[NEWS] Days Broken Into Fragments
Title: Days Broken Into Fragments
Pairing: Yamapi/NEWS
Rating: G
Author: misticloud
Words: 6,608
Summary: Yamapi realises how far he has fallen behind the members.
Note: Written for je_ficgames to the prompt of 'Garasu no Shounen'. Thanks once again to binmusic, you know this fic would never have come to fruition without you.
of rain falling at a bus stop
Yamapi wishes that the rain would stop.
Fervently, devotedly, whole-heartedly wishes that the rain would stop, just so that he won’t be an object of ridicule for smug drivers in the cars swishing by. It’s not like he wants to be here. It’s not like he ever wants to be here in this kind of situation unless it is in the script and there are a couple of cameras filming him.
Even then, like Tegoshi used to say, “Rain scenes suck.”
“Yes,” Shige had agreed, “the water flies everywhere and all you want to do is rub your eyes and sneeze, but that isn’t what a drama hero is supposed to do.”
“Rain scenes suck,” Tegoshi said again.
Yamapi rubs his eyes and sighs. It’s a little disturbing how much he can miss them in so short a period of time. Not that most people would consider it short; one year is considerable, definitely long enough for Koyama to decide that he wants to marry and settle down with one of the office girls whom he’d first gotten involved with two years ago. Yamapi grins for a moment as he remembers the furore that had caused in the Jimusho; how Johnny-san had called Koyama into his office and given him a very strict talk on work boundaries and the absolute indecency of love affairs between colleagues. Nobody had felt like grinning then but now, in hindsight, even tough times are cast in a gentler light. There isn’t anyone to oppose Koyama’s relationship with Riko-san now. The Jimusho is dead.
Sometimes, especially times like these when he has nothing to do and nowhere to go, Yamapi doesn’t feel as though one year has passed since the Jimusho went bankrupt and released all the bands. It had given him a start the other day when his friend casually observed, “So, it’s been a year since Johnny’s crashed, huh?” A year? He’d thought. Twelve months; three hundred and sixty five days? It didn’t make sense. His memories were much too clear for it to have happened a year ago. He could even remember the number of lines on their manager’s forehead as he had confirmed the news of the bankruptcy with them; Yamapi had counted the lines over and over, starting from the first one near the hairline to the last one above the eyebrows, until even Tegoshi gave him a puzzled look and asked him why in heaven’s name was he staring at the manager’s forehead.
“My eyes missed their target,” he’d said.
They’d laughed then, in a way that only imminently unemployed people could laugh. Like how, he thought, soldiers sitting in their waterlogged trenches had bantered the night before going over the top tomorrow. Desperate, worried, unbelieving; how scared they’d all been at the thought of their work security, almost their life’s security, tumbling down like that right before their eyes. Who would want to employ a bunch of thirty year olds without viable working experience? Shige had said that he couldn’t put ‘ability to give come hither looks’ in his resume.
“You couldn’t anyway,” Ryo had interrupted, “it would be a blatant lie.”
That had triggered off another bout of laughter.
Shige is doing fine now though. He’d made use of his contacts in the law industry and phoned around until a friend’s dad finally fitted him up as a paralegal in a reputable firm. Shige was smart and hard-working and already his boss was saying that he couldn’t imagine how life had been before Kato Shigeaki came into it. They’d known from the start that Shige would be okay. So would Massu, who’d managed to secure a job as a personal trainer for starlets and starlet wannabes. And Tegoshi, who was working as an assistant music producer in Avex Trax and Koyama, who was doing quite well in getting together enough funds to start a family with his freelance hosting and talent management. They were four sixths okay.
Another car swishes by and water splashes over Yamapi’s shoes. For the third time, he thinks that he should really have brought an umbrella along. He’d seen those gray clouds before he left home. He’d known subconsciously that rain was very likely. But he’d decided to stick by Ryo’s stand that carrying umbrellas along was the antithesis of glamour. Even though Ryo doesn’t give a damn about whether or not to carry umbrellas now. Ryo, who has been in depression for five months and only recently started going for psychiatric help. Ryo has far more important things to worry about now, like his emotional health maybe. So why on earth did Yamapi not carry an umbrella?
Because I can’t let things go. I’m still stuck in the past. Cobwebbed down.
He can’t let go of them. It’s funny. He was so opposed to NEWS’ formation, and yet now he’s the one having the most trouble with its disbandment. Both him and Ryo, in fact. They were the shining stars, the duo faces of NEWS, and now that they’ve been thrown out into the real world with nary a line to save them from sinking, they’ve gone straight down to the bottom. To be sure, he still gets acting offers and he gets by financially. There is demand in the market for ex top idols, it seems. But emotionally…he’s pretty sure that he’ll wind up as the next candidate for psychiatric help. If all this isn’t cruel irony, what is?
“You should seek help,” Ryo’d said morosely, “it can be interesting. The other day my psychiatrist told me that all I had to do was start with the small step of release. So I asked, should I pick up a couple of girls from a club and release with them? He didn’t even laugh. He said that I shouldn’t let emotion impair my sensibility. Rather that I should start by calling a couple of friends out for a drink - he meant coffee - and start enjoying being in the present.”
Then Ryo had rubbed his face. “You know what, Pi? When I looked down in the coffee, I was still reflected upside down.”
The noise the rain makes on the tiny bus stop roof is unbelievable. Yamapi looks up at the droplets hanging off the edge, then falling down into the rivulets of water running along the sides of the roads. Upside down? He thinks. That’s what we’ll always be; we chose it when we didn’t know what we were choosing. We will always be upside down won’t we, Ryo-chan.
Ryo
of upside down reflections
Ryo hasn't always been depressed, though that seems a while ago now. There have actually been times in the past when he'd phoned Yamapi and hadn't been crying illogically and unstoppably. Times when he'd gone out bowling or clubbing with their group of guys and hadn't bothered staring at his alcohol before downing it. Times when he'd been happy and laughing and pulling Tegoshi's hair, stealing Shige's prawns, hitting Koyama with hair dryers, buying snacks for Massu.
The problem is, Yamapi can't remember those times very well. Mostly he remembers taking Ryo out for yet another night of drinks, even though he knew that was probably not the best way to help a person teetering on depression, and talking reams and reams of unimportant stuff, trying to get him back on his feet. And he sees Ryo staring into his glass in the way Ryo had stared into his coffee nearly ten years ago, when he'd been young and exhausted and an hour away from commuting back to Osaka for some Eito work.
“I'm all upside down, like how I'm reflected in here,” Ryo said. “I'm supposed to be famous and lucky and girls send their panties to me. But I'm twenty-three and I'm stuck going back and from two cities working my ass off instead of hanging out with friends on a Saturday night. I don't even have any normal friends outside the industry. I don't mean anything against you or the guys, but that's just it, I don't have friends outside the industry. I've been working since I was a kid and when I'm forty years old, the job that I've been working at all my life will reject me and I won't have anywhere to go. Have you ever heard of anything so pathetic?”
“Kind of like Prince Charles,” Yamapi chortled. He was never too emotional when he was drunk. “He's been working at his potential job for sixty years and there's a chance he'll never even get it. At least you're better looking than Prince Charles, Ryo-chan.”
Ryo had debated that for a moment before laughing and they moved on to another topic but, drunk as he was, Yamapi remembers that night perfectly. Upside down Ryo-chan. Just like him, upside down Yamapi. What a couple of sad bastards.
The next time Ryo mentioned it, they were with Koyama and Shige and all of them were gloriously drunk. Shige had just gotten over his normal drunken crying fit when Ryo pointed a finger at him and said, “You don't have any right to cry. You are always upright.”
“What does that mean!” Shige protested.
“You are a normal university student and you don't get mobbed in airports, like Pi here,” Ryo slurred. “You have tons of friends. You spend most of your Saturday nights with friends. You're supposed to be the non-famous unlucky one but you're upright!”
“Ryo-chan...” Yamapi tried to grab hold of his arm to get him to shut up, but Shige didn't seem offended. Instead, he leaned over and snapped his finger against Ryo's hand.
“Bakayaro!” he growled in an exact imitation of the comedian Beat Takeshi, and Ryo abandoned his accusations for laughter.
But Ryo can't be saved so easily by laughter now. When Yamapi thinks of how he and Jin had jimmied Ryo's lock and found him huddled drunk and crying on the kitchen floor, he can't believe there was ever a time when Ryo used to laugh from the heart.
“What do I do now?” Ryo had asked them as they dragged him up and wiped cold damp cloths over his feverish forehead. “My entire life, all that I’ve worked for, all that I’ve done…what do I do now? Where do I go?”
They couldn’t answer him; they were asking the same questions, too.
Sometime in their lives, they had been under fifteen and Ryo had put his head on Yamapi's shoulder on the van one night when going back to the office after studio filming. Yamapi had circled his shoulders with his arm and thought to himself that Ryo-chan was minuscule, eighty pounds of will and strength and loyalty and contradictions. “We'll always be friends,” Ryo had said, his voice thick with drowsiness. “And I'll always want to make you smile.”
Ryo can't remember that scene at all. He insists that Yamapi is lying whenever Yamapi mentions it. There is no way he would have said such a ridiculous thing.
Tegoshi
of kisses in a movie theatre
Yamapi’s phone lights up and chimes. He hears it through the clatter of rain. Somehow he’s beginning to tune out the noise; his ears are getting in line with selective hearing.
----
FROM: Tegoshi
I’ll be there really soon!
----
So Tegoshi is driving, he thinks. Someone must have made him do it. Tegoshi doesn’t like to drive, he likes being driven. He likes sitting in the passenger seat and lazing around while someone else takes him to his destination. And of course, as it has been and forever will be, the members indulge him. It’s impossible not to pamper Tegoshi the sunshine kid, who proclaims harmless self-centred genes and insists that his superior way of talking is due to his naturally born high voice.
Yamapi takes a moment to ponder the ‘I’ in the message over the more accurate ‘we’. That’s typical Tegoshi right there, mindless of the rest when it doesn’t count. Forcing Shige and Koyama to listen to his endless analysis of soccer, taking Koyama’s shampoo without first asking, singing at midnight in the hotel room when Massu really, really wants to sleep, insisting that Koyama and Shige go to karaoke with him even though they want to go bowling, dragging Yamapi out for a sappy chick flick and paying for the ticket.
Tegoshi cares when it counts.
Yamapi remembers clearly the lightness of Tegoshi’s hands on his shoulders and the concern in his voice that day, years ago, when he’d been huddled up alone in the dressing room with his face on his knees after everyone else had left. “Yamashita-kun?” Tegoshi had said gently, “are you okay?”
Yamapi had meant to say yes, he was fine, because that was what a senpai and a group leader should do, but instead he’d mumbled, “No.”
Tegoshi sat down beside him, keeping a hand on his shoulder. “Why not?”
Yamapi took a moment to breathe long and slow; he would never be able to understand why he’d replied Tegoshi then. He wasn’t particularly close to Tegoshi; till then they’d never had a private moment together worth speaking of. Still, he’d said, “It’s one of those days when I feel so frightened, and I don’t know what of.”
There was a short pause, then Tegoshi said, “I want to watch a movie, a really sentimental one! Ne, Yamashita-kun, there’s ‘Koizora’ showing, why don’t we go watch that?”
“I don’t want to…” Yamapi began, but Tegoshi dragged him off the couch.
“I’ll pay for your ticket, so you’ll have to come with me!”
And Yamapi found himself in a darkened theatre forty-five minutes later with popcorn in one hand and a Coke in another. Tegoshi leaned across and whispered, “Just enjoy the movie, okay?”
So he said, but he didn’t give Yamapi much chance to enjoy the sickly sweet scenes played out before them. “How does he know it’s her handphone!” Tegoshi whispers, “he never saw it before!” A while later, “He grows flowers?! He has bleached hair and he grows flowers? Do girls really like guys who grow flowers?”
Tegoshi was even more fascinated by the kissing scenes, leaning over and making kissing noises. “I don’t like being left out when there’s kissing going on, do you? I really want to kiss too. And she’s going to get pregnant, wait and see!”
Yamapi pushed Tegoshi away. “I’m trying to enjoy the movie!”
Tegoshi giggled. “Oh, they’re still kissing. She’s going to get pregnant, she totally is.”
Of course she did, and miscarried into the bargain. They watched as the story became more and more clichéd, winding up in abandonment and a nice second guy and cancer, and Tegoshi couldn’t shut up about it, “Why was he ‘waiting’ for her when he was trying to be all selfless in letting her go? I think there’s some contradiction here! She’s better off with the second guy” then, “He’s going to die isn’t he? He’s totally going to die” a moment later, “What kind of cancer does he have anyway?”
When the movie ended, they left the theatre and Tegoshi eagerly pointed at an ice cream bar. “I think we need some ice cream as a reward for having sat through that movie.”
“But you were the one who wanted to watch it,” Yamapi said.
“Of course! So that I could reward myself for it later,” Tegoshi said with his usual illogical logic. “Which flavour do you like, Yamashita-kun?”
It was only after they’d finished their ice cream and Yamapi was thinking about cheesy romantic lines and fizzy Coke and chocolate chip ice cream that Tegoshi finally grabbed hold of his arm and said, “If you’re frightened again, Yamashita-kun, let’s watch another sappy movie okay?”
He smiled brightly, and Yamapi smiled back. “Sure.”
Ten minutes later they went their separate ways. Tegoshi had not treated him to another afternoon out because Yamapi hadn’t felt the fear again, not until NEWS disbanded and he found himself alone in ways he had never imagined before. Ways that had led to Ryo crying on the kitchen floor and Yamapi to whiling away many sweaty, worried nights trying to talk himself out of a possible depression.
His phone jangles again.
----
FROM: Tegoshi
Ten more minutes! Don’t give up.
----
Yamapi closes his eyes for a moment, recalls the sweetness of ice cream on his tongue, the lightness of Tegoshi’s hands, the feeling of leaving the movie theatre and realising the absence of fear, the beauty of companionship when needed.
When he opens his eyes, he thinks there might be tears.
Shige
of empty cans on footpaths
“The wonderful thing about photography,” Shige said once, “is the beauty it brings out in everything.”
“But only if you can capture it,” Yamapi said. They were leaning against a building, taking a brief rest from the frantic weekend crowds and wondering where to go next after their lunch. Somehow they couldn't decide on a place. It was silly sometimes how such simple decisions could take forever to be decided.
It seemed that Shige had given up the struggle of deciding where to go next in favour of proving his point about photography. “You’re right,” he said, “only if you can capture the beauty of it. Not everything looks beautiful, but everything has a bit of beauty in it. I think about that a lot.”
“Why?” Yamapi asked. Shige's philosophies always interested him, even though he was generally too lazy to think of philosophies himself.
“Well, it's something you can apply to life,” Shige said. “I've applied it to myself ever since I took it up. I always remind myself to look out for the beauty in things.” He quirked an eyebrow at Yamapi. “I don't mean that I go around staring at garbage cans and thinking that they glint beautifully in the sun. That would just be stupid.”
Yamapi grinned. “I wasn't thinking it.”
“Definitely not dumb things like that, but other things,” said Shige. “More practical things.”
Shige, Yamapi muses, is always practical. One can always count on him to point out the non-practical part of a suggestion. “Wear full three-piece suits in summer? Are you nuts, Tego? We won't look cool, we'll look boiling hot. Do you want to be known as the Sweaty Idols?”
And then everyone will laugh. Oh yes, Shige is great at that. There's something about him that sees humour in every situation, even when it involves laughing at himself. Everybody loves that about Shige. He's so much the better to bully because of it. He might moan and grumble for the next three hours, but ultimately he'll laugh and when he does, everyone else will laugh too. Yamapi wasn't surprised when he visited Shige in his office six months after they disbanded and found a group of people gathered around Shige, all laughing.
“Shige is amazing, huh,” he'd said later as they slurped down soba. “You're the same everywhere you go, always lightening up the atmosphere.”
“I had good practice with you guys,” said Shige. “I've lost count of the amount of times I had to think of how to make you guys laugh after you were all sulky over some argument. And I definitely learned to be cheerful after being forced to deal with Nishikido-kun for over a decade.”
“You make it sound so bad,” Yamapi said, laughing.
Shige smiled too. “I’m exaggerating. It wasn't so bad after I applied my camera theory to it.”
Then Yamapi was brought back to the roughness of the wall against his palms and the heat on his hair that day as Shige said, “More practical things” and stepped away from the wall, pointing at an empty can lying beside them.
“Someone littered!” Yamapi said.
“Uh huh,” Shige said, grinning. “That's one way to look at it.”
“How else can you look at it? It's just an empty can.”
“Yeah, I just want to use it to illustrate my philosophy. Imagine, somehow from a shelf of a supermarket or a convenience store, it got thrown away by some litterbug and kicked around until it ended up here, lying on a footpath near a building. Nobody even looks at it. It's just lying here amongst a few thousand feet walking past. Solitary peace in the middle of a city. Also unheeded and unwanted trash. There're lots of ways to look at it. A camera can bring out both ways, or just focus on one.” Shige glanced up at Yamapi, who was gazing at him. “I decided that I should be a camera, too. There are so many ways of looking at things, but I choose only to look at the good part. All the ugly parts, the unhappy parts, I blur the focus on them. When I get teased by Nishikido-kun, or Tegoshi takes something I want, or Massu makes me want to pull my hair out from his indecision, or the Jimusho throws me aside and doesn't want to promote me, I choose to find the humour in it so that I'm able to laugh. Once that happens, everything is okay.”
“And through that you make others happy,” said Yamapi, but Shige blushed and refused to acknowledge that.
The rain still hasn't let up, and Yamapi is getting really cold. He wishes, for a moment in place of the rain stopping, that he could hear Shige's laughter once more and his teasing, cloying voice saying, “Look for the beauty in things, Yamashita-kun! No, no, not that ugly bit of it, who wants to look at ugly things except M people! I'm talking about the beautiful bit of it. What, you still don't think the shirt looks good on me? Too bad. I'll get a second opinion, someone who is more in tune with beauty than you are.”
Then Yamapi can't help but smile. Even memories of Shige carry vague happiness.
Massu
of windows in buses
Wheels splash through the water and Yamapi looks up with a start to see a bus pulling into the stop. The door opens and disgorges about five or six school children, who squeal and struggle to put up umbrellas the moment they’re out. A couple of them unlucky enough not to have umbrellas start running down the footpath, tiptoeing their way through puddles. Yamapi looks back at the bus as the engine revs and it starts pulling away. A line of side profiles at the windows blur past him and then the bus is gone and he’s alone in the bus stop again.
He wishes his mind would give him a break already but he doesn’t have a choice, he’s in a reminiscing mood. The more he sits there, the more he’s brought back to a cold early-winter morning fumbling about in his apartment for his sunglasses. He knew it was somewhere in the living room, and he also knew, as his handphone rang for the third time, that he was late. Very late. Fifteen minutes late, to be precise.
He stuck his hand down the armchair in a last desperate attempt and his fingers closed around the sunglasses. Who was it who said that you generally found something in the last place you would look at? Damn that guy. He grabbed the sunglasses and was out of the door the next minute, struggling to lock the door and hook his bag strap over his shoulder at the same time. He was late. Very late. Almost twenty minutes late.
The lift was agonisingly slow, as it would be on the one and only day he needed it to be fast, so he gave up and took the stairs instead. By the time he reached the bottom, he was exactly twenty minutes late and if they didn’t hightail it all the way to the airport, they would miss the flight and the Jimusho would probably cut his pay to compensate them for three airplane tickets. Not to mention Ryo would be incredibly mad at them for turning up late to a dress rehearsal. Yamapi shuddered a little at that thought and quickened his speed towards the nondescript bus waiting at the kerb.
Quite suddenly, a face appeared at the window and he braced himself for a scowl and a soundless “Hurry up!”.
But, as he got closer, he realised that it was Massu, and Massu was smiling. Huge dimples, happy crinkled eyes, white teeth. On a cold early-winter morning waiting for a twenty-minute late member. If he hadn’t already been frazzled beyond all help, Yamapi thought that his stress would most likely have fallen away at the sight of that smile.
“Yamashita-kun, you finally made it!” Massu greeted him as he climbed onto the bus and started his apologies.
“We have to hurry to the airport or we won’t make it,” said Koyama gloomily.
Yamapi collapsed in the seat beside Massu as the bus moved off. “I know, I’m sorry. I woke up late and then everything after that just became late too.”
Massu patted his shoulder. “Maa maa, we’re all used to Yamashita-kun being late.” Yamapi wasn’t very sure if that was supposed to be comforting until Massu added, “Don’t worry, we’ll definitely make it there on time! If Yamashita-kun has always been late and yet we’ve never missed a plane before, then there shouldn’t be a reason why we should miss the plane this time, right?”
“Massu, you’re not making sense,” Koyama commented, but Yamapi was pretty sure now that Massu meant to be comforting, because he was comforted. Even though he didn’t have a right to be, considering that he was the one at fault in the first place. But Massu was the only one in the group who would overlook that technicality.
“Thank you,” he said, and Massu just smiled back and pulled out a bag of cream puffs. “I was saving it till Yamashita-kun came. Might as well eat on the way to the airport!”
They made it to the airport in time, but Massu got held up by the metal detector for some metallic quality about him that nobody could figure out. Ryo was messaging them frustratedly from the plane, asking them when on earth they would feel that they were ready to get on, but both Yamapi and Koyama stayed and waited for Massu to get clearance. It wasn’t much, after all. He really wanted to show some gratitude for that unexpected smile through the bus window. He suspected that Koyama just stayed because he would feel guilty if he walked off by himself.
“Thanks for waiting for me, guys,” Massu said when he stopped beeping at last.
“Don’t worry,” said Yamapi as they rushed on. “We’re fated to be on this plane. Besides, you waited for me, didn’t you?”
Massu blinked. “I was having my breakfast on the bus, ne,” he said after a moment. “I like having a slow breakfast. I wasn’t thinking of Yamashita-kun at all. Perhaps if I was, I wouldn’t have been okay about it. You were really late.”
Yamapi stopped and stared at him, and Massu stared back with an innocuously blank face. Koyama started hopping a bit, calling to them to hurry, and the airport staff were coming round to see what was the hold up, and suddenly Massu laughed and reached out to pull Yamapi along with him. “But we wouldn’t have moved off without Yamashita-kun!” he said. “You couldn’t be left behind.”
“I’m sorry,” said Yamapi, a little awkwardly.
“Silly,” said Massu with a touch of affection in his voice. “I just wanted to make you feel bad by being nice about it.”
Then Yamapi started laughing too, and the stewardesses standing at the airplane doors gave them baffled polite smiles.
He doesn’t like attaching significance to insignificant things, but he still asks himself a question from time to time that he avoids answering. Have they left him behind this time, or has he been the one dragging his feet while they’ve been trying to pull him along?
Koyama
of blinking on an uptown street
Shibuya, of the busiest intersection in the world and the iconic glass-fronted Starbucks Coffee with HMV in the background. Yamapi has been there countless times before, randomly browsing, shopping, eating, watching thick crowds move across the pedestrian crossings and the few stragglers dashing pass seconds before the traffic lights turn green. “Looking for death!” Koyama had called it once as they watched a guy cheat death by a couple of seconds.
It had been a cold drizzly night as they sat on the barstools in Starbucks and watched the crowds gather and disperse, gather and disperse at regular intervals. The condensation on his latte was cold to Yamapi’s fingers; he couldn’t figure out why he’d ordered a cold drink on a night when he and Koyama needed so much warmth.
“I wouldn’t run across if the traffic light was turning green,” said Koyama. “I wouldn’t bet on my life like that.”
“Yeah…” Yamapi murmured. “I wonder where we’re going with ours?”
“Ours?”
“Our lives.”
Koyama looked lost. He’d never been good at conversations like that; he left analysis and conjecture to Shige. Koyama was someone who took life as it came, made the best out of what he had. He didn’t speculate, didn’t try guesswork, didn’t like to dwell on things that made him feel miserable. “I don’t know.”
Yamapi didn’t know either. They’d laughed about their imminent ‘Not in Employment, Education or Training’ state earlier on in the afternoon when Shige had said he couldn’t put ‘ability to give come hither looks’ in his resume, but in actual fact, it wasn’t really funny, was it? Now that he was here facing reality, he couldn’t remember why he’d laughed.
“I think Shige will be okay,” said Koyama. “Anyone would be willing to hire him, don’t you think?”
“Yeah…”
“And Tegoshi will be okay whatever happens to him. He’ll find his own way somehow. Massu…”
“Do you think…” Yamapi interrupted, “we’ll still be meeting up forty years later? Or will the fact that we’re not working together anymore end up in us becoming strangers?”
Koyama turned to Yamapi with a horrified face. “Of course we’ll still be friends! Haven’t we known each other since we were teenagers? Haven’t we gone through thick and thin together, turned our failures into successes as a group? Just because we’re not working together anymore doesn’t mean that we won’t need each other!”
“But what for?” Yamapi said tonelessly. “You, Shige, Tegoshi, Massu…the four of you have so much going on for you in your private lives. You don’t really need Ryo-chan and I hanging around and reminding you of the old days.”
“Don’t say that!” Koyama laid his hand on Yamapi’s arm briefly. Yamapi could feel the coldness of Koyama’s fingers through the thin material of his long sleeve. “The both of you have been such big influences in our lives. Didn’t you inspire and encourage us into being better than what we were? Didn’t you push NEWS from nothing into something? Didn’t you stick by us and refuse to give up hope in us even when we disappointed you? I know you’re going to say that we didn’t, but we did, in the beginning! And yet you didn’t give up on us.”
Yamapi couldn’t remember a time when he hadn’t been proud of them, but he knew that long ago, in some foolish yesteryear, he’d sulked for months at the Jimusho for putting him together with a bunch of strange guys. In a way he felt that he didn’t deserve this rosy retelling of a not-quite-so-glorious past, but he continued listening.
“Remember all the meals we’ve shared?” Koyama pressed on. “We would always give Tegoshi the best bits of everything and Ryo-chan would stuff Shige and we would all call pork ‘Massu’. During concerts, all we’d need are glances at each other to know exactly where everyone is and what we’d be doing next. And we would trust each other with our lives because we’ve been through enough to know that we’ll be okay as long as we’re together as a team. Right?”
He nodded speechlessly.
“All that won’t disappear.” Koyama blinked once, hard. “We trust you so much, Yamapi. Don’t have such little faith in us!”
The traffic lights below turned green and another sea of people started strolling across the crossings. Yamapi looked at Koyama, who was still blinking hard, and was about to make a remark about Koyama’s unmanly desire to cry when he choked and started blinking as well. Koyama let go of his arm and laughed. “Look at how stupid we’re being!”
“No,” said Yamapi, “look at how stupid I’m being.”
They laughed again, companionably, then Yamapi rubbed his hands and covered Koyama’s cold hand with his warmth. “I do trust you guys,” he said. “Whenever I start being frightened, I’ll remember that we’re still in this together, for good. Don’t leave me behind.”
Koyama pointed both index fingers at him. “Believe!” he said in mock-Tegoshi style.
Even so, he forgets more frequently than he remembers. There are times when he thinks he should just give up on their friendship before they give up on him first; times when his longing for the old days gets so bad that he has to forego his reservations to give one of them a call, any one, as long as someone picks up. And of course that someone always does, be it Tegoshi or Massu or Shige or Koyama. They’re always around if only to say ‘hi’ and ‘how are you doing’ and suggest lunch; it’s Yamapi who, despite everything, refuses to believe in them.
of rainclouds parting over a bus stop
Yamapi wishes that the rain would stop. Really. It has been raining long enough and he’s cold enough and it’s just high time that it stop. Even during filming, the rain gets turned off once the director says ‘cut’. It’s silly if it continues raining for too long.
He hears the sound of wheels through the water again and when he doesn’t bother looking up, the loud horn tells him that he should.
“Yamashita-kun!” someone calls and he looks to see Massu hanging out of the MPV window waving at him. “Sorry, we were stuck in a traffic jam. Come on!”
Yamapi stares stupidly for a minute, then picks up his bag from the ground beside him. “But I don’t have an umbrella,” he says.
It is Massu’s turn to stare. “Umbrella? What for?”
“It’s raining…”
“It’s not raining anymore!” Massu laughs.
Slowly, Yamapi looks up at the roof and observes that the frequency of the droplets has drastically decreased. How had it happened that he’d not even noticed the rain stopping?
Tegoshi works the horn again and Massu says, “Yamashita-kun, are you alright? Hurry up, there’s a bus coming behind us!”
Yamapi finally stirs and walks over to the MPV with his bag dangling from his fingers. The door is thrown open by Shige and when he steps in, all he sees are huge smiles on the members’ faces.
“Hello, Yamashita-kun!” calls Tegoshi from the driver’s seat. “Sorry we took so long! Were you very bored waiting for us?”
“No,” Yamapi says and glances at the backseat, where Koyama is sitting with his arm thrown protectively around Ryo. Ryo offers him a smile; there are dark circles under his eyes and he’s not very shaven, but he looks happy and the smile is real. A couple of days ago, Koyama had declared that he and Shige were going to descend on Ryo’s apartment and drag him out whether he liked it or not. If ever there are two people who can pull someone out of depression by mere determination and cheerfulness, they’re Koyama and Shige and evidently they’ve worked their magic on Ryo at least for a while.
“How are you feeling?” he asks.
“I’m okay,” Ryo replies, and for the first time in a long time, Yamapi feels that he really is.
“Okay!” Tegoshi says, stepping on the accelerator as the bus behind warns them in a flurry of indignant honks that they better get out of the way or else. “Let’s have a great trip! My goal is to make Kei-chan drunk every night so that we’ll have lots of embarrassing stories to tell Riko-san!”
Koyama wails, “You’re not going to destroy my last bachelor’s holiday!”
“My goal,” says Massu happily, “is to have really good barbeques at the beach!”
“Massu never changes,” Shige snorts. “Hey Tegoshi, I’ll help you get Koyama drunk and embarrassing.”
Tegoshi whoops and Koyama groans again, and Yamapi hears himself laughing. He’d almost forgotten what a wonderful thing it is to be able to laugh freely and loudly from the heart; and when he looks back, Ryo is laughing as well and he thinks the joy at that sight could be a little too much for him to take. Only he really doesn’t want to cry because as understanding as his members (or ex-members) are, he knows they’ll still interpret it wrongly.
“And then,” Tegoshi announces, “we shall go for a public bath together again.”
“I won’t go!” Massu squawks in horror.
“You will!” Tegoshi sings.
“Let him be,” Shige protests. “If he doesn’t want to go, we can’t force him.”
“I’ll force him,” Ryo says.
“Ryo-chan, you too?” Koyama says in a mock-horrified tone that sets everyone laughing again.
“Oh, Nishikido-kun, I meant to tell you!” Tegoshi says. “Your demo tape was great, ne. I’ll send it in cause I think the company will definitely be interested in buying the song from you.”
Massu claps his hands and Shige turns to the back with a huge smile to demand, “Isn’t that great? I always knew Nishikido-kun could write far better songs than what we hear on the market these days.”
Ryo only smiles and says, “Thank you”, but they know how much it means to him.
“Well then,” says Massu, “we’ll have a great holiday! And maybe I’ll go into the public bath with you guys after all, in celebration of Nishikido-kun becoming the next big songwriter.”
“Oh,” says Tegoshi disappointedly, “I was looking forward to dragging you in.”
“Lest you forget, Massu has far more muscles than you,” Shige points out.
Yamapi leans back in his seat and listens idly to the flow of chatter around him as they move along with the traffic. He thinks of the roughness of the wall on his palms, the sweetness of ice cream, the coldness of iced latte’s condensation on his fingers, the cream puffs on the way to the airport. And then of Ryo’s smiles, Ryo’s laughter. The dark rings around his eyes that will surely soften by the end of the holiday, the song that will soon be playing on their radios.
Of himself, and relationships. It takes two hands to clap, two viewpoints to argue, two persons to maintain a friendship. Even more persons to support one through life and all that it has to throw at you. When he takes a look around, he knows that he’s so lucky to be here amid that support.
Tegoshi and Shige are squabbling good-naturedly about some triviality, Ryo is making a few remarks to Koyama, Massu is turning up the volume of the CD player. An old JE song blasts out at him.
Nanika ga owatte hajimaru. Kumo ga kirete boku wo terashidasu, kimi dake wo ai shiteta…
When something ends, something begins. The clouds part and light shines on me, you’re the only person I loved.
People, not person; love, not loved, he thinks. It’s time to do some serious catching up.
end
Pairing: Yamapi/NEWS
Rating: G
Author: misticloud
Words: 6,608
Summary: Yamapi realises how far he has fallen behind the members.
Note: Written for je_ficgames to the prompt of 'Garasu no Shounen'. Thanks once again to binmusic, you know this fic would never have come to fruition without you.
of rain falling at a bus stop
Yamapi wishes that the rain would stop.
Fervently, devotedly, whole-heartedly wishes that the rain would stop, just so that he won’t be an object of ridicule for smug drivers in the cars swishing by. It’s not like he wants to be here. It’s not like he ever wants to be here in this kind of situation unless it is in the script and there are a couple of cameras filming him.
Even then, like Tegoshi used to say, “Rain scenes suck.”
“Yes,” Shige had agreed, “the water flies everywhere and all you want to do is rub your eyes and sneeze, but that isn’t what a drama hero is supposed to do.”
“Rain scenes suck,” Tegoshi said again.
Yamapi rubs his eyes and sighs. It’s a little disturbing how much he can miss them in so short a period of time. Not that most people would consider it short; one year is considerable, definitely long enough for Koyama to decide that he wants to marry and settle down with one of the office girls whom he’d first gotten involved with two years ago. Yamapi grins for a moment as he remembers the furore that had caused in the Jimusho; how Johnny-san had called Koyama into his office and given him a very strict talk on work boundaries and the absolute indecency of love affairs between colleagues. Nobody had felt like grinning then but now, in hindsight, even tough times are cast in a gentler light. There isn’t anyone to oppose Koyama’s relationship with Riko-san now. The Jimusho is dead.
Sometimes, especially times like these when he has nothing to do and nowhere to go, Yamapi doesn’t feel as though one year has passed since the Jimusho went bankrupt and released all the bands. It had given him a start the other day when his friend casually observed, “So, it’s been a year since Johnny’s crashed, huh?” A year? He’d thought. Twelve months; three hundred and sixty five days? It didn’t make sense. His memories were much too clear for it to have happened a year ago. He could even remember the number of lines on their manager’s forehead as he had confirmed the news of the bankruptcy with them; Yamapi had counted the lines over and over, starting from the first one near the hairline to the last one above the eyebrows, until even Tegoshi gave him a puzzled look and asked him why in heaven’s name was he staring at the manager’s forehead.
“My eyes missed their target,” he’d said.
They’d laughed then, in a way that only imminently unemployed people could laugh. Like how, he thought, soldiers sitting in their waterlogged trenches had bantered the night before going over the top tomorrow. Desperate, worried, unbelieving; how scared they’d all been at the thought of their work security, almost their life’s security, tumbling down like that right before their eyes. Who would want to employ a bunch of thirty year olds without viable working experience? Shige had said that he couldn’t put ‘ability to give come hither looks’ in his resume.
“You couldn’t anyway,” Ryo had interrupted, “it would be a blatant lie.”
That had triggered off another bout of laughter.
Shige is doing fine now though. He’d made use of his contacts in the law industry and phoned around until a friend’s dad finally fitted him up as a paralegal in a reputable firm. Shige was smart and hard-working and already his boss was saying that he couldn’t imagine how life had been before Kato Shigeaki came into it. They’d known from the start that Shige would be okay. So would Massu, who’d managed to secure a job as a personal trainer for starlets and starlet wannabes. And Tegoshi, who was working as an assistant music producer in Avex Trax and Koyama, who was doing quite well in getting together enough funds to start a family with his freelance hosting and talent management. They were four sixths okay.
Another car swishes by and water splashes over Yamapi’s shoes. For the third time, he thinks that he should really have brought an umbrella along. He’d seen those gray clouds before he left home. He’d known subconsciously that rain was very likely. But he’d decided to stick by Ryo’s stand that carrying umbrellas along was the antithesis of glamour. Even though Ryo doesn’t give a damn about whether or not to carry umbrellas now. Ryo, who has been in depression for five months and only recently started going for psychiatric help. Ryo has far more important things to worry about now, like his emotional health maybe. So why on earth did Yamapi not carry an umbrella?
Because I can’t let things go. I’m still stuck in the past. Cobwebbed down.
He can’t let go of them. It’s funny. He was so opposed to NEWS’ formation, and yet now he’s the one having the most trouble with its disbandment. Both him and Ryo, in fact. They were the shining stars, the duo faces of NEWS, and now that they’ve been thrown out into the real world with nary a line to save them from sinking, they’ve gone straight down to the bottom. To be sure, he still gets acting offers and he gets by financially. There is demand in the market for ex top idols, it seems. But emotionally…he’s pretty sure that he’ll wind up as the next candidate for psychiatric help. If all this isn’t cruel irony, what is?
“You should seek help,” Ryo’d said morosely, “it can be interesting. The other day my psychiatrist told me that all I had to do was start with the small step of release. So I asked, should I pick up a couple of girls from a club and release with them? He didn’t even laugh. He said that I shouldn’t let emotion impair my sensibility. Rather that I should start by calling a couple of friends out for a drink - he meant coffee - and start enjoying being in the present.”
Then Ryo had rubbed his face. “You know what, Pi? When I looked down in the coffee, I was still reflected upside down.”
The noise the rain makes on the tiny bus stop roof is unbelievable. Yamapi looks up at the droplets hanging off the edge, then falling down into the rivulets of water running along the sides of the roads. Upside down? He thinks. That’s what we’ll always be; we chose it when we didn’t know what we were choosing. We will always be upside down won’t we, Ryo-chan.
Ryo
of upside down reflections
Ryo hasn't always been depressed, though that seems a while ago now. There have actually been times in the past when he'd phoned Yamapi and hadn't been crying illogically and unstoppably. Times when he'd gone out bowling or clubbing with their group of guys and hadn't bothered staring at his alcohol before downing it. Times when he'd been happy and laughing and pulling Tegoshi's hair, stealing Shige's prawns, hitting Koyama with hair dryers, buying snacks for Massu.
The problem is, Yamapi can't remember those times very well. Mostly he remembers taking Ryo out for yet another night of drinks, even though he knew that was probably not the best way to help a person teetering on depression, and talking reams and reams of unimportant stuff, trying to get him back on his feet. And he sees Ryo staring into his glass in the way Ryo had stared into his coffee nearly ten years ago, when he'd been young and exhausted and an hour away from commuting back to Osaka for some Eito work.
“I'm all upside down, like how I'm reflected in here,” Ryo said. “I'm supposed to be famous and lucky and girls send their panties to me. But I'm twenty-three and I'm stuck going back and from two cities working my ass off instead of hanging out with friends on a Saturday night. I don't even have any normal friends outside the industry. I don't mean anything against you or the guys, but that's just it, I don't have friends outside the industry. I've been working since I was a kid and when I'm forty years old, the job that I've been working at all my life will reject me and I won't have anywhere to go. Have you ever heard of anything so pathetic?”
“Kind of like Prince Charles,” Yamapi chortled. He was never too emotional when he was drunk. “He's been working at his potential job for sixty years and there's a chance he'll never even get it. At least you're better looking than Prince Charles, Ryo-chan.”
Ryo had debated that for a moment before laughing and they moved on to another topic but, drunk as he was, Yamapi remembers that night perfectly. Upside down Ryo-chan. Just like him, upside down Yamapi. What a couple of sad bastards.
The next time Ryo mentioned it, they were with Koyama and Shige and all of them were gloriously drunk. Shige had just gotten over his normal drunken crying fit when Ryo pointed a finger at him and said, “You don't have any right to cry. You are always upright.”
“What does that mean!” Shige protested.
“You are a normal university student and you don't get mobbed in airports, like Pi here,” Ryo slurred. “You have tons of friends. You spend most of your Saturday nights with friends. You're supposed to be the non-famous unlucky one but you're upright!”
“Ryo-chan...” Yamapi tried to grab hold of his arm to get him to shut up, but Shige didn't seem offended. Instead, he leaned over and snapped his finger against Ryo's hand.
“Bakayaro!” he growled in an exact imitation of the comedian Beat Takeshi, and Ryo abandoned his accusations for laughter.
But Ryo can't be saved so easily by laughter now. When Yamapi thinks of how he and Jin had jimmied Ryo's lock and found him huddled drunk and crying on the kitchen floor, he can't believe there was ever a time when Ryo used to laugh from the heart.
“What do I do now?” Ryo had asked them as they dragged him up and wiped cold damp cloths over his feverish forehead. “My entire life, all that I’ve worked for, all that I’ve done…what do I do now? Where do I go?”
They couldn’t answer him; they were asking the same questions, too.
Sometime in their lives, they had been under fifteen and Ryo had put his head on Yamapi's shoulder on the van one night when going back to the office after studio filming. Yamapi had circled his shoulders with his arm and thought to himself that Ryo-chan was minuscule, eighty pounds of will and strength and loyalty and contradictions. “We'll always be friends,” Ryo had said, his voice thick with drowsiness. “And I'll always want to make you smile.”
Ryo can't remember that scene at all. He insists that Yamapi is lying whenever Yamapi mentions it. There is no way he would have said such a ridiculous thing.
Tegoshi
of kisses in a movie theatre
Yamapi’s phone lights up and chimes. He hears it through the clatter of rain. Somehow he’s beginning to tune out the noise; his ears are getting in line with selective hearing.
----
FROM: Tegoshi
I’ll be there really soon!
----
So Tegoshi is driving, he thinks. Someone must have made him do it. Tegoshi doesn’t like to drive, he likes being driven. He likes sitting in the passenger seat and lazing around while someone else takes him to his destination. And of course, as it has been and forever will be, the members indulge him. It’s impossible not to pamper Tegoshi the sunshine kid, who proclaims harmless self-centred genes and insists that his superior way of talking is due to his naturally born high voice.
Yamapi takes a moment to ponder the ‘I’ in the message over the more accurate ‘we’. That’s typical Tegoshi right there, mindless of the rest when it doesn’t count. Forcing Shige and Koyama to listen to his endless analysis of soccer, taking Koyama’s shampoo without first asking, singing at midnight in the hotel room when Massu really, really wants to sleep, insisting that Koyama and Shige go to karaoke with him even though they want to go bowling, dragging Yamapi out for a sappy chick flick and paying for the ticket.
Tegoshi cares when it counts.
Yamapi remembers clearly the lightness of Tegoshi’s hands on his shoulders and the concern in his voice that day, years ago, when he’d been huddled up alone in the dressing room with his face on his knees after everyone else had left. “Yamashita-kun?” Tegoshi had said gently, “are you okay?”
Yamapi had meant to say yes, he was fine, because that was what a senpai and a group leader should do, but instead he’d mumbled, “No.”
Tegoshi sat down beside him, keeping a hand on his shoulder. “Why not?”
Yamapi took a moment to breathe long and slow; he would never be able to understand why he’d replied Tegoshi then. He wasn’t particularly close to Tegoshi; till then they’d never had a private moment together worth speaking of. Still, he’d said, “It’s one of those days when I feel so frightened, and I don’t know what of.”
There was a short pause, then Tegoshi said, “I want to watch a movie, a really sentimental one! Ne, Yamashita-kun, there’s ‘Koizora’ showing, why don’t we go watch that?”
“I don’t want to…” Yamapi began, but Tegoshi dragged him off the couch.
“I’ll pay for your ticket, so you’ll have to come with me!”
And Yamapi found himself in a darkened theatre forty-five minutes later with popcorn in one hand and a Coke in another. Tegoshi leaned across and whispered, “Just enjoy the movie, okay?”
So he said, but he didn’t give Yamapi much chance to enjoy the sickly sweet scenes played out before them. “How does he know it’s her handphone!” Tegoshi whispers, “he never saw it before!” A while later, “He grows flowers?! He has bleached hair and he grows flowers? Do girls really like guys who grow flowers?”
Tegoshi was even more fascinated by the kissing scenes, leaning over and making kissing noises. “I don’t like being left out when there’s kissing going on, do you? I really want to kiss too. And she’s going to get pregnant, wait and see!”
Yamapi pushed Tegoshi away. “I’m trying to enjoy the movie!”
Tegoshi giggled. “Oh, they’re still kissing. She’s going to get pregnant, she totally is.”
Of course she did, and miscarried into the bargain. They watched as the story became more and more clichéd, winding up in abandonment and a nice second guy and cancer, and Tegoshi couldn’t shut up about it, “Why was he ‘waiting’ for her when he was trying to be all selfless in letting her go? I think there’s some contradiction here! She’s better off with the second guy” then, “He’s going to die isn’t he? He’s totally going to die” a moment later, “What kind of cancer does he have anyway?”
When the movie ended, they left the theatre and Tegoshi eagerly pointed at an ice cream bar. “I think we need some ice cream as a reward for having sat through that movie.”
“But you were the one who wanted to watch it,” Yamapi said.
“Of course! So that I could reward myself for it later,” Tegoshi said with his usual illogical logic. “Which flavour do you like, Yamashita-kun?”
It was only after they’d finished their ice cream and Yamapi was thinking about cheesy romantic lines and fizzy Coke and chocolate chip ice cream that Tegoshi finally grabbed hold of his arm and said, “If you’re frightened again, Yamashita-kun, let’s watch another sappy movie okay?”
He smiled brightly, and Yamapi smiled back. “Sure.”
Ten minutes later they went their separate ways. Tegoshi had not treated him to another afternoon out because Yamapi hadn’t felt the fear again, not until NEWS disbanded and he found himself alone in ways he had never imagined before. Ways that had led to Ryo crying on the kitchen floor and Yamapi to whiling away many sweaty, worried nights trying to talk himself out of a possible depression.
His phone jangles again.
----
FROM: Tegoshi
Ten more minutes! Don’t give up.
----
Yamapi closes his eyes for a moment, recalls the sweetness of ice cream on his tongue, the lightness of Tegoshi’s hands, the feeling of leaving the movie theatre and realising the absence of fear, the beauty of companionship when needed.
When he opens his eyes, he thinks there might be tears.
Shige
of empty cans on footpaths
“The wonderful thing about photography,” Shige said once, “is the beauty it brings out in everything.”
“But only if you can capture it,” Yamapi said. They were leaning against a building, taking a brief rest from the frantic weekend crowds and wondering where to go next after their lunch. Somehow they couldn't decide on a place. It was silly sometimes how such simple decisions could take forever to be decided.
It seemed that Shige had given up the struggle of deciding where to go next in favour of proving his point about photography. “You’re right,” he said, “only if you can capture the beauty of it. Not everything looks beautiful, but everything has a bit of beauty in it. I think about that a lot.”
“Why?” Yamapi asked. Shige's philosophies always interested him, even though he was generally too lazy to think of philosophies himself.
“Well, it's something you can apply to life,” Shige said. “I've applied it to myself ever since I took it up. I always remind myself to look out for the beauty in things.” He quirked an eyebrow at Yamapi. “I don't mean that I go around staring at garbage cans and thinking that they glint beautifully in the sun. That would just be stupid.”
Yamapi grinned. “I wasn't thinking it.”
“Definitely not dumb things like that, but other things,” said Shige. “More practical things.”
Shige, Yamapi muses, is always practical. One can always count on him to point out the non-practical part of a suggestion. “Wear full three-piece suits in summer? Are you nuts, Tego? We won't look cool, we'll look boiling hot. Do you want to be known as the Sweaty Idols?”
And then everyone will laugh. Oh yes, Shige is great at that. There's something about him that sees humour in every situation, even when it involves laughing at himself. Everybody loves that about Shige. He's so much the better to bully because of it. He might moan and grumble for the next three hours, but ultimately he'll laugh and when he does, everyone else will laugh too. Yamapi wasn't surprised when he visited Shige in his office six months after they disbanded and found a group of people gathered around Shige, all laughing.
“Shige is amazing, huh,” he'd said later as they slurped down soba. “You're the same everywhere you go, always lightening up the atmosphere.”
“I had good practice with you guys,” said Shige. “I've lost count of the amount of times I had to think of how to make you guys laugh after you were all sulky over some argument. And I definitely learned to be cheerful after being forced to deal with Nishikido-kun for over a decade.”
“You make it sound so bad,” Yamapi said, laughing.
Shige smiled too. “I’m exaggerating. It wasn't so bad after I applied my camera theory to it.”
Then Yamapi was brought back to the roughness of the wall against his palms and the heat on his hair that day as Shige said, “More practical things” and stepped away from the wall, pointing at an empty can lying beside them.
“Someone littered!” Yamapi said.
“Uh huh,” Shige said, grinning. “That's one way to look at it.”
“How else can you look at it? It's just an empty can.”
“Yeah, I just want to use it to illustrate my philosophy. Imagine, somehow from a shelf of a supermarket or a convenience store, it got thrown away by some litterbug and kicked around until it ended up here, lying on a footpath near a building. Nobody even looks at it. It's just lying here amongst a few thousand feet walking past. Solitary peace in the middle of a city. Also unheeded and unwanted trash. There're lots of ways to look at it. A camera can bring out both ways, or just focus on one.” Shige glanced up at Yamapi, who was gazing at him. “I decided that I should be a camera, too. There are so many ways of looking at things, but I choose only to look at the good part. All the ugly parts, the unhappy parts, I blur the focus on them. When I get teased by Nishikido-kun, or Tegoshi takes something I want, or Massu makes me want to pull my hair out from his indecision, or the Jimusho throws me aside and doesn't want to promote me, I choose to find the humour in it so that I'm able to laugh. Once that happens, everything is okay.”
“And through that you make others happy,” said Yamapi, but Shige blushed and refused to acknowledge that.
The rain still hasn't let up, and Yamapi is getting really cold. He wishes, for a moment in place of the rain stopping, that he could hear Shige's laughter once more and his teasing, cloying voice saying, “Look for the beauty in things, Yamashita-kun! No, no, not that ugly bit of it, who wants to look at ugly things except M people! I'm talking about the beautiful bit of it. What, you still don't think the shirt looks good on me? Too bad. I'll get a second opinion, someone who is more in tune with beauty than you are.”
Then Yamapi can't help but smile. Even memories of Shige carry vague happiness.
Massu
of windows in buses
Wheels splash through the water and Yamapi looks up with a start to see a bus pulling into the stop. The door opens and disgorges about five or six school children, who squeal and struggle to put up umbrellas the moment they’re out. A couple of them unlucky enough not to have umbrellas start running down the footpath, tiptoeing their way through puddles. Yamapi looks back at the bus as the engine revs and it starts pulling away. A line of side profiles at the windows blur past him and then the bus is gone and he’s alone in the bus stop again.
He wishes his mind would give him a break already but he doesn’t have a choice, he’s in a reminiscing mood. The more he sits there, the more he’s brought back to a cold early-winter morning fumbling about in his apartment for his sunglasses. He knew it was somewhere in the living room, and he also knew, as his handphone rang for the third time, that he was late. Very late. Fifteen minutes late, to be precise.
He stuck his hand down the armchair in a last desperate attempt and his fingers closed around the sunglasses. Who was it who said that you generally found something in the last place you would look at? Damn that guy. He grabbed the sunglasses and was out of the door the next minute, struggling to lock the door and hook his bag strap over his shoulder at the same time. He was late. Very late. Almost twenty minutes late.
The lift was agonisingly slow, as it would be on the one and only day he needed it to be fast, so he gave up and took the stairs instead. By the time he reached the bottom, he was exactly twenty minutes late and if they didn’t hightail it all the way to the airport, they would miss the flight and the Jimusho would probably cut his pay to compensate them for three airplane tickets. Not to mention Ryo would be incredibly mad at them for turning up late to a dress rehearsal. Yamapi shuddered a little at that thought and quickened his speed towards the nondescript bus waiting at the kerb.
Quite suddenly, a face appeared at the window and he braced himself for a scowl and a soundless “Hurry up!”.
But, as he got closer, he realised that it was Massu, and Massu was smiling. Huge dimples, happy crinkled eyes, white teeth. On a cold early-winter morning waiting for a twenty-minute late member. If he hadn’t already been frazzled beyond all help, Yamapi thought that his stress would most likely have fallen away at the sight of that smile.
“Yamashita-kun, you finally made it!” Massu greeted him as he climbed onto the bus and started his apologies.
“We have to hurry to the airport or we won’t make it,” said Koyama gloomily.
Yamapi collapsed in the seat beside Massu as the bus moved off. “I know, I’m sorry. I woke up late and then everything after that just became late too.”
Massu patted his shoulder. “Maa maa, we’re all used to Yamashita-kun being late.” Yamapi wasn’t very sure if that was supposed to be comforting until Massu added, “Don’t worry, we’ll definitely make it there on time! If Yamashita-kun has always been late and yet we’ve never missed a plane before, then there shouldn’t be a reason why we should miss the plane this time, right?”
“Massu, you’re not making sense,” Koyama commented, but Yamapi was pretty sure now that Massu meant to be comforting, because he was comforted. Even though he didn’t have a right to be, considering that he was the one at fault in the first place. But Massu was the only one in the group who would overlook that technicality.
“Thank you,” he said, and Massu just smiled back and pulled out a bag of cream puffs. “I was saving it till Yamashita-kun came. Might as well eat on the way to the airport!”
They made it to the airport in time, but Massu got held up by the metal detector for some metallic quality about him that nobody could figure out. Ryo was messaging them frustratedly from the plane, asking them when on earth they would feel that they were ready to get on, but both Yamapi and Koyama stayed and waited for Massu to get clearance. It wasn’t much, after all. He really wanted to show some gratitude for that unexpected smile through the bus window. He suspected that Koyama just stayed because he would feel guilty if he walked off by himself.
“Thanks for waiting for me, guys,” Massu said when he stopped beeping at last.
“Don’t worry,” said Yamapi as they rushed on. “We’re fated to be on this plane. Besides, you waited for me, didn’t you?”
Massu blinked. “I was having my breakfast on the bus, ne,” he said after a moment. “I like having a slow breakfast. I wasn’t thinking of Yamashita-kun at all. Perhaps if I was, I wouldn’t have been okay about it. You were really late.”
Yamapi stopped and stared at him, and Massu stared back with an innocuously blank face. Koyama started hopping a bit, calling to them to hurry, and the airport staff were coming round to see what was the hold up, and suddenly Massu laughed and reached out to pull Yamapi along with him. “But we wouldn’t have moved off without Yamashita-kun!” he said. “You couldn’t be left behind.”
“I’m sorry,” said Yamapi, a little awkwardly.
“Silly,” said Massu with a touch of affection in his voice. “I just wanted to make you feel bad by being nice about it.”
Then Yamapi started laughing too, and the stewardesses standing at the airplane doors gave them baffled polite smiles.
He doesn’t like attaching significance to insignificant things, but he still asks himself a question from time to time that he avoids answering. Have they left him behind this time, or has he been the one dragging his feet while they’ve been trying to pull him along?
Koyama
of blinking on an uptown street
Shibuya, of the busiest intersection in the world and the iconic glass-fronted Starbucks Coffee with HMV in the background. Yamapi has been there countless times before, randomly browsing, shopping, eating, watching thick crowds move across the pedestrian crossings and the few stragglers dashing pass seconds before the traffic lights turn green. “Looking for death!” Koyama had called it once as they watched a guy cheat death by a couple of seconds.
It had been a cold drizzly night as they sat on the barstools in Starbucks and watched the crowds gather and disperse, gather and disperse at regular intervals. The condensation on his latte was cold to Yamapi’s fingers; he couldn’t figure out why he’d ordered a cold drink on a night when he and Koyama needed so much warmth.
“I wouldn’t run across if the traffic light was turning green,” said Koyama. “I wouldn’t bet on my life like that.”
“Yeah…” Yamapi murmured. “I wonder where we’re going with ours?”
“Ours?”
“Our lives.”
Koyama looked lost. He’d never been good at conversations like that; he left analysis and conjecture to Shige. Koyama was someone who took life as it came, made the best out of what he had. He didn’t speculate, didn’t try guesswork, didn’t like to dwell on things that made him feel miserable. “I don’t know.”
Yamapi didn’t know either. They’d laughed about their imminent ‘Not in Employment, Education or Training’ state earlier on in the afternoon when Shige had said he couldn’t put ‘ability to give come hither looks’ in his resume, but in actual fact, it wasn’t really funny, was it? Now that he was here facing reality, he couldn’t remember why he’d laughed.
“I think Shige will be okay,” said Koyama. “Anyone would be willing to hire him, don’t you think?”
“Yeah…”
“And Tegoshi will be okay whatever happens to him. He’ll find his own way somehow. Massu…”
“Do you think…” Yamapi interrupted, “we’ll still be meeting up forty years later? Or will the fact that we’re not working together anymore end up in us becoming strangers?”
Koyama turned to Yamapi with a horrified face. “Of course we’ll still be friends! Haven’t we known each other since we were teenagers? Haven’t we gone through thick and thin together, turned our failures into successes as a group? Just because we’re not working together anymore doesn’t mean that we won’t need each other!”
“But what for?” Yamapi said tonelessly. “You, Shige, Tegoshi, Massu…the four of you have so much going on for you in your private lives. You don’t really need Ryo-chan and I hanging around and reminding you of the old days.”
“Don’t say that!” Koyama laid his hand on Yamapi’s arm briefly. Yamapi could feel the coldness of Koyama’s fingers through the thin material of his long sleeve. “The both of you have been such big influences in our lives. Didn’t you inspire and encourage us into being better than what we were? Didn’t you push NEWS from nothing into something? Didn’t you stick by us and refuse to give up hope in us even when we disappointed you? I know you’re going to say that we didn’t, but we did, in the beginning! And yet you didn’t give up on us.”
Yamapi couldn’t remember a time when he hadn’t been proud of them, but he knew that long ago, in some foolish yesteryear, he’d sulked for months at the Jimusho for putting him together with a bunch of strange guys. In a way he felt that he didn’t deserve this rosy retelling of a not-quite-so-glorious past, but he continued listening.
“Remember all the meals we’ve shared?” Koyama pressed on. “We would always give Tegoshi the best bits of everything and Ryo-chan would stuff Shige and we would all call pork ‘Massu’. During concerts, all we’d need are glances at each other to know exactly where everyone is and what we’d be doing next. And we would trust each other with our lives because we’ve been through enough to know that we’ll be okay as long as we’re together as a team. Right?”
He nodded speechlessly.
“All that won’t disappear.” Koyama blinked once, hard. “We trust you so much, Yamapi. Don’t have such little faith in us!”
The traffic lights below turned green and another sea of people started strolling across the crossings. Yamapi looked at Koyama, who was still blinking hard, and was about to make a remark about Koyama’s unmanly desire to cry when he choked and started blinking as well. Koyama let go of his arm and laughed. “Look at how stupid we’re being!”
“No,” said Yamapi, “look at how stupid I’m being.”
They laughed again, companionably, then Yamapi rubbed his hands and covered Koyama’s cold hand with his warmth. “I do trust you guys,” he said. “Whenever I start being frightened, I’ll remember that we’re still in this together, for good. Don’t leave me behind.”
Koyama pointed both index fingers at him. “Believe!” he said in mock-Tegoshi style.
Even so, he forgets more frequently than he remembers. There are times when he thinks he should just give up on their friendship before they give up on him first; times when his longing for the old days gets so bad that he has to forego his reservations to give one of them a call, any one, as long as someone picks up. And of course that someone always does, be it Tegoshi or Massu or Shige or Koyama. They’re always around if only to say ‘hi’ and ‘how are you doing’ and suggest lunch; it’s Yamapi who, despite everything, refuses to believe in them.
of rainclouds parting over a bus stop
Yamapi wishes that the rain would stop. Really. It has been raining long enough and he’s cold enough and it’s just high time that it stop. Even during filming, the rain gets turned off once the director says ‘cut’. It’s silly if it continues raining for too long.
He hears the sound of wheels through the water again and when he doesn’t bother looking up, the loud horn tells him that he should.
“Yamashita-kun!” someone calls and he looks to see Massu hanging out of the MPV window waving at him. “Sorry, we were stuck in a traffic jam. Come on!”
Yamapi stares stupidly for a minute, then picks up his bag from the ground beside him. “But I don’t have an umbrella,” he says.
It is Massu’s turn to stare. “Umbrella? What for?”
“It’s raining…”
“It’s not raining anymore!” Massu laughs.
Slowly, Yamapi looks up at the roof and observes that the frequency of the droplets has drastically decreased. How had it happened that he’d not even noticed the rain stopping?
Tegoshi works the horn again and Massu says, “Yamashita-kun, are you alright? Hurry up, there’s a bus coming behind us!”
Yamapi finally stirs and walks over to the MPV with his bag dangling from his fingers. The door is thrown open by Shige and when he steps in, all he sees are huge smiles on the members’ faces.
“Hello, Yamashita-kun!” calls Tegoshi from the driver’s seat. “Sorry we took so long! Were you very bored waiting for us?”
“No,” Yamapi says and glances at the backseat, where Koyama is sitting with his arm thrown protectively around Ryo. Ryo offers him a smile; there are dark circles under his eyes and he’s not very shaven, but he looks happy and the smile is real. A couple of days ago, Koyama had declared that he and Shige were going to descend on Ryo’s apartment and drag him out whether he liked it or not. If ever there are two people who can pull someone out of depression by mere determination and cheerfulness, they’re Koyama and Shige and evidently they’ve worked their magic on Ryo at least for a while.
“How are you feeling?” he asks.
“I’m okay,” Ryo replies, and for the first time in a long time, Yamapi feels that he really is.
“Okay!” Tegoshi says, stepping on the accelerator as the bus behind warns them in a flurry of indignant honks that they better get out of the way or else. “Let’s have a great trip! My goal is to make Kei-chan drunk every night so that we’ll have lots of embarrassing stories to tell Riko-san!”
Koyama wails, “You’re not going to destroy my last bachelor’s holiday!”
“My goal,” says Massu happily, “is to have really good barbeques at the beach!”
“Massu never changes,” Shige snorts. “Hey Tegoshi, I’ll help you get Koyama drunk and embarrassing.”
Tegoshi whoops and Koyama groans again, and Yamapi hears himself laughing. He’d almost forgotten what a wonderful thing it is to be able to laugh freely and loudly from the heart; and when he looks back, Ryo is laughing as well and he thinks the joy at that sight could be a little too much for him to take. Only he really doesn’t want to cry because as understanding as his members (or ex-members) are, he knows they’ll still interpret it wrongly.
“And then,” Tegoshi announces, “we shall go for a public bath together again.”
“I won’t go!” Massu squawks in horror.
“You will!” Tegoshi sings.
“Let him be,” Shige protests. “If he doesn’t want to go, we can’t force him.”
“I’ll force him,” Ryo says.
“Ryo-chan, you too?” Koyama says in a mock-horrified tone that sets everyone laughing again.
“Oh, Nishikido-kun, I meant to tell you!” Tegoshi says. “Your demo tape was great, ne. I’ll send it in cause I think the company will definitely be interested in buying the song from you.”
Massu claps his hands and Shige turns to the back with a huge smile to demand, “Isn’t that great? I always knew Nishikido-kun could write far better songs than what we hear on the market these days.”
Ryo only smiles and says, “Thank you”, but they know how much it means to him.
“Well then,” says Massu, “we’ll have a great holiday! And maybe I’ll go into the public bath with you guys after all, in celebration of Nishikido-kun becoming the next big songwriter.”
“Oh,” says Tegoshi disappointedly, “I was looking forward to dragging you in.”
“Lest you forget, Massu has far more muscles than you,” Shige points out.
Yamapi leans back in his seat and listens idly to the flow of chatter around him as they move along with the traffic. He thinks of the roughness of the wall on his palms, the sweetness of ice cream, the coldness of iced latte’s condensation on his fingers, the cream puffs on the way to the airport. And then of Ryo’s smiles, Ryo’s laughter. The dark rings around his eyes that will surely soften by the end of the holiday, the song that will soon be playing on their radios.
Of himself, and relationships. It takes two hands to clap, two viewpoints to argue, two persons to maintain a friendship. Even more persons to support one through life and all that it has to throw at you. When he takes a look around, he knows that he’s so lucky to be here amid that support.
Tegoshi and Shige are squabbling good-naturedly about some triviality, Ryo is making a few remarks to Koyama, Massu is turning up the volume of the CD player. An old JE song blasts out at him.
Nanika ga owatte hajimaru. Kumo ga kirete boku wo terashidasu, kimi dake wo ai shiteta…
When something ends, something begins. The clouds part and light shines on me, you’re the only person I loved.
People, not person; love, not loved, he thinks. It’s time to do some serious catching up.
end