[fic] Lose Me - Twelfth Cut ~Destruction of the Grove~
Title: Lose Me
Pairing: Jin x Kame
Rating: NC-17
Genre - Catch Me: AU, angst, romance, smut, drama, tragedy
Beta by: my cat. okay, seriously, nobody
Disclaimer: I don't own KAT-TUN, any of its members, any other JE people. I write this for fun and for other fans of these fine folks. But don't steal my plots, mmkay? I put a great deal of time into them except for when I'm randomly spastically spitting words onto a page. But I value those too...
Summary - Catch Me: A dramatic turn in his life throws Kame into Jin's college world. Almost immediately they notice an attraction, but they spend more time clashing than not.
Summary - Lose Me: Kame and Jin still have the occasional argument but mostly they live happily together. But when someone from Kame's past shows up, will the two be able to deal?
Warning: While "Catch Me" part is more towards the fluffy end of the scale at times, the other three parts have such things as drugs and murder and rape and all the fun parts of a bad neighborhood in a big city. Oh, and character death(s).
On my journal: Catch Me, Lose Me, Find Me, Heal Me
On the akame_ Community: Catch Me, Lose Me, Find Me, Heal Me
On the akame_fanfics Community: Catch Me, Lose Me, Find Me, Heal Me
On the kattun_fanfics Community: Catch Me, Lose Me, Find Me, Heal Me
A/N: Here you go!
Don't kill me.
Lose Me
Twelfth Cut ~Destruction of the Grove~
Kame wasn’t sure how long he spent lying on the grass crying. Time didn’t seem real to him. Nothing seemed real.
Which is why, when he heard Ryo’s voice say, “Finally alone,” he was sure he’d imagined it. But when he sat up, he saw he hadn’t imagined it at all. Ryo really was there.
“How… how did you find this place?” Panic swelled in his breast. He was essentially cornered. There was the concrete wall with the deadly drop on one side, the dense bushes on the other side, and Ryo blocking the only clear way through the trees.
Ryo laughed. “After I managed to separate you from Jin, I followed you here.” He slowly looked around. “This place must have some special meaning for you, if you’d flee here without waiting for your protector.”
Kame didn’t want Ryo to know how important this place was to him. He didn’t want Ryo to take that from him, too. “No, not really…” He forced the words out.
“We’ll soon see, won’t we…” Ryo said as he took a step towards the sitting Kame.
Scrambling back away from the advancing Ryo, Kame asked, “What are you doing?”
“I think you know.”
“I… I’ll scream…”
“I don’t think anyone would hear you, not from here.”
And he was right. Kame knew he was right. He felt his back hit the concrete wall. He couldn’t go any further that way. Rising to his feet, he took a deep breath. Feinting to the right, he tried to bolt to the left past Ryo. Ryo grabbed his shirt to bring him back down, ripping it in the process. They both landed hard but Ryo was faster and had Kame pinned before he could get his breath back.
Kame did his best, kicking and clawing and biting, to get Ryo off of him but he just wasn’t strong enough. Crying, he begged, “Please don’t do this, Ryo! Not here! Oh, god… Please, Ryo!” as Ryo flipped him over. “I’ll do whatever you want, I promise… just not here!” But Ryo ignored his pleas, pulling his pants down.
“I think you’ll do whatever I want anyway,” Ryo laughed.
“No!!” Kame screamed as Ryo pushed into him and started to take him hard on the grass, right there in that special place that meant so much to Kame and Jin. He tried to claw his way out from beneath Ryo but only succeeding in pulling up some grass and getting dirt under his nails . “No…” he wept. “No no no…”
“You know you enjoy it, Kazu. Tell me you like it.”
“Please… it hurts so much…” he cried as both he and his safe haven were violated.
“Tell me,” and Ryo slammed into him even harder, “you like it.”
Sobbing, Kame said, “I like it…”
+++
Three hours later, when he had finished with him for the time being, Ryo tied Kame’s wrists together and then tied the other end to one of the trees. Ryo took him brutally two more times during the night and once again sometime late the next morning.
When Ryo reached for him yet again, Kame barely even flinched. He didn’t have the strength left for even that small gesture of willfulness. But Ryo wasn’t reaching out for sex. “You’re going to make a phone call.”
“I’m going to make a phone call.”
“Tell him to stop looking for you.”
“Stop looking for me.”
“Tell him you don’t want to ever see him again.”
“Don’t want…” Kame trailed off. He was so tired.
Ryo backhanded him. “Pay attention! Don’t screw this up, okay?”
Ryo found Jin’s number programmed in Kame’s phone and dialed for him, then held the phone to Kame’s ear.
“Kazu!” he heard Jin’s worried voice in his ear. “Where are you, Kazu?”
“Stop looking for me.”
“… what? Are you okay? What’s wrong? Your voice…”
Jin sounded so far away. “Stop looking for me. I don’t want to see you anymore.”
“Is Ryo… are you being forced to say this?”
“Goodbye, Jin.” And as Ryo hung up the phone, Kame wondered if he’d ever see Jin again.
The phone rang a few times. Ryo blocked the number and left it lying on the grass. He led Kame through the trees out of the grove… but not back towards the park. They went parallel the wall for some time, the land sloping downward, until they came out in a back lot. After a lot of twists and turns that Kame was too tired to remember, they ended up at some back alley squatters’ nest. Ryo untied his hands, locked him in a very dark room, and left. Kame lay down on the cold, hard floor, curled up in as tight a ball as he could manage. He was too worn to even cry.
+++
“These are for you, so you can destroy them.” Ueda gestured at his desk. “I… I watched part of the tapes. I had to know. But here are both tapes and the digital card with the photos.”
“You watched… wait, both? There’s more than one tape?”
“The one the online clip came from and one from… well, the time/date stamp says it was that Sunday. You didn’t know?”
“No, I didn’t know.” How dare he! Those were not his to watch! Angrily, he said, “Why did you watch them?”
“I had no choice! You wouldn’t let me apologize to Kame so he cannot judge whether I have atoned for my crime. Therefore, I had to find out on my own. But now I wish I hadn’t…” and then Ueda was crying. “Oh, Jin… it’s all my fault. You were right, Ryo did hurt him after. I should have said something! I’ll never be able to make up for this. Never. But I swear to you now, if I ever see Ryo again, I will kill him. If I had known, I’d have done it when he dropped this stuff off and I gave him the money.”
Jin had been reaching out to take the tapes (or possibly throttle Ueda… he wasn’t really sure which) but stopped suddenly. “Wait, you saw him? This morning?”
“About twenty minutes or so ago, yes.”
“KAZU’S MISSING! HE MIGHT HAVE KAZU!” Jin roared. He punched Ueda as hard as he could, sending him sprawling to the floor. “How could you let him go?” and Jin fell to his knees. “How could you let him go…”
Ueda spit blood as he stood back up. “Then you need to know what he’s capable of. Just… it’s worse than you think.”
“It couldn’t be.”
“I don’t want to see it again but you shouldn’t have to see it alone. So we’ll watch it, now, and then I will call in any favor I have to, make any promises I must, to track them both down and bring Kame home.”
“Tat-chan, I’m afraid…” Jin whispered, “I’m so scared to watch it. I didn’t ask Kazu-chan. I didn’t want to know. I said it was because I didn’t want to make him relive it but really, I think I just couldn’t handle the thought of another man with him no matter that it wasn’t his choice… I wanted to be the only one ever. I was his first. I was his only. Until Ryo.”
“I know, Jin. I know.” Ueda locked the dorm room door and put the second tape in as Jin forced himself to not look away.
+++
Off camera, you could hear a door open. Kame came into the picture as if he was thrown to the floor from just off-camera, accompanied by the sound of a door slamming. Ryo stalked into frame, fuming. “You just couldn’t keep your mouth shut, could you? Tattling to Jin, telling him you cheated. Now that tape is a useless threat. Do you know how hard it was to set all that up? To get you alone, get you here?”
Kame pushed himself up a bit but Ryo dropped down, straddling him so that he could not get up. He was crying as Ryo ripped his shirt off. “But I didn’t tell him!”
Jin growled at the sight of Ryo slapping Kame. “Don’t lie to me, Kazu.”
“Don’t… don’t call me Kazu…” And Ryo slapped Kame again. Then he pulled Kame’s pants off and jerked him up to his feet, but only long enough to spin him around and push him down on his knees, bent over the bed.
It took every bit of Jin’s will to force himself to keep watching as Ryo pushed into Kame. Kame let out a scream of pain, largely muffled by the bed, while Ryo began a hard and fast rhythm.
Jin could see the tears streaming down his Kazu-chan’s face as he turned his head to the side, facing the general direction of the camera.
Did it get worse? Was that even possible?
As it turned out, the answer to both of those questions was a definite yes.
“How do you like this?” he asked. “Tell me you like it.” Ryo laughed. He laughed!
Kame whispered something, too quiet for the camera to pick up.
“Tell me you like it. Say it. Now!”
“I like it!” Kame sobbed.
“Say it again.”
“Oh, god, it hurts…”
“Say it again or I’ll make it hurt a lot more.”
“I like it.” It came out barely loud enough for the camera to pick up.
“Louder!”
“I like it!”
Laughing, Ryo said, “Again.”
Jin thought he was going to be sick. How long had this gone on?
The better part of an hour later, he had his answer. Ryo made Kame say everything he could think of to torture and humiliate him. Ryo told Kame that, after he was done with him, nobody would ever want him again. He told him Jin would never forgive him for cheating like that, as if what Ryo was doing to him was somehow his own fault.
Jin was in tears, made worse by watching the fight slowly leave Kame over the past hour. But eventually Ryo finished. He got dressed and then left without so much as a second glance at Kame.
The tape continued. After a few moments of sobbing naked on Ryo’s floor, Kame scrambled off-camera in the direction of the bathroom. A moment later, he returned. He put on his pants and stumbled out of the frame again and, Jin supposed, out of the room.
And then the tape was over.
And then Jin punched Ueda again as hard as he could. Ueda didn’t even try to block it. “See what you let happen?”
“I’m so sorry…”
Jin punched him again. “Don’t apologize to me, you… Apologize to him!” he shouted as he pointed at the black TV screen. “Oh, god, I have to find him. Please, help me find him…”
It took Ueda a minute to recover from the second punch, but when he had, he asked, “When did you last see him?”
“Yesterday. He went back to the room only when I got there, he was already gone. He saw that website and then I don’t know what happened after. There was food everywhere and the door was wide open. I don’t know if he left on his own or if he was taken or what…”
“And that’s the last you heard from him?”
Weeping, Jin said, “No. He called a few hours ago. He told me to stop looking for him and that he didn’t want to see me anymore. Then he blocked my number. I’ve been trying to reach his cell phone with everyone’s phones but it’s just ringing and ringing.”
“So he has his phone? Or, at least, he did?”
Jin nodded.
“Then let’s find his phone.”
“How?”
“We’ll call it and then see what tower it pings from. I’ll get my cousin’s wife at the phone company to check it for us. Then we can take a look at the area that tower covers and see what locations in it he might go if upset or where someone might take a protesting person without attracting a lot of attention.”
+++
With the city map spread out in front of them, Ueda said, “Dialing now,” to the woman on Jin’s speakerphone. They had spent the fifteen minutes on the phone with her, plotting the major cell towers the phone company had on record and then it was finally time to call Kame’s phone.
Ueda made the call and the woman said, “Okay, that phone is bouncing off of tower number 14, west quadrant. If you want, we can try this again in a few minutes to see if the phone is on the move.”
But, upon checking the map, Jin realized they would not need to. He knew exactly where to go. Shaking his head at Ueda, he folded the map. Ueda replied to the woman on the phone, “No, I think we have it. Thanks. I’ll tell father you said hello.”
“I should have thought of...”
“You know where to go?”
But Jin didn’t wait around to answer him. As soon as he’d seen which tower, he realized there was only one place Kame would have gone that would be safe and calming in light of the shock of the website - the place they made love the first time. The place where they lay holding each other, sending their dreams out to the stars on that one perfect night.
So Jin went there, barely aware of Ueda keeping pace with him.
“Kazu-chan?” Jin called out as he got close. “Kazu??”
But when he stepped out from between the trees, Kame wasn’t there. His phone was lying on the ground, though. At least Jin now knew Kame had been there earlier. But where would he have gone after leaving that spot?
Ueda’s voice from behind him, “Let’s look for clues. Maybe he plans to come back or he left something that will tell us what direction he went.”
As they searched, however, their hopes sank. What they found did not bode well for Kame. There were buttons scattered in the grass - buttons from the shirt Kame wore yesterday. As Jin picked up one of the buttons to examine it, he saw gouges in the dirt, mostly hidden by the grass, like someone had been scratching at the soil. All in all, it looked like some sort of struggle had taken place, though Jin had no idea how to tell how recent it was.
And, worst of all, there was no sign of where he went next.
Jin folded his arms across his stomach and wept. His Kazu was really gone, wasn’t he? Would he ever see him again?
He felt Ueda put his arm around him. “Oh, Tat-chan… he’s gone! He’s gone!” and he grabbed the front of Ueda’s shirt, crying in his arms. “I failed him!”
+++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++
The story continues:
First Cut ~The Cops~
A/N: And that's the end of "Lose Me" part. Would love to know what you think. What do you think will happen next?
And how will Ryo escape the terrible uprising of my readers who already wanted him dead and now will really, really want him dead? Hell, I expect bar-room brawls amongst you all over who gets to push him in the piranha-infested river when the time gets here.
As I wrote this fic, though, I came to the conclusion that Ryo, aside from being all psycho and cruel and whatnot, really believes that, with Jin out of the way, once Kame stops fighting him and lets things happen, Kame will love him and want to be with him. He just has to convince Kame to play nice until Kame realizes it, too.
What do you guys think? Think Kame will go all Stockholm Syndrome with Ryo or will Kame escape or will he be rescued or will he die?
Anyway, starting tomorrow night it's no longer "Lose Me" but rather the start of "Find Me" arc.
Pairing: Jin x Kame
Rating: NC-17
Genre - Catch Me: AU, angst, romance, smut, drama, tragedy
Beta by: my cat. okay, seriously, nobody
Disclaimer: I don't own KAT-TUN, any of its members, any other JE people. I write this for fun and for other fans of these fine folks. But don't steal my plots, mmkay? I put a great deal of time into them except for when I'm randomly spastically spitting words onto a page. But I value those too...
Summary - Catch Me: A dramatic turn in his life throws Kame into Jin's college world. Almost immediately they notice an attraction, but they spend more time clashing than not.
Summary - Lose Me: Kame and Jin still have the occasional argument but mostly they live happily together. But when someone from Kame's past shows up, will the two be able to deal?
Warning: While "Catch Me" part is more towards the fluffy end of the scale at times, the other three parts have such things as drugs and murder and rape and all the fun parts of a bad neighborhood in a big city. Oh, and character death(s).
On my journal: Catch Me, Lose Me, Find Me, Heal Me
On the akame_ Community: Catch Me, Lose Me, Find Me, Heal Me
On the akame_fanfics Community: Catch Me, Lose Me, Find Me, Heal Me
On the kattun_fanfics Community: Catch Me, Lose Me, Find Me, Heal Me
A/N: Here you go!
Don't kill me.
Lose Me
Twelfth Cut ~Destruction of the Grove~
Kame wasn’t sure how long he spent lying on the grass crying. Time didn’t seem real to him. Nothing seemed real.
Which is why, when he heard Ryo’s voice say, “Finally alone,” he was sure he’d imagined it. But when he sat up, he saw he hadn’t imagined it at all. Ryo really was there.
“How… how did you find this place?” Panic swelled in his breast. He was essentially cornered. There was the concrete wall with the deadly drop on one side, the dense bushes on the other side, and Ryo blocking the only clear way through the trees.
Ryo laughed. “After I managed to separate you from Jin, I followed you here.” He slowly looked around. “This place must have some special meaning for you, if you’d flee here without waiting for your protector.”
Kame didn’t want Ryo to know how important this place was to him. He didn’t want Ryo to take that from him, too. “No, not really…” He forced the words out.
“We’ll soon see, won’t we…” Ryo said as he took a step towards the sitting Kame.
Scrambling back away from the advancing Ryo, Kame asked, “What are you doing?”
“I think you know.”
“I… I’ll scream…”
“I don’t think anyone would hear you, not from here.”
And he was right. Kame knew he was right. He felt his back hit the concrete wall. He couldn’t go any further that way. Rising to his feet, he took a deep breath. Feinting to the right, he tried to bolt to the left past Ryo. Ryo grabbed his shirt to bring him back down, ripping it in the process. They both landed hard but Ryo was faster and had Kame pinned before he could get his breath back.
Kame did his best, kicking and clawing and biting, to get Ryo off of him but he just wasn’t strong enough. Crying, he begged, “Please don’t do this, Ryo! Not here! Oh, god… Please, Ryo!” as Ryo flipped him over. “I’ll do whatever you want, I promise… just not here!” But Ryo ignored his pleas, pulling his pants down.
“I think you’ll do whatever I want anyway,” Ryo laughed.
“No!!” Kame screamed as Ryo pushed into him and started to take him hard on the grass, right there in that special place that meant so much to Kame and Jin. He tried to claw his way out from beneath Ryo but only succeeding in pulling up some grass and getting dirt under his nails . “No…” he wept. “No no no…”
“You know you enjoy it, Kazu. Tell me you like it.”
“Please… it hurts so much…” he cried as both he and his safe haven were violated.
“Tell me,” and Ryo slammed into him even harder, “you like it.”
Sobbing, Kame said, “I like it…”
+++
Three hours later, when he had finished with him for the time being, Ryo tied Kame’s wrists together and then tied the other end to one of the trees. Ryo took him brutally two more times during the night and once again sometime late the next morning.
When Ryo reached for him yet again, Kame barely even flinched. He didn’t have the strength left for even that small gesture of willfulness. But Ryo wasn’t reaching out for sex. “You’re going to make a phone call.”
“I’m going to make a phone call.”
“Tell him to stop looking for you.”
“Stop looking for me.”
“Tell him you don’t want to ever see him again.”
“Don’t want…” Kame trailed off. He was so tired.
Ryo backhanded him. “Pay attention! Don’t screw this up, okay?”
Ryo found Jin’s number programmed in Kame’s phone and dialed for him, then held the phone to Kame’s ear.
“Kazu!” he heard Jin’s worried voice in his ear. “Where are you, Kazu?”
“Stop looking for me.”
“… what? Are you okay? What’s wrong? Your voice…”
Jin sounded so far away. “Stop looking for me. I don’t want to see you anymore.”
“Is Ryo… are you being forced to say this?”
“Goodbye, Jin.” And as Ryo hung up the phone, Kame wondered if he’d ever see Jin again.
The phone rang a few times. Ryo blocked the number and left it lying on the grass. He led Kame through the trees out of the grove… but not back towards the park. They went parallel the wall for some time, the land sloping downward, until they came out in a back lot. After a lot of twists and turns that Kame was too tired to remember, they ended up at some back alley squatters’ nest. Ryo untied his hands, locked him in a very dark room, and left. Kame lay down on the cold, hard floor, curled up in as tight a ball as he could manage. He was too worn to even cry.
+++
“These are for you, so you can destroy them.” Ueda gestured at his desk. “I… I watched part of the tapes. I had to know. But here are both tapes and the digital card with the photos.”
“You watched… wait, both? There’s more than one tape?”
“The one the online clip came from and one from… well, the time/date stamp says it was that Sunday. You didn’t know?”
“No, I didn’t know.” How dare he! Those were not his to watch! Angrily, he said, “Why did you watch them?”
“I had no choice! You wouldn’t let me apologize to Kame so he cannot judge whether I have atoned for my crime. Therefore, I had to find out on my own. But now I wish I hadn’t…” and then Ueda was crying. “Oh, Jin… it’s all my fault. You were right, Ryo did hurt him after. I should have said something! I’ll never be able to make up for this. Never. But I swear to you now, if I ever see Ryo again, I will kill him. If I had known, I’d have done it when he dropped this stuff off and I gave him the money.”
Jin had been reaching out to take the tapes (or possibly throttle Ueda… he wasn’t really sure which) but stopped suddenly. “Wait, you saw him? This morning?”
“About twenty minutes or so ago, yes.”
“KAZU’S MISSING! HE MIGHT HAVE KAZU!” Jin roared. He punched Ueda as hard as he could, sending him sprawling to the floor. “How could you let him go?” and Jin fell to his knees. “How could you let him go…”
Ueda spit blood as he stood back up. “Then you need to know what he’s capable of. Just… it’s worse than you think.”
“It couldn’t be.”
“I don’t want to see it again but you shouldn’t have to see it alone. So we’ll watch it, now, and then I will call in any favor I have to, make any promises I must, to track them both down and bring Kame home.”
“Tat-chan, I’m afraid…” Jin whispered, “I’m so scared to watch it. I didn’t ask Kazu-chan. I didn’t want to know. I said it was because I didn’t want to make him relive it but really, I think I just couldn’t handle the thought of another man with him no matter that it wasn’t his choice… I wanted to be the only one ever. I was his first. I was his only. Until Ryo.”
“I know, Jin. I know.” Ueda locked the dorm room door and put the second tape in as Jin forced himself to not look away.
+++
Off camera, you could hear a door open. Kame came into the picture as if he was thrown to the floor from just off-camera, accompanied by the sound of a door slamming. Ryo stalked into frame, fuming. “You just couldn’t keep your mouth shut, could you? Tattling to Jin, telling him you cheated. Now that tape is a useless threat. Do you know how hard it was to set all that up? To get you alone, get you here?”
Kame pushed himself up a bit but Ryo dropped down, straddling him so that he could not get up. He was crying as Ryo ripped his shirt off. “But I didn’t tell him!”
Jin growled at the sight of Ryo slapping Kame. “Don’t lie to me, Kazu.”
“Don’t… don’t call me Kazu…” And Ryo slapped Kame again. Then he pulled Kame’s pants off and jerked him up to his feet, but only long enough to spin him around and push him down on his knees, bent over the bed.
It took every bit of Jin’s will to force himself to keep watching as Ryo pushed into Kame. Kame let out a scream of pain, largely muffled by the bed, while Ryo began a hard and fast rhythm.
Jin could see the tears streaming down his Kazu-chan’s face as he turned his head to the side, facing the general direction of the camera.
Did it get worse? Was that even possible?
As it turned out, the answer to both of those questions was a definite yes.
“How do you like this?” he asked. “Tell me you like it.” Ryo laughed. He laughed!
Kame whispered something, too quiet for the camera to pick up.
“Tell me you like it. Say it. Now!”
“I like it!” Kame sobbed.
“Say it again.”
“Oh, god, it hurts…”
“Say it again or I’ll make it hurt a lot more.”
“I like it.” It came out barely loud enough for the camera to pick up.
“Louder!”
“I like it!”
Laughing, Ryo said, “Again.”
Jin thought he was going to be sick. How long had this gone on?
The better part of an hour later, he had his answer. Ryo made Kame say everything he could think of to torture and humiliate him. Ryo told Kame that, after he was done with him, nobody would ever want him again. He told him Jin would never forgive him for cheating like that, as if what Ryo was doing to him was somehow his own fault.
Jin was in tears, made worse by watching the fight slowly leave Kame over the past hour. But eventually Ryo finished. He got dressed and then left without so much as a second glance at Kame.
The tape continued. After a few moments of sobbing naked on Ryo’s floor, Kame scrambled off-camera in the direction of the bathroom. A moment later, he returned. He put on his pants and stumbled out of the frame again and, Jin supposed, out of the room.
And then the tape was over.
And then Jin punched Ueda again as hard as he could. Ueda didn’t even try to block it. “See what you let happen?”
“I’m so sorry…”
Jin punched him again. “Don’t apologize to me, you… Apologize to him!” he shouted as he pointed at the black TV screen. “Oh, god, I have to find him. Please, help me find him…”
It took Ueda a minute to recover from the second punch, but when he had, he asked, “When did you last see him?”
“Yesterday. He went back to the room only when I got there, he was already gone. He saw that website and then I don’t know what happened after. There was food everywhere and the door was wide open. I don’t know if he left on his own or if he was taken or what…”
“And that’s the last you heard from him?”
Weeping, Jin said, “No. He called a few hours ago. He told me to stop looking for him and that he didn’t want to see me anymore. Then he blocked my number. I’ve been trying to reach his cell phone with everyone’s phones but it’s just ringing and ringing.”
“So he has his phone? Or, at least, he did?”
Jin nodded.
“Then let’s find his phone.”
“How?”
“We’ll call it and then see what tower it pings from. I’ll get my cousin’s wife at the phone company to check it for us. Then we can take a look at the area that tower covers and see what locations in it he might go if upset or where someone might take a protesting person without attracting a lot of attention.”
+++
With the city map spread out in front of them, Ueda said, “Dialing now,” to the woman on Jin’s speakerphone. They had spent the fifteen minutes on the phone with her, plotting the major cell towers the phone company had on record and then it was finally time to call Kame’s phone.
Ueda made the call and the woman said, “Okay, that phone is bouncing off of tower number 14, west quadrant. If you want, we can try this again in a few minutes to see if the phone is on the move.”
But, upon checking the map, Jin realized they would not need to. He knew exactly where to go. Shaking his head at Ueda, he folded the map. Ueda replied to the woman on the phone, “No, I think we have it. Thanks. I’ll tell father you said hello.”
“I should have thought of...”
“You know where to go?”
But Jin didn’t wait around to answer him. As soon as he’d seen which tower, he realized there was only one place Kame would have gone that would be safe and calming in light of the shock of the website - the place they made love the first time. The place where they lay holding each other, sending their dreams out to the stars on that one perfect night.
So Jin went there, barely aware of Ueda keeping pace with him.
“Kazu-chan?” Jin called out as he got close. “Kazu??”
But when he stepped out from between the trees, Kame wasn’t there. His phone was lying on the ground, though. At least Jin now knew Kame had been there earlier. But where would he have gone after leaving that spot?
Ueda’s voice from behind him, “Let’s look for clues. Maybe he plans to come back or he left something that will tell us what direction he went.”
As they searched, however, their hopes sank. What they found did not bode well for Kame. There were buttons scattered in the grass - buttons from the shirt Kame wore yesterday. As Jin picked up one of the buttons to examine it, he saw gouges in the dirt, mostly hidden by the grass, like someone had been scratching at the soil. All in all, it looked like some sort of struggle had taken place, though Jin had no idea how to tell how recent it was.
And, worst of all, there was no sign of where he went next.
Jin folded his arms across his stomach and wept. His Kazu was really gone, wasn’t he? Would he ever see him again?
He felt Ueda put his arm around him. “Oh, Tat-chan… he’s gone! He’s gone!” and he grabbed the front of Ueda’s shirt, crying in his arms. “I failed him!”
+++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++
The story continues:
First Cut ~The Cops~
A/N: And that's the end of "Lose Me" part. Would love to know what you think. What do you think will happen next?
And how will Ryo escape the terrible uprising of my readers who already wanted him dead and now will really, really want him dead? Hell, I expect bar-room brawls amongst you all over who gets to push him in the piranha-infested river when the time gets here.
As I wrote this fic, though, I came to the conclusion that Ryo, aside from being all psycho and cruel and whatnot, really believes that, with Jin out of the way, once Kame stops fighting him and lets things happen, Kame will love him and want to be with him. He just has to convince Kame to play nice until Kame realizes it, too.
What do you guys think? Think Kame will go all Stockholm Syndrome with Ryo or will Kame escape or will he be rescued or will he die?
Anyway, starting tomorrow night it's no longer "Lose Me" but rather the start of "Find Me" arc.