Resurrection of the Tegos (part1)
Title: Resurrection of the Tegos
Beta: A big thanks goes to snowing_inside not only for making miracles with my grammar, but also for being patient all the time when I was plotting and throwing ideas at her. If there is a story somewhere in the fic, it’s partly her fault work.
Characters/Pairings: Jin, Kazuya, Nakamaru, Reio, Yamapi, Ryo, mentions of others + Tegoshi and Koki as guest stars / Akame
Rating: PG-13
Word count: cca 29 300
Genre: AU, sci-fi, crack, Doctor Who crossover
Warnings: the usual Akanishi Troop warnings apply, not nearly enough Akame moments, fucking lots of swearing + I should apologize to Tegoshi’s fans :| and someone kind of dies here...not really but... um, well.
Summary: Akanishi Jin is just an ordinary boy living an ordinary life in a dirty Tokyo neighborhood, dreaming of becoming a music star and leaving the hole where he has grown up once and for good. His dreams may seem too big to come true, but Christmas time this year is all but ordinary. Strange pink snow brings two men in a phone booth and an alien invasion right to Jin’s threshold and Jin runs when he is told to.
A/N: MASTERPOST + art by ttalktomesoftly >> HERE << please go there and check it, yo :D
Akanishi Jin was on his way home from a rehearsal when the world around turned pink.
It was a Thursday evening, two weeks until Christmas; tingling melodies of carols could be heard everywhere, and a freshly fallen fluffy layer of snow was covering streets decorated in red and green. Jin was dragging his feet through the slop of melting snow and salt, the case with his guitar hanging at his back.
His mood should have been much brighter. His best friend Yamapi had made an appointment for their band to play in front of an actual, real audience a couple of evenings over the following week, and that was exactly what they had always wanted, after all. Well, technically, it wasn’t Yamapi, but Yamapi’s sister who had talked to people who had talked to people until there had been a call and Yamapi had rushed to the afternoon rehearsal all excited to tell Jin and their two other band mates, Ryo and Shirota, that the deal had been made. They would have a couple of concerts, more like performances actually, for various office Christmas parties of companies in the neighborhood.
Considering the news and the given opportunity, Jin really should have been in a better mood. And he was; sort of. He was glad. Grateful. However, this wasn’t exactly how he imagined his music career. He didn’t want to play at stupid Christmas parties for people who had most likely known him since kindergarten and who kept mistaking him with his younger brother Reio on every other opportunity.
As he walked down the street, passing places he knew all too well, never having left farther than a few train stations from the street he lived in; his thoughts kept running into an imaginary world he had created while being in the fifth grade and finding a guitar under the Christmas tree. In that world, he never played for people who were still giving him sympathetic looks for the one-sided crush he had had on his first grade teacher, or reminding him to drop by someday because their grandparents knew his dad, or just because they hadn’t seen Jin for a while. In that world, there were people -fans- cheering for him, for the band, because of the music they played.
He wasn’t paying attention to his surroundings at all; he would be able to find a way home even blindfolded after all. Wrapped in a thick, warm jacket, a knitted hat sitting low on his head, Jin was listening to music from his headphones, getting lost in his thoughts. The street around him, with illuminated shop windows and people rushing in either one direction or another, became a blur.
It took a moment, two songs started and came to their end in Jin’s ears, before he noticed something was wrong. Different from all the other times he walked the same street, heading home.
Something was off.
First it was nothing but small, light pink splotches scattered around the small hills of drawn aside snow. As if someone had spilled raspberry syrup. As Jin kept walking, more and more aware of the colored snow illuminated by street lamps, the light pinkish stains were turning into bigger and darker ones, covering not only the fallen snow on the ground but also the nearby buildings. It almost looked like the color was creeping up the walls, leaving randomly shaped traces.
Jin shrugged it off after a while and didn’t pay attention anymore, ascribing the feeling of moving colorful streaks to the lighting. All the mess must have been just one of those stupid jokes the kids in the neighborhood had come up with anyway. This wasn’t the best part of the city, and kids had way too much free time. Jin would know, he had grown up the same way after all; lazing around with a couple of friends, until they had decided that having a band and playing music might be more fun than be running around and getting scolded even if they, for once, hadn’t done anything wrong.
He was almost at the corner of the street, and from there it wouldn’t have taken much to get home, when Jin heard a loud crashing sound followed by a muffled beating. He stopped in the middle of the next step to take a look around - and that most probably saved his life.
Something flew across the street right in front of him. A blurred pink smudge hit the nearest building wall and splashed all over it. The color soaked into the surface and spread around.
“GET-PINK-ED!”
Jin had just enough time to jerk and dodge aside before another dash rushed around him and splashed on the wall, a couple of inches away from the previous one.
“GET-PINK-ED! GET-PINK-ED!” A voice was screeching from across the street as more pink balls flew around Jin, missing him just really closely.
“Fuck off!” Jin shouted into the dark alley between two blocks where the one throwing the colored snowballs must have been standing and hiding from being recognized. Jin wasn’t in any mood for messing around with annoying kids. All he wanted was to get home, open a beer and spend the evening watching TV. His friends had tried to talk him into going to a club tonight, but there were just so many mornings into a week that Jin wanted to wake up with a hangover into. His boss in a small hair cosmetics factory Jin worked in might want to either skin him alive or have his balls on a silver plate if Jin were late for his shift also the next morning. The last time it happened it hadn’t been more than ten minutes, and yet his late arrival had nearly caused a war.
“GET-PINK-ED!” the voice kept repeating as Jin tried to see through the falling night and shadows, and spot the face that was behind the attack.
Instead of a face though, his vision caught a nearing snowball, and Jin was pretty sure it would be a direct hit this time.
To his surprise, it wasn’t.
A hand snapped out of nowhere and grabbed Jin’s shoulder, spinning him around with such vigor that Jin wasn’t far from losing his balance and toppling over.
The snowball hit the guitar case instead of Jin’s face.
“What-?”
“Come with me, hurry!” A tall, dark haired stranger with a strikingly big nose in a friendly face urged him while another one, slightly smaller young man clad in a stylish jacket pulled the guitar case down Jin’s shoulder and held it just in the right height to protect the three of them from another couple of thrown snowballs.
Jin was confused; and that might be an understatement. All he cared about during the short moment when everything seemed to be happening at once, was that someone was trying to take his guitar away from him. And no one ever had the right to touch Jin’s guitar. He had worked -fucking slaved- to have money to buy it, and now he was determined to protect it with his own life if necessary.
The little fucker attacking him with snow was the smallest of his problems at the moment; which was actually funny, considering that just a minute or two ago, Jin hadn’t wanted anything but run across the street and punch whoever he would have found there snickering in the shadows.
“Don’t fucking touch it!” he reached for the guitar case to tear it from the guy’s hands.
“GET-PINK-ED!” the voice thundered again and this time, the dark alley at the other side of the street flashed with a bright blue light.
Jin got distracted for less than three seconds, but that was enough for the other to pluck the case out of Jin’s grip and throw it to the snow. The man gripping his arm was dragging him away with more strength than Jin would have expected. Jin wasn’t much of a fighter to begin with, and the momentary confusion didn’t help anyway.
“Let me go! What the fuck do you think you are doing?” Jin was trying to twist his way out of the tight grip. Everything looked way too much like mugging, only he didn’t have anything that might be worthy stealing. Just the guitar, but that was lying half buried in snow now. Jin looked over there rather desperately because his whole future, the future he dreamt of as well as the one that was more likely to happen, him and his friends playing in local bars and during various festivals taking place in the neighborhood; was abandoned and left for anyone to take it. “I have nothing, you don’t need me!”
His struggling was in vain though.
“Of course we don’t,” the stylish guy mumbled, annoyed.
“But we can’t leave you here either,” added the other, “it’s dangerous.”
And as if to make a point of his words, he nodded towards the guitar case. The streetlamp was shining down on it, and Jin’s eyes grew bigger, nearly falling out of his head, as only now, for the first time since this whole mess had started, he could clearly see that the pink smudges didn’t only soak into the snow, they expanded, grew bigger, crawling over any surface they ran into… the case carrying his guitar was already pink. Jin made a sound, as close to a yelp as he would ever be willing to admit.
“H-how…? What have you done to my guitar, you fuckers?”
“It wasn’t us, it was them.” The guy with the big nose pointed a finger in a very specific direction to the other side of the street.
One of the blue lights from before pulled out of the dark alley, and Jin could see the source of it wasn’t a bored, annoying kid from the neighborhood, a kid he had wanted to punch after having been nearly hit by the snowball the first time; instead a silver and pink little tank-like shell with a shining blue eye in the middle of its upper cupola-shaped part appeared, slowly rolling towards them.
“We need to get out of here! Now!”
The nosy guy tugged at Jin’s hand again to make him move, just as his younger companion had urged. Jin was startled, his feet and legs not really cooperating. He didn’t understand what was going on. A Christmas prank that had gotten out of control? But it had nothing to do with him. He just wanted to go home - and take his guitar with him, preferably.
Another glance to the discarded case, almost completely swallowed by pink by now, and Jin forgot to struggle. Gave up.
Something was really, really wrong here.
They ran then, the tall guy and Jin in the front and the other right behind them, judging by the sound of his steps so close at Jin’s back. They lost each other only for a moment -Jin couldn’t hear more than relentless “GET-PINK-ED!” from the main street, and curses and muffled rustle- and after a while of rushing through the fallen dark and slipping on melting snow, they reached what looked a lot like a very old phone box, one of those made of wood and glass. Jin had noticed one of them standing somewhere around Shibuya and always wondered if it was still possible to make calls with it. Seeing the booth here, just around the corner from his home, was definitely unexpected.
He glanced over his shoulder to check the situation.
Just because the last few minutes (or was it just seconds?) didn’t make sense at all, didn’t mean Jin couldn’t try to keep up with it. So what? His guitar was gone and two weirdos had dragged him to a dark dead end of an alley. Jin could deal with that, right? The times he had helped Yamapi get home, they both completely wasted, sleeping at random places because idiot Yamapi couldn’t remember where he had put his keys, had done a good job preparing him for anything. Maybe… just maybe he lacked even the slightest idea of how to react when a couple of lunatics kidnapped him on the street while another bunch of inmates of possibly the same asylum was wandering around the Christmas city, throwing some fucking pink acid-like shit at everything they encountered, and ruining his guitar. But he could handle that as well. He had to. If he wanted to get out of this mess.
Jin was still watching the guy at the back, now getting rid of his jacket and tossing it on the ground with jerky moves, cursing and throwing a tantrum at a small group of those pink robotic things following them; when suddenly something snapped and Jin was dragged into a light.
Blinking off the initial confusion, and getting even more confused right away, Jin found himself standing in a door.
A door that, with close to no doubt, led into the old phone box.
Only the interior didn’t look like the old phone box at all. Neither did it look like an interior of a newer phone box.
It was bigger. Way bigger.
There were lights and non-transparent walls, even though Jin would bet his life (which was a bit uncertain and probably very fragile at the moment anyway) that he had seen an ordinary booth with a phone device from the outside.
“Enough! Let me go!” he wrenched his arm out of the grip of the guy and tried to catch his breath.
This time, his hand was really released.
Jin turned around to punch the guy. The other was still outside so maybe a fist in the face would stun his nosy attacker for just enough time to give Jin a chance to run away. However, his hand flew through air and hit nothing.
And before Jin could have made out how and when the guy had moved from the spot right beside him over to a control panel in the middle of the room, the door they had run through fell shut with a loud thud. The stylish guy, now stripped off of his jacket, with his dark brown hair ruffled, was leaning his back against it and panting after the frantic dash.
“Take off, Yuichi!” -Something hit the door at the other side, the whole place shook under the attack, and Jin instinctively reached out and grabbed a nearby handrail.- “Get us out of here! Fucking Tegos, my jacket is gone.” The guy pouted at his own disheveled appearance and smoothed the bottom rim of his shirt over his tight fitting jeans.
“Just like my guitar,” Jin grumbled, cautiously overlooking his surroundings. Everything looked a bit like in those rather cheap sci-fi series made for television, with an addition of light effects and a strange tinge of elegance that Jin couldn’t quite explain, but which made perfect sense when put in connection with the grunting young man.
And that was when the said man glanced up, giving Jin a death glare. “Your guitar? Excuse me, but the jacket was one of the only three pieces made for the 4720 Ralph Lauren Winter Collection. Do you have any idea how hard it is to get these things in the forty eighth century?” he shook his head, annoyed by Jin’s blunt ignorance.
“Forty eighth… what?” Jin choked. He couldn’t have cared less about a Winter Collection of Ralph Who-the-fuck-ever, but forty eighth century? Seriously? He turned to the nosy guy…Yuichi…right, the other called him Yuichi. “Okay, enough. What is going on here? Did Ryo send you?”
“Who is Ryo?” Yuichi asked just by the way while busying himself with the control panel, pressing buttons and pulling various levers. A transparent cylinder going up from the middle of the panel slowly filled with light purple liquid. It resembled a breathing support unit in a hospital intensive care room, the level raising and falling constantly, producing a muffled sound that filled the room.
“Or Shirota?” Jin pondered on. If someone had set up all of this, it must have been either Ryo or Shirota. Yamapi wouldn’t have been able to keep his face today in front of Jin if he had had his fingers in this shit as well. But Ryo and Shirota were damn good. Little shits. Literally, and well, figuratively in Shirota’s case. This seemed a lot like something to fit to their sense of sick humor.
Yuichi finally finished whatever he had been doing and looked over at his companion, who was standing there, peevish about the loss of his brand jacket. “Are you okay, Kazuya?”
“Do I look okay? They got my jacket. Any chance our next stop would be New New Earth, forty eighth century?”
“We have work here,” Yuichi replied, unaffected by Kazuya’s mood.
Kazuya huffed. “Right. Just great. Of course we do.”
“If we don’t stop them, there will be no New New Earth and no more Ralph Lauren Winter Collections though.”
The words clearly frightened Kazuya, because the next moment he was standing by the control panel, too, checking blinking screens for any data that would help. “What’s the plan then? We need to stop those fuckers before the future gets changed irreparably.” There were still two more jackets of the treasured collection somewhere in the future and he wanted one of them.
Jin watched the scene unfolding in front of him for a while, astounded not as much by the whole fashion talk (because what did he know about fashion anyway), but by how convincing those two were while making all the remarks about forty eighth century and the rest of the cryptic shit. He wondered where Ryo, or Shirota, had found them. A theatre club? The Art School?
And should he play along?
Then a memory of his guitar case being fused by the pink shit flashed through his mind, and Jin frowned. His best friends could be real fuckers at times, but they knew just how much Jin treasured his guitar. They wouldn’t do anything to destroy it.
Such conclusion was both relieving and disturbing - if it hadn’t been Ryo or Shirota’s doing, what the hell was going on here?
Jin cleared his throat and stepped closer to the control panel to get attention of the two guys. “Who the fuck are they?” he waved a hand towards the door. If he was clever enough, he could play along for the case it all was a prank after all, yet at the same time get some information and explanation in case this was -somehow- for real.
The guy called Yuichi flicked a look at Jin then fell back into studying the control panel and various lights changing colors there.
“The Tegos,” Yuichi said matter-of-factly. “They…”
Jin didn’t let him finish. “And what are they doing? I mean, if you haven’t noticed yet, everything out there is turning pink!”
“Yeah, that’s… that’s what they do. Everything they run into turns pink.” Yuichi shrugged. “It’s kind of their color.”
Jin turned to look at Kazuya, remembering the other had taken off his jacket outside. Had one of those snowballs hit him? “Did they touch him, too?” he asked, concerned. From all he knew so far, the pink color spread like a plague. The last time he had spotted the case of his guitar, it had been wholly sheeted with pink. He didn’t even want to think of what had happened to the guitar itself. “Isn’t it dangerous?”
“Of course it’s fucking dangerous!” Kazuya groaned. “I wouldn’t have thrown away my jacket otherwise.”
Jin nodded towards him with an inquiring look. “Are you gonna be okay?”
“What?” Puzzled by Jin’s expression, Kazuya glanced down at his shirt. Of a light pink color. “Fuck you!”
“Don’t worry, he took the jacket off before the pink touched anything else,” Yuichi hurried with an explanation before Kazuya would have had a chance to swoop down on Jin and start strangling. Which might have been in any moment by then, actually. Stepping forward, Yuichi quickly stood in front of Kazuya, just in case. If the other still wanted to try something. “That’s Kamenashi Kazuya. And pink is kind of his color as well.”
Kazuya was frowning, aggrieved. “Every color can be pretty much mine.” He folded his hands at his chest. He was not going to stop wearing his favorite shirt just because an alien race of fucking selfish exterminators had a sick fetish for pink.
Having a feeling it might be for his own good, Jin rather didn’t comment on Kazuya’s last remark. So far, anything he had told the other had turned into a bicker, leaving both of them annoyed and ready to snap. And moreover, there were still more important things to learn than Kamenashi’s fashion sense - even though something was telling Jin that Kamenashi might see it differently.
“And who exactly are you?” he asked the Yuichi guy.
Kazuya sighed, reminding himself of the Tegos menace out there and the reason why they must have taken the annoying guy along. Yuichi didn’t like when humans died. Or any possible life forms, actually. He was one of those delusional individuals who believed in universal peace across all the galaxies out there, and how all the different races should be able to get along or at least tolerate each other. If it had been up to Kazuya, the Tegos would have been eliminated as a whole a long time ago. But no, Yuichi had just had to stop him from destroying the only fleet that had managed to escape when their planet had exploded and dispersed into a pink cloud. When the Tegos had later attacked another planet to occupy it by force, all that had been left for Kazuya was to say, “Told you so”. And here they were again now, twenty first century, Earth, and a fucking group of the Tegos strolling down the streets of Tokyo.
Tokyo, above all. Couldn’t have they picked another place to start their invasion and takeover? Kazuya would have loved to see a twenty first century Paris. Or nearly anything else in Europe. Tokyo with its busy, crowded streets and sky-reaching glass buildings looked awfully a lot like the place he had come from. And there had been a reason why he had left in the first place; given up on the life someone else had chosen for him, put a stop on obediently listening to what the others had wanted from him. It had been a tough decision, but it had also eventually saved his life and led him to traveling with Yuichi who had made it up for him a million times.
“That’s the General,” Kazuya said, pushing away his grumpiness over the lost jacket, because Yuichi was right - having he not thrown it away, the Tegos would have turned him pink and made him a part of their new kingdom. His Ralph Lauren had saved his life. One more reason to never change his favorite fashion brand.
Jin’s eyebrow twitched. “A general… of what?” The situation wasn’t really getting any better. The image of general Yuichi pushing buttons on the control panel in what seemed like a random order didn’t help with reducing Jin’s doubts.
“The General. Are you stupid or what?” Kazuya shook his head.
“Oh, that makes much more sense,” Jin snapped back. Kamenashi Kazuya was getting on his nerves. Fast. Again.
It was only for the good of the moment when Yuichi pushed the last lever, firing up the heart of his purple box, and joined the bickering couple. Finally, he had a chance to bow politely and greet the newcomer on board. “My name is Nakamaru Yuichi. People call me the General though. It’s easier to remember. And I look good in an army uniform.”
Kazuya standing next to him rolled his eyes then turned around and offered Yuichi a bright, sweet smile. “Anything is better than argyle,” he ran a finger down Yuichi’s chest clad in a knit vest with a simple, black-white-dark-purple argyle pattern.
“Argyle is cool,” Yuichi replied promptly. The tone of his voice, the way he said the statement in, and his expression, all indicated how scandalized he was by Kazuya’s lack of understanding to such a serious matter. “You, above everyone else, should know, by the way.”
“In your dreams.”
Jin considered asking for details but in the end, a fashion sense dissent between Kamenashi Kazuya and Nakamaru Yuichi was not really his business. He could hardly side with either of them, because Jin was neither the type to dress like a good schoolboy from the 50’s, nor was he particularly eager to look like a model of menswear.
“Excuse me, Naka- um, General,” Jin ruffled his hair in a nervous jerk then moved his hand to his face and rubbed his chin with the pads of his fingers, “the things out there, they…”
“Came here to erase all humanity and turn Earth into their new empire of pink,” Yuichi finished Jin’s question, his statement half worried, half rather excited, because knowing what an enemy was up to was always an advantage. “Thrilling, isn’t it? It would be better to stop them though, because otherwise Kazuya won’t have a chance to get his jacket and I’ll be condemned to bear with his grumpiness through a galaxy or two.”
Kazuya made a face which Yuichi ostentatiously ignored.
“The key question is though,” Yuichi gave Jin an intent look, “who are you?”
“Akanishi.” Jin frowned. So there were pink robots ready to seize the whole fucking planet and all this General of nothing cared about was Jin’s name? This was really getting better with every minute passed. “Akanishi Jin. Just Jin is fine, too. Whatever. Now, how are we going to stop them?” He waved to the door distractedly.
We.
Yeah, why not.
He could play along. For now.
“Nice to meet you, Jin-Just-Jin,” Yuichi smiled and bowed.
Kazuya, on the other hand, just casually leaned against one of the couple of pillars towering around the room, penetrating both the floor and the ceiling, and by Jin’s poor guess, reaching through the whole space of this… this thing. The most spacious phone booth Jin had ever seen in his life. He hoped he would get a chance to ask a few questions about the props and where Shirota had gotten them after this whole thing would be over.
Jin felt Kazuya’s look, studying him from afar, and most probably trying to figure out how to get rid of Jin for good. Which was, actually, something Jin wished himself. To leave this strange place and even stranger people, find his guitar (intact and still at its place), and return home. Have a beer or two and wake up with a start into a new day, his biggest and only concern being him being late for work, and not a bunch of speaking overgrown Barbie doll accessories.
Jin impatiently twitched a brow.
“Stopping them sounds like a plan,” Yuichi grinned.
“No kidding. But how?”
To Jin’s utter shock, Yuichi shrugged and went back to the control panel again, pressing another seemingly random sequence of buttons; and Jin was more and more inclined to the thought that the guy really did all the stuff at random.
Seriously, even Yamapi would have done a better job with saving the world from those… pink things.
Instinctively, Jin turned to Kazuya.
The other didn’t seem to be helpful either though. “What?” Kazuya frowned, snapping at Jin, looking offended just by the mere fact that Jin had attempted to get his attention. “Don’t ask me. The last time we met the Tegos, there was a huge-ass spaceship with a transdimensional teleport that we blew up and let everything get sucked into a parallel universe that was about to implode or something.”
“Can’t we do it again?”
“How many imploding parallel universes do you think exist out there?”
Jin hadn’t realized Yuichi was listening to him and Kazuya until the guy spoke up, in a tone that sounded like once again questioning Jin’s intelligence. - While in fact, the only thing to question there was the sanity of those two weird figures that had brought such a mess into Jin’s usually calm life. Well, not every night out with his friends could be called exactly ‘calm’, but at least there were no spaceships and no ends of the world while getting drunk with them.
“I… don’t know? As many as one needs?”
Kazuya snorted.
“That would be handy, wouldn’t it?” Yuichi mused while moving around the console. The central cylinder started pumping the purple liquid again. “Sadly, imploding universes are out of stock. And even if there were one, we could hardly blow up a half of this city to open the portal.”
Jin sucked in a breath for a sharp retort, but a loud knock at the door from the outside caused him to breathe out and take a sharp turn backwards. “What…?”
“The invisible mask doesn’t help, they know we are still here,” Kazuya said, and Jin thought he would stop being bewildered by everything these two were talking about, but then-
“Time to take off,” Yuichi announced cheerfully and pulled the closest lever. “Take a hold of something, this is gonna yank with our ship.”
“Our ship?” Jin yelped.
Kazuya shook his head. “Don’t tell me you thought this was really just a phone booth?”
“I…” Did he? Jin shrugged and quickly took a grip on the closest railing.
“Welcome on the board of J.Imusho,” Yuichi grinned. “Do not mistake it with J.Lo. Unlike the latter, my ship can sing. And she likes to be called Jay.”
Jin’s eyebrows furrowed.
The next moment, everything around him shook vehemently and Jin yelped, forgetting about J.Imusho and J.Lo and all the ‘what-the-fuck’ questions he had wanted to ask. It felt like he would never have a solid ground under his feet; the booth wobbled, would have thrown him against a wall had it not been for his fingers firmly holding the railing. And then his question was back, only for all different reasons. “What the fuck…?” His big, shocked eyes flicked around and found the General staggering behind the control console, holding on to a lever, and it was difficult to tell if the guy was actually really controlling anything, or was just trying to stay on his feet just like Jin was.
“She doesn’t like the starts,” Yuichi commented as calmly as the situation allowed him. He was obviously enjoying every tremble and recoil. When the shaking calmed down a little a moment later, he soothed the control panel, and Jin would swear he caught the General mumbling something, talking to the shining tube running around the center of the circular panel. “Right, Pretty? No worries, it’s over now. Everything is fine again, Jay…”
Jin blinked. He glanced over at Kazuya, seeking an explanation. If there could be any, of course, which Jin had his doubts about. Nothing made sense anymore. He might as well try to get used to it.
“Don’t mind him,” Kazuya chuckled, gaining back his balance as the place became steady again. “He still believes the ship is a she.” He rolled his eyes.
“This ship? A she? WHAT?”
Right, nothing made sense anymore. Not at all.
Jin rubbed his face.
“My thought exactly. There’s no way we have been flying in a girl all this time. I’ve been telling him since forever that Jay is, in fact, a guy!” Kazuya shook his head, his words intentionally loud enough for Yuichi to hear them, too. “Seriously, the fucking ship moans and writhes whenever someone touches the levers or pushes the right buttons or, in Yuichi’s case, strokes the fucking surface.”
“She likes my touch!” Yuichi snapped off.
“Of course he does, since you jerk the damn levers every time you want to move this thing.”
Yuichi shook his head. “I don’t jerk anyone! The less my ship.”
“Come on, Yuichi, just accept that you have a gay ship, and you had it even before my arrival, so it’s not my fault. And your boy loves your hand,” Kazuya smirked.
Jin’s eyes grew bigger. He might have been just about to come to terms with the possibility (fact) that he had somehow gotten on the board of a spaceship. And now Kamenashi just… Jin frowned. Did Kamenashi really hint that the ship needed to get off to actually… get off?
Jin coughed, choking at the thought, and his fingers let go of the railing. Who knew where the damn thing had its erogenous zones.
Kazuya noticed and laughed, reached out to grab Jin’s hand and brought it back to the railing. His hand covered Jin’s, a warm palm rested atop of Jin’s fingers. Jin’s eyes flicked to watch. Kazuya’s hand was smaller, with short fingers and manicured nails; there was a rather massive skull ring on his forefinger and the metal was cool against the bit of Jin’s skin it touched.
“You should not trust a post-orgasmic ship,” Kazuya smirked while looking at Jin.
Somewhere in the background, Yuichi’s voice was soothing the control panel, telling it to ignore Kamenashi as always.
Slowly, Jin’s frown faded and his grip around the railing got firmer again. Kazuya smiled. Just in time for another shake, obviously a completely random one, because not even Kazuya seemed to be expecting that one. He lost balance and was thrown against Jin. His head made a dull contact with Jin’s jaw, and both guys groaned at the sharp pain.
“What the hell?” Kazuya asked grumpily, but didn’t make any effort to pull himself away from Jin’s chest, while Jin had found himself not able to push the other either. In fact, his instinct had been to wrap his free hand around Kazuya’s back and pull him in when the disturbance had occurred, and now the feeling of another body against him, leaning, relying, warm, gave him the security he needed.
A nagging thought of Shirota again.
Yu never missed an opportunity to hook Jin up with someone - as if Jin needed a middleman. Tsk.
And then it was gone. This was not Shirota’s doing. Neither had Ryo fingers in it. Jin knew his friends. This was too big, even for them. This was a spaceship. A fucking real one. And aliens. Right, let’s not forget about the aliens. Aliens attacking the ship, and okay, Jin always thought his life was kind of boring but this… this was not what he had imagined when he had wished for a change. This was far from stages and concerts and fans. This was pretty far from small private performances during the Christmas week, too.
Another shake; it felt like the ship had sagged rapidly. Somewhere. Down.
Jin thought of the little things somewhere out there, shooting pink balls at the phone booth. Balls that could, obviously, turn everything pink, swallow it, make it a part of the new empire of…of… what was the name again? The Tegos? Yeah, right. The Tegos, that was how Kamenashi and the General called them.
“Are we…” Jin swallowed and tore his eyes off Kazuya to look at Yuichi behind the console, “Are we going to be okay? Is this place safe?”
“The safest place in the universe,” Yuichi nodded.
When Jin glanced at Kamenashi and his raised brow though, the statement didn’t really sound as convincing as it should have. As Jin had wished it would.
“And the people outside?”
Yamapi. Ryo. Even Shirota, despite the times the two of them were close to punch each other. Despite the times they actually had.
Jin was pretty sure Ryo wouldn’t appreciate pink color anywhere near him.
“Working on it,” Yuichi sent Jin another bright smile and pushed a few more buttons. “Though it might be a problem without blowing up a metropolis or two. Earth is so backwards.”
“As expected since it’s populated with humans,” Kazuya shrugged. His hand hadn’t left its place on Jin’s yet though.
Jin pouted. “Hey!”
“I’m just stating the facts.”
The place finally settled in a steady state again. It was difficult to say if they were even moving anymore, but judging from Yuichi’s continuous fiddling with the control panel, something was still going on. Jin’s eyes slipped to the railing and Kazuya’s hand holding his, and there was a nervous tug in his head because he didn’t know what to do. If it was okay to move, let go of the railing. Remind Kamenashi of the existence of his hand.
“Look, I’ve seen planets inhabited with slimy clods of condensed intelligence and they managed to build a civilization more advanced than yours,” Kazuya snorted. “Without limbs. Without… pretty much everything. Do you have any idea what a slimy clod of condensed intelligence looks like anyway?”
Jin shrugged. “Not really? Sounds kind of like a mucus with a brain.” The idea made him shudder. It sounded like something out of one of Yamapi’s jokes. Only it wasn’t. Jin thought the Tegos should have rather attacked the slimy planet, but then again, who would actually want to have anything to do with intelligent mucus, right? Jin tilted his head a bit and watched Kazuya. “You look pretty human yourself though.”
“No way!”
Yuichi chuckled in the background. This might get rather entertaining. If there was something Kazuya was touchy about more than fashion, then it was the question of his humanity.
Jin’s brows twitched in surprise. Both Kazuya and Yuichi really did look like every other person he met.
Of course, there was the General’s nose that looked bigger than any other nose that Jin had ever seen - but if a big nose had been any sign of someone being an alien, Jin would have needed to have a talk with Shirota one of those days. His nose was kind of a distinct trait after all.
And then there was… Kazuya. Right. Kazuya was different. Not different different, as in eight tentacles and a third eye in the middle of the forehead kind of an alien-ish way, but more like… the most attractive man Jin had ever seen.
Jin had never thought he had a ‘type’; his interest in genders and looks usually shifted with his mood, and then there was always the thing about clicking together… Jin shook his head. He and Kamenashi definitely didn’t click. Kamenashi was annoying and Jin could be hardly attracted to someone who hadn’t done anything but mock him since the moment they had met-
-but the hand.
It felt nice. The warmth was calming. Unlike the rest of Kamenashi’s presence.
Jin let his eyes travel up and down Kazuya’s body… until his eyes reached the other’s face. With a teasing smirk. Jin blinked. Caught in the act, wasn’t he? He cleared his throat, masking his embarrassment the best he could.
“You really think that humans are the only species in the whole universe who can and do look like this? Don’t be naïve, your little blue planet is not as special as humans believe.”
“Kazuya!” Yuichi finally stepped into the conversation. “Enough.”
Jin noticed how Kazuya rolled his eyes before turning around. Then the hand was gone, as well as Kazuya who moved towards the control panel to join Yuichi. Jin held the railing for a little longer, remembering the warmth.
Yuichi slightly bowed. “Excuse him. We haven’t been to Earth for a while and he forgot his good manners.”
Something on the control panel made a sharp beep. The liquid purple heart of the ship wavered up and down inside the transparent tube, drawing the attention of not only the General but Kazuya and Jin’s, too. Something was wrong again, and Kazuya’s manners were not the case this time.
“That’s…not good, I guess?” Jin asked. He was clutching the railing now again. All alone. No other hand to calm him down, give him a feeling of safety. The place was steady for now, just floating…flying through something-
Were they in space, anyway?
The exact position was most probably not the priority of the moment, even Jin could tell so much; however, under all the shock and slowly growing panic, he was also curious. Even excited, perhaps. Spaceships and alien invasions were not a concert tour, nowhere near that, but it was also more than just another monotonous, boring day spent at work, walking around an old, decaying hair cosmetics factory that should have been shut down ages ago, only it hadn’t because the owner was a fucker who knew to obtain the right licenses and stamps to fool responsible authorities. Jin worked as a guard there - as if there had been anything to steal. Just machines and dirt and superfluously huge metal tanks filled with greasy…stuff. Jin hoped he would never meet the sludgy substance closely. His job was just to make sure there would be no unauthorized visitors around. Right. His job. Ever since he had left high school a year before graduation. He wasn’t an idiot, but studying wasn’t really his thing. Books and theories couldn’t prepare him for the life out there, and well, speaking his mind out in front of one of the teachers hadn’t been the smartest idea… but now he was here.
With two aliens.
And an invasion of others.
“It’s also not bad though,” Yuichi grinned, and there was once again the gleam of delight in his voice and face. One would almost think that the General was enjoying the situation.
“Does it mean you know about another inter… trans… you know, that nifty thing with sending them to another dimension, after all?” Because that would be really helpful right now.
“I told you it’s not easy to find a portal into a parallel universe,” Yuichi shook his head.
Jin’s shoulders sagged. “But there’s another way, too, right? Those… those things can’t just turn my home into their pink kingdom.” And then again. The thought of Shirota. And Ryo. Yamapi. “I have friends there! And…m-my…” Oh god. “My family.” Was it just him or was there suddenly no air to breathe? Neither the General nor Kazuya seemed to have troubles breathing… but they were aliens, right? What if they didn’t need air at all? “My brother is still in school, he wants to be an actor and how cool is that, isn’t it? If…if this… would they let him play? Once he came home and had to practice an expression of a plastic sponge for his drama course, I’m sure he could pull out also some intergalactic intelligent slime if it was necessary… and-”
Jin was babbling. He knew he was.
It just hit him, hit him hard that he was here, in the spaceship and apparently safe while the rest of the world was turning pink just the way his guitar case had.
“The Tegos do not need humans for anything,” Kazuya said. It was an answer, too.
The world started shaking for Jin again. Just for him this time.
Yuichi was next to Kazuya in a matter of an eyewink and smacked him. Hard, or it looked like that from the way Kazuya jerked and rubbed the hurting spot with low grunts.
The two of them exchanged a meaningful look. The General said something Jin couldn’t hear, until there was a quiet “…you above everyone should know the feeling,” and Kazuya was lowering his eyes and bowing ever so slightly. Jin didn’t catch the short glance Kazuya sent him a moment later, dark eyes blank.
Yuichi approached Jin then, put a hand on his shoulder in a friendly, soothing gesture. “How about a little rest? I promise we will find a way to save not only your family and friends, but also the rest of the planet.”
“Really?” Jin blinked, focused on the General and ignored Kazuya standing nearby with an unreadable expression. Whatever was the thing Yuichi had told him, it obviously had its desired effect. No more poignant remarks. “I mean… without blowing Tokyo up and…such?”
“No blowing up, I promise. Unless it’s pink and threatening.”
The time seemed to still. And at the same time everything felt so rushed and as if it had been days since Jin had been walking down the well-known street, heading home… and never having reached it. In his quiet boring life. Looking back, boring hadn’t been so bad. No aliens. Neither those threatening Earth nor the attractive ones trying to save it.
Jin was sitting on steps leading somewhere up and into the depths of the ship; listened to the quiet hum around. Engines. Maybe. More likely not though, because the General treated the ship as something that was alive, and living organisms didn’t need engines. Jin knew so much. He had spent at least an hour or so wandering up and down the labyrinth of corridors curving around the insides of this J.Imusho-thing, vainly searching for a place to rest just like the General had suggested, and then had given up. The last thing he needed was to get lost on board a spaceship. Eventually, he had just sat down and hoped the others would notice his absence sooner or later.
He ran fingers through his hair and sighed. Was there a way to check what the world down there looked like by now? What were the chances that Tokyo had been already covered with a pink veil?
When… if this ever ended, Jin was sure he would not want to see anything pink anywhere near. Yamapi’s wardrobe would be in need of some dramatic changes.
Another sigh.
Without thinking, Jin reached into his pocket and found his cell phone. Both his guitar case and his bag were gone. Dropped in the pink snow after the attack and on his rushed retreat from the street. The phone was now the only connection with everything -everyone- he knew and was worried about.
Jin pressed a couple of buttons.
“Come on, Pi. Pick it up,” he was mumbling into the cell, at first oblivious of the dead tone coming out as the only reply. “Don’t be an ass for once-”
Then it dawned on him.
He was in space. Fucking space.
The monthly fees he paid his mobile operator were hardly enough to cover domestic connection… And now he was a couple of thousands of miles away from the nearest signal point. Yamapi couldn’t have the slightest idea there was someone trying to reach him. That was, of course, if Yamapi was still… if he…
Jin choked and out of pure desperation tried to dial also Shirota’s number. Because that made so much more sense. Right.
“Fuck,” Jin whimpered as soon as he realized what he was doing.
Still in space. No signal.
Of course.
Only then he noticed a quiet cough coming from a couple of feet away. He looked up and saw Kamenashi standing in the doorframe, a hand still resting on the knob so it was hard to guess how long the other had been standing there. The hesitation between coming in and leaving unnoticed clear from the tension his whole body straightened up with when Jin glanced up in his direction.
“I’m… sorry, I didn’t mean to.” Kazuya shrugged his shoulders. “If you want to make a call, the General could activate your phone for intergalactic calls. He… this ship is really smart.” A nervous puff of air.
“I just need to know they are fine.”
Kazuya nodded. “Not knowing is the worst.”
“The General said he would find a way to help. He… Can he do it?” Jin asked. Right now it didn’t matter that he and Kamenashi hadn’t had a smooth start. Nothing mattered more than the people he had left down there. And something was different about Kamenashi, too. Jin wrinkled his nose, thinking about then and now, and Kamenashi’s concern. No mockery. No making fun of Jin or his planet and the intelligence of humans.
Kamenashi sounded and looked like he actually knew. And cared.
“He is… still working on it, sorry.” Kazuya swayed on his feet and pushed hands deep into the pockets of his tight-fitting pants. “But he is good. We should already know enough about the Tegos… considering all the times we have already run into them.”
“But the other times,” Jin remembered, clutching his useless phone so tight his palms were starting to hurt, “there were exploding spaceships and different universes and all the other things. Right?”
“Yeah, but we didn’t know any of those would work either.” Kazuya walked closer to the stairs and a bit hesitantly took a seat next to Jin. “It was luck, nothing more. It always is mostly about luck. With the General. That’s how he works. His brains, I mean.” Kazuya smiled, as if remembering something, then raised a hand and rubbed Jin’s shoulder. “Things may look pretty bad, but he never gives up. And just when everything is about to get even worse, something completely random gives him the idea that saves everything.”
The hand. Again.
Jin felt it, blocked everything else and focused only on the gentle pressure against his shoulder and upper arm. It was nice.
“So, that’s what you two do? Travel through space and save… things?”
“And time,” Kazuya grinned at Jin’s question. “Told you this ship is smart. It can travel through time, too. And yes, travelling around and saving things is what we do. Well, the General does. I’m here because he took me in.”
“But you help, don’t you? Because before… you were there, too. You saved me.”
“I do my best.” A moment of silence and then, “I’ve seen what the Tegos are capable of. All the worlds they erased from the map of the universe.” Kazuya bit his lower lip, scratched his teeth over it, and sighed. “My home planet included.” It was not more than a quiet, shallow breath.
But it hit hard anyway.
Jin’s eyes went wide in consternation.
Kazuya took a breath, shaking his head to sort out the memories that all at once flooded his mind. “Yeah. It’s… I didn’t really live there anymore. Kind of wanted to find my own way in the world. By the time the Tegos came, I had been working on a space station up on the orbit. A sports caster for the colonized planets in the system,” Kazuya added, maybe more details than he had intended to. “When it happened, the invasion…all I could do was watch the planet slowly turn from green to pink.” He closed his eyes. Too many memories. Fucking Tegos. He had tried so much to bury all the pain, not to think about any of that. But now there was Earth and Tokyo and Jin, and if the General didn’t come up with one of his smart ideas soon, Jin would have to go through the same hell of losing everything and everyone.
Jin’s thoughts were taking similar direction. What if the same Kamenashi was talking about was going to happen this time, too? With Earth. His blue home turning pink. Like a graphic effect. Only in real.
Deathly shade of pink.
The spaceship had no windows. He might not even get to know when… what if… already…
“I’m sorry,” he mumbled. “About everything.”
Kazuya straightened up and patted Jin’s shoulder. “It’s been a long time ago. It can’t be changed. I met the General and things got better. We saved a lot of people.”
“Didn’t you say this thing can travel through time?”
The question didn’t even come across weird or ridiculous. Jin was getting used to the rather strange direction his life had taken today.
Spaceships. Aliens. Time traveling.
Cool.
The geek inside Ryo’s head would have been pissing himself from sheer happiness, if he had known. Jin could only hope he would have a chance to tell his friends everything.
Kazuya nodded, smiling. “Yeah, how cool is that?”
“Can’t we just go back to the morning, or yesterday, or something? To stop everything before it even started.”
The smile on Kazuya’s face faded out. If only things could have been so easy.
“Time paradox. One of the few uncool things about time traveling. Changing the past of this moment would lead to erasing the moment itself so there would be no decision about going back and… and believe me, you do not want to suggest it to the General,” Kazuya was gesturing rather violently with his hands now, hinting at something Jin couldn’t quite tell. It looked a bit like ‘everything is a big ball of something messy and weird and will explode if you breathe in a wrong way’, and also a bit like ‘my fingers stiffened and I need to stretch them’. Most likely both were right. Or wrong. The point was made though. They had a time travelling ship but were stuck in there and then.
“We have no time for his lectures about these messy time twists.”
“So there’s nothing we could do, right?” Jin sighed. A cold shiver ran down his spine.
“I’m not sure. The General does his best though. Jin, you need to understand that the Tegos are a dangerous race. You saw the pink shit out there. That’s how they work. Spread. Like a plague. A pink, shiny plague.”
“No. There must be something. Other than blowing up half of Tokyo and sending them to another reality. Some kind of weapons or-”
Kazuya was shaking his head again. “Their armor is bulletproof. It protects them from nearly everything.”
“But.”
“But what?”
“Nearly.” Jin’s eyelids fluttered. He stopped finally fiddling with the phone and stared at the dark display, seeing his own blurred reflection. “You said nearly. And you and the General have met them before, possibly more than once. You must know what their weaknesses are.” Jin fidgeted around and turned to face Kazuya. “Come on. Anything.”
“They are a mass of pink jelly securely locked in the hardest metal in the universe. There is no weapon that could possibly cause them any harm. I’ve heard about their wars, I’ve seen their wars. All they leave behind are waste pink planets all across the universe.”
They fell into a heavy silence, as if letting the words sink.
Jin’s troubles with his boss, as well as his disappointment regarding his nonexistent music career were nothing compared to the Tegos.
Jin didn’t notice when it happened but then he felt Kazuya’s hand rubbing his back, slow, soothing moves. Things were going to work out somehow. The General was trying to find a solution out of this situation. And Kazuya was not going anywhere. Not right now. Jin leaned in a bit, instinctively seeking comfort.
“We are landing! Hold on to something now, or don’t complain about bruises later,” the General’s voice reached Kazuya and Jin a moment later, and broke the calm moment of peace and quiet breaths and no thoughts of what might have been going on in the streets of Tokyo, and maybe already in different parts of Jin’s home planet, too.
PART TWO
Beta: A big thanks goes to snowing_inside not only for making miracles with my grammar, but also for being patient all the time when I was plotting and throwing ideas at her. If there is a story somewhere in the fic, it’s partly her fault work.
Characters/Pairings: Jin, Kazuya, Nakamaru, Reio, Yamapi, Ryo, mentions of others + Tegoshi and Koki as guest stars / Akame
Rating: PG-13
Word count: cca 29 300
Genre: AU, sci-fi, crack, Doctor Who crossover
Warnings: the usual Akanishi Troop warnings apply, not nearly enough Akame moments, fucking lots of swearing + I should apologize to Tegoshi’s fans :| and someone kind of dies here...not really but... um, well.
Summary: Akanishi Jin is just an ordinary boy living an ordinary life in a dirty Tokyo neighborhood, dreaming of becoming a music star and leaving the hole where he has grown up once and for good. His dreams may seem too big to come true, but Christmas time this year is all but ordinary. Strange pink snow brings two men in a phone booth and an alien invasion right to Jin’s threshold and Jin runs when he is told to.
A/N: MASTERPOST + art by ttalktomesoftly >> HERE << please go there and check it, yo :D
Akanishi Jin was on his way home from a rehearsal when the world around turned pink.
It was a Thursday evening, two weeks until Christmas; tingling melodies of carols could be heard everywhere, and a freshly fallen fluffy layer of snow was covering streets decorated in red and green. Jin was dragging his feet through the slop of melting snow and salt, the case with his guitar hanging at his back.
His mood should have been much brighter. His best friend Yamapi had made an appointment for their band to play in front of an actual, real audience a couple of evenings over the following week, and that was exactly what they had always wanted, after all. Well, technically, it wasn’t Yamapi, but Yamapi’s sister who had talked to people who had talked to people until there had been a call and Yamapi had rushed to the afternoon rehearsal all excited to tell Jin and their two other band mates, Ryo and Shirota, that the deal had been made. They would have a couple of concerts, more like performances actually, for various office Christmas parties of companies in the neighborhood.
Considering the news and the given opportunity, Jin really should have been in a better mood. And he was; sort of. He was glad. Grateful. However, this wasn’t exactly how he imagined his music career. He didn’t want to play at stupid Christmas parties for people who had most likely known him since kindergarten and who kept mistaking him with his younger brother Reio on every other opportunity.
As he walked down the street, passing places he knew all too well, never having left farther than a few train stations from the street he lived in; his thoughts kept running into an imaginary world he had created while being in the fifth grade and finding a guitar under the Christmas tree. In that world, he never played for people who were still giving him sympathetic looks for the one-sided crush he had had on his first grade teacher, or reminding him to drop by someday because their grandparents knew his dad, or just because they hadn’t seen Jin for a while. In that world, there were people -fans- cheering for him, for the band, because of the music they played.
He wasn’t paying attention to his surroundings at all; he would be able to find a way home even blindfolded after all. Wrapped in a thick, warm jacket, a knitted hat sitting low on his head, Jin was listening to music from his headphones, getting lost in his thoughts. The street around him, with illuminated shop windows and people rushing in either one direction or another, became a blur.
It took a moment, two songs started and came to their end in Jin’s ears, before he noticed something was wrong. Different from all the other times he walked the same street, heading home.
Something was off.
First it was nothing but small, light pink splotches scattered around the small hills of drawn aside snow. As if someone had spilled raspberry syrup. As Jin kept walking, more and more aware of the colored snow illuminated by street lamps, the light pinkish stains were turning into bigger and darker ones, covering not only the fallen snow on the ground but also the nearby buildings. It almost looked like the color was creeping up the walls, leaving randomly shaped traces.
Jin shrugged it off after a while and didn’t pay attention anymore, ascribing the feeling of moving colorful streaks to the lighting. All the mess must have been just one of those stupid jokes the kids in the neighborhood had come up with anyway. This wasn’t the best part of the city, and kids had way too much free time. Jin would know, he had grown up the same way after all; lazing around with a couple of friends, until they had decided that having a band and playing music might be more fun than be running around and getting scolded even if they, for once, hadn’t done anything wrong.
He was almost at the corner of the street, and from there it wouldn’t have taken much to get home, when Jin heard a loud crashing sound followed by a muffled beating. He stopped in the middle of the next step to take a look around - and that most probably saved his life.
Something flew across the street right in front of him. A blurred pink smudge hit the nearest building wall and splashed all over it. The color soaked into the surface and spread around.
“GET-PINK-ED!”
Jin had just enough time to jerk and dodge aside before another dash rushed around him and splashed on the wall, a couple of inches away from the previous one.
“GET-PINK-ED! GET-PINK-ED!” A voice was screeching from across the street as more pink balls flew around Jin, missing him just really closely.
“Fuck off!” Jin shouted into the dark alley between two blocks where the one throwing the colored snowballs must have been standing and hiding from being recognized. Jin wasn’t in any mood for messing around with annoying kids. All he wanted was to get home, open a beer and spend the evening watching TV. His friends had tried to talk him into going to a club tonight, but there were just so many mornings into a week that Jin wanted to wake up with a hangover into. His boss in a small hair cosmetics factory Jin worked in might want to either skin him alive or have his balls on a silver plate if Jin were late for his shift also the next morning. The last time it happened it hadn’t been more than ten minutes, and yet his late arrival had nearly caused a war.
“GET-PINK-ED!” the voice kept repeating as Jin tried to see through the falling night and shadows, and spot the face that was behind the attack.
Instead of a face though, his vision caught a nearing snowball, and Jin was pretty sure it would be a direct hit this time.
To his surprise, it wasn’t.
A hand snapped out of nowhere and grabbed Jin’s shoulder, spinning him around with such vigor that Jin wasn’t far from losing his balance and toppling over.
The snowball hit the guitar case instead of Jin’s face.
“What-?”
“Come with me, hurry!” A tall, dark haired stranger with a strikingly big nose in a friendly face urged him while another one, slightly smaller young man clad in a stylish jacket pulled the guitar case down Jin’s shoulder and held it just in the right height to protect the three of them from another couple of thrown snowballs.
Jin was confused; and that might be an understatement. All he cared about during the short moment when everything seemed to be happening at once, was that someone was trying to take his guitar away from him. And no one ever had the right to touch Jin’s guitar. He had worked -fucking slaved- to have money to buy it, and now he was determined to protect it with his own life if necessary.
The little fucker attacking him with snow was the smallest of his problems at the moment; which was actually funny, considering that just a minute or two ago, Jin hadn’t wanted anything but run across the street and punch whoever he would have found there snickering in the shadows.
“Don’t fucking touch it!” he reached for the guitar case to tear it from the guy’s hands.
“GET-PINK-ED!” the voice thundered again and this time, the dark alley at the other side of the street flashed with a bright blue light.
Jin got distracted for less than three seconds, but that was enough for the other to pluck the case out of Jin’s grip and throw it to the snow. The man gripping his arm was dragging him away with more strength than Jin would have expected. Jin wasn’t much of a fighter to begin with, and the momentary confusion didn’t help anyway.
“Let me go! What the fuck do you think you are doing?” Jin was trying to twist his way out of the tight grip. Everything looked way too much like mugging, only he didn’t have anything that might be worthy stealing. Just the guitar, but that was lying half buried in snow now. Jin looked over there rather desperately because his whole future, the future he dreamt of as well as the one that was more likely to happen, him and his friends playing in local bars and during various festivals taking place in the neighborhood; was abandoned and left for anyone to take it. “I have nothing, you don’t need me!”
His struggling was in vain though.
“Of course we don’t,” the stylish guy mumbled, annoyed.
“But we can’t leave you here either,” added the other, “it’s dangerous.”
And as if to make a point of his words, he nodded towards the guitar case. The streetlamp was shining down on it, and Jin’s eyes grew bigger, nearly falling out of his head, as only now, for the first time since this whole mess had started, he could clearly see that the pink smudges didn’t only soak into the snow, they expanded, grew bigger, crawling over any surface they ran into… the case carrying his guitar was already pink. Jin made a sound, as close to a yelp as he would ever be willing to admit.
“H-how…? What have you done to my guitar, you fuckers?”
“It wasn’t us, it was them.” The guy with the big nose pointed a finger in a very specific direction to the other side of the street.
One of the blue lights from before pulled out of the dark alley, and Jin could see the source of it wasn’t a bored, annoying kid from the neighborhood, a kid he had wanted to punch after having been nearly hit by the snowball the first time; instead a silver and pink little tank-like shell with a shining blue eye in the middle of its upper cupola-shaped part appeared, slowly rolling towards them.
“We need to get out of here! Now!”
The nosy guy tugged at Jin’s hand again to make him move, just as his younger companion had urged. Jin was startled, his feet and legs not really cooperating. He didn’t understand what was going on. A Christmas prank that had gotten out of control? But it had nothing to do with him. He just wanted to go home - and take his guitar with him, preferably.
Another glance to the discarded case, almost completely swallowed by pink by now, and Jin forgot to struggle. Gave up.
Something was really, really wrong here.
They ran then, the tall guy and Jin in the front and the other right behind them, judging by the sound of his steps so close at Jin’s back. They lost each other only for a moment -Jin couldn’t hear more than relentless “GET-PINK-ED!” from the main street, and curses and muffled rustle- and after a while of rushing through the fallen dark and slipping on melting snow, they reached what looked a lot like a very old phone box, one of those made of wood and glass. Jin had noticed one of them standing somewhere around Shibuya and always wondered if it was still possible to make calls with it. Seeing the booth here, just around the corner from his home, was definitely unexpected.
He glanced over his shoulder to check the situation.
Just because the last few minutes (or was it just seconds?) didn’t make sense at all, didn’t mean Jin couldn’t try to keep up with it. So what? His guitar was gone and two weirdos had dragged him to a dark dead end of an alley. Jin could deal with that, right? The times he had helped Yamapi get home, they both completely wasted, sleeping at random places because idiot Yamapi couldn’t remember where he had put his keys, had done a good job preparing him for anything. Maybe… just maybe he lacked even the slightest idea of how to react when a couple of lunatics kidnapped him on the street while another bunch of inmates of possibly the same asylum was wandering around the Christmas city, throwing some fucking pink acid-like shit at everything they encountered, and ruining his guitar. But he could handle that as well. He had to. If he wanted to get out of this mess.
Jin was still watching the guy at the back, now getting rid of his jacket and tossing it on the ground with jerky moves, cursing and throwing a tantrum at a small group of those pink robotic things following them; when suddenly something snapped and Jin was dragged into a light.
Blinking off the initial confusion, and getting even more confused right away, Jin found himself standing in a door.
A door that, with close to no doubt, led into the old phone box.
Only the interior didn’t look like the old phone box at all. Neither did it look like an interior of a newer phone box.
It was bigger. Way bigger.
There were lights and non-transparent walls, even though Jin would bet his life (which was a bit uncertain and probably very fragile at the moment anyway) that he had seen an ordinary booth with a phone device from the outside.
“Enough! Let me go!” he wrenched his arm out of the grip of the guy and tried to catch his breath.
This time, his hand was really released.
Jin turned around to punch the guy. The other was still outside so maybe a fist in the face would stun his nosy attacker for just enough time to give Jin a chance to run away. However, his hand flew through air and hit nothing.
And before Jin could have made out how and when the guy had moved from the spot right beside him over to a control panel in the middle of the room, the door they had run through fell shut with a loud thud. The stylish guy, now stripped off of his jacket, with his dark brown hair ruffled, was leaning his back against it and panting after the frantic dash.
“Take off, Yuichi!” -Something hit the door at the other side, the whole place shook under the attack, and Jin instinctively reached out and grabbed a nearby handrail.- “Get us out of here! Fucking Tegos, my jacket is gone.” The guy pouted at his own disheveled appearance and smoothed the bottom rim of his shirt over his tight fitting jeans.
“Just like my guitar,” Jin grumbled, cautiously overlooking his surroundings. Everything looked a bit like in those rather cheap sci-fi series made for television, with an addition of light effects and a strange tinge of elegance that Jin couldn’t quite explain, but which made perfect sense when put in connection with the grunting young man.
And that was when the said man glanced up, giving Jin a death glare. “Your guitar? Excuse me, but the jacket was one of the only three pieces made for the 4720 Ralph Lauren Winter Collection. Do you have any idea how hard it is to get these things in the forty eighth century?” he shook his head, annoyed by Jin’s blunt ignorance.
“Forty eighth… what?” Jin choked. He couldn’t have cared less about a Winter Collection of Ralph Who-the-fuck-ever, but forty eighth century? Seriously? He turned to the nosy guy…Yuichi…right, the other called him Yuichi. “Okay, enough. What is going on here? Did Ryo send you?”
“Who is Ryo?” Yuichi asked just by the way while busying himself with the control panel, pressing buttons and pulling various levers. A transparent cylinder going up from the middle of the panel slowly filled with light purple liquid. It resembled a breathing support unit in a hospital intensive care room, the level raising and falling constantly, producing a muffled sound that filled the room.
“Or Shirota?” Jin pondered on. If someone had set up all of this, it must have been either Ryo or Shirota. Yamapi wouldn’t have been able to keep his face today in front of Jin if he had had his fingers in this shit as well. But Ryo and Shirota were damn good. Little shits. Literally, and well, figuratively in Shirota’s case. This seemed a lot like something to fit to their sense of sick humor.
Yuichi finally finished whatever he had been doing and looked over at his companion, who was standing there, peevish about the loss of his brand jacket. “Are you okay, Kazuya?”
“Do I look okay? They got my jacket. Any chance our next stop would be New New Earth, forty eighth century?”
“We have work here,” Yuichi replied, unaffected by Kazuya’s mood.
Kazuya huffed. “Right. Just great. Of course we do.”
“If we don’t stop them, there will be no New New Earth and no more Ralph Lauren Winter Collections though.”
The words clearly frightened Kazuya, because the next moment he was standing by the control panel, too, checking blinking screens for any data that would help. “What’s the plan then? We need to stop those fuckers before the future gets changed irreparably.” There were still two more jackets of the treasured collection somewhere in the future and he wanted one of them.
Jin watched the scene unfolding in front of him for a while, astounded not as much by the whole fashion talk (because what did he know about fashion anyway), but by how convincing those two were while making all the remarks about forty eighth century and the rest of the cryptic shit. He wondered where Ryo, or Shirota, had found them. A theatre club? The Art School?
And should he play along?
Then a memory of his guitar case being fused by the pink shit flashed through his mind, and Jin frowned. His best friends could be real fuckers at times, but they knew just how much Jin treasured his guitar. They wouldn’t do anything to destroy it.
Such conclusion was both relieving and disturbing - if it hadn’t been Ryo or Shirota’s doing, what the hell was going on here?
Jin cleared his throat and stepped closer to the control panel to get attention of the two guys. “Who the fuck are they?” he waved a hand towards the door. If he was clever enough, he could play along for the case it all was a prank after all, yet at the same time get some information and explanation in case this was -somehow- for real.
The guy called Yuichi flicked a look at Jin then fell back into studying the control panel and various lights changing colors there.
“The Tegos,” Yuichi said matter-of-factly. “They…”
Jin didn’t let him finish. “And what are they doing? I mean, if you haven’t noticed yet, everything out there is turning pink!”
“Yeah, that’s… that’s what they do. Everything they run into turns pink.” Yuichi shrugged. “It’s kind of their color.”
Jin turned to look at Kazuya, remembering the other had taken off his jacket outside. Had one of those snowballs hit him? “Did they touch him, too?” he asked, concerned. From all he knew so far, the pink color spread like a plague. The last time he had spotted the case of his guitar, it had been wholly sheeted with pink. He didn’t even want to think of what had happened to the guitar itself. “Isn’t it dangerous?”
“Of course it’s fucking dangerous!” Kazuya groaned. “I wouldn’t have thrown away my jacket otherwise.”
Jin nodded towards him with an inquiring look. “Are you gonna be okay?”
“What?” Puzzled by Jin’s expression, Kazuya glanced down at his shirt. Of a light pink color. “Fuck you!”
“Don’t worry, he took the jacket off before the pink touched anything else,” Yuichi hurried with an explanation before Kazuya would have had a chance to swoop down on Jin and start strangling. Which might have been in any moment by then, actually. Stepping forward, Yuichi quickly stood in front of Kazuya, just in case. If the other still wanted to try something. “That’s Kamenashi Kazuya. And pink is kind of his color as well.”
Kazuya was frowning, aggrieved. “Every color can be pretty much mine.” He folded his hands at his chest. He was not going to stop wearing his favorite shirt just because an alien race of fucking selfish exterminators had a sick fetish for pink.
Having a feeling it might be for his own good, Jin rather didn’t comment on Kazuya’s last remark. So far, anything he had told the other had turned into a bicker, leaving both of them annoyed and ready to snap. And moreover, there were still more important things to learn than Kamenashi’s fashion sense - even though something was telling Jin that Kamenashi might see it differently.
“And who exactly are you?” he asked the Yuichi guy.
Kazuya sighed, reminding himself of the Tegos menace out there and the reason why they must have taken the annoying guy along. Yuichi didn’t like when humans died. Or any possible life forms, actually. He was one of those delusional individuals who believed in universal peace across all the galaxies out there, and how all the different races should be able to get along or at least tolerate each other. If it had been up to Kazuya, the Tegos would have been eliminated as a whole a long time ago. But no, Yuichi had just had to stop him from destroying the only fleet that had managed to escape when their planet had exploded and dispersed into a pink cloud. When the Tegos had later attacked another planet to occupy it by force, all that had been left for Kazuya was to say, “Told you so”. And here they were again now, twenty first century, Earth, and a fucking group of the Tegos strolling down the streets of Tokyo.
Tokyo, above all. Couldn’t have they picked another place to start their invasion and takeover? Kazuya would have loved to see a twenty first century Paris. Or nearly anything else in Europe. Tokyo with its busy, crowded streets and sky-reaching glass buildings looked awfully a lot like the place he had come from. And there had been a reason why he had left in the first place; given up on the life someone else had chosen for him, put a stop on obediently listening to what the others had wanted from him. It had been a tough decision, but it had also eventually saved his life and led him to traveling with Yuichi who had made it up for him a million times.
“That’s the General,” Kazuya said, pushing away his grumpiness over the lost jacket, because Yuichi was right - having he not thrown it away, the Tegos would have turned him pink and made him a part of their new kingdom. His Ralph Lauren had saved his life. One more reason to never change his favorite fashion brand.
Jin’s eyebrow twitched. “A general… of what?” The situation wasn’t really getting any better. The image of general Yuichi pushing buttons on the control panel in what seemed like a random order didn’t help with reducing Jin’s doubts.
“The General. Are you stupid or what?” Kazuya shook his head.
“Oh, that makes much more sense,” Jin snapped back. Kamenashi Kazuya was getting on his nerves. Fast. Again.
It was only for the good of the moment when Yuichi pushed the last lever, firing up the heart of his purple box, and joined the bickering couple. Finally, he had a chance to bow politely and greet the newcomer on board. “My name is Nakamaru Yuichi. People call me the General though. It’s easier to remember. And I look good in an army uniform.”
Kazuya standing next to him rolled his eyes then turned around and offered Yuichi a bright, sweet smile. “Anything is better than argyle,” he ran a finger down Yuichi’s chest clad in a knit vest with a simple, black-white-dark-purple argyle pattern.
“Argyle is cool,” Yuichi replied promptly. The tone of his voice, the way he said the statement in, and his expression, all indicated how scandalized he was by Kazuya’s lack of understanding to such a serious matter. “You, above everyone else, should know, by the way.”
“In your dreams.”
Jin considered asking for details but in the end, a fashion sense dissent between Kamenashi Kazuya and Nakamaru Yuichi was not really his business. He could hardly side with either of them, because Jin was neither the type to dress like a good schoolboy from the 50’s, nor was he particularly eager to look like a model of menswear.
“Excuse me, Naka- um, General,” Jin ruffled his hair in a nervous jerk then moved his hand to his face and rubbed his chin with the pads of his fingers, “the things out there, they…”
“Came here to erase all humanity and turn Earth into their new empire of pink,” Yuichi finished Jin’s question, his statement half worried, half rather excited, because knowing what an enemy was up to was always an advantage. “Thrilling, isn’t it? It would be better to stop them though, because otherwise Kazuya won’t have a chance to get his jacket and I’ll be condemned to bear with his grumpiness through a galaxy or two.”
Kazuya made a face which Yuichi ostentatiously ignored.
“The key question is though,” Yuichi gave Jin an intent look, “who are you?”
“Akanishi.” Jin frowned. So there were pink robots ready to seize the whole fucking planet and all this General of nothing cared about was Jin’s name? This was really getting better with every minute passed. “Akanishi Jin. Just Jin is fine, too. Whatever. Now, how are we going to stop them?” He waved to the door distractedly.
We.
Yeah, why not.
He could play along. For now.
“Nice to meet you, Jin-Just-Jin,” Yuichi smiled and bowed.
Kazuya, on the other hand, just casually leaned against one of the couple of pillars towering around the room, penetrating both the floor and the ceiling, and by Jin’s poor guess, reaching through the whole space of this… this thing. The most spacious phone booth Jin had ever seen in his life. He hoped he would get a chance to ask a few questions about the props and where Shirota had gotten them after this whole thing would be over.
Jin felt Kazuya’s look, studying him from afar, and most probably trying to figure out how to get rid of Jin for good. Which was, actually, something Jin wished himself. To leave this strange place and even stranger people, find his guitar (intact and still at its place), and return home. Have a beer or two and wake up with a start into a new day, his biggest and only concern being him being late for work, and not a bunch of speaking overgrown Barbie doll accessories.
Jin impatiently twitched a brow.
“Stopping them sounds like a plan,” Yuichi grinned.
“No kidding. But how?”
To Jin’s utter shock, Yuichi shrugged and went back to the control panel again, pressing another seemingly random sequence of buttons; and Jin was more and more inclined to the thought that the guy really did all the stuff at random.
Seriously, even Yamapi would have done a better job with saving the world from those… pink things.
Instinctively, Jin turned to Kazuya.
The other didn’t seem to be helpful either though. “What?” Kazuya frowned, snapping at Jin, looking offended just by the mere fact that Jin had attempted to get his attention. “Don’t ask me. The last time we met the Tegos, there was a huge-ass spaceship with a transdimensional teleport that we blew up and let everything get sucked into a parallel universe that was about to implode or something.”
“Can’t we do it again?”
“How many imploding parallel universes do you think exist out there?”
Jin hadn’t realized Yuichi was listening to him and Kazuya until the guy spoke up, in a tone that sounded like once again questioning Jin’s intelligence. - While in fact, the only thing to question there was the sanity of those two weird figures that had brought such a mess into Jin’s usually calm life. Well, not every night out with his friends could be called exactly ‘calm’, but at least there were no spaceships and no ends of the world while getting drunk with them.
“I… don’t know? As many as one needs?”
Kazuya snorted.
“That would be handy, wouldn’t it?” Yuichi mused while moving around the console. The central cylinder started pumping the purple liquid again. “Sadly, imploding universes are out of stock. And even if there were one, we could hardly blow up a half of this city to open the portal.”
Jin sucked in a breath for a sharp retort, but a loud knock at the door from the outside caused him to breathe out and take a sharp turn backwards. “What…?”
“The invisible mask doesn’t help, they know we are still here,” Kazuya said, and Jin thought he would stop being bewildered by everything these two were talking about, but then-
“Time to take off,” Yuichi announced cheerfully and pulled the closest lever. “Take a hold of something, this is gonna yank with our ship.”
“Our ship?” Jin yelped.
Kazuya shook his head. “Don’t tell me you thought this was really just a phone booth?”
“I…” Did he? Jin shrugged and quickly took a grip on the closest railing.
“Welcome on the board of J.Imusho,” Yuichi grinned. “Do not mistake it with J.Lo. Unlike the latter, my ship can sing. And she likes to be called Jay.”
Jin’s eyebrows furrowed.
The next moment, everything around him shook vehemently and Jin yelped, forgetting about J.Imusho and J.Lo and all the ‘what-the-fuck’ questions he had wanted to ask. It felt like he would never have a solid ground under his feet; the booth wobbled, would have thrown him against a wall had it not been for his fingers firmly holding the railing. And then his question was back, only for all different reasons. “What the fuck…?” His big, shocked eyes flicked around and found the General staggering behind the control console, holding on to a lever, and it was difficult to tell if the guy was actually really controlling anything, or was just trying to stay on his feet just like Jin was.
“She doesn’t like the starts,” Yuichi commented as calmly as the situation allowed him. He was obviously enjoying every tremble and recoil. When the shaking calmed down a little a moment later, he soothed the control panel, and Jin would swear he caught the General mumbling something, talking to the shining tube running around the center of the circular panel. “Right, Pretty? No worries, it’s over now. Everything is fine again, Jay…”
Jin blinked. He glanced over at Kazuya, seeking an explanation. If there could be any, of course, which Jin had his doubts about. Nothing made sense anymore. He might as well try to get used to it.
“Don’t mind him,” Kazuya chuckled, gaining back his balance as the place became steady again. “He still believes the ship is a she.” He rolled his eyes.
“This ship? A she? WHAT?”
Right, nothing made sense anymore. Not at all.
Jin rubbed his face.
“My thought exactly. There’s no way we have been flying in a girl all this time. I’ve been telling him since forever that Jay is, in fact, a guy!” Kazuya shook his head, his words intentionally loud enough for Yuichi to hear them, too. “Seriously, the fucking ship moans and writhes whenever someone touches the levers or pushes the right buttons or, in Yuichi’s case, strokes the fucking surface.”
“She likes my touch!” Yuichi snapped off.
“Of course he does, since you jerk the damn levers every time you want to move this thing.”
Yuichi shook his head. “I don’t jerk anyone! The less my ship.”
“Come on, Yuichi, just accept that you have a gay ship, and you had it even before my arrival, so it’s not my fault. And your boy loves your hand,” Kazuya smirked.
Jin’s eyes grew bigger. He might have been just about to come to terms with the possibility (fact) that he had somehow gotten on the board of a spaceship. And now Kamenashi just… Jin frowned. Did Kamenashi really hint that the ship needed to get off to actually… get off?
Jin coughed, choking at the thought, and his fingers let go of the railing. Who knew where the damn thing had its erogenous zones.
Kazuya noticed and laughed, reached out to grab Jin’s hand and brought it back to the railing. His hand covered Jin’s, a warm palm rested atop of Jin’s fingers. Jin’s eyes flicked to watch. Kazuya’s hand was smaller, with short fingers and manicured nails; there was a rather massive skull ring on his forefinger and the metal was cool against the bit of Jin’s skin it touched.
“You should not trust a post-orgasmic ship,” Kazuya smirked while looking at Jin.
Somewhere in the background, Yuichi’s voice was soothing the control panel, telling it to ignore Kamenashi as always.
Slowly, Jin’s frown faded and his grip around the railing got firmer again. Kazuya smiled. Just in time for another shake, obviously a completely random one, because not even Kazuya seemed to be expecting that one. He lost balance and was thrown against Jin. His head made a dull contact with Jin’s jaw, and both guys groaned at the sharp pain.
“What the hell?” Kazuya asked grumpily, but didn’t make any effort to pull himself away from Jin’s chest, while Jin had found himself not able to push the other either. In fact, his instinct had been to wrap his free hand around Kazuya’s back and pull him in when the disturbance had occurred, and now the feeling of another body against him, leaning, relying, warm, gave him the security he needed.
A nagging thought of Shirota again.
Yu never missed an opportunity to hook Jin up with someone - as if Jin needed a middleman. Tsk.
And then it was gone. This was not Shirota’s doing. Neither had Ryo fingers in it. Jin knew his friends. This was too big, even for them. This was a spaceship. A fucking real one. And aliens. Right, let’s not forget about the aliens. Aliens attacking the ship, and okay, Jin always thought his life was kind of boring but this… this was not what he had imagined when he had wished for a change. This was far from stages and concerts and fans. This was pretty far from small private performances during the Christmas week, too.
Another shake; it felt like the ship had sagged rapidly. Somewhere. Down.
Jin thought of the little things somewhere out there, shooting pink balls at the phone booth. Balls that could, obviously, turn everything pink, swallow it, make it a part of the new empire of…of… what was the name again? The Tegos? Yeah, right. The Tegos, that was how Kamenashi and the General called them.
“Are we…” Jin swallowed and tore his eyes off Kazuya to look at Yuichi behind the console, “Are we going to be okay? Is this place safe?”
“The safest place in the universe,” Yuichi nodded.
When Jin glanced at Kamenashi and his raised brow though, the statement didn’t really sound as convincing as it should have. As Jin had wished it would.
“And the people outside?”
Yamapi. Ryo. Even Shirota, despite the times the two of them were close to punch each other. Despite the times they actually had.
Jin was pretty sure Ryo wouldn’t appreciate pink color anywhere near him.
“Working on it,” Yuichi sent Jin another bright smile and pushed a few more buttons. “Though it might be a problem without blowing up a metropolis or two. Earth is so backwards.”
“As expected since it’s populated with humans,” Kazuya shrugged. His hand hadn’t left its place on Jin’s yet though.
Jin pouted. “Hey!”
“I’m just stating the facts.”
The place finally settled in a steady state again. It was difficult to say if they were even moving anymore, but judging from Yuichi’s continuous fiddling with the control panel, something was still going on. Jin’s eyes slipped to the railing and Kazuya’s hand holding his, and there was a nervous tug in his head because he didn’t know what to do. If it was okay to move, let go of the railing. Remind Kamenashi of the existence of his hand.
“Look, I’ve seen planets inhabited with slimy clods of condensed intelligence and they managed to build a civilization more advanced than yours,” Kazuya snorted. “Without limbs. Without… pretty much everything. Do you have any idea what a slimy clod of condensed intelligence looks like anyway?”
Jin shrugged. “Not really? Sounds kind of like a mucus with a brain.” The idea made him shudder. It sounded like something out of one of Yamapi’s jokes. Only it wasn’t. Jin thought the Tegos should have rather attacked the slimy planet, but then again, who would actually want to have anything to do with intelligent mucus, right? Jin tilted his head a bit and watched Kazuya. “You look pretty human yourself though.”
“No way!”
Yuichi chuckled in the background. This might get rather entertaining. If there was something Kazuya was touchy about more than fashion, then it was the question of his humanity.
Jin’s brows twitched in surprise. Both Kazuya and Yuichi really did look like every other person he met.
Of course, there was the General’s nose that looked bigger than any other nose that Jin had ever seen - but if a big nose had been any sign of someone being an alien, Jin would have needed to have a talk with Shirota one of those days. His nose was kind of a distinct trait after all.
And then there was… Kazuya. Right. Kazuya was different. Not different different, as in eight tentacles and a third eye in the middle of the forehead kind of an alien-ish way, but more like… the most attractive man Jin had ever seen.
Jin had never thought he had a ‘type’; his interest in genders and looks usually shifted with his mood, and then there was always the thing about clicking together… Jin shook his head. He and Kamenashi definitely didn’t click. Kamenashi was annoying and Jin could be hardly attracted to someone who hadn’t done anything but mock him since the moment they had met-
-but the hand.
It felt nice. The warmth was calming. Unlike the rest of Kamenashi’s presence.
Jin let his eyes travel up and down Kazuya’s body… until his eyes reached the other’s face. With a teasing smirk. Jin blinked. Caught in the act, wasn’t he? He cleared his throat, masking his embarrassment the best he could.
“You really think that humans are the only species in the whole universe who can and do look like this? Don’t be naïve, your little blue planet is not as special as humans believe.”
“Kazuya!” Yuichi finally stepped into the conversation. “Enough.”
Jin noticed how Kazuya rolled his eyes before turning around. Then the hand was gone, as well as Kazuya who moved towards the control panel to join Yuichi. Jin held the railing for a little longer, remembering the warmth.
Yuichi slightly bowed. “Excuse him. We haven’t been to Earth for a while and he forgot his good manners.”
Something on the control panel made a sharp beep. The liquid purple heart of the ship wavered up and down inside the transparent tube, drawing the attention of not only the General but Kazuya and Jin’s, too. Something was wrong again, and Kazuya’s manners were not the case this time.
“That’s…not good, I guess?” Jin asked. He was clutching the railing now again. All alone. No other hand to calm him down, give him a feeling of safety. The place was steady for now, just floating…flying through something-
Were they in space, anyway?
The exact position was most probably not the priority of the moment, even Jin could tell so much; however, under all the shock and slowly growing panic, he was also curious. Even excited, perhaps. Spaceships and alien invasions were not a concert tour, nowhere near that, but it was also more than just another monotonous, boring day spent at work, walking around an old, decaying hair cosmetics factory that should have been shut down ages ago, only it hadn’t because the owner was a fucker who knew to obtain the right licenses and stamps to fool responsible authorities. Jin worked as a guard there - as if there had been anything to steal. Just machines and dirt and superfluously huge metal tanks filled with greasy…stuff. Jin hoped he would never meet the sludgy substance closely. His job was just to make sure there would be no unauthorized visitors around. Right. His job. Ever since he had left high school a year before graduation. He wasn’t an idiot, but studying wasn’t really his thing. Books and theories couldn’t prepare him for the life out there, and well, speaking his mind out in front of one of the teachers hadn’t been the smartest idea… but now he was here.
With two aliens.
And an invasion of others.
“It’s also not bad though,” Yuichi grinned, and there was once again the gleam of delight in his voice and face. One would almost think that the General was enjoying the situation.
“Does it mean you know about another inter… trans… you know, that nifty thing with sending them to another dimension, after all?” Because that would be really helpful right now.
“I told you it’s not easy to find a portal into a parallel universe,” Yuichi shook his head.
Jin’s shoulders sagged. “But there’s another way, too, right? Those… those things can’t just turn my home into their pink kingdom.” And then again. The thought of Shirota. And Ryo. Yamapi. “I have friends there! And…m-my…” Oh god. “My family.” Was it just him or was there suddenly no air to breathe? Neither the General nor Kazuya seemed to have troubles breathing… but they were aliens, right? What if they didn’t need air at all? “My brother is still in school, he wants to be an actor and how cool is that, isn’t it? If…if this… would they let him play? Once he came home and had to practice an expression of a plastic sponge for his drama course, I’m sure he could pull out also some intergalactic intelligent slime if it was necessary… and-”
Jin was babbling. He knew he was.
It just hit him, hit him hard that he was here, in the spaceship and apparently safe while the rest of the world was turning pink just the way his guitar case had.
“The Tegos do not need humans for anything,” Kazuya said. It was an answer, too.
The world started shaking for Jin again. Just for him this time.
Yuichi was next to Kazuya in a matter of an eyewink and smacked him. Hard, or it looked like that from the way Kazuya jerked and rubbed the hurting spot with low grunts.
The two of them exchanged a meaningful look. The General said something Jin couldn’t hear, until there was a quiet “…you above everyone should know the feeling,” and Kazuya was lowering his eyes and bowing ever so slightly. Jin didn’t catch the short glance Kazuya sent him a moment later, dark eyes blank.
Yuichi approached Jin then, put a hand on his shoulder in a friendly, soothing gesture. “How about a little rest? I promise we will find a way to save not only your family and friends, but also the rest of the planet.”
“Really?” Jin blinked, focused on the General and ignored Kazuya standing nearby with an unreadable expression. Whatever was the thing Yuichi had told him, it obviously had its desired effect. No more poignant remarks. “I mean… without blowing Tokyo up and…such?”
“No blowing up, I promise. Unless it’s pink and threatening.”
The time seemed to still. And at the same time everything felt so rushed and as if it had been days since Jin had been walking down the well-known street, heading home… and never having reached it. In his quiet boring life. Looking back, boring hadn’t been so bad. No aliens. Neither those threatening Earth nor the attractive ones trying to save it.
Jin was sitting on steps leading somewhere up and into the depths of the ship; listened to the quiet hum around. Engines. Maybe. More likely not though, because the General treated the ship as something that was alive, and living organisms didn’t need engines. Jin knew so much. He had spent at least an hour or so wandering up and down the labyrinth of corridors curving around the insides of this J.Imusho-thing, vainly searching for a place to rest just like the General had suggested, and then had given up. The last thing he needed was to get lost on board a spaceship. Eventually, he had just sat down and hoped the others would notice his absence sooner or later.
He ran fingers through his hair and sighed. Was there a way to check what the world down there looked like by now? What were the chances that Tokyo had been already covered with a pink veil?
When… if this ever ended, Jin was sure he would not want to see anything pink anywhere near. Yamapi’s wardrobe would be in need of some dramatic changes.
Another sigh.
Without thinking, Jin reached into his pocket and found his cell phone. Both his guitar case and his bag were gone. Dropped in the pink snow after the attack and on his rushed retreat from the street. The phone was now the only connection with everything -everyone- he knew and was worried about.
Jin pressed a couple of buttons.
“Come on, Pi. Pick it up,” he was mumbling into the cell, at first oblivious of the dead tone coming out as the only reply. “Don’t be an ass for once-”
Then it dawned on him.
He was in space. Fucking space.
The monthly fees he paid his mobile operator were hardly enough to cover domestic connection… And now he was a couple of thousands of miles away from the nearest signal point. Yamapi couldn’t have the slightest idea there was someone trying to reach him. That was, of course, if Yamapi was still… if he…
Jin choked and out of pure desperation tried to dial also Shirota’s number. Because that made so much more sense. Right.
“Fuck,” Jin whimpered as soon as he realized what he was doing.
Still in space. No signal.
Of course.
Only then he noticed a quiet cough coming from a couple of feet away. He looked up and saw Kamenashi standing in the doorframe, a hand still resting on the knob so it was hard to guess how long the other had been standing there. The hesitation between coming in and leaving unnoticed clear from the tension his whole body straightened up with when Jin glanced up in his direction.
“I’m… sorry, I didn’t mean to.” Kazuya shrugged his shoulders. “If you want to make a call, the General could activate your phone for intergalactic calls. He… this ship is really smart.” A nervous puff of air.
“I just need to know they are fine.”
Kazuya nodded. “Not knowing is the worst.”
“The General said he would find a way to help. He… Can he do it?” Jin asked. Right now it didn’t matter that he and Kamenashi hadn’t had a smooth start. Nothing mattered more than the people he had left down there. And something was different about Kamenashi, too. Jin wrinkled his nose, thinking about then and now, and Kamenashi’s concern. No mockery. No making fun of Jin or his planet and the intelligence of humans.
Kamenashi sounded and looked like he actually knew. And cared.
“He is… still working on it, sorry.” Kazuya swayed on his feet and pushed hands deep into the pockets of his tight-fitting pants. “But he is good. We should already know enough about the Tegos… considering all the times we have already run into them.”
“But the other times,” Jin remembered, clutching his useless phone so tight his palms were starting to hurt, “there were exploding spaceships and different universes and all the other things. Right?”
“Yeah, but we didn’t know any of those would work either.” Kazuya walked closer to the stairs and a bit hesitantly took a seat next to Jin. “It was luck, nothing more. It always is mostly about luck. With the General. That’s how he works. His brains, I mean.” Kazuya smiled, as if remembering something, then raised a hand and rubbed Jin’s shoulder. “Things may look pretty bad, but he never gives up. And just when everything is about to get even worse, something completely random gives him the idea that saves everything.”
The hand. Again.
Jin felt it, blocked everything else and focused only on the gentle pressure against his shoulder and upper arm. It was nice.
“So, that’s what you two do? Travel through space and save… things?”
“And time,” Kazuya grinned at Jin’s question. “Told you this ship is smart. It can travel through time, too. And yes, travelling around and saving things is what we do. Well, the General does. I’m here because he took me in.”
“But you help, don’t you? Because before… you were there, too. You saved me.”
“I do my best.” A moment of silence and then, “I’ve seen what the Tegos are capable of. All the worlds they erased from the map of the universe.” Kazuya bit his lower lip, scratched his teeth over it, and sighed. “My home planet included.” It was not more than a quiet, shallow breath.
But it hit hard anyway.
Jin’s eyes went wide in consternation.
Kazuya took a breath, shaking his head to sort out the memories that all at once flooded his mind. “Yeah. It’s… I didn’t really live there anymore. Kind of wanted to find my own way in the world. By the time the Tegos came, I had been working on a space station up on the orbit. A sports caster for the colonized planets in the system,” Kazuya added, maybe more details than he had intended to. “When it happened, the invasion…all I could do was watch the planet slowly turn from green to pink.” He closed his eyes. Too many memories. Fucking Tegos. He had tried so much to bury all the pain, not to think about any of that. But now there was Earth and Tokyo and Jin, and if the General didn’t come up with one of his smart ideas soon, Jin would have to go through the same hell of losing everything and everyone.
Jin’s thoughts were taking similar direction. What if the same Kamenashi was talking about was going to happen this time, too? With Earth. His blue home turning pink. Like a graphic effect. Only in real.
Deathly shade of pink.
The spaceship had no windows. He might not even get to know when… what if… already…
“I’m sorry,” he mumbled. “About everything.”
Kazuya straightened up and patted Jin’s shoulder. “It’s been a long time ago. It can’t be changed. I met the General and things got better. We saved a lot of people.”
“Didn’t you say this thing can travel through time?”
The question didn’t even come across weird or ridiculous. Jin was getting used to the rather strange direction his life had taken today.
Spaceships. Aliens. Time traveling.
Cool.
The geek inside Ryo’s head would have been pissing himself from sheer happiness, if he had known. Jin could only hope he would have a chance to tell his friends everything.
Kazuya nodded, smiling. “Yeah, how cool is that?”
“Can’t we just go back to the morning, or yesterday, or something? To stop everything before it even started.”
The smile on Kazuya’s face faded out. If only things could have been so easy.
“Time paradox. One of the few uncool things about time traveling. Changing the past of this moment would lead to erasing the moment itself so there would be no decision about going back and… and believe me, you do not want to suggest it to the General,” Kazuya was gesturing rather violently with his hands now, hinting at something Jin couldn’t quite tell. It looked a bit like ‘everything is a big ball of something messy and weird and will explode if you breathe in a wrong way’, and also a bit like ‘my fingers stiffened and I need to stretch them’. Most likely both were right. Or wrong. The point was made though. They had a time travelling ship but were stuck in there and then.
“We have no time for his lectures about these messy time twists.”
“So there’s nothing we could do, right?” Jin sighed. A cold shiver ran down his spine.
“I’m not sure. The General does his best though. Jin, you need to understand that the Tegos are a dangerous race. You saw the pink shit out there. That’s how they work. Spread. Like a plague. A pink, shiny plague.”
“No. There must be something. Other than blowing up half of Tokyo and sending them to another reality. Some kind of weapons or-”
Kazuya was shaking his head again. “Their armor is bulletproof. It protects them from nearly everything.”
“But.”
“But what?”
“Nearly.” Jin’s eyelids fluttered. He stopped finally fiddling with the phone and stared at the dark display, seeing his own blurred reflection. “You said nearly. And you and the General have met them before, possibly more than once. You must know what their weaknesses are.” Jin fidgeted around and turned to face Kazuya. “Come on. Anything.”
“They are a mass of pink jelly securely locked in the hardest metal in the universe. There is no weapon that could possibly cause them any harm. I’ve heard about their wars, I’ve seen their wars. All they leave behind are waste pink planets all across the universe.”
They fell into a heavy silence, as if letting the words sink.
Jin’s troubles with his boss, as well as his disappointment regarding his nonexistent music career were nothing compared to the Tegos.
Jin didn’t notice when it happened but then he felt Kazuya’s hand rubbing his back, slow, soothing moves. Things were going to work out somehow. The General was trying to find a solution out of this situation. And Kazuya was not going anywhere. Not right now. Jin leaned in a bit, instinctively seeking comfort.
“We are landing! Hold on to something now, or don’t complain about bruises later,” the General’s voice reached Kazuya and Jin a moment later, and broke the calm moment of peace and quiet breaths and no thoughts of what might have been going on in the streets of Tokyo, and maybe already in different parts of Jin’s home planet, too.
PART TWO