Gift fic for yamapea
To: yamapea
From: peroxidepest17
HAPPY HOLIDAYS!
Title: NewS Medley (or Five Lifetimes Where Yamapi Falls In Love with NewS and One Lifetime Where he Finally Gets to Tell them Out Loud)
Pairing/Group: YamapixNewS (with the requisite appearance by Jin)
Rating: PG-13
Warnings: an unholy mix of genres ahead. And more OOC than you can shake a stick at. Maybe some death.
Notes: for yamapea and the je-holiday 2008 fic exchange. Special thanks to M and S for their last minute beta work and tough love. <3 My recipient said she liked AUs and genfic, which this kind of is, mostly. I hope you’ll forgive me for also including one of the things you DIDN’T want on your request list, but this is sort of just how it came out. If you hate it I will um, write you something new instead.
Summary: Yamapi learns to believe in fate.
1. Ginza Rhapsody: Mafuyuu no Nagareboshi
She is a star.
Or at least she has the makings of one. It’s what Mama tells Tomoyo whenever she looks at Tomoyo’s face, as the older woman smiles around the end of her elegant pipe and sees whatever part of herself from twenty-five years ago it is that she sees in Tomoyo now.
“One day, you’ll rule this town,” Mama tells Tomoyo confidently, as she cups Tomoyo’s chin in her white-gloved fingers and runs the pads over the rosy apples of Tomoyo’s cheeks. “You’ll be the top hostess in all of Japan, because you’re just like I was once, a long time ago. All you have to do to get there is do exactly what Mama says.”
“I will,” Tomoyo tells Mama very seriously, because she wants to be at the top, just like Mama tells her. “I believe in Mama.”
Mama laughs and there is a flicker of something in her eyes, a mixture of regret and anticipation and something else altogether. “There are three rules to being a successful hostess, Tomo-chan,” she tells Tomoyo as she empties her pipe into the fancy glass ashtray on the table in front of her, “only three very short, very sweet rules. It’s all quite simple.”
Tomoyo nods eagerly.
“One,” Mama begins, and reaches out to tug on Tomoyo’s ear, “always listen. The more you listen, the more you learn. The more you learn the more power you have. Power wins in this world.”
Tomoyo nods. “Always listen,” she repeats obediently, thinking to herself that Mama is very wise.
“Two,” Mama continues, satisfied with whatever it is she is seeing in Tomoyo’s expression, “refine your tastes. This isn’t a world for simple girls or small town girls, or girls who can’t tell the difference between a horse drawn cart and an imported Model-T.”
“Be refined,” Tomoyo repeats again. She takes a deep breath and throws away her small town past.
“And three, three is the most important rule of all, Tomo-chan. Are you listening?”
“Yes, Mama.”
Mama’s eyes darken then, and Tomoyo can see that hint of regret again, somewhere deep down. “Never fall in love. As cliché and stupid as it might sound in this day and age, it’s also the most important thing for you to remember, Tomo-chan.”
For some reason, Tomoyo looks away from Mama when she hears that, for the very first time. She furrows her brow and glances down at her lap, where her hands are folded, fingers tight around each other. “Never fall in love,” she murmurs.
“Do you understand, Tomo-chan? I’m going to make you a star.”
Tomoyo takes another deep breath, before looking back up again, back at Mama, who has already given her so much. “Yes, I understand Mama,” she says. “Don’t fall in love.”
Mama nods and stands, adjusting her shawl around her shoulders. “You’ll be a star, Tomo-chan. I can feel it.” She leaves the room with big plans for Tomoyo’s future.
Tomoyo is left sitting on the plush couch of Ginza’s top hostess club all alone; she looks at her fingers again, clenched around each other tightly. “Be a star,” she tells herself, and engraves Mama’s words into her heart.
~~~~~
He comes to the club for the first time exactly one month after Tomoyo has become a star.
He’s awkward and fumbling and bows every few minutes, for dropping something, for saying something weird, for not being more attentive to his senpai.
He’s a loser.
That’s what his boss scoffs that first night, when he is drunk and displeased with Koyama, Koyama the rookie who doesn’t know what he’s doing, who messes up orders, who forgets important messages and can’t fight to save his life.
“I’m sorry!” Koyama says earnestly when he hears, and bows again, the hundredth time in a row. “I’ll try harder, Boss!”
“Do you hear that, Tomo-chan?” the boss says, red in the face and glaring. “My no good excuse for an underling is apologizing. If you’re so sorry cut off your own finger in repentance!”
Koyama looks pale at the order, but after a moment, swallows. “H-hai!” he says, and bows again, “I’m sorry, Boss!”
Tomoyo makes a horrified noise. “Ezaki-kun,” she breathes, “please don’t make him do that, I’d feel just awful.”
Ezaki eyes her. Manages a smile. “Don’t let this loser worry you, Tomo-chan,” he tells her, voice sweet again when he sees her pretty face.
She smiles back, touches him on the cheek gently. “Then promise me you won’t do such a horrible thing to this poor guy, ne? I was a beginner once before too, you know. If Mama didn’t forgive all my mistakes when I started, I definitely wouldn’t be here with you now.”
Ezaki-san lets something a lot like a giggle escape his lips when she touches him, and after a moment, rests his head on her shoulder, a much tamer yakuza in the capable hands of Ginza’s number one rookie. “If you say so, Tomo-chan,” he twitters, and orders Koyama to get them more wine. The good stuff.
“H-hai!” Koyama says, and as he turns to go, gives Tomoyo the most genuine look of appreciation she has ever seen. Thanks, he mouths to her as he scurries off, and makes her smile back without knowing she’s doing it.
~~~~~
She watches him carry his unconscious boss out of the club later, bowing in apology (again) for the ruckus their presence has caused tonight as he leaves.
“That boy isn’t meant to be a yakuza,” Mama tsks after they’re gone, and shakes her head. “He isn’t the type.”
“What type is he, Mama?” Tomoyo asks, because she can’t help it.
Mama casually blows out a mouthful of smoke and dumps the ash from her pipe. “He’s the type decent girls take home to their parents,” she chuckles, before turning around and heading back inside. “Not the kind we see here often, Tomo-chan.”
~~~~~
But they see him often, because Tomo-chan is his boss’s favorite and according to his boss, Koyama is only good when you use him as a designated driver.
And so she always ends up sitting across from Koyama week in and week out, as he looks on attentively, as he tries hard and sometimes messes up and always, unfailingly, smiles as he carries Ezaki-san out of the club at the end of the night, bowing to Mama in apology for the noise or the spills or the rudeness.
Whenever Tomoyo meets his eyes, he smiles back at her, big and genuine and goofy. “Thank you for always taking such good care of Boss,” he tells her sometimes, on his way out the door.
“Thank you for always coming,” she replies automatically, except she means it this time.
~~~~~
Tomoyo realizes she is in love on her birthday.
Her admirers all come to see her with gifts or send gifts by post because they’re far away leading glamorous lives; she gets diamonds and gold and roses and beautiful clothes coming for her in box after box after box, until the other girls start to complain that there’s no space anymore, until Mama has to laugh and start turning away deliveries.
Ezaki-san comes that night as well, and scares off all of her other visitors because he is at the top of the suitor food-chain. He brings an enormous diamond necklace and earring set for her and orders two bottles of the house’s most expensive wine to commemorate the occasion.
Koyama isn’t with him.
“Where’s your driver?” Tomoyo finds herself asking, lip daintily poised at the top of her glass and doing her best not to sound disappointed.
“Running an errand,” he tells her, “finally earning his goddamned keep. He’ll show up when I’m ready for him to. Do you like your presents, Tomo-chan?”
She manages a smile thanks him for the gifts again; she even lets him put the necklace on her, and it weighs her down like a chain for the rest of the night.
When Ezaki-san finally passes out it is 11:49pm.
It is 11:56pm when Koyama comes racing up the stairs and through the door, a slightly limp bouquet of pink carnations clutched in his hand as he glances at his watch.
“I’m sorry I’m late!” he apologizes quickly, bowing to the whole club before looking embarrassed and hurrying to Ezaki-san’s booth.
Tomoyo’s eyebrows jump a little when she sees him up close, his suit disheveled and a little dirty, a small bruise on the side of his face and his lip bleeding from the corner. “Koyama-kun,” she greets, and when he smiles back at her with his whole heart she can’t help but do the same.
“Um, these are for you!” he says after a moment, awkwardly. “They were…livelier at the beginning of the night, but then Ezaki-san sent me off on this last minute thing, and these guys kept trying to hit me and… well.” He thrusts the bouquet of carnations at her shyly and looks at his watch again. “Just in time, ne.”
She blinks at them.
He fidgets. Realizes he must look idiotic. “I know it’s not uh, you know… and you probably got a lot of fancier things ne. And hahaha these are already dying…”
She takes them from him before he can retract the offer, fingers brushing lightly against his hand. “Thank you.”
He turns a little red. “Uh… happy birthday.”
She turns a little red too, surprisingly. “Do you want some ice?”
He blinks. “Eh?”
She laughs. “For your face. Are you okay?”
He looks sheepish. “Oh. I’m okay. Just um, you know. Just business. I should…” he indicates Ezaki-san, who is lolling stupidly on the couch, scratching his belly in his sleep and moaning Tomoyo’s name.
She nods, and holds the flowers to her chest. “Right. Thank you, again, for the present.”
He turns redder somehow, and bows, as is his custom. “Thank you for taking care of Boss,” he says again, and quickly moves to gather Ezaki-san up because he can’t look her in the eye anymore.
“Sorry for the trouble!” he adds to Mama somewhere by the doorway, and manages to bow clumsily with his much larger, much heavier Boss slung over his shoulder.
The moment when Tomoyo finds herself laughing after him with a limp bouquet of pink carnations in hand is the moment that she first realizes she’s in love.
~~~~~
She never gets the chance to tell anyone.
The next week, when Ezaki-san comes he comes alone and already drunk, arm in a sling and looking nowhere near the proud gang leader that she’s known all this time.
“What’s wrong?” she asks right away, forgetting herself for a moment.
“That stupid son of a bitch,” Ezaki-san curses, and slams his good hand into one of the walls.
She jumps a little, startled, heart pounding in her chest. “Ezaki-san?”
“Fucking kid,” he hisses, “even after all these months he didn’t know what he was doing, he messed up orders, and never did learn how to fight properly.”
“Koyama-kun?” Tomoyo asks, “are you talking about Koyama-kun?”
“I knew the moment I laid eyes on him that no good little shit didn’t belong in the yakuza,” Ezaki-san spits, “didn’t know any of the right stuff. Couldn’t finish someone off even when they were trying to off him first. Couldn’t even throw a punch right. Even when everything was riding on it.”
For a moment, Tomoyo’s heart stops. “No…” she murmurs, “Ezaki-san you don’t mean…”
He slams his fist into the wall again, opens up another string of cuts along his knuckles. “Only thing the idiot learned after all these months working for us was how to take a knife for a no good, drunk old man. Stupid fucker!”
When Ezaki-san breaks down sobbing in the middle of Ginza’s number one hostess club that night, Tomoyo falls to her knees next to him and does the exact same thing.
Mama sees it, and shakes her head regretfully. “You could have been a star,” she whispers to Tomoyo afterwards, when she drops Tomoyo off at home at the end of the night. She reaches out and tenderly tucks a lock of hair behind Tomoyo’s ear, and when she does it like that, it feels a lot like goodbye. “Now all you can do is make a wish, before you hit the ground.”
Tomoyo silently gets out of the car.
She makes a wish.
~~~~~
2. Stranger’s Sonata: Minna ga Iru Sekai wo Hitotsu ni ai wo Motto Give & Take Shimashou
Their story ends before it even really has the chance to begin, in the middle of a fire when he is ten years old and sick at home, left alone after his sister and his mother had gone to fetch the doctor to see to him. He thinks that maybe the cat knocked over the candle his mother had left on for him in the corner when no one was looking, or that perhaps a demon had come to his home in the midst of his feverish nightmares and cursed him to die. Regardless of how he’d gotten there he is trapped and alone in the burning house when it happens, his cries for help growing steadily weaker as it becomes harder and harder to breathe.
It is just as his eyes are fluttering closed for what he thinks is the last time when something suddenly crashes in nearby and the crowd outside shouts collectively; before he knows it there is a hand on his face and he blinks, tries to open his eyes to see who it is, if it’s his mother or Rina or maybe that nice ojiisan who lives next door and gives him and Rina manju before dinner sometimes, when no one is looking.
As it turns out it isn’t any of those familiar people; it is a face of someone who he doesn’t know at all, the smiling countenance of a complete stranger who is suddenly picking him up in strong arms and saying, very gently, “It’s okay, ne. Don’t be afraid.”
He’s too weak to say anything much in response, so he uses all the strength he has left to grab a handful of the stranger’s sleeve instead. It earns him another bright smile, and before anything else can happen, his face is being pushed into the fabric of the beaten old haori, under which he can hear a steady, comforting heartbeat.
Another crash comes from somewhere nearby and the arms holding him tighten just a little, the heartbeat under his ears speeds up. His eyes hurt and it’s still hard to breathe and when he hears the sounds of the roof collapsing and the screams of the neighbors, he thinks that maybe he’s going to die after all, and that he’s going to take this nice stranger with him as well, without even knowing his name first.
The hand cupping the back of his head gives him a pat and he can hear the stranger whisper, “Everything will work out somehow,” before they’re suddenly moving, fast and hard straight for the burning sliding door.
The stranger jumps and they’re airborne for a moment, before rolling to the ground with a thud, his head still cupped protectively by the stranger’s arms.
Minutes later he’s gasping for fresh air, on the dirt in front of his burning home, still feverish and weak and on the verge of vomiting again.
“You’re okay now,” the stranger says, with another one of those undefeatable smiles, and before he can figure out what’s going on he’s passed along, into the arms of his sobbing mother and his panicky younger sister.
The last thing he hears are his mother’s grateful, “Thank yous” before he curls up against her shoulder and passes out, too tired to keep his eyes open anymore.
When he wakes up the following afternoon in one of the neighbor’s houses, he discovers that the mysterious stranger is long gone; he learns from Rina that the weird ojisan who saved him hadn’t said much about what happened afterwards but that he had smiled and declared that he liked their mother’s cooking very much. Rina says she’d been scared of him at first, because he had two big swords, but since he gave her manju before dinner when kaasan wasn’t looking, she likes him a lot.
“What was his name?” he asks her groggily. “Was he a samurai?”
Rina says she doesn’t know; she adds that she hopes niichan will get better soon and become strong again, so everyone will stop worrying about him.
He promises her that he will and tells her it’s because there is someone who he has to thank one day, when he finds him again.
She smiles obliviously at him and runs outside to tell their mother that he’s finally woken up.
~~~~~
3. Schoolyard Serenade: Kimi+Boku=Love
On his first day at his new school Tomo-chan is scared he won’t make any friends and that they’ll think he’s weird because he’s from the country; it lasts up until the moment when he introduces him and a kid in the back with crazy hair raises his hand and says, “Where I’m from, there are tanuki! Do you have those too?”
Tomo-chan smiles and says, “Un! Lots! And foxes too.”
The kid in the back grins and asks the teacher if they can sit together; his name is Hiro-kun and he was the last new kid in class, up until the moment Tomo-chan walked into the door.
“Let’s be friends!” Hiro declares as Tomo-chan sits down next to him, and the two of them spend the rest of the afternoon in their kindergarten class just like that, talking about the places they lived in before they came to live here and how great Astro Boy is.
“Hey,” Hiro murmurs secretively to Tomo-chan later that afternoon, when the teacher is reading to them from a colorful picture book. “Watch this…”
He reaches out towards the girl who is sitting in front of them-the one with the two cute pigtails peeking out from under her yellow cap- and pulls sharply on one of them.
“Ow!” she shouts when he does, and Hiro pulls back his hand quickly and bursts out laughing when she whirls around, glaring at them both.
“Hiro, stop that!” she complains, rubbing at her head and frowning. “I didn’t do anything to you!”
“Shigeru-chan,” the teacher says, stopping in the middle of the story and looking at the little girl with concern, “is something wrong?”
“Hiro is pulling my hair!” Shigeru-chan shouts right away, and even goes so far as to point a finger at Hiro in all her righteous indignation.
“I’m innocent!” Hiro proclaims, while Tomo-chan can’t say a word either way.
He’s not sure why exactly, but he thinks that the way Shigeru-chan’s bottom lip is quivering in anger might be one of the most impressive things he has ever seen in all his six years on this earth.
~~~~~
The next day, Tomo-chan is the one who pulls Shigeru-chan’s hair this time; she blames it on Hiro at first but he quickly declines and points to Tomo-chan and their poor, set-upon teacher cannot finish her duck-and-cover drill to save her life.
“Both of you, the principal’s office!” she declares, and sends Hiro and Tomo-chan both.
“But I didn’t do anything this time!” Hiro complains. “Really!”
“You’re going for being a bad example!” sensei tells him, and Shigeru looks superior from her seat as she crosses her arms and becomes smug and tells them both, “That’s what you get for being immature and disgusting.”
“Shigeru-chan! Don’t call names,” their sensei admonishes, and she ends up getting sent to the principal’s office too.
“I didn’t say anything that wasn’t true!” she protests, and sniffs and holds her head up in the hair prettily as she spins around and flounces after Hiro and Tomo-chan.
Tomo-chan thinks that she’s the weirdest girl in the whole wide world.
~~~~~
“This is all your fault!” Shigeru-chan declares imperiously to Hiro later, when the three of them are waiting in the hallway for their turn to go into the principal’s office.
“It’s your fault!” Hiro shoots back on instinct. “If you weren’t such a know-it-all all the time then maybe I wouldn’t want to pull your hair.”
“Maybe you wouldn’t want to pull my hair if you did your homework and stopped using me as an excuse to distract yourself from the real problem here, which is clearly the inferiority complex you’ve developed ever since you realized how stupid you really are,” she shoots back, and Tomo-chan blinks because he thinks there were words in there that are too big for kids their age to know.
A moment.
Then Tomo-chan holds up his hand.
“What?” she asks when he does, and it sounds like she’s snapping.
He smiles. “I’m Tomo,” he says to her, and points to himself.
She sighs in a long-suffering sort of way. “I know that,” she tells him, “I saw you introduce yourself when you came here, stupid.”
Tomo’s smile fades. “Oh,” he says, and Hiro laughs at him because he has a stupid look on his face now.
As for Shigeru-chan (who Hiro informs Tomo-chan is an elite princess), she doesn’t pay him any attention for the rest of the day.
No matter how hard he tries to get her to.
~~~~~
In the following weeks Tomo-chan tries to get on Shigeru-chan’s good side by always doing his homework and studying for tests (because those seem to be her two favorite things in the world); on the day of his first spelling exam he beats her score by one point and is so proud that he runs up to her with the paper in hand and says, “Look, Shigeru-chan!”
She stops short when she sees the score on his test, makes an odd expression, and then turns around and storms off muttering in disbelief to herself.
Hiro blinks when he sees and grins at Tomo-chan. “I’ve never seen her do that before!” he whoops, “And I’ve known her for our whole lives!”
Tomo-chan wonders what he did wrong this time.
~~~~~
When he and Shigeru-chan (as the two top students in the class) both get elected to hall monitor duty together, Tomo-chan smiles at her and says they should do their best as a team.
“Are you making fun of me?” she asks after a second, and Tomo-chan realizes that she hasn’t stopped looking at the class ranking chart since the new results got posted today.
“No, I don’t think so,” he replies eventually, when he isn’t sure what she means. He thinks their names look nice together, both tied for the number one spot.
Her shoulders slump and she tells him to go take out the trash.
~~~~~
All of the other girls in class seem to like Tomo-chan more than Shigeru-chan does; they come up to him and ask him to play house and be the daddy or they ask him if they think they’re cute and what kinds of girls he likes.
He always answers them politely and as well as he can and thinks that girls in the city sure are different from girls in the country, because he can never tell what they’re thinking here.
Hiro throws his hands up over his head whenever Tomo-chan talks about it and simply says, “You don’t know the half of it!”
~~~~~
Shigeru-chan, Tomo-chan discovers, is really, really smart.
She is, however, very, very bad at sports.
He watches her at the three-legged race with her mother on sports day, as she falls before the second step has even been taken.
She spills out on the ground and pulls her mother down with her too; the two of them covered in dirt and looking very surprised.
Tomo-chan laughs because he can’t help it; even when it’s like that, he realizes he still likes the face she makes, maybe even more than the one she makes when she’s mad at Hiro.
~~~~~
“Hiro,” Tomo-chan begins one day during lunch, as the two of them are sitting under the shade of a tree in the school yard, sipping their milk from the cartons. “Do you think Shigeru-chan wants to be friends with me?”
Hiro blinks. “Probably not,” he reasons after a minute, “since she thinks you’re a weirdo. She told me yesterday when we walked home.”
Tomo-chan frowns. “You walked home together?” he asks, and sounds more upset about that than the fact that he got called a weirdo.
“Well we’re neighbors so yeah,” Hiro replies, like that should be obvious.
Tomo-chan, however, is very troubled by this. “Did you have to cross a street?”
“Yes. Two.”
“…did you hold hands?”
“Just like they tell us to in class,” Hiro confirms, around a grin. “I do pay attention sometimes.”
A moment.
Then, “Hiro, can I come over to your house after school today?”
~~~~~
“Why is he here?” Shigeru-chan asks when Hiro jogs up to her at the front gate with Tomo-chan in tow.
“He’s hanging out at my house today,” Hiro explains plainly. “We’re going to read Astro Boy together.”
Shigeru-chan sighs. “I can’t believe I’m losing to him,” she mutters darkly to herself, and starts walking ahead of the boys.
Tomo-chan lengthens his stride to catch up, and right when they get to the first crosswalk, has his hand out and ready for holding while he looks left, then right, then left again. “It’s safe!” he declares after a beat, and thinks his heart is beating a lot faster all of a sudden.
“Oh ew,” Shigeru-chan says, but grudgingly takes both Tomo-chan and Hiro’s hands with her own as they cross.
Tomo-chan thinks it is the best street he has ever crossed.
~~~~~
On Valentine’s Day that year, when Shigeru-chan grudgingly presents Tomo-chan and Hiro with obligation chocolates that her mom made her make, Tomo-chan eats every last piece even though he doesn’t particularly like chocolate.
He gets a bunch of other chocolate from the other girls in class that day (Hiro says it’s because he’s the school’s number one most popular boy), but doesn’t particularly want any of it because he’s already had more than enough chocolate for the whole year at that point. When he moves to throw the extra packages away, Shigeru-chan gives him a withering look, says that she’s only ever giving Hiro chocolates again, and flounces off looking like a superior human being.
Tomo-chan thinks twice about the chocolates after that; he spends the entire rest of the term finishing them off, one piece at a time every day until summer vacation.
~~~~~
During summer vacation, Tomo-chan finds every excuse he possibly can to go over and hang out at Hiro’s house, be it Astro Boy, summer homework, or the fact that he promised Hiro’s mom that he’d help pull weeds with Hiro in the front yard.
Shigeru-chan can see them from her window and often peeks out of it and shakes he head at them; “You’re doing it all wrong!” she tells them, nose wrinkled. “Get the roots, the roots!”
“Stop nagging woman!” Hiro shouts in reply, and earns a scandalized look before Shigeru-chan shuts the window with a huff.
Hiro grins and falls back onto the ground in relief. “That always works when my dad says it too,” Hiro explains in satisfaction. “Though afterwards he always has to apologize and buy something nice, but he says it’s worth it to get her to shut up for a while.”
It doesn’t work with Shigeru-chan though, because three seconds later she is storming out of her house and promising to go tell what Hiro just said to Hiro’s mom.
“I’m sorry! I’ll give you a marble!” Hiro says quickly, and subdues her for a while.
The three of them end up spending the afternoon on the front lawn catching grasshoppers together instead (though Shigeru-chan isn’t very good at it); Tomo-chan thinks that he wouldn’t mind spending his whole life in days like this, comfortable in Hiro’s laughter and Shigeru-chan’s complaints.
~~~~~
One day in the late summer, when Tomo-chan comes to visit, Hiro is sitting on his front porch with his head hanging; he isn’t smiling like he usually is.
Even worse, Shigeru-chan is sitting next to him, sobbing her eyes out and hitting Hiro on the arm.
“You can’t just go!” she wails, and sounds horribly betrayed somehow.
“I have to go,” he sighs, and lets her hit him.
Tomo-chan is confused. “What’s wrong?” he asks, and fights back a strange urge to apologize to Shigeru-chan, even though he’s fairly certain he isn’t the one making her cry.
“Hiro’s moving!” she shouts, and stands and kicks Hiro in the shin once before running back to her house next door.
Tomo-chan blinks. “You’re moving?”
A small smile. “Yeah. The company my dad and Shigeru-chan’s dad works for transferred my family,” he explains, looking on the verge of tears himself. “Because Dad says they opened another branch overseas.”
“Oh,” Tomo-chan murmurs.
“I leave next week.”
“Oh,” Tomo-chan says again, and doesn’t know what else to do.
“Hey Tomo-chan,” Hiro starts after a minute, and looks kind of embarrassed, “can I tell you a secret?”
Tomo-chan sits down next to him on the porch. “Sure,” he says.
Hiro looks around to make sure no one else is listening, then lowers his voice. “Shigeru-chan is the only girl I’ve ever liked, so when I’m gone, you have to take care of her for me, okay?”
Tomo-chan’s eyes get wide. “Liked? Like…like?”
Hiro turns a little pink and nods. “She’s mad at me and she says she won’t talk to me ever again, but tell her that I’ll come back for her, okay?” He scratches his head. “I’m stupid just like she says, but tell her I promise that I’ll come back a great man.”
“Oh,” Tomo-chan manages eventually, when he doesn’t know what to say all over again.
Hiro looks troubled; probably far too troubled for someone who is only six and a half years old. “Do you think she’ll wait for me?”
Tomo-chan swallows. “Yeah,” he says after what feels like a very long time. “I think she will.”
Hiro smiles. “You have to take care of her while I’m gone, okay? She’s afraid of spiders and big dogs and high places, so make sure you’re there with her if those things are around. You promise?”
Tomo-chan swallows. “I promise.”
Somehow, Hiro looks relieved.
Tomo-chan goes home early that night, with a great weight on his shoulders.
When his mother asks him what’s wrong, he tells her that his chest mysteriously started hurting.
~~~~~
At the end of the summer after his seventh birthday, Tomo-chan’s best friend moves away and his first love comes to an end because of a promise between men.
He thinks to himself that it’s been a year where he’d had to grow up a lot more than he’d planned to.
~~~~~
4. Hymn for the Hopeless: Ai Nante
“Yamashita-sensei,” a nurse says, approaching him with a chart and a look of regret on her face. “We don’t know what’s wrong with him.”
Yamashita-sensei, tired and moody and starting to feel the beginnings of a massive migraine forming somewhere in the back of his skull, pauses to blink at her. “Him?” he asks, lost for a moment.
“Yuya-kun,” she clarifies. “Patient 9.”
Yamashita-sensei runs the number through his head. “The one who collapsed suddenly from a headache,” he murmurs, and takes the chart from her. “How is he?”
“He seems fine for the time being,” she admits, “which is why it’s so puzzling that he just collapsed like that, when he’d felt perfectly healthy just a few moments before. I think he wants to see you.”
Yamashita-sensei furrows his brow. “I guess we should check this out, just to be safe,” he admits after a beat, and heads down the hall towards the room with the scared teenager inside of it.
When he opens the door and lays eyes on his patient for the first time, he’s a little bit surprised.
“You’re really eighteen?” he asks, looking at what seems to be a fifteen-year-old teenager on the bed skeptically.
A small, vaguely terrified smile in response. “You’re really a doctor?”
Yamashita-sensei blinks. “Fair enough. What seems to be the problem?” he asks, as he skims the patient’s chart.
“I was kinda hoping you could tell me,” Yuya-kun admits, clearly trying to be brave (and failing) as he glances down at the IV drip in his arm.
Yamashita-sensei continues to go over the mysterious charts before perfunctorily examining the patient’s eyes and the back of his throat, touching his lymph nodes and listening to his heartbeat. “We’ll run some tests,” he says after a minute after he finds nothing out of the ordinary. He’s confident that it’s nothing to worry about, that it’s just the summer heat. The young are strong, after all; even if they get sick they bounce right back a few days later.
“Am I going to be okay?” Yuya-kun asks, eyes looking up at Yamashita-sensei with all this hope and fear.
Yamashita- sensei nods perfunctorily, and is already thinking about his next patient, the elderly woman down the hall with the wet cough. “We’ll run some tests,” he repeats, and then turns around and heads out the door.
He passes the chart back to one of the nurses and doesn’t think about Yuya-kun anymore, for the rest of the day.
~~~~~
“Sensei,” the same nurse from before asks Yamashita-sensei the next day, cornering him as he stands in front of one of the small clinic’s fans that afternoon, trying to avoid the sticky summer heat, “Sensei, Yuya-kun is asking for you again.”
Yamashita-sensei blinks, wipes sweat from his forehead. “Yuya-kun?”
She sighs. “Patient 9.”
He furrows his brow. “Oh,” he recalls, after a moment, “The kid.” Pause. “Did his tests come back?”
She hands him the chart. “All negative.”
He blinks. “How is he doing?”
She looks terribly sad. “Not well.”
Yamashita-sensei tucks the chart under his arm and goes to see his patient.
~~~~~
“There are other tests we can run,” Yamashita-sensei explains to Yuya-kun when he’s seated at the younger man’s bedside, taking in the increasingly gray pallor of his skin, the listlessness of his eyes. “We’ll find out what’s wrong and order the medicine. A shipment via courier from the city can’t take more than a few days.”
Yuya-kun is clearly very scared, but manages a small smile all the same. “Sensei,” he begins softly, “will I be okay?”
Yamashita-sensei sits up straighter, finishes counting his patient’s pulse. “You’ll be okay,” he says, with certainty.
Yuya-kun nods. “If sensei says so, I believe it.”
Yamashita-sensei smiles back, without knowing he’s doing it. “Right,” he says confidently, “believe.”
He gets up and goes to attend his other patients shortly thereafter, telling himself that people so young don’t just die from mysterious things like this; not in this modern day in age, not with the influx of western knowledge and medical advancements and technological accomplishment in this post-war era.
Yamashita-sensei remembers seeing a movie for the first time the other day, at the new theater down the block; he thinks that if the world can accomplish something so profound for the sake of entertainment, then there is no end to what they can do for the sake of saving a life.
He’s confident that there is nothing to worry about.
~~~~~
The next morning, when Yamashita-sensei does his rounds, he finds Yuya-kun’s mother in the room with her son; she looks up when he comes into the room and her gaze is accusatory. “Why isn’t he getting better?” she demands, voice shrill.
Yamashita-sensei stays calm, moves to explain that it’s because they still don’t know what’s wrong with him yet.
But Yuya-kun talks first, smiling and taking his mother’s hand confidently. “Kaasan,” he soothes, “Kaasan, Yamashita-sensei says I’ll be fine. He’s a very good doctor, ne. The best in the world.”
She sighs under his expression and takes his hand. “How do you feel?” she asks, and decides to pay attention to her son rather than the doctor who isn’t helping him.
“Better,” he tells her, though Yamashita-sensei can tell it’s a blatant lie, one told naturally around a bright smile and gentle eyes. “I’m feeling much better today, kaasan.”
She leaves the hospital some time later, with a promise to bring her son some of his favorite homemade foods tomorrow, when she comes again.
Yamashita-sensei sees to Yuya-kun afterwards, and tells him that they still don’t know what’s wrong, but that he looks much better today, like he has more energy.
“I do,” Yuya-kun tells him, like if he says it enough it will start to come true. “Sensei is working very hard, ne.”
Yamashita-sensei takes his temperature, hand brushing across his forehead gently, against soft hair and hot, clammy skin. “So are you,” he admits, when he realizes how hard Yuya-kun is working to try and believe in him. “I’ll do my best to help you,” he promises.
Yuya-kun smiles in that undefeatable way of his. “I know.”
That day, it is the first time Yamashita-sensei has ever stayed in one of his patient’s rooms for a little while after the initial examination is done just to chat; he finds out that Yuya-kun likes dogs and taking walks and that he’s never been in love, but would like to be one day, with a nice girl who sings well and gets embarrassed when you watch her eat.
“I think that’s a nice dream,” Yamashita-sensei finds himself saying, when he hears about Yuya-kun’s life.
“Has sensei ever been in love?” Yuya-kun asks, as Yamashita-sensei wipes the sweat from his forehead.
Yamashita-sensei frowns when he hears the question. “No,” he finally admits, when he thinks about it. “Not really.”
A small laugh. “Eh, really? That seems hard to believe, ne.”
Yamashita-sensei wonders why he’s never felt lonely about it until the tired eyes of a sickly child stopped to ask him about it.
“Ah, it’s because sensei is working hard all the time like this,” Yuya-kun murmurs eventually, and it almost sounds apologetic. “He’s a hero.”
“You should rest,” is all Yamashita-sensei says in response, though before he leaves, he does reach out-tentatively-to pat Yuya-kun’s head. “And let me get back to work, so I can help you get better.”
“Believe?” Yuya-kun says, as his eyes flutter closed.
“Believe,” Yamashita-sensei replies.
~~~~~
“We don’t know what’s wrong,” the other doctors on staff admit some days later, when Yamashita-sensei has called in every favor he has to try and solve Yuya-kun’s mysterious illness.
“Modern medicine just hasn’t come far enough,” one of the older doctors sighs, looking wistful. “There’s still so much we don’t know that keeps us from saving people.”
“Please don’t say that,” Yamashita-sensei says. “This patient is still alive.”
“Not if we don’t come up with something soon,” a young resident points out, as he looks over the charts and clucks disapprovingly. “I’d say he’s got a week left at best, not counting Sunday.”
Yamashita-sensei takes back Yuya-kun’s charts and leaves the meeting wondering if he had ever been like those other doctors are being like now. He can’t remember.
~~~~~
Over the course of the next few days, Yuya-kun has trouble breathing. Yamashita-sensei sits at his bedside for a whole hour after the examination is done and talks to him because Yuya-kun can’t really talk himself. He says a lot of nothing but he thinks he can see that his patient appreciates it.
Afterwards, when Yuya-kun is asleep, Yamashita-sensei stands in the hallway and gets screamed at and hit by Yuya-kun’s sobbing mother.
All he can do is apologize.
~~~~~
On Saturday night of that week, Yamashita-sensei has to tell Yuya-kun’s mother that her son is going to die.
She looks like she is going to scream again, like she is going to hit him again, but before she can Yuya-kun takes her hand and squeezes it and says, “Kaasan, sensei has been working hard for my sake all this time.”
Yamashita-sensei thinks he would have preferred the screaming and the hitting again, because he can deal with that, can deal with a reaction like that better than what he’s feeling now, that incredulous sense of wondering what he’s done-what he possibly could have done-for Yuya-kun that could inspire such unconditional faith.
He leaves the room before he can think about it too much.
~~~~~
Early on Monday morning, when Yuya-kun’s mother has fallen asleep in the hallway outside of his room, Yamashita-sensei slips in to see his patient, before his shift begins.
Yuya-kun is wide awake and dying.
“Sensei,” he says, voice weak, “good morning.”
“I’ll wake your mother,” Yamashita-sensei says, hands fisted at his sides. “She should be…”
“She just fell asleep, ne,” Yuya-kun murmurs. “She hasn’t slept a lot.”
“But…”
A small smile. “I’m glad I have such a kind doctor, ne.”
Yamashita-sensei stands obediently by Yuya-kun’s bed. “Is there anything I can do?” he asks, out of habit.
A small laugh. “Sensei is always working hard, even when he doesn’t have to, ne,” Yuya-kun murmurs, and Yamashita-sensei wants to tell him it wasn’t enough but there isn’t time.
The last word on Yuya-kun’s lips that morning is, “Believe.” It’s all he has left to say before he dies smiling, in his hospital bed while a stranger who he’d put too much unfounded faith in stands by watching.
Yamashita-sensei stays in the room long after Yuya-kun is gone and thinks that if he didn’t know any better, it looks like he is asleep, perfectly at peace.
“Believe,” he murmurs to himself around something almost like tears.
He leaves the room and wonders if it was all worth caring so much just to have it come to this.
~~~~~
The following week, when a middle-aged woman with no family is admitted to the hospital he examines her just like he always does with any of his patients, calmly and professionally and as quickly as possible.
But this time he pauses before he’s about to turn around and head out the door; he hears something like “Sensei is always working hard,” in the back of his mind and before he knows what he’s doing, he turns around and takes a seat.
“Koizumi-san,” he asks her, when she looks at him in surprise, “what kind of hobbies do you have?”
He thinks that maybe it’s time to start earning his praise.
~~~~~
5. War March: Kimi Omou Yoru
Ryo comes to the dojo a scant few months after Tomohisa does; they become sparring partners when sensei sees Ryo’s determination and Tomohisa’s skills. “You two,” he tells them on the day when they first lay eyes on each other, “can serve the country better by learning from each other.”
Tomohisa doesn’t understand what that means exactly, but ever since he was old enough to understand the meaning of the words, he has pledged his life to the emperor and the protection of the country. As such he does as he is told without thinking about it very much, knowing that his body is nothing more than an instrument of the emperor, a tool to be used to the emperor’s will. If his instructors feel that he can better serve this purpose by fighting with someone much smaller and weaker than himself, then it is only as they say.
Ryo on the other hand, doesn’t consider it very fair at all and every time he is certain that sensei isn’t listening, he rails about how unjust it is to be put with such a featureless, boring person day in and day out.
Tomohisa bears his complaints silently (he supposes that perhaps it is just a characteristic of those from the country) and searches for the thing in Ryo that sensei wants him to learn. He can understand why working together is advantageous to Ryo in that he catches up to Tomohisa’s level very quickly by necessity, and before long Tomohisa can even consider them rivals.
“Your form is reckless,” he comments to Ryo one day some months into their training, after a particularly intense session between the two of them that had ended in a draw.
“You’re boring,” Ryo replies as he gasps for air, stretched out on the floor staring up at the ceiling. Then, eventually, he sighs and sits up. “Where’d I mess up?”
Tomohisa explains exactly where and in exactly what moment, and once Ryo acknowledges it, he very tentatively asks, “What makes me boring?”
Ryo snorts in laughter and says, “Your sword is.”
Tomohisa doesn’t know how to respond to that.
~~~~~
“Think about the thing that moves you to fight,” sensei tells all of his students in the school one afternoon, as he sits, old and wizened on the tatami in front of them. “Your motivation is the soul of your skill; its purity will strengthen your blade and move you forward.”
That afternoon, Tomohisa thinks of nothing but dying for the sake of his ruler.
He loses every single match he has that day, and when his shinai snaps against Ryo’s in the final hour of practice, Ryo dodges the splintered pieces of wood and looks at Tomohisa tellingly again. “Your sword is boring,” he repeats, and goes to clean up for supper.
Tomohisa looks down at the broken shards of his shinai and wonders if his intentions somehow make him weak.
~~~~~
That night, for the first time since he was born, since his father died a general in battle and his mother did not shed a tear because it was his duty, Tomohisa thinks about being a tool of the emperor.
From the bedroll beside his, he hears Ryo writing something by candlelight, hastily scribbling a letter to someone somewhere even though they were to be asleep ten minutes ago.
“Nishikido-san,” Tomohisa begins reluctantly after a moment, because he can’t help himself when he thinks about how badly he’d been beaten today, “can I ask you something?”
There is a pause in the writing. Then, a slightly surprised, “You do realize you’re breaking the rules by talking to me right now, right?”
Tomohisa looks embarrassed. “Yes.”
Ryo grins. “Ask away.”
“What makes you fight?”
Silence.
“Nishikido-san?”
“Just Ryo,” the older boy snaps.
“Ryo…kun,” Tomohisa adds, when he can’t help it.
Ryo sighs. “You can’t tell anyone I told you this,” he says after a moment, very seriously.
Tomohisa promises. Solemnly.
Ryo holds out the letter to him, almost finished now. “I have a friend,” he says, looking kind of embarrassed in the candlelight.
Tomohisa takes the letter, eyes wide as he reads the address. “Dear Hiroki-kun…”
“Well don’t just read it,” Ryo snaps hastily, “I was just showing you in general, okay?” He quickly snatches the paper back. “But yeah.”
“Is he a great warrior?” Tomohisa asks.
Ryo nearly laughs out loud. “He’s a princess,” the older boy tells him flatly.
“Eh? Really?”
Ryo looks at Tomohisa like he’s stupid. “He’s studying to be a calligrapher,” Ryo explains eventually, when it looks like most of what he is saying is going right over Tomohisa’s head. “He’s always been kind of sick, but when we were little he said it was his dream if he could be a great samurai one day, like his grandfather.”
“So you’re doing it for him, because he can’t.”
“That’s not it,” Ryo says. “Let me finish, would you?”
Tomohisa apologizes.
“One winter he got really sick and everyone thought he was going to die. He got better eventually, but after that he was so weak he could barely go outside anymore,” Ryo continues, looking down at the letter without seeing it. “So his grandfather gave up on him becoming a great warrior and now he’s up at the emperor’s court, studying calligraphy every day and being bored out of his mind.”
Tomohisa doesn’t follow. “So the reason you fight is because…”
“Because he’s in the emperor’s court, you idiot,” Ryo tells him, looking embarrassed at having to say it out loud. “I know you’re set on serving the emperor and dying in the line of duty and protecting your country and all that, but there’s only one thing in this world I want to protect.”
Tomohisa finally gets it. “Oh.”
Ryo nods. “If anyone wants to attack us, I’ll die before I let them get past those gates.”
When he hears it put like that, Tomohisa knows that it is selfish and childish goes against everything that he was raised to believe, everything that he has been training for his whole life.
But when he looks at Ryo’s face-and the resolve there-when he talks about it, when he says things about defending the court not for king and country but for a sickly calligrapher within its walls, Tomohisa can’t help but feel like he is in the presence of the most formidable swordsman in the country.
He remembers what sensei said this morning, about the purity of what moves you.
He wonders if he will be able to find motivation that will make his blade anywhere near as strong as Ryo’s.
~~~~~
He finds it unexpectedly one day some time later, right in front of his face.
It’s another night when he’s pretending not to notice Ryo still up, writing another long letter by candlelight in the dead of winter, when it’s cold and he seems more worried than usual. Tomohisa thinks he’s worried about Hiroki-kun’s health, about whether he’s doing alright and if the pressures of court living aren’t making it hard on him.
That night Tomohisa sneaks a look out of the corner of his eye and sees Ryo the most serious he’s ever seen him, brow furrowed as he hunches, shivering, over the letter in the night air, determinedly finishing it off, telling Hiroki-kun about how hard he’s working and how strong he’s becoming each day.
Tomohisa finds himself thinking, “I want Ryo-kun’s dream to come true. I want to help him become strong so that he can protect what is important to him.”
The next day, during morning practice, sensei takes Tomohisa aside and smiles. “Yamashita-kun,’ he says gently, “Yamashita-kun, I can feel the power behind your blade now. Use it well.”
“I will,” Tomohisa promises, and won’t ever let himself be anything less than the rival Ryo deserves.
~~~~~
“Something’s different,” Ryo admits later that week, when he’s disarmed and laid out flat on his back, looking incredulously up at Tomohisa for the fifth time in so many days. “I can’t figure it out, but something’s different,” he breathes.
Tomohisa lets himself smile a little and reaches out to help Ryo up. “You’re losing,” he says, plainly.
Ryo snorts and ignores the hand up by stubbornly smacking it away and getting up on his own. “And you’re smiling,” he rejoins. “The world is clearly ending.”
But Tomohisa can tell Ryo isn’t really mad because Ryo is kind of smiling back.
~~~~~
In the years that follow the two of them climb the ranks quickly, working hard to outdo each other and encourage each other and push each other forward; sensei looks at the two of them and tells all of his students that no one ever grew strong for the sake of themselves.
In the midst of battle during first fight as officers of the Shinsengumi some years later, Tomohisa saves Ryo’s life.
Ryo saves his twice and has a fit yelling at him to be more careful afterwards.
Tomohisa promises him that he will be.
~~~~~
That care gets them noticed by the generals years later, and before long they invited into the walls of the court to be presented by their sensei as two promising youths who will serve the future of the country well.
The look in Ryo’s eyes- the anticipation of seeing an old friend and the pride at having worked hard to get this opportunity- is enough to make Tomohisa’s heart beat faster too, even though he has no concept of Hiroki-san, even if he has no ties with him beyond the one they share with Ryo.
When Yamapi lays eyes on Hiroki-san for the first time-tall and pale and much stronger than Ryo led him to believe, if the way he smirks at Ryo tells him anything-Yamapi thinks he wants to become the strongest general in the world, if only to get to see the two of them chatter cattily to each other forever just like they are now, for the rest of his life.
“I think,” Hiroki declares late that night, when everyone is a little bit drunk and very happy, “that your friend has a crush on us.”
Ryo blinks back at him blearily. “Us? You’re an idiot. He has no reason to like you.”
Tomohisa is concentrating too hard on putting one foot in front of the other to argue either way.
~~~~~
The following morning, when they are presented to the court, an old, stern-looking general gives them each a once over and proclaims them to be fit, if not particularly impressive.
“We will do everything in our power,” Tomohisa vows, “to protect the walls of this palace.”
“They have good eyes,” the general acquiesces eventually, and dismisses them as satisfactory. “Continue to train our country’s youths successfully in this manner, sensei,” he tells sensei next, and goes back to his meal, which he has much more interest in.
Sensei chuckles and bows and leads them away, glad that no one noticed that Nishikido-kun only looks so intent because he is hungover and has a headache.
“Did you learn something important in your time here?” Sensei asks them later, on the road back home.
“I drank too much,” Ryo complains.
“I learned something important here,” Tomohisa replies seriously.
Sensei laughs at them both. “Good, good. Keep your blades pure.”
Ryo throws up on the side of the road a little while later, and Tomohisa lets him lean on his shoulder for the rest of the day.
He thinks that he is glad to have Ryo in his life, just like Ryo is glad to have Hiroki-kun.
He’s sure it must be a great existence to be someone who is that precious to someone else.
~~~~~
Ryo dies two years later, in a battle that they had no hope of winning, defending the place he always said he would.
Tomohisa sees it the moment it happens, because when it does, it’s to save Tomohisa’s life.
“You idiot,” Ryo breathes as he staggers off of the end of his dead opponent’s sword, as he falls to the ground. “I told you to be more careful!”
“I’m sorry,” Tomohisa says automatically, and puts his hand over the wound because he doesn’t know what else to do. “I’m sorry; I’ll protect him for you. I promise I’ll protect him for you so…”
“Stupid,” Ryo mutters, and swats Tomohisa’s hand away from his chest, “Stupid, watch out for yourself first. You matter too, you stupid idiot.”
He dies just like that a moment, a breath, a second later, and Tomohisa has to get up and fight on and do what he promised afterwards, because for the longest time, Ryo has been the most important thing in his life.
~~~~~
Tomohisa dies a day after Ryo does, in that same battle, fighting for the only reason he could find worth dying for in all his years on this earth.
Tomohisa’s only regret is that he never got to tell Ryo what it was.
~~~~~
6. Reprise (Variations on a Theme): Hoshi wo Mezashite
When NewS is first formed, Yamapi resents it. He’s not sure why he does exactly, though there are plenty of people who are ready and willing to speculate on the matter for him.
As for himself, he can’t quite put his finger on it. It just feels like something is missing.
He doesn’t know why that’s annoying, it just is.
He thinks that maybe it’s because Koyama tries so hard even at the things he’s not good at, or because he’s a little jealous that Ryo and Uchi at least have each other no matter what, even though they have to work double time at a job that’s already so stressful; it might have something to do with how Massu always seems to be smiling stupidly when there’s no reason to and how Kusano always has energy to do everything and talk to everyone even when Yamapi doesn’t. Maybe a part of it also comes from how subdued Shige is and how Tegoshi is so obviously scared but doing his best (and failing) to not let it show, calling Yamapi his hero all the time, saying that he looks up to Yamapi more than anything when Yamapi is fairly certain he hasn’t done anything to deserve that kind of praise.
Something bothers Yamapi about all of this; he just doesn’t know what yet.
“Something is definitely missing,” he tells Jin one afternoon, when it’s just the two of them at lunch.
“Your brain?” Jin offers, around a smirk. He successfully steals one of Yamapi’s sticks of yakitori.
Yamapi ignores him, furrowing his brow and resolved to think about it very carefully, until he figures it out. It bothers him too much just to let it go.
He ends up thinking about it for years.
He thinks about it through 2004, when there is uncomfortable silence and forced, painfully awkward laughter. He thinks about it through 2005 as well, when there is tentative peace and the very first outreach of an olive branch from Koyama’s hands.
He thinks about it after Uchi’s suspension and Kusano’s voluntary leave and through the long months of 2006 when he can’t see them anymore, when he isn’t sure if they’ll ever be a group again.
It isn’t until after the suspension that he thinks he’s starting to get it.
“Something is definitely missing,” he muses out loud to Jin one evening at the izakaya, when he is holding his drink and looking into the amber liquid like it holds all the answers to all the questions in the universe.
“Uh, your group?” Jin offers, around a glazed, slightly (very) drunken look. He snorts and laughs to himself at his own cleverness, knocking over a bowl full of edamame in the process and spilling empty peapods all over the table.
Yamapi blinks.
“Yeah,” he murmurs, looking intently at the edamame’s empty shells when he finally, finally understands. “I think that’s it.”
~~~~~
When NewS comes back, the first thing Yamapi tells the other members is, “This is our new beginning.”
The second thing he tells them is that he loves NewS a lot-more than he thought he ever would-and the moment he does, the moment he can admit it out loud for the first time and the other members can hear it laid out for them just like that, it’s like a huge weight has finally been lifted off of his chest. When he looks at them, he thinks that something just like it has been lifted from each of theirs as well.
“We’re fated,” he finds himself adding suddenly after a moment, without meaning to. “I think the six of us were fated to be together just like this.”
Koyama laughs and has to wipe tears from his eyes when he hears that, as the six of them huddle together in a tight circle backstage, during the final minutes before the very first of their NewS comeback concerts is supposed to start.
“Don’t cry, idiot!” Ryo immediately barks when he looks at a sobbing Koyama, and has to turn away so he won’t start too, muttering to himself in embarrassment as he hides behind Shige’s blush and Massu’s smile and Tegoshi’s elated laughter.
“Sorry! I’m sorry!” Koyama apologizes, though the tears keep streaming down anyway.
Yamapi just smiles. “I think…we’re exactly where we’re supposed to be now,” he finishes resolutely after a moment, while the others all quietly-happily- agree.
Somehow, it feels like the six of them have been waiting forever to hear those words.
End
From: peroxidepest17
HAPPY HOLIDAYS!
Title: NewS Medley (or Five Lifetimes Where Yamapi Falls In Love with NewS and One Lifetime Where he Finally Gets to Tell them Out Loud)
Pairing/Group: YamapixNewS (with the requisite appearance by Jin)
Rating: PG-13
Warnings: an unholy mix of genres ahead. And more OOC than you can shake a stick at. Maybe some death.
Notes: for yamapea and the je-holiday 2008 fic exchange. Special thanks to M and S for their last minute beta work and tough love. <3 My recipient said she liked AUs and genfic, which this kind of is, mostly. I hope you’ll forgive me for also including one of the things you DIDN’T want on your request list, but this is sort of just how it came out. If you hate it I will um, write you something new instead.
Summary: Yamapi learns to believe in fate.
1. Ginza Rhapsody: Mafuyuu no Nagareboshi
She is a star.
Or at least she has the makings of one. It’s what Mama tells Tomoyo whenever she looks at Tomoyo’s face, as the older woman smiles around the end of her elegant pipe and sees whatever part of herself from twenty-five years ago it is that she sees in Tomoyo now.
“One day, you’ll rule this town,” Mama tells Tomoyo confidently, as she cups Tomoyo’s chin in her white-gloved fingers and runs the pads over the rosy apples of Tomoyo’s cheeks. “You’ll be the top hostess in all of Japan, because you’re just like I was once, a long time ago. All you have to do to get there is do exactly what Mama says.”
“I will,” Tomoyo tells Mama very seriously, because she wants to be at the top, just like Mama tells her. “I believe in Mama.”
Mama laughs and there is a flicker of something in her eyes, a mixture of regret and anticipation and something else altogether. “There are three rules to being a successful hostess, Tomo-chan,” she tells Tomoyo as she empties her pipe into the fancy glass ashtray on the table in front of her, “only three very short, very sweet rules. It’s all quite simple.”
Tomoyo nods eagerly.
“One,” Mama begins, and reaches out to tug on Tomoyo’s ear, “always listen. The more you listen, the more you learn. The more you learn the more power you have. Power wins in this world.”
Tomoyo nods. “Always listen,” she repeats obediently, thinking to herself that Mama is very wise.
“Two,” Mama continues, satisfied with whatever it is she is seeing in Tomoyo’s expression, “refine your tastes. This isn’t a world for simple girls or small town girls, or girls who can’t tell the difference between a horse drawn cart and an imported Model-T.”
“Be refined,” Tomoyo repeats again. She takes a deep breath and throws away her small town past.
“And three, three is the most important rule of all, Tomo-chan. Are you listening?”
“Yes, Mama.”
Mama’s eyes darken then, and Tomoyo can see that hint of regret again, somewhere deep down. “Never fall in love. As cliché and stupid as it might sound in this day and age, it’s also the most important thing for you to remember, Tomo-chan.”
For some reason, Tomoyo looks away from Mama when she hears that, for the very first time. She furrows her brow and glances down at her lap, where her hands are folded, fingers tight around each other. “Never fall in love,” she murmurs.
“Do you understand, Tomo-chan? I’m going to make you a star.”
Tomoyo takes another deep breath, before looking back up again, back at Mama, who has already given her so much. “Yes, I understand Mama,” she says. “Don’t fall in love.”
Mama nods and stands, adjusting her shawl around her shoulders. “You’ll be a star, Tomo-chan. I can feel it.” She leaves the room with big plans for Tomoyo’s future.
Tomoyo is left sitting on the plush couch of Ginza’s top hostess club all alone; she looks at her fingers again, clenched around each other tightly. “Be a star,” she tells herself, and engraves Mama’s words into her heart.
~~~~~
He comes to the club for the first time exactly one month after Tomoyo has become a star.
He’s awkward and fumbling and bows every few minutes, for dropping something, for saying something weird, for not being more attentive to his senpai.
He’s a loser.
That’s what his boss scoffs that first night, when he is drunk and displeased with Koyama, Koyama the rookie who doesn’t know what he’s doing, who messes up orders, who forgets important messages and can’t fight to save his life.
“I’m sorry!” Koyama says earnestly when he hears, and bows again, the hundredth time in a row. “I’ll try harder, Boss!”
“Do you hear that, Tomo-chan?” the boss says, red in the face and glaring. “My no good excuse for an underling is apologizing. If you’re so sorry cut off your own finger in repentance!”
Koyama looks pale at the order, but after a moment, swallows. “H-hai!” he says, and bows again, “I’m sorry, Boss!”
Tomoyo makes a horrified noise. “Ezaki-kun,” she breathes, “please don’t make him do that, I’d feel just awful.”
Ezaki eyes her. Manages a smile. “Don’t let this loser worry you, Tomo-chan,” he tells her, voice sweet again when he sees her pretty face.
She smiles back, touches him on the cheek gently. “Then promise me you won’t do such a horrible thing to this poor guy, ne? I was a beginner once before too, you know. If Mama didn’t forgive all my mistakes when I started, I definitely wouldn’t be here with you now.”
Ezaki-san lets something a lot like a giggle escape his lips when she touches him, and after a moment, rests his head on her shoulder, a much tamer yakuza in the capable hands of Ginza’s number one rookie. “If you say so, Tomo-chan,” he twitters, and orders Koyama to get them more wine. The good stuff.
“H-hai!” Koyama says, and as he turns to go, gives Tomoyo the most genuine look of appreciation she has ever seen. Thanks, he mouths to her as he scurries off, and makes her smile back without knowing she’s doing it.
~~~~~
She watches him carry his unconscious boss out of the club later, bowing in apology (again) for the ruckus their presence has caused tonight as he leaves.
“That boy isn’t meant to be a yakuza,” Mama tsks after they’re gone, and shakes her head. “He isn’t the type.”
“What type is he, Mama?” Tomoyo asks, because she can’t help it.
Mama casually blows out a mouthful of smoke and dumps the ash from her pipe. “He’s the type decent girls take home to their parents,” she chuckles, before turning around and heading back inside. “Not the kind we see here often, Tomo-chan.”
~~~~~
But they see him often, because Tomo-chan is his boss’s favorite and according to his boss, Koyama is only good when you use him as a designated driver.
And so she always ends up sitting across from Koyama week in and week out, as he looks on attentively, as he tries hard and sometimes messes up and always, unfailingly, smiles as he carries Ezaki-san out of the club at the end of the night, bowing to Mama in apology for the noise or the spills or the rudeness.
Whenever Tomoyo meets his eyes, he smiles back at her, big and genuine and goofy. “Thank you for always taking such good care of Boss,” he tells her sometimes, on his way out the door.
“Thank you for always coming,” she replies automatically, except she means it this time.
~~~~~
Tomoyo realizes she is in love on her birthday.
Her admirers all come to see her with gifts or send gifts by post because they’re far away leading glamorous lives; she gets diamonds and gold and roses and beautiful clothes coming for her in box after box after box, until the other girls start to complain that there’s no space anymore, until Mama has to laugh and start turning away deliveries.
Ezaki-san comes that night as well, and scares off all of her other visitors because he is at the top of the suitor food-chain. He brings an enormous diamond necklace and earring set for her and orders two bottles of the house’s most expensive wine to commemorate the occasion.
Koyama isn’t with him.
“Where’s your driver?” Tomoyo finds herself asking, lip daintily poised at the top of her glass and doing her best not to sound disappointed.
“Running an errand,” he tells her, “finally earning his goddamned keep. He’ll show up when I’m ready for him to. Do you like your presents, Tomo-chan?”
She manages a smile thanks him for the gifts again; she even lets him put the necklace on her, and it weighs her down like a chain for the rest of the night.
When Ezaki-san finally passes out it is 11:49pm.
It is 11:56pm when Koyama comes racing up the stairs and through the door, a slightly limp bouquet of pink carnations clutched in his hand as he glances at his watch.
“I’m sorry I’m late!” he apologizes quickly, bowing to the whole club before looking embarrassed and hurrying to Ezaki-san’s booth.
Tomoyo’s eyebrows jump a little when she sees him up close, his suit disheveled and a little dirty, a small bruise on the side of his face and his lip bleeding from the corner. “Koyama-kun,” she greets, and when he smiles back at her with his whole heart she can’t help but do the same.
“Um, these are for you!” he says after a moment, awkwardly. “They were…livelier at the beginning of the night, but then Ezaki-san sent me off on this last minute thing, and these guys kept trying to hit me and… well.” He thrusts the bouquet of carnations at her shyly and looks at his watch again. “Just in time, ne.”
She blinks at them.
He fidgets. Realizes he must look idiotic. “I know it’s not uh, you know… and you probably got a lot of fancier things ne. And hahaha these are already dying…”
She takes them from him before he can retract the offer, fingers brushing lightly against his hand. “Thank you.”
He turns a little red. “Uh… happy birthday.”
She turns a little red too, surprisingly. “Do you want some ice?”
He blinks. “Eh?”
She laughs. “For your face. Are you okay?”
He looks sheepish. “Oh. I’m okay. Just um, you know. Just business. I should…” he indicates Ezaki-san, who is lolling stupidly on the couch, scratching his belly in his sleep and moaning Tomoyo’s name.
She nods, and holds the flowers to her chest. “Right. Thank you, again, for the present.”
He turns redder somehow, and bows, as is his custom. “Thank you for taking care of Boss,” he says again, and quickly moves to gather Ezaki-san up because he can’t look her in the eye anymore.
“Sorry for the trouble!” he adds to Mama somewhere by the doorway, and manages to bow clumsily with his much larger, much heavier Boss slung over his shoulder.
The moment when Tomoyo finds herself laughing after him with a limp bouquet of pink carnations in hand is the moment that she first realizes she’s in love.
~~~~~
She never gets the chance to tell anyone.
The next week, when Ezaki-san comes he comes alone and already drunk, arm in a sling and looking nowhere near the proud gang leader that she’s known all this time.
“What’s wrong?” she asks right away, forgetting herself for a moment.
“That stupid son of a bitch,” Ezaki-san curses, and slams his good hand into one of the walls.
She jumps a little, startled, heart pounding in her chest. “Ezaki-san?”
“Fucking kid,” he hisses, “even after all these months he didn’t know what he was doing, he messed up orders, and never did learn how to fight properly.”
“Koyama-kun?” Tomoyo asks, “are you talking about Koyama-kun?”
“I knew the moment I laid eyes on him that no good little shit didn’t belong in the yakuza,” Ezaki-san spits, “didn’t know any of the right stuff. Couldn’t finish someone off even when they were trying to off him first. Couldn’t even throw a punch right. Even when everything was riding on it.”
For a moment, Tomoyo’s heart stops. “No…” she murmurs, “Ezaki-san you don’t mean…”
He slams his fist into the wall again, opens up another string of cuts along his knuckles. “Only thing the idiot learned after all these months working for us was how to take a knife for a no good, drunk old man. Stupid fucker!”
When Ezaki-san breaks down sobbing in the middle of Ginza’s number one hostess club that night, Tomoyo falls to her knees next to him and does the exact same thing.
Mama sees it, and shakes her head regretfully. “You could have been a star,” she whispers to Tomoyo afterwards, when she drops Tomoyo off at home at the end of the night. She reaches out and tenderly tucks a lock of hair behind Tomoyo’s ear, and when she does it like that, it feels a lot like goodbye. “Now all you can do is make a wish, before you hit the ground.”
Tomoyo silently gets out of the car.
She makes a wish.
~~~~~
2. Stranger’s Sonata: Minna ga Iru Sekai wo Hitotsu ni ai wo Motto Give & Take Shimashou
Their story ends before it even really has the chance to begin, in the middle of a fire when he is ten years old and sick at home, left alone after his sister and his mother had gone to fetch the doctor to see to him. He thinks that maybe the cat knocked over the candle his mother had left on for him in the corner when no one was looking, or that perhaps a demon had come to his home in the midst of his feverish nightmares and cursed him to die. Regardless of how he’d gotten there he is trapped and alone in the burning house when it happens, his cries for help growing steadily weaker as it becomes harder and harder to breathe.
It is just as his eyes are fluttering closed for what he thinks is the last time when something suddenly crashes in nearby and the crowd outside shouts collectively; before he knows it there is a hand on his face and he blinks, tries to open his eyes to see who it is, if it’s his mother or Rina or maybe that nice ojiisan who lives next door and gives him and Rina manju before dinner sometimes, when no one is looking.
As it turns out it isn’t any of those familiar people; it is a face of someone who he doesn’t know at all, the smiling countenance of a complete stranger who is suddenly picking him up in strong arms and saying, very gently, “It’s okay, ne. Don’t be afraid.”
He’s too weak to say anything much in response, so he uses all the strength he has left to grab a handful of the stranger’s sleeve instead. It earns him another bright smile, and before anything else can happen, his face is being pushed into the fabric of the beaten old haori, under which he can hear a steady, comforting heartbeat.
Another crash comes from somewhere nearby and the arms holding him tighten just a little, the heartbeat under his ears speeds up. His eyes hurt and it’s still hard to breathe and when he hears the sounds of the roof collapsing and the screams of the neighbors, he thinks that maybe he’s going to die after all, and that he’s going to take this nice stranger with him as well, without even knowing his name first.
The hand cupping the back of his head gives him a pat and he can hear the stranger whisper, “Everything will work out somehow,” before they’re suddenly moving, fast and hard straight for the burning sliding door.
The stranger jumps and they’re airborne for a moment, before rolling to the ground with a thud, his head still cupped protectively by the stranger’s arms.
Minutes later he’s gasping for fresh air, on the dirt in front of his burning home, still feverish and weak and on the verge of vomiting again.
“You’re okay now,” the stranger says, with another one of those undefeatable smiles, and before he can figure out what’s going on he’s passed along, into the arms of his sobbing mother and his panicky younger sister.
The last thing he hears are his mother’s grateful, “Thank yous” before he curls up against her shoulder and passes out, too tired to keep his eyes open anymore.
When he wakes up the following afternoon in one of the neighbor’s houses, he discovers that the mysterious stranger is long gone; he learns from Rina that the weird ojisan who saved him hadn’t said much about what happened afterwards but that he had smiled and declared that he liked their mother’s cooking very much. Rina says she’d been scared of him at first, because he had two big swords, but since he gave her manju before dinner when kaasan wasn’t looking, she likes him a lot.
“What was his name?” he asks her groggily. “Was he a samurai?”
Rina says she doesn’t know; she adds that she hopes niichan will get better soon and become strong again, so everyone will stop worrying about him.
He promises her that he will and tells her it’s because there is someone who he has to thank one day, when he finds him again.
She smiles obliviously at him and runs outside to tell their mother that he’s finally woken up.
~~~~~
3. Schoolyard Serenade: Kimi+Boku=Love
On his first day at his new school Tomo-chan is scared he won’t make any friends and that they’ll think he’s weird because he’s from the country; it lasts up until the moment when he introduces him and a kid in the back with crazy hair raises his hand and says, “Where I’m from, there are tanuki! Do you have those too?”
Tomo-chan smiles and says, “Un! Lots! And foxes too.”
The kid in the back grins and asks the teacher if they can sit together; his name is Hiro-kun and he was the last new kid in class, up until the moment Tomo-chan walked into the door.
“Let’s be friends!” Hiro declares as Tomo-chan sits down next to him, and the two of them spend the rest of the afternoon in their kindergarten class just like that, talking about the places they lived in before they came to live here and how great Astro Boy is.
“Hey,” Hiro murmurs secretively to Tomo-chan later that afternoon, when the teacher is reading to them from a colorful picture book. “Watch this…”
He reaches out towards the girl who is sitting in front of them-the one with the two cute pigtails peeking out from under her yellow cap- and pulls sharply on one of them.
“Ow!” she shouts when he does, and Hiro pulls back his hand quickly and bursts out laughing when she whirls around, glaring at them both.
“Hiro, stop that!” she complains, rubbing at her head and frowning. “I didn’t do anything to you!”
“Shigeru-chan,” the teacher says, stopping in the middle of the story and looking at the little girl with concern, “is something wrong?”
“Hiro is pulling my hair!” Shigeru-chan shouts right away, and even goes so far as to point a finger at Hiro in all her righteous indignation.
“I’m innocent!” Hiro proclaims, while Tomo-chan can’t say a word either way.
He’s not sure why exactly, but he thinks that the way Shigeru-chan’s bottom lip is quivering in anger might be one of the most impressive things he has ever seen in all his six years on this earth.
~~~~~
The next day, Tomo-chan is the one who pulls Shigeru-chan’s hair this time; she blames it on Hiro at first but he quickly declines and points to Tomo-chan and their poor, set-upon teacher cannot finish her duck-and-cover drill to save her life.
“Both of you, the principal’s office!” she declares, and sends Hiro and Tomo-chan both.
“But I didn’t do anything this time!” Hiro complains. “Really!”
“You’re going for being a bad example!” sensei tells him, and Shigeru looks superior from her seat as she crosses her arms and becomes smug and tells them both, “That’s what you get for being immature and disgusting.”
“Shigeru-chan! Don’t call names,” their sensei admonishes, and she ends up getting sent to the principal’s office too.
“I didn’t say anything that wasn’t true!” she protests, and sniffs and holds her head up in the hair prettily as she spins around and flounces after Hiro and Tomo-chan.
Tomo-chan thinks that she’s the weirdest girl in the whole wide world.
~~~~~
“This is all your fault!” Shigeru-chan declares imperiously to Hiro later, when the three of them are waiting in the hallway for their turn to go into the principal’s office.
“It’s your fault!” Hiro shoots back on instinct. “If you weren’t such a know-it-all all the time then maybe I wouldn’t want to pull your hair.”
“Maybe you wouldn’t want to pull my hair if you did your homework and stopped using me as an excuse to distract yourself from the real problem here, which is clearly the inferiority complex you’ve developed ever since you realized how stupid you really are,” she shoots back, and Tomo-chan blinks because he thinks there were words in there that are too big for kids their age to know.
A moment.
Then Tomo-chan holds up his hand.
“What?” she asks when he does, and it sounds like she’s snapping.
He smiles. “I’m Tomo,” he says to her, and points to himself.
She sighs in a long-suffering sort of way. “I know that,” she tells him, “I saw you introduce yourself when you came here, stupid.”
Tomo’s smile fades. “Oh,” he says, and Hiro laughs at him because he has a stupid look on his face now.
As for Shigeru-chan (who Hiro informs Tomo-chan is an elite princess), she doesn’t pay him any attention for the rest of the day.
No matter how hard he tries to get her to.
~~~~~
In the following weeks Tomo-chan tries to get on Shigeru-chan’s good side by always doing his homework and studying for tests (because those seem to be her two favorite things in the world); on the day of his first spelling exam he beats her score by one point and is so proud that he runs up to her with the paper in hand and says, “Look, Shigeru-chan!”
She stops short when she sees the score on his test, makes an odd expression, and then turns around and storms off muttering in disbelief to herself.
Hiro blinks when he sees and grins at Tomo-chan. “I’ve never seen her do that before!” he whoops, “And I’ve known her for our whole lives!”
Tomo-chan wonders what he did wrong this time.
~~~~~
When he and Shigeru-chan (as the two top students in the class) both get elected to hall monitor duty together, Tomo-chan smiles at her and says they should do their best as a team.
“Are you making fun of me?” she asks after a second, and Tomo-chan realizes that she hasn’t stopped looking at the class ranking chart since the new results got posted today.
“No, I don’t think so,” he replies eventually, when he isn’t sure what she means. He thinks their names look nice together, both tied for the number one spot.
Her shoulders slump and she tells him to go take out the trash.
~~~~~
All of the other girls in class seem to like Tomo-chan more than Shigeru-chan does; they come up to him and ask him to play house and be the daddy or they ask him if they think they’re cute and what kinds of girls he likes.
He always answers them politely and as well as he can and thinks that girls in the city sure are different from girls in the country, because he can never tell what they’re thinking here.
Hiro throws his hands up over his head whenever Tomo-chan talks about it and simply says, “You don’t know the half of it!”
~~~~~
Shigeru-chan, Tomo-chan discovers, is really, really smart.
She is, however, very, very bad at sports.
He watches her at the three-legged race with her mother on sports day, as she falls before the second step has even been taken.
She spills out on the ground and pulls her mother down with her too; the two of them covered in dirt and looking very surprised.
Tomo-chan laughs because he can’t help it; even when it’s like that, he realizes he still likes the face she makes, maybe even more than the one she makes when she’s mad at Hiro.
~~~~~
“Hiro,” Tomo-chan begins one day during lunch, as the two of them are sitting under the shade of a tree in the school yard, sipping their milk from the cartons. “Do you think Shigeru-chan wants to be friends with me?”
Hiro blinks. “Probably not,” he reasons after a minute, “since she thinks you’re a weirdo. She told me yesterday when we walked home.”
Tomo-chan frowns. “You walked home together?” he asks, and sounds more upset about that than the fact that he got called a weirdo.
“Well we’re neighbors so yeah,” Hiro replies, like that should be obvious.
Tomo-chan, however, is very troubled by this. “Did you have to cross a street?”
“Yes. Two.”
“…did you hold hands?”
“Just like they tell us to in class,” Hiro confirms, around a grin. “I do pay attention sometimes.”
A moment.
Then, “Hiro, can I come over to your house after school today?”
~~~~~
“Why is he here?” Shigeru-chan asks when Hiro jogs up to her at the front gate with Tomo-chan in tow.
“He’s hanging out at my house today,” Hiro explains plainly. “We’re going to read Astro Boy together.”
Shigeru-chan sighs. “I can’t believe I’m losing to him,” she mutters darkly to herself, and starts walking ahead of the boys.
Tomo-chan lengthens his stride to catch up, and right when they get to the first crosswalk, has his hand out and ready for holding while he looks left, then right, then left again. “It’s safe!” he declares after a beat, and thinks his heart is beating a lot faster all of a sudden.
“Oh ew,” Shigeru-chan says, but grudgingly takes both Tomo-chan and Hiro’s hands with her own as they cross.
Tomo-chan thinks it is the best street he has ever crossed.
~~~~~
On Valentine’s Day that year, when Shigeru-chan grudgingly presents Tomo-chan and Hiro with obligation chocolates that her mom made her make, Tomo-chan eats every last piece even though he doesn’t particularly like chocolate.
He gets a bunch of other chocolate from the other girls in class that day (Hiro says it’s because he’s the school’s number one most popular boy), but doesn’t particularly want any of it because he’s already had more than enough chocolate for the whole year at that point. When he moves to throw the extra packages away, Shigeru-chan gives him a withering look, says that she’s only ever giving Hiro chocolates again, and flounces off looking like a superior human being.
Tomo-chan thinks twice about the chocolates after that; he spends the entire rest of the term finishing them off, one piece at a time every day until summer vacation.
~~~~~
During summer vacation, Tomo-chan finds every excuse he possibly can to go over and hang out at Hiro’s house, be it Astro Boy, summer homework, or the fact that he promised Hiro’s mom that he’d help pull weeds with Hiro in the front yard.
Shigeru-chan can see them from her window and often peeks out of it and shakes he head at them; “You’re doing it all wrong!” she tells them, nose wrinkled. “Get the roots, the roots!”
“Stop nagging woman!” Hiro shouts in reply, and earns a scandalized look before Shigeru-chan shuts the window with a huff.
Hiro grins and falls back onto the ground in relief. “That always works when my dad says it too,” Hiro explains in satisfaction. “Though afterwards he always has to apologize and buy something nice, but he says it’s worth it to get her to shut up for a while.”
It doesn’t work with Shigeru-chan though, because three seconds later she is storming out of her house and promising to go tell what Hiro just said to Hiro’s mom.
“I’m sorry! I’ll give you a marble!” Hiro says quickly, and subdues her for a while.
The three of them end up spending the afternoon on the front lawn catching grasshoppers together instead (though Shigeru-chan isn’t very good at it); Tomo-chan thinks that he wouldn’t mind spending his whole life in days like this, comfortable in Hiro’s laughter and Shigeru-chan’s complaints.
~~~~~
One day in the late summer, when Tomo-chan comes to visit, Hiro is sitting on his front porch with his head hanging; he isn’t smiling like he usually is.
Even worse, Shigeru-chan is sitting next to him, sobbing her eyes out and hitting Hiro on the arm.
“You can’t just go!” she wails, and sounds horribly betrayed somehow.
“I have to go,” he sighs, and lets her hit him.
Tomo-chan is confused. “What’s wrong?” he asks, and fights back a strange urge to apologize to Shigeru-chan, even though he’s fairly certain he isn’t the one making her cry.
“Hiro’s moving!” she shouts, and stands and kicks Hiro in the shin once before running back to her house next door.
Tomo-chan blinks. “You’re moving?”
A small smile. “Yeah. The company my dad and Shigeru-chan’s dad works for transferred my family,” he explains, looking on the verge of tears himself. “Because Dad says they opened another branch overseas.”
“Oh,” Tomo-chan murmurs.
“I leave next week.”
“Oh,” Tomo-chan says again, and doesn’t know what else to do.
“Hey Tomo-chan,” Hiro starts after a minute, and looks kind of embarrassed, “can I tell you a secret?”
Tomo-chan sits down next to him on the porch. “Sure,” he says.
Hiro looks around to make sure no one else is listening, then lowers his voice. “Shigeru-chan is the only girl I’ve ever liked, so when I’m gone, you have to take care of her for me, okay?”
Tomo-chan’s eyes get wide. “Liked? Like…like?”
Hiro turns a little pink and nods. “She’s mad at me and she says she won’t talk to me ever again, but tell her that I’ll come back for her, okay?” He scratches his head. “I’m stupid just like she says, but tell her I promise that I’ll come back a great man.”
“Oh,” Tomo-chan manages eventually, when he doesn’t know what to say all over again.
Hiro looks troubled; probably far too troubled for someone who is only six and a half years old. “Do you think she’ll wait for me?”
Tomo-chan swallows. “Yeah,” he says after what feels like a very long time. “I think she will.”
Hiro smiles. “You have to take care of her while I’m gone, okay? She’s afraid of spiders and big dogs and high places, so make sure you’re there with her if those things are around. You promise?”
Tomo-chan swallows. “I promise.”
Somehow, Hiro looks relieved.
Tomo-chan goes home early that night, with a great weight on his shoulders.
When his mother asks him what’s wrong, he tells her that his chest mysteriously started hurting.
~~~~~
At the end of the summer after his seventh birthday, Tomo-chan’s best friend moves away and his first love comes to an end because of a promise between men.
He thinks to himself that it’s been a year where he’d had to grow up a lot more than he’d planned to.
~~~~~
4. Hymn for the Hopeless: Ai Nante
“Yamashita-sensei,” a nurse says, approaching him with a chart and a look of regret on her face. “We don’t know what’s wrong with him.”
Yamashita-sensei, tired and moody and starting to feel the beginnings of a massive migraine forming somewhere in the back of his skull, pauses to blink at her. “Him?” he asks, lost for a moment.
“Yuya-kun,” she clarifies. “Patient 9.”
Yamashita-sensei runs the number through his head. “The one who collapsed suddenly from a headache,” he murmurs, and takes the chart from her. “How is he?”
“He seems fine for the time being,” she admits, “which is why it’s so puzzling that he just collapsed like that, when he’d felt perfectly healthy just a few moments before. I think he wants to see you.”
Yamashita-sensei furrows his brow. “I guess we should check this out, just to be safe,” he admits after a beat, and heads down the hall towards the room with the scared teenager inside of it.
When he opens the door and lays eyes on his patient for the first time, he’s a little bit surprised.
“You’re really eighteen?” he asks, looking at what seems to be a fifteen-year-old teenager on the bed skeptically.
A small, vaguely terrified smile in response. “You’re really a doctor?”
Yamashita-sensei blinks. “Fair enough. What seems to be the problem?” he asks, as he skims the patient’s chart.
“I was kinda hoping you could tell me,” Yuya-kun admits, clearly trying to be brave (and failing) as he glances down at the IV drip in his arm.
Yamashita-sensei continues to go over the mysterious charts before perfunctorily examining the patient’s eyes and the back of his throat, touching his lymph nodes and listening to his heartbeat. “We’ll run some tests,” he says after a minute after he finds nothing out of the ordinary. He’s confident that it’s nothing to worry about, that it’s just the summer heat. The young are strong, after all; even if they get sick they bounce right back a few days later.
“Am I going to be okay?” Yuya-kun asks, eyes looking up at Yamashita-sensei with all this hope and fear.
Yamashita- sensei nods perfunctorily, and is already thinking about his next patient, the elderly woman down the hall with the wet cough. “We’ll run some tests,” he repeats, and then turns around and heads out the door.
He passes the chart back to one of the nurses and doesn’t think about Yuya-kun anymore, for the rest of the day.
~~~~~
“Sensei,” the same nurse from before asks Yamashita-sensei the next day, cornering him as he stands in front of one of the small clinic’s fans that afternoon, trying to avoid the sticky summer heat, “Sensei, Yuya-kun is asking for you again.”
Yamashita-sensei blinks, wipes sweat from his forehead. “Yuya-kun?”
She sighs. “Patient 9.”
He furrows his brow. “Oh,” he recalls, after a moment, “The kid.” Pause. “Did his tests come back?”
She hands him the chart. “All negative.”
He blinks. “How is he doing?”
She looks terribly sad. “Not well.”
Yamashita-sensei tucks the chart under his arm and goes to see his patient.
~~~~~
“There are other tests we can run,” Yamashita-sensei explains to Yuya-kun when he’s seated at the younger man’s bedside, taking in the increasingly gray pallor of his skin, the listlessness of his eyes. “We’ll find out what’s wrong and order the medicine. A shipment via courier from the city can’t take more than a few days.”
Yuya-kun is clearly very scared, but manages a small smile all the same. “Sensei,” he begins softly, “will I be okay?”
Yamashita-sensei sits up straighter, finishes counting his patient’s pulse. “You’ll be okay,” he says, with certainty.
Yuya-kun nods. “If sensei says so, I believe it.”
Yamashita-sensei smiles back, without knowing he’s doing it. “Right,” he says confidently, “believe.”
He gets up and goes to attend his other patients shortly thereafter, telling himself that people so young don’t just die from mysterious things like this; not in this modern day in age, not with the influx of western knowledge and medical advancements and technological accomplishment in this post-war era.
Yamashita-sensei remembers seeing a movie for the first time the other day, at the new theater down the block; he thinks that if the world can accomplish something so profound for the sake of entertainment, then there is no end to what they can do for the sake of saving a life.
He’s confident that there is nothing to worry about.
~~~~~
The next morning, when Yamashita-sensei does his rounds, he finds Yuya-kun’s mother in the room with her son; she looks up when he comes into the room and her gaze is accusatory. “Why isn’t he getting better?” she demands, voice shrill.
Yamashita-sensei stays calm, moves to explain that it’s because they still don’t know what’s wrong with him yet.
But Yuya-kun talks first, smiling and taking his mother’s hand confidently. “Kaasan,” he soothes, “Kaasan, Yamashita-sensei says I’ll be fine. He’s a very good doctor, ne. The best in the world.”
She sighs under his expression and takes his hand. “How do you feel?” she asks, and decides to pay attention to her son rather than the doctor who isn’t helping him.
“Better,” he tells her, though Yamashita-sensei can tell it’s a blatant lie, one told naturally around a bright smile and gentle eyes. “I’m feeling much better today, kaasan.”
She leaves the hospital some time later, with a promise to bring her son some of his favorite homemade foods tomorrow, when she comes again.
Yamashita-sensei sees to Yuya-kun afterwards, and tells him that they still don’t know what’s wrong, but that he looks much better today, like he has more energy.
“I do,” Yuya-kun tells him, like if he says it enough it will start to come true. “Sensei is working very hard, ne.”
Yamashita-sensei takes his temperature, hand brushing across his forehead gently, against soft hair and hot, clammy skin. “So are you,” he admits, when he realizes how hard Yuya-kun is working to try and believe in him. “I’ll do my best to help you,” he promises.
Yuya-kun smiles in that undefeatable way of his. “I know.”
That day, it is the first time Yamashita-sensei has ever stayed in one of his patient’s rooms for a little while after the initial examination is done just to chat; he finds out that Yuya-kun likes dogs and taking walks and that he’s never been in love, but would like to be one day, with a nice girl who sings well and gets embarrassed when you watch her eat.
“I think that’s a nice dream,” Yamashita-sensei finds himself saying, when he hears about Yuya-kun’s life.
“Has sensei ever been in love?” Yuya-kun asks, as Yamashita-sensei wipes the sweat from his forehead.
Yamashita-sensei frowns when he hears the question. “No,” he finally admits, when he thinks about it. “Not really.”
A small laugh. “Eh, really? That seems hard to believe, ne.”
Yamashita-sensei wonders why he’s never felt lonely about it until the tired eyes of a sickly child stopped to ask him about it.
“Ah, it’s because sensei is working hard all the time like this,” Yuya-kun murmurs eventually, and it almost sounds apologetic. “He’s a hero.”
“You should rest,” is all Yamashita-sensei says in response, though before he leaves, he does reach out-tentatively-to pat Yuya-kun’s head. “And let me get back to work, so I can help you get better.”
“Believe?” Yuya-kun says, as his eyes flutter closed.
“Believe,” Yamashita-sensei replies.
~~~~~
“We don’t know what’s wrong,” the other doctors on staff admit some days later, when Yamashita-sensei has called in every favor he has to try and solve Yuya-kun’s mysterious illness.
“Modern medicine just hasn’t come far enough,” one of the older doctors sighs, looking wistful. “There’s still so much we don’t know that keeps us from saving people.”
“Please don’t say that,” Yamashita-sensei says. “This patient is still alive.”
“Not if we don’t come up with something soon,” a young resident points out, as he looks over the charts and clucks disapprovingly. “I’d say he’s got a week left at best, not counting Sunday.”
Yamashita-sensei takes back Yuya-kun’s charts and leaves the meeting wondering if he had ever been like those other doctors are being like now. He can’t remember.
~~~~~
Over the course of the next few days, Yuya-kun has trouble breathing. Yamashita-sensei sits at his bedside for a whole hour after the examination is done and talks to him because Yuya-kun can’t really talk himself. He says a lot of nothing but he thinks he can see that his patient appreciates it.
Afterwards, when Yuya-kun is asleep, Yamashita-sensei stands in the hallway and gets screamed at and hit by Yuya-kun’s sobbing mother.
All he can do is apologize.
~~~~~
On Saturday night of that week, Yamashita-sensei has to tell Yuya-kun’s mother that her son is going to die.
She looks like she is going to scream again, like she is going to hit him again, but before she can Yuya-kun takes her hand and squeezes it and says, “Kaasan, sensei has been working hard for my sake all this time.”
Yamashita-sensei thinks he would have preferred the screaming and the hitting again, because he can deal with that, can deal with a reaction like that better than what he’s feeling now, that incredulous sense of wondering what he’s done-what he possibly could have done-for Yuya-kun that could inspire such unconditional faith.
He leaves the room before he can think about it too much.
~~~~~
Early on Monday morning, when Yuya-kun’s mother has fallen asleep in the hallway outside of his room, Yamashita-sensei slips in to see his patient, before his shift begins.
Yuya-kun is wide awake and dying.
“Sensei,” he says, voice weak, “good morning.”
“I’ll wake your mother,” Yamashita-sensei says, hands fisted at his sides. “She should be…”
“She just fell asleep, ne,” Yuya-kun murmurs. “She hasn’t slept a lot.”
“But…”
A small smile. “I’m glad I have such a kind doctor, ne.”
Yamashita-sensei stands obediently by Yuya-kun’s bed. “Is there anything I can do?” he asks, out of habit.
A small laugh. “Sensei is always working hard, even when he doesn’t have to, ne,” Yuya-kun murmurs, and Yamashita-sensei wants to tell him it wasn’t enough but there isn’t time.
The last word on Yuya-kun’s lips that morning is, “Believe.” It’s all he has left to say before he dies smiling, in his hospital bed while a stranger who he’d put too much unfounded faith in stands by watching.
Yamashita-sensei stays in the room long after Yuya-kun is gone and thinks that if he didn’t know any better, it looks like he is asleep, perfectly at peace.
“Believe,” he murmurs to himself around something almost like tears.
He leaves the room and wonders if it was all worth caring so much just to have it come to this.
~~~~~
The following week, when a middle-aged woman with no family is admitted to the hospital he examines her just like he always does with any of his patients, calmly and professionally and as quickly as possible.
But this time he pauses before he’s about to turn around and head out the door; he hears something like “Sensei is always working hard,” in the back of his mind and before he knows what he’s doing, he turns around and takes a seat.
“Koizumi-san,” he asks her, when she looks at him in surprise, “what kind of hobbies do you have?”
He thinks that maybe it’s time to start earning his praise.
~~~~~
5. War March: Kimi Omou Yoru
Ryo comes to the dojo a scant few months after Tomohisa does; they become sparring partners when sensei sees Ryo’s determination and Tomohisa’s skills. “You two,” he tells them on the day when they first lay eyes on each other, “can serve the country better by learning from each other.”
Tomohisa doesn’t understand what that means exactly, but ever since he was old enough to understand the meaning of the words, he has pledged his life to the emperor and the protection of the country. As such he does as he is told without thinking about it very much, knowing that his body is nothing more than an instrument of the emperor, a tool to be used to the emperor’s will. If his instructors feel that he can better serve this purpose by fighting with someone much smaller and weaker than himself, then it is only as they say.
Ryo on the other hand, doesn’t consider it very fair at all and every time he is certain that sensei isn’t listening, he rails about how unjust it is to be put with such a featureless, boring person day in and day out.
Tomohisa bears his complaints silently (he supposes that perhaps it is just a characteristic of those from the country) and searches for the thing in Ryo that sensei wants him to learn. He can understand why working together is advantageous to Ryo in that he catches up to Tomohisa’s level very quickly by necessity, and before long Tomohisa can even consider them rivals.
“Your form is reckless,” he comments to Ryo one day some months into their training, after a particularly intense session between the two of them that had ended in a draw.
“You’re boring,” Ryo replies as he gasps for air, stretched out on the floor staring up at the ceiling. Then, eventually, he sighs and sits up. “Where’d I mess up?”
Tomohisa explains exactly where and in exactly what moment, and once Ryo acknowledges it, he very tentatively asks, “What makes me boring?”
Ryo snorts in laughter and says, “Your sword is.”
Tomohisa doesn’t know how to respond to that.
~~~~~
“Think about the thing that moves you to fight,” sensei tells all of his students in the school one afternoon, as he sits, old and wizened on the tatami in front of them. “Your motivation is the soul of your skill; its purity will strengthen your blade and move you forward.”
That afternoon, Tomohisa thinks of nothing but dying for the sake of his ruler.
He loses every single match he has that day, and when his shinai snaps against Ryo’s in the final hour of practice, Ryo dodges the splintered pieces of wood and looks at Tomohisa tellingly again. “Your sword is boring,” he repeats, and goes to clean up for supper.
Tomohisa looks down at the broken shards of his shinai and wonders if his intentions somehow make him weak.
~~~~~
That night, for the first time since he was born, since his father died a general in battle and his mother did not shed a tear because it was his duty, Tomohisa thinks about being a tool of the emperor.
From the bedroll beside his, he hears Ryo writing something by candlelight, hastily scribbling a letter to someone somewhere even though they were to be asleep ten minutes ago.
“Nishikido-san,” Tomohisa begins reluctantly after a moment, because he can’t help himself when he thinks about how badly he’d been beaten today, “can I ask you something?”
There is a pause in the writing. Then, a slightly surprised, “You do realize you’re breaking the rules by talking to me right now, right?”
Tomohisa looks embarrassed. “Yes.”
Ryo grins. “Ask away.”
“What makes you fight?”
Silence.
“Nishikido-san?”
“Just Ryo,” the older boy snaps.
“Ryo…kun,” Tomohisa adds, when he can’t help it.
Ryo sighs. “You can’t tell anyone I told you this,” he says after a moment, very seriously.
Tomohisa promises. Solemnly.
Ryo holds out the letter to him, almost finished now. “I have a friend,” he says, looking kind of embarrassed in the candlelight.
Tomohisa takes the letter, eyes wide as he reads the address. “Dear Hiroki-kun…”
“Well don’t just read it,” Ryo snaps hastily, “I was just showing you in general, okay?” He quickly snatches the paper back. “But yeah.”
“Is he a great warrior?” Tomohisa asks.
Ryo nearly laughs out loud. “He’s a princess,” the older boy tells him flatly.
“Eh? Really?”
Ryo looks at Tomohisa like he’s stupid. “He’s studying to be a calligrapher,” Ryo explains eventually, when it looks like most of what he is saying is going right over Tomohisa’s head. “He’s always been kind of sick, but when we were little he said it was his dream if he could be a great samurai one day, like his grandfather.”
“So you’re doing it for him, because he can’t.”
“That’s not it,” Ryo says. “Let me finish, would you?”
Tomohisa apologizes.
“One winter he got really sick and everyone thought he was going to die. He got better eventually, but after that he was so weak he could barely go outside anymore,” Ryo continues, looking down at the letter without seeing it. “So his grandfather gave up on him becoming a great warrior and now he’s up at the emperor’s court, studying calligraphy every day and being bored out of his mind.”
Tomohisa doesn’t follow. “So the reason you fight is because…”
“Because he’s in the emperor’s court, you idiot,” Ryo tells him, looking embarrassed at having to say it out loud. “I know you’re set on serving the emperor and dying in the line of duty and protecting your country and all that, but there’s only one thing in this world I want to protect.”
Tomohisa finally gets it. “Oh.”
Ryo nods. “If anyone wants to attack us, I’ll die before I let them get past those gates.”
When he hears it put like that, Tomohisa knows that it is selfish and childish goes against everything that he was raised to believe, everything that he has been training for his whole life.
But when he looks at Ryo’s face-and the resolve there-when he talks about it, when he says things about defending the court not for king and country but for a sickly calligrapher within its walls, Tomohisa can’t help but feel like he is in the presence of the most formidable swordsman in the country.
He remembers what sensei said this morning, about the purity of what moves you.
He wonders if he will be able to find motivation that will make his blade anywhere near as strong as Ryo’s.
~~~~~
He finds it unexpectedly one day some time later, right in front of his face.
It’s another night when he’s pretending not to notice Ryo still up, writing another long letter by candlelight in the dead of winter, when it’s cold and he seems more worried than usual. Tomohisa thinks he’s worried about Hiroki-kun’s health, about whether he’s doing alright and if the pressures of court living aren’t making it hard on him.
That night Tomohisa sneaks a look out of the corner of his eye and sees Ryo the most serious he’s ever seen him, brow furrowed as he hunches, shivering, over the letter in the night air, determinedly finishing it off, telling Hiroki-kun about how hard he’s working and how strong he’s becoming each day.
Tomohisa finds himself thinking, “I want Ryo-kun’s dream to come true. I want to help him become strong so that he can protect what is important to him.”
The next day, during morning practice, sensei takes Tomohisa aside and smiles. “Yamashita-kun,’ he says gently, “Yamashita-kun, I can feel the power behind your blade now. Use it well.”
“I will,” Tomohisa promises, and won’t ever let himself be anything less than the rival Ryo deserves.
~~~~~
“Something’s different,” Ryo admits later that week, when he’s disarmed and laid out flat on his back, looking incredulously up at Tomohisa for the fifth time in so many days. “I can’t figure it out, but something’s different,” he breathes.
Tomohisa lets himself smile a little and reaches out to help Ryo up. “You’re losing,” he says, plainly.
Ryo snorts and ignores the hand up by stubbornly smacking it away and getting up on his own. “And you’re smiling,” he rejoins. “The world is clearly ending.”
But Tomohisa can tell Ryo isn’t really mad because Ryo is kind of smiling back.
~~~~~
In the years that follow the two of them climb the ranks quickly, working hard to outdo each other and encourage each other and push each other forward; sensei looks at the two of them and tells all of his students that no one ever grew strong for the sake of themselves.
In the midst of battle during first fight as officers of the Shinsengumi some years later, Tomohisa saves Ryo’s life.
Ryo saves his twice and has a fit yelling at him to be more careful afterwards.
Tomohisa promises him that he will be.
~~~~~
That care gets them noticed by the generals years later, and before long they invited into the walls of the court to be presented by their sensei as two promising youths who will serve the future of the country well.
The look in Ryo’s eyes- the anticipation of seeing an old friend and the pride at having worked hard to get this opportunity- is enough to make Tomohisa’s heart beat faster too, even though he has no concept of Hiroki-san, even if he has no ties with him beyond the one they share with Ryo.
When Yamapi lays eyes on Hiroki-san for the first time-tall and pale and much stronger than Ryo led him to believe, if the way he smirks at Ryo tells him anything-Yamapi thinks he wants to become the strongest general in the world, if only to get to see the two of them chatter cattily to each other forever just like they are now, for the rest of his life.
“I think,” Hiroki declares late that night, when everyone is a little bit drunk and very happy, “that your friend has a crush on us.”
Ryo blinks back at him blearily. “Us? You’re an idiot. He has no reason to like you.”
Tomohisa is concentrating too hard on putting one foot in front of the other to argue either way.
~~~~~
The following morning, when they are presented to the court, an old, stern-looking general gives them each a once over and proclaims them to be fit, if not particularly impressive.
“We will do everything in our power,” Tomohisa vows, “to protect the walls of this palace.”
“They have good eyes,” the general acquiesces eventually, and dismisses them as satisfactory. “Continue to train our country’s youths successfully in this manner, sensei,” he tells sensei next, and goes back to his meal, which he has much more interest in.
Sensei chuckles and bows and leads them away, glad that no one noticed that Nishikido-kun only looks so intent because he is hungover and has a headache.
“Did you learn something important in your time here?” Sensei asks them later, on the road back home.
“I drank too much,” Ryo complains.
“I learned something important here,” Tomohisa replies seriously.
Sensei laughs at them both. “Good, good. Keep your blades pure.”
Ryo throws up on the side of the road a little while later, and Tomohisa lets him lean on his shoulder for the rest of the day.
He thinks that he is glad to have Ryo in his life, just like Ryo is glad to have Hiroki-kun.
He’s sure it must be a great existence to be someone who is that precious to someone else.
~~~~~
Ryo dies two years later, in a battle that they had no hope of winning, defending the place he always said he would.
Tomohisa sees it the moment it happens, because when it does, it’s to save Tomohisa’s life.
“You idiot,” Ryo breathes as he staggers off of the end of his dead opponent’s sword, as he falls to the ground. “I told you to be more careful!”
“I’m sorry,” Tomohisa says automatically, and puts his hand over the wound because he doesn’t know what else to do. “I’m sorry; I’ll protect him for you. I promise I’ll protect him for you so…”
“Stupid,” Ryo mutters, and swats Tomohisa’s hand away from his chest, “Stupid, watch out for yourself first. You matter too, you stupid idiot.”
He dies just like that a moment, a breath, a second later, and Tomohisa has to get up and fight on and do what he promised afterwards, because for the longest time, Ryo has been the most important thing in his life.
~~~~~
Tomohisa dies a day after Ryo does, in that same battle, fighting for the only reason he could find worth dying for in all his years on this earth.
Tomohisa’s only regret is that he never got to tell Ryo what it was.
~~~~~
6. Reprise (Variations on a Theme): Hoshi wo Mezashite
When NewS is first formed, Yamapi resents it. He’s not sure why he does exactly, though there are plenty of people who are ready and willing to speculate on the matter for him.
As for himself, he can’t quite put his finger on it. It just feels like something is missing.
He doesn’t know why that’s annoying, it just is.
He thinks that maybe it’s because Koyama tries so hard even at the things he’s not good at, or because he’s a little jealous that Ryo and Uchi at least have each other no matter what, even though they have to work double time at a job that’s already so stressful; it might have something to do with how Massu always seems to be smiling stupidly when there’s no reason to and how Kusano always has energy to do everything and talk to everyone even when Yamapi doesn’t. Maybe a part of it also comes from how subdued Shige is and how Tegoshi is so obviously scared but doing his best (and failing) to not let it show, calling Yamapi his hero all the time, saying that he looks up to Yamapi more than anything when Yamapi is fairly certain he hasn’t done anything to deserve that kind of praise.
Something bothers Yamapi about all of this; he just doesn’t know what yet.
“Something is definitely missing,” he tells Jin one afternoon, when it’s just the two of them at lunch.
“Your brain?” Jin offers, around a smirk. He successfully steals one of Yamapi’s sticks of yakitori.
Yamapi ignores him, furrowing his brow and resolved to think about it very carefully, until he figures it out. It bothers him too much just to let it go.
He ends up thinking about it for years.
He thinks about it through 2004, when there is uncomfortable silence and forced, painfully awkward laughter. He thinks about it through 2005 as well, when there is tentative peace and the very first outreach of an olive branch from Koyama’s hands.
He thinks about it after Uchi’s suspension and Kusano’s voluntary leave and through the long months of 2006 when he can’t see them anymore, when he isn’t sure if they’ll ever be a group again.
It isn’t until after the suspension that he thinks he’s starting to get it.
“Something is definitely missing,” he muses out loud to Jin one evening at the izakaya, when he is holding his drink and looking into the amber liquid like it holds all the answers to all the questions in the universe.
“Uh, your group?” Jin offers, around a glazed, slightly (very) drunken look. He snorts and laughs to himself at his own cleverness, knocking over a bowl full of edamame in the process and spilling empty peapods all over the table.
Yamapi blinks.
“Yeah,” he murmurs, looking intently at the edamame’s empty shells when he finally, finally understands. “I think that’s it.”
~~~~~
When NewS comes back, the first thing Yamapi tells the other members is, “This is our new beginning.”
The second thing he tells them is that he loves NewS a lot-more than he thought he ever would-and the moment he does, the moment he can admit it out loud for the first time and the other members can hear it laid out for them just like that, it’s like a huge weight has finally been lifted off of his chest. When he looks at them, he thinks that something just like it has been lifted from each of theirs as well.
“We’re fated,” he finds himself adding suddenly after a moment, without meaning to. “I think the six of us were fated to be together just like this.”
Koyama laughs and has to wipe tears from his eyes when he hears that, as the six of them huddle together in a tight circle backstage, during the final minutes before the very first of their NewS comeback concerts is supposed to start.
“Don’t cry, idiot!” Ryo immediately barks when he looks at a sobbing Koyama, and has to turn away so he won’t start too, muttering to himself in embarrassment as he hides behind Shige’s blush and Massu’s smile and Tegoshi’s elated laughter.
“Sorry! I’m sorry!” Koyama apologizes, though the tears keep streaming down anyway.
Yamapi just smiles. “I think…we’re exactly where we’re supposed to be now,” he finishes resolutely after a moment, while the others all quietly-happily- agree.
Somehow, it feels like the six of them have been waiting forever to hear those words.
End