080. (fic) SoulxSoul, Ch. 6
title: soulxsoul, ch. 6
rating/genre: pg; au, drama, romance
pairing(s): ohmiya, sakuraiba
words: 2,004
summary: nino doesn't think he's crazy, but he doesn't tell anyone about satoshi anymore. because how could you tell anyone that you have another person living in your body?
disclaimer: FICTION.
notes: reviving this fic, dammit! more notes regarding its future in the AN. in this chapter: jun POV, and aiba explains some of what is going on. but not really.
Chapter 1| Chapter 2| Chapter 3| Chapter 4| Chapter 5
Chapter 6
Before he can slam his bedroom door, Jun hears a thud, hears Aiba saying “Ninomiya-kun!” and turns in surprise to see Nino hitting the floor. He’s still so angry, a part of him just wants to ignore it, shut himself in his room and let Aiba deal with Nino and how bizarre he’s been acting.
But he doesn’t. He’s crouched down next to Nino seconds later, shaking him by the shoulder.
“Nino? Nino!” He looks up at Aiba, kneeling on Nino’s other side with a panicked expression. The clothes he was holding are scattered across the floor. “What happened?” Jun demands.
Aiba shakes his head. “I don’t know!” he says, sounding almost close to tears. “I just…He just, all of a sudden-” Aiba keeps making useless little gestures, his hand against Nino’s forehead, his throat, gripping at his arm and chest. “Wake up, Kazu, please-”
For a few moments, Jun can only stare, first at Aiba, then at Nino, who is still and pale, with a little furrow between his brows. Jun doesn’t really know anything about first-aid, but he bats Aiba’s hands away and finds the pulse in Nino’s neck. It seems regular enough, he supposes, and Nino is still breathing.
“Help me,” he tells Aiba, and then moves around to lift Nino by the shoulders. Aiba takes the cue, and gets a grip on Nino’s legs and together they carry him over to the couch. Jun starts to take out his phone, to call an ambulance, something, when Aiba suddenly grabs him by the wrist.
“Wait! Who…?”
Jun snatches his hand away again, rubbing his wrist where Aiba touched him. It didn’t hurt, just…he could have sworn, for a second, he saw-but no. He shakes himself out of it, raising his hand again and starting to dial. “We have to get him to the hospital.”
“Don’t!” Aiba almost yells, and Jun stops out of pure shock. “We can’t-we can’t get anyone involved…”
“He passed out,” Jun says, his own voice rising. “He is unconscious, for apparently no reason, and we’re just going to…what, hope he gets better?”
Aiba opens his mouth, closes it again, pushes his hands through his hair. “None of this was supposed to happen,” he mutters, staring and staring at Nino’s prone form.
Jun feels his helpless anger rising again. A week ago-just one week-his life was normal. He was a normal student at a normal college, and while his love life was perhaps a little deviant, overall that had been normal, too, he thought. The thing with Nino was just a thing, a casual friendly thing, but apparently it had meant more than he realized. Because as soon as he heard Nino say “Satoshi”, something had sprung to life in his chest, hot and fierce, and even after Nino had shot him down so completely, Jun just couldn’t stop thinking about it.
And now this, this random stranger who seems so familiar appears out of nowhere, and somehow he knows Nino, knows about Satoshi, whoever he is, and more than anything, Jun wants to know, too. He needs to know. And he will not let anything bad happen to Nino. He will not.
“Tell me,” Jun says sharply. Against his better judgment he puts his phone away, then turns to face Aiba fully. “Nino’s been acting weird for a while, he won’t talk to me, and then I meet you, and it turns out you know each other, and this whole Satoshi business-” He cuts himself off, takes a calming breath. “Tell me what’s going on, or I’m throwing you out and calling an ambulance.”
Aiba turns his wide, scared eyes to Jun and doesn’t speak for a moment. Aiba still has his hands in his hair, and he’s wearing Jun’s grey and purple track suit-Jun remembers the ramen spilling incident suddenly, though it already seems like it happened days ago. Aiba looks so young and lost, and all of a sudden Jun feels a burst of affection that is strangely strong, seeing as he just met this guy earlier today. Without really thinking about it, Jun reaches out and puts a hand on Aiba’s shoulder, to soften his words. And then it happens again.
-Masaki’s face, close to tears, desperately gripping Jun’s hands, saying “Jun, Jun, you don’t have to do this, it’s too dangerous”-
Jun tears his hand away with a gasp, stumbles back a few steps. Aiba looks just as surprised as he does, staring at Jun like he saw it too, like he knows.
“How did you do that?” Jun says, trying to keep his voice from shaking. “How do you keep doing that?”
“I don’t…” Aiba shakes his head a little. “I didn’t mean to.”
“What the hell is going on?” Jun demands again. He clenches his hands into fists to still their trembling. “Tell me what is going on.”
Aiba is silent for a moment, watching Jun with a deep, measuring stare. Then he nods, just fractionally.
“Yeah,” he murmurs, so low it almost seems unconscious. “Okay.”
Aiba sits down, right there on the floor in front of the couch, as if he doesn’t want to move away from Nino even to sit in the armchair nearby. Jun joins him on the hardwood, feeling a little baffled, but he’s too shaken up to protest. Aiba ruffles his hair up even more while he organizes his thoughts, then drops his hands to his lap and looks up at Jun again.
“First,” he says, “you have to promise to believe me.”
Jun blinks a few times. “…okay?”
“No, really,” Aiba insists. “A lot of what I’m going to tell you is probably going to sound totally crazy, but it’s the truth, and if you don’t believe me you’re just going to get mad again, so…”
Jun furrows his brows and squeezes his eyes shut briefly. Aiba’s logic is a bit headache-inducing.
“I will…do my very best,” he compromises, and Aiba nods, seeming to settle for that.
“Okay. Well, I work for this organization called the ASD, it stands for ‘All Souls Division’.”
Jun quirks an eyebrow. Even with his limited grasp of English, the name sounds weird, and definitely fake, but Aiba is going on, so Jun restrains his skepticism for the time being.
“It’s, like, a secret agency,” Aiba continues, fiddling nervously with the zipper on his track suit. “And, well, it’s hard to explain everything about it, but the main thing is that they deal with a lot of, you know, paranormal stuff-ghosts and spirits and past lives.”
“Uh huh,” Jun says slowly.
“But it’s science, too!” Aiba says emphatically. “They’re working on lots of different technology that-never mind, never mind. Okay. So, I work for them because I’m a Decoder, I’m someone who can remember stuff from my past lives, and sometimes I can make other people remember stuff, too.”
Jun’s mouth is hanging open just a little. While he’s kind of blown away that Aiba expects him to believe this insanity, a little voice in the back of his mind is whispering déjà vu.
“And, so, anyway, I just started working as a full agent and me and Sho-chan-” Aiba’s voice falters a little here, his brows come together, but he shakes himself out of it quickly. “-me and my partner, we were working on this controlled migration project, right? Like, directing souls to their next body, but we weren’t having a lot of luck with the experiments we were doing with the old people and the babies, because babies, you know, already have souls when they’re born, and we couldn’t figure out what stage in a pregnancy that the soul actually transfers-”
“You were experimenting on babies?” Jun interjects.
“No, no, didn’t I just say-” but Aiba cuts himself off with a wave of his hands. “Anyway, the important thing is, we decided to try something else, and that’s how we ended up contacting Ninomiya-kun and Satoshi. They were so healthy and, like, sane, even though they were sharing a body, Sho said it would be a lot easier for-”
“Wait, wait, wait,” Jun cuts in belatedly, his mind still reeling. “Did you just…did you just say sharing a body?”
“Yes,” Aiba affirms with a brisk nod. “There are two souls in Ninomiya-kun’s body.”
“And the other soul is called Satoshi?”
Aiba nods again.
Jun can only stare at him. “This is insane,” he says finally.
“You promised to believe me,” Aiba reminds him.
“I promised to try,” Jun mutters, rubbing his temples. “You’re making it increasingly difficult.”
“But here’s the thing,” Aiba continues urgently, apparently unperturbed by Jun’s scowl. “I think…I mean, I know I remember them, I knew that when we were given the assignment and I thought it was weird, but Sho-chan said it would be fine-”
“What do you mean, you ‘remember’ them?” Jun asks, sighing at the ridiculousness of all of this.
“Like, from before. From a past life.”
Jun’s not sure his eyebrow can get any higher on his forehead. “Isn’t that an awfully big coincidence?”
“I know, right?” Aiba says enthusiastically. “I mean, since I already knew Sho-chan before, I thought it was so weird that it just happened that I knew these two guys, too, and now you-”
“What about me?” Jun says, narrowing his eyes.
“Well, I remember you, too. You said so, too, didn’t you? ‘Déjà vu’?”
“That’s-I-” Jun splutters, but he can’t deny that there is something familiar about Aiba, in more than just a he-looks-like-someone-famous way. If Jun believed in that kind of thing, he might say it’s almost a maybe-I-knew-him-in-a-past-life way. And there are those visions, or whatever it was that happened every time Aiba touched him, seeing things that felt like memories but that Jun knows have never happened to him.
“Insane,” he finishes weakly.
“I know,” Aiba agrees, but probably for different reasons. He looks back over to Nino, who seems to still be breathing steadily.
“Do you know what happened to him?” Jun asks quietly.
Aiba starts to shake his head, stops, chews on his lip. “Well…”
“Tell me,” Jun says. “You said you’d tell me.”
Aiba’s gaze flicks over to Jun nervously. “I’m not sure. But. Well, it’s not good for two souls to be in one body for too long. It can start to…deteriorate.”
“What?”
The faintest, sad little smile curls the corner of Aiba’s mouth. “I thought you didn’t believe me?”
“I promised I would, didn’t I?” Jun snaps. “Anyway, what do we do about it? Can we…I don’t know, get the other soul out, or…?”
“Not without the right equipment,” Aiba says, and Jun has sudden visions of little soul-vacuums that put him near the point of hysterical laughter. “And anyway,” Aiba continues, “we don’t have a body to put him into.”
“Do we need one? Can’t we just send it off into the ether or something?”
“No!” Aiba says immediately. “If we just put Satoshi back in-cycle we might never meet him again! We can’t do that to them!”
“Why not?” Jun shoots back.
“They’ve been together their whole lives,” Aiba says softly. “They love each other.”
“That doesn’t make any sense,” Jun replies, too quickly, because part of him thinks maybe it does.
“Why not?” Aiba asks, echoing Jun’s earlier question, and Jun doesn’t have an answer for him.
Jun stands and starts pacing in frustration. “So we just let Nino ‘deteriorate’? What if he dies?”
Aiba sighs heavily and drops his head into his hands again. “No, no, but…I just-I don’t-”
Before he can say any more, there is a faint groan from the couch, and they both turn quickly to see Nino stirring. Aiba rises to his knees, and Jun drops down beside him, a hand on Nino’s chest.
“Nino,” he says softly, reassured by the heartbeat under his hand. “Nino, can you-”
They are interrupted by a loud knock on the door.
chapter 7
Author's Note: okay, so, yeah, four months later :D;;;;; here's the deal, guys: i AM going to finish this fic. soon. with the help of my wonderful girlfriend, i finally, FINALLY hammered out the rest of the plot, so hopefully i will be able to finish this during my winter break. so, yes, this chapter is dedicated to my girlfriend, who isn't even in the fandom, but knows who nino and ohno are on sight ♥ and thank you to everyone else for your tremendous patience with this, and me m(___)m
rating/genre: pg; au, drama, romance
pairing(s): ohmiya, sakuraiba
words: 2,004
summary: nino doesn't think he's crazy, but he doesn't tell anyone about satoshi anymore. because how could you tell anyone that you have another person living in your body?
disclaimer: FICTION.
notes: reviving this fic, dammit! more notes regarding its future in the AN. in this chapter: jun POV, and aiba explains some of what is going on. but not really.
Chapter 1| Chapter 2| Chapter 3| Chapter 4| Chapter 5
Chapter 6
Before he can slam his bedroom door, Jun hears a thud, hears Aiba saying “Ninomiya-kun!” and turns in surprise to see Nino hitting the floor. He’s still so angry, a part of him just wants to ignore it, shut himself in his room and let Aiba deal with Nino and how bizarre he’s been acting.
But he doesn’t. He’s crouched down next to Nino seconds later, shaking him by the shoulder.
“Nino? Nino!” He looks up at Aiba, kneeling on Nino’s other side with a panicked expression. The clothes he was holding are scattered across the floor. “What happened?” Jun demands.
Aiba shakes his head. “I don’t know!” he says, sounding almost close to tears. “I just…He just, all of a sudden-” Aiba keeps making useless little gestures, his hand against Nino’s forehead, his throat, gripping at his arm and chest. “Wake up, Kazu, please-”
For a few moments, Jun can only stare, first at Aiba, then at Nino, who is still and pale, with a little furrow between his brows. Jun doesn’t really know anything about first-aid, but he bats Aiba’s hands away and finds the pulse in Nino’s neck. It seems regular enough, he supposes, and Nino is still breathing.
“Help me,” he tells Aiba, and then moves around to lift Nino by the shoulders. Aiba takes the cue, and gets a grip on Nino’s legs and together they carry him over to the couch. Jun starts to take out his phone, to call an ambulance, something, when Aiba suddenly grabs him by the wrist.
“Wait! Who…?”
Jun snatches his hand away again, rubbing his wrist where Aiba touched him. It didn’t hurt, just…he could have sworn, for a second, he saw-but no. He shakes himself out of it, raising his hand again and starting to dial. “We have to get him to the hospital.”
“Don’t!” Aiba almost yells, and Jun stops out of pure shock. “We can’t-we can’t get anyone involved…”
“He passed out,” Jun says, his own voice rising. “He is unconscious, for apparently no reason, and we’re just going to…what, hope he gets better?”
Aiba opens his mouth, closes it again, pushes his hands through his hair. “None of this was supposed to happen,” he mutters, staring and staring at Nino’s prone form.
Jun feels his helpless anger rising again. A week ago-just one week-his life was normal. He was a normal student at a normal college, and while his love life was perhaps a little deviant, overall that had been normal, too, he thought. The thing with Nino was just a thing, a casual friendly thing, but apparently it had meant more than he realized. Because as soon as he heard Nino say “Satoshi”, something had sprung to life in his chest, hot and fierce, and even after Nino had shot him down so completely, Jun just couldn’t stop thinking about it.
And now this, this random stranger who seems so familiar appears out of nowhere, and somehow he knows Nino, knows about Satoshi, whoever he is, and more than anything, Jun wants to know, too. He needs to know. And he will not let anything bad happen to Nino. He will not.
“Tell me,” Jun says sharply. Against his better judgment he puts his phone away, then turns to face Aiba fully. “Nino’s been acting weird for a while, he won’t talk to me, and then I meet you, and it turns out you know each other, and this whole Satoshi business-” He cuts himself off, takes a calming breath. “Tell me what’s going on, or I’m throwing you out and calling an ambulance.”
Aiba turns his wide, scared eyes to Jun and doesn’t speak for a moment. Aiba still has his hands in his hair, and he’s wearing Jun’s grey and purple track suit-Jun remembers the ramen spilling incident suddenly, though it already seems like it happened days ago. Aiba looks so young and lost, and all of a sudden Jun feels a burst of affection that is strangely strong, seeing as he just met this guy earlier today. Without really thinking about it, Jun reaches out and puts a hand on Aiba’s shoulder, to soften his words. And then it happens again.
-Masaki’s face, close to tears, desperately gripping Jun’s hands, saying “Jun, Jun, you don’t have to do this, it’s too dangerous”-
Jun tears his hand away with a gasp, stumbles back a few steps. Aiba looks just as surprised as he does, staring at Jun like he saw it too, like he knows.
“How did you do that?” Jun says, trying to keep his voice from shaking. “How do you keep doing that?”
“I don’t…” Aiba shakes his head a little. “I didn’t mean to.”
“What the hell is going on?” Jun demands again. He clenches his hands into fists to still their trembling. “Tell me what is going on.”
Aiba is silent for a moment, watching Jun with a deep, measuring stare. Then he nods, just fractionally.
“Yeah,” he murmurs, so low it almost seems unconscious. “Okay.”
Aiba sits down, right there on the floor in front of the couch, as if he doesn’t want to move away from Nino even to sit in the armchair nearby. Jun joins him on the hardwood, feeling a little baffled, but he’s too shaken up to protest. Aiba ruffles his hair up even more while he organizes his thoughts, then drops his hands to his lap and looks up at Jun again.
“First,” he says, “you have to promise to believe me.”
Jun blinks a few times. “…okay?”
“No, really,” Aiba insists. “A lot of what I’m going to tell you is probably going to sound totally crazy, but it’s the truth, and if you don’t believe me you’re just going to get mad again, so…”
Jun furrows his brows and squeezes his eyes shut briefly. Aiba’s logic is a bit headache-inducing.
“I will…do my very best,” he compromises, and Aiba nods, seeming to settle for that.
“Okay. Well, I work for this organization called the ASD, it stands for ‘All Souls Division’.”
Jun quirks an eyebrow. Even with his limited grasp of English, the name sounds weird, and definitely fake, but Aiba is going on, so Jun restrains his skepticism for the time being.
“It’s, like, a secret agency,” Aiba continues, fiddling nervously with the zipper on his track suit. “And, well, it’s hard to explain everything about it, but the main thing is that they deal with a lot of, you know, paranormal stuff-ghosts and spirits and past lives.”
“Uh huh,” Jun says slowly.
“But it’s science, too!” Aiba says emphatically. “They’re working on lots of different technology that-never mind, never mind. Okay. So, I work for them because I’m a Decoder, I’m someone who can remember stuff from my past lives, and sometimes I can make other people remember stuff, too.”
Jun’s mouth is hanging open just a little. While he’s kind of blown away that Aiba expects him to believe this insanity, a little voice in the back of his mind is whispering déjà vu.
“And, so, anyway, I just started working as a full agent and me and Sho-chan-” Aiba’s voice falters a little here, his brows come together, but he shakes himself out of it quickly. “-me and my partner, we were working on this controlled migration project, right? Like, directing souls to their next body, but we weren’t having a lot of luck with the experiments we were doing with the old people and the babies, because babies, you know, already have souls when they’re born, and we couldn’t figure out what stage in a pregnancy that the soul actually transfers-”
“You were experimenting on babies?” Jun interjects.
“No, no, didn’t I just say-” but Aiba cuts himself off with a wave of his hands. “Anyway, the important thing is, we decided to try something else, and that’s how we ended up contacting Ninomiya-kun and Satoshi. They were so healthy and, like, sane, even though they were sharing a body, Sho said it would be a lot easier for-”
“Wait, wait, wait,” Jun cuts in belatedly, his mind still reeling. “Did you just…did you just say sharing a body?”
“Yes,” Aiba affirms with a brisk nod. “There are two souls in Ninomiya-kun’s body.”
“And the other soul is called Satoshi?”
Aiba nods again.
Jun can only stare at him. “This is insane,” he says finally.
“You promised to believe me,” Aiba reminds him.
“I promised to try,” Jun mutters, rubbing his temples. “You’re making it increasingly difficult.”
“But here’s the thing,” Aiba continues urgently, apparently unperturbed by Jun’s scowl. “I think…I mean, I know I remember them, I knew that when we were given the assignment and I thought it was weird, but Sho-chan said it would be fine-”
“What do you mean, you ‘remember’ them?” Jun asks, sighing at the ridiculousness of all of this.
“Like, from before. From a past life.”
Jun’s not sure his eyebrow can get any higher on his forehead. “Isn’t that an awfully big coincidence?”
“I know, right?” Aiba says enthusiastically. “I mean, since I already knew Sho-chan before, I thought it was so weird that it just happened that I knew these two guys, too, and now you-”
“What about me?” Jun says, narrowing his eyes.
“Well, I remember you, too. You said so, too, didn’t you? ‘Déjà vu’?”
“That’s-I-” Jun splutters, but he can’t deny that there is something familiar about Aiba, in more than just a he-looks-like-someone-famous way. If Jun believed in that kind of thing, he might say it’s almost a maybe-I-knew-him-in-a-past-life way. And there are those visions, or whatever it was that happened every time Aiba touched him, seeing things that felt like memories but that Jun knows have never happened to him.
“Insane,” he finishes weakly.
“I know,” Aiba agrees, but probably for different reasons. He looks back over to Nino, who seems to still be breathing steadily.
“Do you know what happened to him?” Jun asks quietly.
Aiba starts to shake his head, stops, chews on his lip. “Well…”
“Tell me,” Jun says. “You said you’d tell me.”
Aiba’s gaze flicks over to Jun nervously. “I’m not sure. But. Well, it’s not good for two souls to be in one body for too long. It can start to…deteriorate.”
“What?”
The faintest, sad little smile curls the corner of Aiba’s mouth. “I thought you didn’t believe me?”
“I promised I would, didn’t I?” Jun snaps. “Anyway, what do we do about it? Can we…I don’t know, get the other soul out, or…?”
“Not without the right equipment,” Aiba says, and Jun has sudden visions of little soul-vacuums that put him near the point of hysterical laughter. “And anyway,” Aiba continues, “we don’t have a body to put him into.”
“Do we need one? Can’t we just send it off into the ether or something?”
“No!” Aiba says immediately. “If we just put Satoshi back in-cycle we might never meet him again! We can’t do that to them!”
“Why not?” Jun shoots back.
“They’ve been together their whole lives,” Aiba says softly. “They love each other.”
“That doesn’t make any sense,” Jun replies, too quickly, because part of him thinks maybe it does.
“Why not?” Aiba asks, echoing Jun’s earlier question, and Jun doesn’t have an answer for him.
Jun stands and starts pacing in frustration. “So we just let Nino ‘deteriorate’? What if he dies?”
Aiba sighs heavily and drops his head into his hands again. “No, no, but…I just-I don’t-”
Before he can say any more, there is a faint groan from the couch, and they both turn quickly to see Nino stirring. Aiba rises to his knees, and Jun drops down beside him, a hand on Nino’s chest.
“Nino,” he says softly, reassured by the heartbeat under his hand. “Nino, can you-”
They are interrupted by a loud knock on the door.
chapter 7
Author's Note: okay, so, yeah, four months later :D;;;;; here's the deal, guys: i AM going to finish this fic. soon. with the help of my wonderful girlfriend, i finally, FINALLY hammered out the rest of the plot, so hopefully i will be able to finish this during my winter break. so, yes, this chapter is dedicated to my girlfriend, who isn't even in the fandom, but knows who nino and ohno are on sight ♥ and thank you to everyone else for your tremendous patience with this, and me m(___)m