nobuta.
The girl stared at the ground in front of her.
“Look, I’m not out to get you or anything. I just want to know who you are. What your name is. Who you’re registered to.” He tried to keep his voice cajoling. “I’m in Maintenance. It’s cool, alright?”
The girl didn’t say anything.
“Is your name Nobuta?”
The girl looked up a little, before turning her face down again.
Koki cursed under his breath. “Look...”
“Kotani.”
Koki breathed out harshly through his nose. “Kotani. Is that all you go by? Do you have a first name with this avatar or anything?”
The girl shook her head a little. “You aren’t Shuji.”
“No.” Koki shook his head. Shuji. That’s what people were calling Kamenashi, but when did he pick up that avatar, and how often did he use it, if people knew him by that name? “I’m Koki.”
“You aren’t Akira.”
“No. Look, do you have a first name? Kotani something? Kotani Nobuta? Nobu...”
“That’s none of your business,” Ariake said fiercely from behind him.
Koki turned. “Ariake. Uehara. Whoever you are. This is an investigation...”
“And you’re picking on Kotani.”
Koki hissed between his teeth. “I’m not picking on her. I’m just trying to get her information because we suspect that she might be involved in rogue programs in this area.”
Ariake stepped between Koki and Kotani Nobuta. “I looked up stuff like this before. You don’t have any right to harass us. Not unless you have proof.”
“Look,” Koki began. “I just want her name.”
Ariake tilted her head up and faced Koki firmly. “Her name is Kotani. Kotani Nobuko. Now leave her alone.”
Koki sighed. “Thanks. That’s all I wanted, kay? I’m going to go now? Is that okay with you, little miss perfect?” He scowled at Ariake.
Ariake stared back. “I’m not perfect,” she said quietly but clearly, tugging Nobuta after her and walking away.
Koki tapped his ear. “Ueda? Hey. Did you get what you needed?”
Ueda’s voice was quiet. “No, but what we got is good. Nakamaru?”
Maru’s voice was low and quiet. “I’m running searches on Kotani Nobuko. No hits so far, but that just means more hacking to do. Taguchi, are you up to it?”
Taguchi hummed a little. “Go in, go out, that’s what I’m here for,” he said cheerfully. Then he sobered up. “The program was doing a hit and run. It was trying to leave the server when you showed up. That means that it’s done with whatever it was doing in the server. We need to find what it did.”
Koki nodded, even if the others couldn’t see him. “And fix it.”
*
“Do you remember Mariko?” Shuji asked thoughtfully as the two of them laid out on the sand, listening to the waves crash against the shore.
“Yes,” Akira replied, legs and arms akimbo as he made a sand angel. “Look, Shuji, Look,” he sang, sitting up and promptly destroying his creation.
“Idiot,” Shuji said, sitting up as well. “Don’t sit up so quickly.”
Akira moved a bit to the left, a bit closer to Shuji, and began to make his second sand angel. “What about Mariko? Do you miss her?”
Shuji shook his head. “No. I just wonder...”
“Shuji has Akira and Nobuta.” Akira sat up, leaving his sand angel incomplete and crumbling in. He twisted around, pressing a finger to Shuji’s cheek. “Except Nobuta is far away.”
“She’s still with us,” Shuji muttered, having grown used to this conversation. “At heart.”
Akira nodded in satisfaction, poking Shuji’s cheek gently.
“Are you all in my head?” Shuji asked suddenly
“What does Shuji think?” Akira replied.
“I think,” Kamenashi found himself saying as he opened his eyes to his hostel, Yamashita lying beside him. “Good morning,” he said instead.
“Morning,” Yamashita grumbled, yawning. “I personally prefer sleeping for longer.”
“Who is Mariko?” Kamenashi asked, sliding out of bed and heading to brush his teeth. It wasn’t often that his drug-induced dreams mentioned other people, but he usually didn’t remember them. He remembered Mariko in frightening detail even after he woke up: long dark hair and smiling eyes. Popular. Different from Nobuta.
“Shuji’s girlfriend,” Yamashita replied in a mumble, eyes still closed even though his voice was Akira’s voice. Kamenashi hadn’t intended for Yamashita to answer, but he supposed it wasn’t that much of a surprise. They shared drug-dreams, they had discovered that the first time they had met. “You dated her for a while.”
“Shuji dated her,” Kamenashi said, even though it felt weird to be referring to somebody he identified with as himself. He watched Yamashita’s eyelids flutter as Yamashita woke up.
Yamashita opened his eyes and blinked.
“Good morning,” Kamenashi said again, clearly.
Yamashita reached out, as if trying to grasp a hold of something he saw in his dreams. Then he blinked again, focused on Kamenashi, and smiled back. “Good morning, Shuji.”
“Kamenashi,” he corrected.
“Kamenashi,” Yamashita repeated agreeably. He sat up, quickly, the same way Akira did in Kamenashi’s dreams. The sheets rumpled, but Yamashita simply smiled. “Breakfast at that cafeteria by Koyama’s place?”
*
“Toda Erika? My name is Nakamaru Yuichi. I work in Network Maintenance. I’m here to under official duty.”
The young women in the projector sighed. “Is this about the Ariake thing?” She reached behind her and felt for the cords trailing from her input jack. So she had just come from the Network. “Ninomiya said that that case was closed.”
Nakamaru shook his head uncomfortably. “I’m here to investigate your association with rogue program NOBUTA on server 520.”
Toda Erika blinked and frowned. “Well, that’s new. Usually I just get questions about Ariake. If I had known that taking the Ariake would have led to this, I wouldn’t have taken that role to begin with. But what do you want with NOBUTA?” She frowned. “Server 520? I don’t remember taking any roles there.”
“Does the avatar label Uehara Mariko mean anything to you?” Nakamaru asked.
“Sure. I played that role once. Do you want my contract proving it? You’ll have to talk to my management company, I’m not allowed to give that information out.”
“Avatar Uehara Mariko was wandering around sever 520 today. She obstructed vital Maintenance investigation. Regarding NOBUTA.” Nakamaru avoided looking at her eyes, instead focusing on the air just beside her ear.
She laughed a little, and then smiled ruefully. “I know better than to do that. You must have been mistaken, it couldn’t have been me. If you need proof, I was in server 335 working with my Misa Misa avatar. She had a photoshoot.”
Nakamaru sighed. “The avatar in question was labeled and answered to Uehara Mariko.”
Toda frowned. “It wasn’t me,” she said clearly.
Nakamaru ducked his head. “Is there anybody who could have accessed that avatar?”
“Not that I know of. I can put you in contact with my management, but seeing as you work in Maintenance, I imagine you already know all of that information.” Her face was set in placid calm, but her voice was firm.
Nakamaru avoided looking at Toda; she wouldn’t have anything to say to him like this. “Thank you very much for your cooperation,” he muttered. He reached over to cut the connection.
Toda said softly, “I’ll be on my Motomiya Yuko avatar tonight if you’d like to talk about this case unofficially.”
Nakamaru buried his face in his hands. “Can’t we just talk like this?”
“Are you working?”
Nakamaru reached for the microphone nestled as his throat, projecting his words to the others. He peeled it off, switched it off, and set it down in front of him. “Not anymore.”
“I suppose you’ll still tell your friends about this though.”
Nakamaru didn’t say anything.
Toda laughed a little. It was a quiet, soft laugh, but then she continued. “You know what Network Actors and Actresses do. We walk around the Network to make the populace’s experience more real. We give them a chance to experience seeing pop stars on the streets. We let them see crime in action. You and I all know about this, I’m sure you’ve done your part, working in Maintenance.
“I was hired once to act in a series of situations. I had a boyfriend, I had a group of friends, and I played a high school student who had what amounted to a perfect life. But then they had the boyfriend break up with me. They had that boy leave. They told me that their work had been done.” She sighed and stared at her hands.
Nakamaru asked quietly, “What was this project called?”
Toda laughed. She stared straight Nakamaru and said clearly, “Producing NOBUTA.”
*
Yamashita slouched in one of the stiff chairs in the cafeteria, flicking his fingers around Kamenashi’s porternal while Kamenashi ate. Sometimes he wondered what it would take to break through all the built-in (and modified, Yamashita knew that Taguchi and Tanaka had their hands on everybody in KAT-TUN’s porternals) security procedures that surrounded Kamenashi’s porternal. Then he thought of the last time he tried hacking and decided that it wasn’t worth the trouble.
“Yamashita?” Kamenashi asked politely.
“Kamenashi,” Yamashita replied cheerfully. Kamenashi had barely touched his food. “What did you dream of last night?”
Kamenashi’s hands trembled, but he faced Yamashita’s eyes steadily. “You don’t remember?” he asked coolly.
“I remember what I dreamed of,” Yamashita said. “I want to know what you dreamed of though.”
Kamenashi shrugged. “What did you dream of?” he asked in reply.
“A beach,” Yamashita said calmly.
“I dreamed of a beach too,” Kamenashi replied, quickly.
“Did you dream of Nobuta?” Yamashita asked, pushing the boundaries. They never talked about their dreams, not after they shared the first one and learned that they dreamed in the same world, and nobody else did.
Kamenashi’s hands trembled.
“I wish I dreamed of Nobuta. I wish I dreamed of her smiling. Or maybe I don’t wish that, but Akira does.”
Kamenashi carefully adjusted the rations on his plate with his chopsticks. He didn’t say anything.
“Did you dream of Mariko instead?”
Kamenashi looked away. “I never cared for Mariko,” he said quietly; the words were Shuji's words, echoing strangely in Kamenashi's mouth.
Yamashita wanted to reach forward with a fox hand and kiss Kamenashi’s nose, but he knew that Kamenashi wouldn’t appreciate that here, outside the safety of drug-induced relaxation. “Of course you did,” he said honestly. “You just didn’t care for Mariko enough.”
*
It’ll be okay. Nobody will hate you.
Sometimes, saying something that you know is a lie isn’t a comfort.
It’s just a lie.
Because even if Akira and I loved you too much to hate you, Mariko wasn’t us. And neither was the rest of the world.
To Week 2: Kouji | To Week 4: Nobuko
Masterpost of Chapters here
Masterlist of fandoms here
Masterlist of Jpop fanfiction here