Fic for bluebirdsongs
Title: Snails à la Ex-idol
Author: marlenem
Pairing: Kame/Jin
Word count: ~4,800
Rating: PG-13
Genre & Warnings: what-if AU, fluff, romance, angst
Notes: Dear bluebirdsongs, you know, you have one awesome and lovely friend, and without her guidance I’d have absolutely failed to satisfy you with the Bemu/Jin story I’ve been so keen on writing for k_x this year xD Say thanks to her when she reveals herself, and I hope you’ll be able to enjoy this fic at least a little bit :)
Summary: The story in which Kazuya becomes a chef when Johnny bans him from KAT-TUN and the media altogether for five years.
“Still no unpronounceable French words on the menu,” Jin purses his lips as he sits down at a random desk and pulls one of Kazuya’s artistically arranged lucky bamboo ornaments closer from the middle of the table. It has a laminated piece of red paper attached to it, with a list of dishes on one side and desserts and drinks on the other. “I’m in the mood to try some snail à la whatever,” he keeps mocking.
“You know where to go to find the fancy food,” Kazuya answers from behind the counter where he’s preparing cabbage for soup, but he’s smiling. Jin keeps criticizing this place, but Jin criticizes most of the things he actually likes, so he’s not to be taken seriously.
Jin wrinkles his nose. “Sometimes I still wonder why you mighty chefs think that the fancy-factor depends on the amount of oyster you put in the food. Your tempura udon is fancy enough for us.”
Two businessmen, who come regularly to the bistro, hum in agreement at the neighbor table.
Kazuya just shakes his head and laughs. He’s given up explaining gourmet and haute cuisine to Jin years ago. Every few months, Jin wants to visit classy restaurants, especially a particular one, but that’s just because he likes to see Kazuya dressed in a white uniform with the ridic toque on top of his head, bossing around in the open kitchen. Most of the time, he’s happy with any place as long as he gets his favorite pasta dishes.
And Kazuya can satisfy both of his needs.
There’s Golden Pond and then there’s the Golden Pond. One name, one owner, but two restaurants. Golden Pond is a tiny, cozy restaurant hidden in the outer area of Ueno, where there are no chefs, no waiters, no kitchen staff, only Kazuya. This is where you look for him if you’re friends with him. The Golden Pond, on the other hand, is an expensive and exclusive restaurant in the heart of Roppongi where you look for Kamenashi if you pretend to know him and you want to boast about seeing him prepare the meal you ordered. Too bad that even though Kazuya owns that classy place, he’s the rarest sight there.
When Kazuya graduated as a chef and rumors got around that he was going to open a restaurant with the name ‘Golden Pond’, all the journalists assumed that he was going to be the head chef there. Well, they weren’t wrong about that; they just got the wrong address in the fax.
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←
“Where’s Kame?” Yuichi asked the manager, voice shaky and accusing. Usually, he was the member with the coldest head in KAT-TUN, but not today. Not when they were about to lose their ‘K’ for probably the rest of the band’s existence.
“Most likely out of the office already,” the manager answered. He was a new one, introduced the day before, and described as a person who was going to be able to control the rebellious band. Nobody knew his name yet, and honestly, nobody cared either at that moment. “You’re prohibited from getting in touch with him. If I catch you doing that, you can kiss your careers goodbye too.”
Jin just stayed silent. Any other time, he’d be first in line to pour his anger on the devil, but he was too dumbfounded to do it now. Not when it was only the night before he told Kazuya that the meeting with Johnny was going to be fine, that other idols got away with far more serious issues in the past.
“Was he fired?” Koki asked then. His voice was no better than Yuichi’s.
“His position within KAT-TUN and the entertainment business is to be discussed again in five years,” the devil said.
“But it was only a gossip on Bubka, for God’s sake!” Koki launched at him. “A Johnny’s is not a Johnny’s until he’s Bubka’d!”
“With photo evidence,” the devil shot back. “From the police station.”
Jin would have probably laughed at Koki’s desperate way to clear Kazuya’s name because it could sound funny. Could, but it didn’t, because it was Kazuya whose skin was at stake.
“Anyway,” the devil continued. “I assume I won’t hear his name from your mouth until the five years are over. Now move, we have a whole single to re-record until tonight.”
→
---
Jin loves how small this place is. How hidden it is and how only a few people know about it. How none of them care who the handsome chef and the handsome regular customer sitting on the same stool at the counter twice a week are - or if they do, they don’t run to the gossip papers with the info. They’re all lovely people, most of them living in the surrounding web of friendly streets, and Kazuya chats all of them up every time they visit.
It’s an unsolved mystery to Jin how Kazuya’s able to pay so much attention to the customers and take care of half a dozen orders at the same time: heating broth for ramen, frying tempura in a pan, cooking fresh rice, filling gyoza dough with mixed vegetables and meat, preparing vegetables and taking care of the side dishes in advance.
“So, spaghetti carbonara for you?” he asks when he takes a second off to catch his breath, but before Jin can even form an answer in his mind, Kazuya already has the bacon out of the fridge to dice it into impossibly identical little cubes. Jin keeps stealing from it when Kazuya turns to stir the udon noodles boiling on the stove and starts heating salty water for the pasta for Jin.
Jin sometimes thinks Kazuya is a magician. Either that, or he’s born to be a chef, just like he was once born to be a baseball player and then to be an admirable actor and a singer.
---
When Kazuya presses a cheek against Jin’s, inhales loudly through his nose and sinks a hand in his thick black mane of hair, that’s when Jin feels that he’s finally at home, not mattering where home actually is.
“Was it amazing?” Kazuya murmurs against his temple, and guides them into the storage room, out of any soul’s sight who might decide to enter the Golden Pond that morning.
“Beyond that,” Jin murmurs back, even though he knows that as wonderful as a concert can be, he’ll never stop missing Kazuya from the stage and from right beside him.
The tour is nearly over; there are only three nights left, all of them in Tokyo Dome. The time he used to spend traveling from one city to another, he can finally spend it with his lover.
Kazuya’s lips quickly find Jin’s and Jin is eager to respond, lets the younger man lean them both against a heavy sack of rice in the dimly lit room and invites Kazuya’s hands under the plain, black t-shirt while he shrugs the bright yellow hoodie off his shoulders.
“I’ve never made out in a storage room yet,” he informs Kazuya helpfully.
In perfect timing, the entrance door to the bistro opens in that moment and there’s the chiming sound of small bells mixed with Fukuda-san’s kind greeting. She’s the lady who brings Kazuya fresh tofu from his son’s tofu shop every Tuesday in exchange for Kazuya’s special mixture of spices for his curry.
“My to-do list is steadily growing, you know,” Jin reminds him, but lets him peacefully go to the front and offer a cup of tea to Fukuda-san for her kindness, but he earns a gentle slap on the top of his head before that.
---
←
Johnny had taken Kazuya’s cell phone away, Jin realized when he tried to dial him as soon as the devil dismissed them for the day. All of his calls went straight to the automatic answering machine which informed him that the number he dialed hadn’t been registered.
Jin had heard the rumors within the jimusho about the management’s ways of executing penalties and hiatuses, had witnessed what Ryo and Yamapi went through when Uchi Hiroki had been plugged out of both NEWS and Kanjani8, but he still had a kid’s heart at that time and didn’t fully understand the cruelty of it all. Now he got everything well enough, and felt even worse than either Ryo or Yamapi; they lost a friend, but Jin, he was forbidden to even hear the voice of his boyfriend again.
Luckily, he’d never been the kind who easily admitted to orders he didn’t like. Of course he drove to Kazuya’s apartment straight from the recording studio.
“It’s me,” he announced in the high-tech intercom as soon as his lover’s face appeared in the small screen.
The screen was tiny, the picture noisy and the colors faded, but it was still impossible to not notice how awful Kazuya looked with his hallow face, puffy eyes and trembling lips.
“Go away,” Kazuya mumbled.
“Let me in,” Jin said stubbornly.
“Go away. I’m being watched.”
“Don’t be a drama queen, let me in,” Jin hissed. “I don’t allow you to break up with me through an intercom.”
“I don’t get to choose,” Kazuya said then, and there was a sniff Jin heard perfectly well. The last thing Kazuya needed now was to be left alone. Jin wasn’t in a much better condition, but he was still collected enough to think straight, probably because reality hadn’t completely dawned on him yet. “Just go away. KAT-TUN can’t lose you too.”
“I don’t care, Kazuya,” he did. Jin knew what would happen to KAT-TUN if it lost the ‘A’ too, but he wasn’t going to give Kazuya a ground to stand on. “I’m not going away, so if you don’t want to get caught with me at your doorstep, I recommend you open that door for me right now.”
The tiny screen in the intercom turned back when Kazuya cut the line. Jin counted to twenty until the lock turned open with a careful click.
→
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←
The next time he heard about Kazuya was more than two years later, and it was through television. Actually, that was the only time Kazuya appeared on screen in the five years of his hiatus, and only because somebody leaked some insider info about him and probable plans of opening a restaurant. Kazuya later told Jin that he had never planned to open an exclusive restaurant in Roppongi, but with the exposure he suddenly got, he had no other option.
A month after the media announcement, Kazuya opened the bistro in Ueno, but kept it in absolute secret. He only mailed the address to a few of his reliable friends, and the list included Jin and the rest of KAT-TUN too.
→
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The concert tour has just ended, but Jin has no time to rest; he has a solo career to work on too, and that includes preparing for his upcoming album promotions. He practices solo choreographies now and discusses the setlist for his own tour taking off next month. He’s busy and tired and mostly hungry, and Kazuya takes care of him in every way he can: by listening to his endless rambles, excitement, complaints and whines, and cooking Jin’s favorite dishes to keep him in shape.
Beforehand, Kazuya thought it was going to be way more difficult to listen to all the show-business stuff Jin’s dealing with, stuff that he once was part of as well. But Kazuya has other things to do now, different dreams to care about, and even if he still finds a part of him envying Jin when he talks about music, bright stages and sexy costumes with stars in his eyes, it gets easier to suppress the feeling with time.
He loves to cook, and he’s grown to love the Roppongi Golden Pond too, and apparently, it was nominated as Best Restaurant of the year in a very famous cuisine magazine a few months ago to make him feel even more proud of owning it. That Golden Pond became the place he can visit any time he thirsts for a fragment of attention, to be remembered to, and then he can spend the rest of the time in his turtle shell in Ueno.
---
They keep talking about moving in together, but somehow it never happens. Both of them want to, sometimes they even sit in front of Jin’s MacBook and look at luxury apartments up for rent on the net, but Kazuya is still paranoid about getting caught and about Johnny destroying Jin’s future as well. There’s still six months left from the five years ban, and Kazuya declines to take any more risks than he does now.
His stubborn conviction of them getting caught together doesn’t keep Jin away from spending the majority of his nights off in his apartment though. Jin thinks he’s overreacting, but Kazuya raises an eyebrow every time paparazzi catches Jin on lenses in front of a club or while going out with a friend. But in the end, he doesn’t have the energy to stay paranoid twenty-four hours a day - though even with that, sharing a place is still too far out of their league.
---
←
It was uncomfortable and a bit on the awkward side, meeting KAT-TUN for the first time after such a long time spent apart. On one hand, he was afraid of getting caught by Johnny, and on the other… it’d been Kazuya who abandoned the band without a word, even if ordered so by Kitagawa himself. The thought of facing them now turned his stomach into a nest of buzzing, angry wasps.
But when he realized the guys were just as happy to see him as he was, he stopped worrying for the moment. Eventually, the awkward atmosphere melted into familiar comfortability where it didn’t feel wrong to fill each other in on all the things they had missed in the last twenty-eight months. Concerts, fights, friendships, relationships, schools, scholarships… a colorful, blurry chain of tales which all of them enjoyed listening to equally.
Kazuya was amazed by the urchin of yellow hair on top of Koki’s head, by how the Nintendo wasn’t glued to Junno’s hands anymore, how Tatsuya spoke in complex sentences more than he had ever heard him, and how Yuichi learnt to silently suffer from all the idiocy coming unleashed around their table. Jin… he wasn’t so sure about him. The two of them eyed each other with wary eyes, and neither of them was sure they liked the way the other one changed.
Upon finding his place within the five of them again, Kazuya looked more relaxed than he had probably ever been in the past. Meat comfortably wrapped around his bones where it used to only be skin, and he was as genuinely talking about cooking now as he used to talk about baseball in another lifetime. Jin’s face was stern now, his voice rougher and his smile less bright, but Kazuya stopped being so concerned about him so much when he opened his mouth the first time and adorable stupidity poured out of it.
At the end of the night, Kazuya was happy he gathered the courage and took the risk of getting caught by inviting KAT-TUN for a private dinner in his Golden Pond.
→
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The person who holds the Roppongi Golden Pond together is Noda, Kazuya’s former classmate and now head chef of his exclusive restaurant. They didn’t particularly share a friendly relationship back then, but Kazuya was barely friends with anyone at that time in school. He was Kamenashi Kazuya after all, an ex-Johnny’s idol, a failure who shouldn’t have a place in an elite school like that with such a shameful past.
Yet, Kazuya wanted the best chef available for the exclusive place, thus gave Noda a call three months after graduation, offering him a role a fresh graduate would never obtain so soon in any other classy place. They worked out the first version of the menu together, integrated Noda’s knowledge in Italian cuisines into Kazuya’s passion for everything French, Chinese and Japanese, and even helped in picking the kitchen crew from the Sous-chef to the very last Chef de partie. Along the way, Noda and Kazuya came to honestly like each other, and by the time the restaurant opened, they made a good team when they needed a job to be done.
Even though Kazuya hardly ever works with food there, he visits the place on a weekly basis to discuss the weekly specialty with Noda and to handle occasional VIP customers. He doesn’t miss the luxury in Ueno, because he didn’t want it in the first place. But whenever he dresses into fancy, expensive suits with matching neckties, walks down on the marble floor, arranges silver cutleries, prints the upgraded version of the menu with ink which has real gold powder in it, listens to Chopin being played at the elegant black piano in the corner of the dining room, and makes sure the place is safe under Noda’s careful directing, he’s happy and satisfied.
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←
Kazuya had pulled all the curtains closed before they went to bed and turned every source of light off, except for the TV. He didn’t want to draw any kind of attention onto his apartment from the street, and it didn’t matter that it was on the twenty-second floor, with windows absolutely unrecognizable from the parking lot. Jin called him paranoid three times that night, but Kazuya wasn’t able to fight that feeling. He, at least, had good motives; he just didn’t want to put Jin into trouble, didn’t want Johnny to discover that Jin had broken his rules on the first night already.
The TV screen kept flickering in the background, muted. Some old dorama was on a rerun, but neither of them were paying attention. They just needed the light because Jin wanted to see Kazuya while they had passionate good-bye sex.
“Five years is too much,” Jin sighed. He was sprawled out on the wide mattress with his face an inch away from his lover’s sweaty temple, at most, with his hand stroking a bony shoulder gently.
“I’m sorry,” Kazuya murmured back, face stubbornly turned towards the ceiling, avoiding Jin’s eyes.
“It’s not your fault,” Jin replied. “Anyone else would have gotten only a single scold.”
“Yeah…” But isn’t that reason a contradiction? Even if Jin meant that Kazuya just wasn’t ‘anyone else’, that he was Kamenashi, thus regularities didn’t apply to him? Because, for some unfair reason, Johnny expected way more from a small number of his idols than from the rest of the agency.
“I still am,” sorry, he meant. “I don’t expect you to become a nun or something for me, you know…” he pressed through his throat in the end. He kind of wanted Jin to become one, that’s what normal people expected of their lovers after all, but in the end, who believed that it was as easy to live up to that kind of expectation?
Kazuya didn’t even trust himself that much, at the threshold of becoming an adult and with Jin owning the whole of his heart at that moment.
Jin stayed silent. He wasn’t naïve either.
Johnny made sure Kazuya moved out of his apartment within a week to dismiss the last chance for contact between him and KAT-TUN.
→
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←
Though anxiety for disclosure seemed to have nestled in his mind comfortably, it was still Kazuya who texted Jin a week after he had the meal with KAT-TUN. It was just a nervous little message with a sorry attempt to put a dose of humor in it, even though Kazuya’s lame jokes were usually more embarrassing than funny. Hey, want to try my Bolognese sauce? Promise I’m not burning the tomatoes anymore :Db He was referring to all those experiments in the past when he felt like surprising Jin with his favorite foreign food on tired nights, and the food tasted more like coal than anything digestible.
He didn’t know what to expect at that time - didn’t even know what he wanted. Was he still in love or was it just an illusion because the two of them had never truly put an end to their relationship? He knew that Jin had had a few girlfriends and Kazuya had his own share of relationships too after disappearing, even if none of them were very steady.
→
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“I don’t understand you,” Jin muses loudly as he scans through a dozen brochures and pamphlets lying in a neat pile on Kazuya’s coffee table. “You want to study abroad, but you don’t want to benefit from your knowledge.”
“That’s not true,” Kazuya declines from where he’s leaning above his notebook, updating the Roppongi restaurant’s online menu for May. May’s gonna be the month of salmon, so he’s arranging a twin page for special salmon dishes available only in that month.
“Yeah, but when are you going to, like, serve Escargot in your bistro?” Jin reads out a random word in italics which he hopes is at least a French dish. “Or Bouillabaisse?” he adds in a horrible accent while he tries to keep up the face of someone who totally speaks Chef.
“It’s enough if I know how to make them.”
Jin thinks he might look like a breathing question mark, but he really honestly doesn’t get Kazuya’s logics here. He arches an eyebrow at him. True, the guy loves to show off his cooking skills, but there should be different motivations as well.
“Well, okay,” Kazuya sighs. “Maybe I’ll want to open a third restaurant sometime? Which isn’t as famous as the one in Roppongi is, but it’s more adequate than my Golden Pond?”
Jin finally nods, approving. That makes sense, and Kazuya can be shy enough to keep such ideas to himself sometimes. Explanation accepted.
But does this mean Kazuya doesn’t plan on returning to KAT-TUN at all? There’s only four months left until Johnny’s supposed to lift the ban from his name.
…
”Hey, when do these courses start, again?” Jin searches for the info after a long pause with his eyebrows furrowed.
---
No, Kazuya’s not chickening out; he’s never been that kind of person. He just considers his options wisely. He knows how to cook now, but he never cared to keep his voice trained, and the last time he acted he was Kiritani Shuuji, almost six years ago. He moved forward in his life, accomplished numerous things and he’s proud of the person he became through the years. KAT-TUN moved forward as well, but in a completely different direction. Yes, he misses being in the show-business, yes, he misses the guys and the fans, and he knows he is still being missed as well. Some fans are anticipating his return on twitter and in blogs and forums. He just doesn’t know whether he still fits into a boyband, even if said boyband’s members are childhood friends. The slight jealousy stringing his heart when Jin’s telling him about his projects isn’t enough to decide.
Plus, who knows what’s still up Johnny’s sleeve for him. As much as he likes Hiroki, and as much as they remained friends through the recent years, Kazuya doesn’t want to be the next Uchi Hiroki. Being promised a place in one of his bands upon returning, and in the last minute degraded into a trainee for yet to be decided how long.
Had it been five years ago, Kazuya would have gladly accepted the offer, but he’s not that kind of person anymore.
Jin’s not telling him what to do either. He tells Kazuya to do the one thing he loves the most, and the problem is, he can’t choose. If he moves to France for six month to be tutored by a famous French chef, he will miss the chance of reunion with KAT-TUN. If he chooses the reunion, he doubts he’ll get a six month holiday from Johnny within the next ten years.
---
←
Umm, wow.
Kazuya felt impossibly massive under his hands. Probably even more massive than Jin himself, as unbelievable as it sounded. Felt definitely better than those times Jin had been afraid of gripping too hard and breaking bones. The muscles, and even the fat on his arms and on his stomach, felt incredibly sexy and arousing when Kazuya used them against Jin to pull him closer, to turn him around, to pin him to bed…
In the past, it had been Jin on the top most of the times, because his man pride hadn’t let him be on the receiver side very often. Kazuya happily filled that place for him, because he loved Jin that much. Five years later though, mentally an adult as well, he wouldn’t mind letting the control out of his hands, and it seemed Kazuya hadn’t planned on spreading his legs tonight as well.
Jin had never seen this possessive side of Kazuya before. He liked it, just as much as he liked the hungry, wet kisses, the impatient struggle against clothes and the urging moans sounds they both made.
→
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←
“So what, are you dating again?” Koki asked one day, when Jin confessed for the third time within a month that sorry, he had already made plans with Kazuya and didn’t want to stand him up in the last minute, so he couldn’t go with Koki wherever he wanted to spend his time off.
“Maybe,” Jin answered with a little pride noticeable in his voice.
Koki wouldn’t mind, he was only concerned for Jin and Kazuya’s safety. Out of KAT-TUN, the paparazzi were most keen on tailing Jin. Koki wasn’t surprised by Jin’s recklessness, but he didn’t think that Kazuya, who had used to be so anal about those things, would follow Jin down that road.
Well, yes. On the sunnier side, Jin was happy Kazuya had managed to remove that stick from up his ass along the years.
They’d been good, obedient boys for so long, and that’s a record for Jin. He surpassed all of Johnny’s honest expectations, so madness is already queued under his name in Johnny’s diary of troublesome idols.
Even with all the expectation, Johnny had never realized he and Kazuya were playing him all along.
→
---
Kazuya contacts a school in Paris and applies for their program which will be starting in September. Jin’s by his side, holding his hand and trying to get him through his sudden burst of inferiority until he’s contacted by someone going with the name ‘Frédéric’. His application’s accepted, and he gets to work under an internationally recognized head chef in a five star restaurant.
Jin misses him when he’s not even gone yet, but he knows he’ll be able to deal with it. He lived without Kazuya five times longer than six months, and six months feels like nothing compared to that.
The rest of KAT-TUN takes the news well enough. They even dwell less upon Kame choosing snails over them than Jin. Apparently, they’re less delusional than Jin as well, and they have never let their hopes down about Kazuya’s possible return.
Johnny’s not mourning as well, when all Kazuya asks from him is to be able to contact his friends whenever he wants to. He can do that, Kitagawa nods.
“I promise I won’t cheat on you with snails,” Kazuya promises Jin the night before his departure.
“I’m more worried about that Frédéric dude,” Jin grumbles back. In all the movies Jin has seen, Frédérics were always played by handsome males in the thirties, and he knows Kazuya’s weak for those kind of people. His lover just laughs at him, doesn’t even find his whine worthy to recognize.
---
Turns out, Frédéric is not handsome at all, and he’s been married for, like, twelve years.
Also turns out, Johnny suddenly thinks cooking idols will sell well, so when Kazuya returns to Japan with a freshly framed certification in his luggage, he’s being offered a weekly late night cooking show at one of the leading TV stations.
It’s getting busier for him again, and the number of nights he can spend with Jin decreases noticeably. Jin thinks he’s going to be able to fully convince Kazuya to just pack his stuff and move in to Jin’s apartment soon enough, if they want to see each other sometimes in person too, not only through LCD screens in the living room. Just until they find a bigger place which both of them like enough to rent.
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The End
Author: marlenem
Pairing: Kame/Jin
Word count: ~4,800
Rating: PG-13
Genre & Warnings: what-if AU, fluff, romance, angst
Notes: Dear bluebirdsongs, you know, you have one awesome and lovely friend, and without her guidance I’d have absolutely failed to satisfy you with the Bemu/Jin story I’ve been so keen on writing for k_x this year xD Say thanks to her when she reveals herself, and I hope you’ll be able to enjoy this fic at least a little bit :)
Summary: The story in which Kazuya becomes a chef when Johnny bans him from KAT-TUN and the media altogether for five years.
“Still no unpronounceable French words on the menu,” Jin purses his lips as he sits down at a random desk and pulls one of Kazuya’s artistically arranged lucky bamboo ornaments closer from the middle of the table. It has a laminated piece of red paper attached to it, with a list of dishes on one side and desserts and drinks on the other. “I’m in the mood to try some snail à la whatever,” he keeps mocking.
“You know where to go to find the fancy food,” Kazuya answers from behind the counter where he’s preparing cabbage for soup, but he’s smiling. Jin keeps criticizing this place, but Jin criticizes most of the things he actually likes, so he’s not to be taken seriously.
Jin wrinkles his nose. “Sometimes I still wonder why you mighty chefs think that the fancy-factor depends on the amount of oyster you put in the food. Your tempura udon is fancy enough for us.”
Two businessmen, who come regularly to the bistro, hum in agreement at the neighbor table.
Kazuya just shakes his head and laughs. He’s given up explaining gourmet and haute cuisine to Jin years ago. Every few months, Jin wants to visit classy restaurants, especially a particular one, but that’s just because he likes to see Kazuya dressed in a white uniform with the ridic toque on top of his head, bossing around in the open kitchen. Most of the time, he’s happy with any place as long as he gets his favorite pasta dishes.
And Kazuya can satisfy both of his needs.
There’s Golden Pond and then there’s the Golden Pond. One name, one owner, but two restaurants. Golden Pond is a tiny, cozy restaurant hidden in the outer area of Ueno, where there are no chefs, no waiters, no kitchen staff, only Kazuya. This is where you look for him if you’re friends with him. The Golden Pond, on the other hand, is an expensive and exclusive restaurant in the heart of Roppongi where you look for Kamenashi if you pretend to know him and you want to boast about seeing him prepare the meal you ordered. Too bad that even though Kazuya owns that classy place, he’s the rarest sight there.
When Kazuya graduated as a chef and rumors got around that he was going to open a restaurant with the name ‘Golden Pond’, all the journalists assumed that he was going to be the head chef there. Well, they weren’t wrong about that; they just got the wrong address in the fax.
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←
“Where’s Kame?” Yuichi asked the manager, voice shaky and accusing. Usually, he was the member with the coldest head in KAT-TUN, but not today. Not when they were about to lose their ‘K’ for probably the rest of the band’s existence.
“Most likely out of the office already,” the manager answered. He was a new one, introduced the day before, and described as a person who was going to be able to control the rebellious band. Nobody knew his name yet, and honestly, nobody cared either at that moment. “You’re prohibited from getting in touch with him. If I catch you doing that, you can kiss your careers goodbye too.”
Jin just stayed silent. Any other time, he’d be first in line to pour his anger on the devil, but he was too dumbfounded to do it now. Not when it was only the night before he told Kazuya that the meeting with Johnny was going to be fine, that other idols got away with far more serious issues in the past.
“Was he fired?” Koki asked then. His voice was no better than Yuichi’s.
“His position within KAT-TUN and the entertainment business is to be discussed again in five years,” the devil said.
“But it was only a gossip on Bubka, for God’s sake!” Koki launched at him. “A Johnny’s is not a Johnny’s until he’s Bubka’d!”
“With photo evidence,” the devil shot back. “From the police station.”
Jin would have probably laughed at Koki’s desperate way to clear Kazuya’s name because it could sound funny. Could, but it didn’t, because it was Kazuya whose skin was at stake.
“Anyway,” the devil continued. “I assume I won’t hear his name from your mouth until the five years are over. Now move, we have a whole single to re-record until tonight.”
→
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Jin loves how small this place is. How hidden it is and how only a few people know about it. How none of them care who the handsome chef and the handsome regular customer sitting on the same stool at the counter twice a week are - or if they do, they don’t run to the gossip papers with the info. They’re all lovely people, most of them living in the surrounding web of friendly streets, and Kazuya chats all of them up every time they visit.
It’s an unsolved mystery to Jin how Kazuya’s able to pay so much attention to the customers and take care of half a dozen orders at the same time: heating broth for ramen, frying tempura in a pan, cooking fresh rice, filling gyoza dough with mixed vegetables and meat, preparing vegetables and taking care of the side dishes in advance.
“So, spaghetti carbonara for you?” he asks when he takes a second off to catch his breath, but before Jin can even form an answer in his mind, Kazuya already has the bacon out of the fridge to dice it into impossibly identical little cubes. Jin keeps stealing from it when Kazuya turns to stir the udon noodles boiling on the stove and starts heating salty water for the pasta for Jin.
Jin sometimes thinks Kazuya is a magician. Either that, or he’s born to be a chef, just like he was once born to be a baseball player and then to be an admirable actor and a singer.
---
When Kazuya presses a cheek against Jin’s, inhales loudly through his nose and sinks a hand in his thick black mane of hair, that’s when Jin feels that he’s finally at home, not mattering where home actually is.
“Was it amazing?” Kazuya murmurs against his temple, and guides them into the storage room, out of any soul’s sight who might decide to enter the Golden Pond that morning.
“Beyond that,” Jin murmurs back, even though he knows that as wonderful as a concert can be, he’ll never stop missing Kazuya from the stage and from right beside him.
The tour is nearly over; there are only three nights left, all of them in Tokyo Dome. The time he used to spend traveling from one city to another, he can finally spend it with his lover.
Kazuya’s lips quickly find Jin’s and Jin is eager to respond, lets the younger man lean them both against a heavy sack of rice in the dimly lit room and invites Kazuya’s hands under the plain, black t-shirt while he shrugs the bright yellow hoodie off his shoulders.
“I’ve never made out in a storage room yet,” he informs Kazuya helpfully.
In perfect timing, the entrance door to the bistro opens in that moment and there’s the chiming sound of small bells mixed with Fukuda-san’s kind greeting. She’s the lady who brings Kazuya fresh tofu from his son’s tofu shop every Tuesday in exchange for Kazuya’s special mixture of spices for his curry.
“My to-do list is steadily growing, you know,” Jin reminds him, but lets him peacefully go to the front and offer a cup of tea to Fukuda-san for her kindness, but he earns a gentle slap on the top of his head before that.
---
←
Johnny had taken Kazuya’s cell phone away, Jin realized when he tried to dial him as soon as the devil dismissed them for the day. All of his calls went straight to the automatic answering machine which informed him that the number he dialed hadn’t been registered.
Jin had heard the rumors within the jimusho about the management’s ways of executing penalties and hiatuses, had witnessed what Ryo and Yamapi went through when Uchi Hiroki had been plugged out of both NEWS and Kanjani8, but he still had a kid’s heart at that time and didn’t fully understand the cruelty of it all. Now he got everything well enough, and felt even worse than either Ryo or Yamapi; they lost a friend, but Jin, he was forbidden to even hear the voice of his boyfriend again.
Luckily, he’d never been the kind who easily admitted to orders he didn’t like. Of course he drove to Kazuya’s apartment straight from the recording studio.
“It’s me,” he announced in the high-tech intercom as soon as his lover’s face appeared in the small screen.
The screen was tiny, the picture noisy and the colors faded, but it was still impossible to not notice how awful Kazuya looked with his hallow face, puffy eyes and trembling lips.
“Go away,” Kazuya mumbled.
“Let me in,” Jin said stubbornly.
“Go away. I’m being watched.”
“Don’t be a drama queen, let me in,” Jin hissed. “I don’t allow you to break up with me through an intercom.”
“I don’t get to choose,” Kazuya said then, and there was a sniff Jin heard perfectly well. The last thing Kazuya needed now was to be left alone. Jin wasn’t in a much better condition, but he was still collected enough to think straight, probably because reality hadn’t completely dawned on him yet. “Just go away. KAT-TUN can’t lose you too.”
“I don’t care, Kazuya,” he did. Jin knew what would happen to KAT-TUN if it lost the ‘A’ too, but he wasn’t going to give Kazuya a ground to stand on. “I’m not going away, so if you don’t want to get caught with me at your doorstep, I recommend you open that door for me right now.”
The tiny screen in the intercom turned back when Kazuya cut the line. Jin counted to twenty until the lock turned open with a careful click.
→
---
←
The next time he heard about Kazuya was more than two years later, and it was through television. Actually, that was the only time Kazuya appeared on screen in the five years of his hiatus, and only because somebody leaked some insider info about him and probable plans of opening a restaurant. Kazuya later told Jin that he had never planned to open an exclusive restaurant in Roppongi, but with the exposure he suddenly got, he had no other option.
A month after the media announcement, Kazuya opened the bistro in Ueno, but kept it in absolute secret. He only mailed the address to a few of his reliable friends, and the list included Jin and the rest of KAT-TUN too.
→
---
The concert tour has just ended, but Jin has no time to rest; he has a solo career to work on too, and that includes preparing for his upcoming album promotions. He practices solo choreographies now and discusses the setlist for his own tour taking off next month. He’s busy and tired and mostly hungry, and Kazuya takes care of him in every way he can: by listening to his endless rambles, excitement, complaints and whines, and cooking Jin’s favorite dishes to keep him in shape.
Beforehand, Kazuya thought it was going to be way more difficult to listen to all the show-business stuff Jin’s dealing with, stuff that he once was part of as well. But Kazuya has other things to do now, different dreams to care about, and even if he still finds a part of him envying Jin when he talks about music, bright stages and sexy costumes with stars in his eyes, it gets easier to suppress the feeling with time.
He loves to cook, and he’s grown to love the Roppongi Golden Pond too, and apparently, it was nominated as Best Restaurant of the year in a very famous cuisine magazine a few months ago to make him feel even more proud of owning it. That Golden Pond became the place he can visit any time he thirsts for a fragment of attention, to be remembered to, and then he can spend the rest of the time in his turtle shell in Ueno.
---
They keep talking about moving in together, but somehow it never happens. Both of them want to, sometimes they even sit in front of Jin’s MacBook and look at luxury apartments up for rent on the net, but Kazuya is still paranoid about getting caught and about Johnny destroying Jin’s future as well. There’s still six months left from the five years ban, and Kazuya declines to take any more risks than he does now.
His stubborn conviction of them getting caught together doesn’t keep Jin away from spending the majority of his nights off in his apartment though. Jin thinks he’s overreacting, but Kazuya raises an eyebrow every time paparazzi catches Jin on lenses in front of a club or while going out with a friend. But in the end, he doesn’t have the energy to stay paranoid twenty-four hours a day - though even with that, sharing a place is still too far out of their league.
---
←
It was uncomfortable and a bit on the awkward side, meeting KAT-TUN for the first time after such a long time spent apart. On one hand, he was afraid of getting caught by Johnny, and on the other… it’d been Kazuya who abandoned the band without a word, even if ordered so by Kitagawa himself. The thought of facing them now turned his stomach into a nest of buzzing, angry wasps.
But when he realized the guys were just as happy to see him as he was, he stopped worrying for the moment. Eventually, the awkward atmosphere melted into familiar comfortability where it didn’t feel wrong to fill each other in on all the things they had missed in the last twenty-eight months. Concerts, fights, friendships, relationships, schools, scholarships… a colorful, blurry chain of tales which all of them enjoyed listening to equally.
Kazuya was amazed by the urchin of yellow hair on top of Koki’s head, by how the Nintendo wasn’t glued to Junno’s hands anymore, how Tatsuya spoke in complex sentences more than he had ever heard him, and how Yuichi learnt to silently suffer from all the idiocy coming unleashed around their table. Jin… he wasn’t so sure about him. The two of them eyed each other with wary eyes, and neither of them was sure they liked the way the other one changed.
Upon finding his place within the five of them again, Kazuya looked more relaxed than he had probably ever been in the past. Meat comfortably wrapped around his bones where it used to only be skin, and he was as genuinely talking about cooking now as he used to talk about baseball in another lifetime. Jin’s face was stern now, his voice rougher and his smile less bright, but Kazuya stopped being so concerned about him so much when he opened his mouth the first time and adorable stupidity poured out of it.
At the end of the night, Kazuya was happy he gathered the courage and took the risk of getting caught by inviting KAT-TUN for a private dinner in his Golden Pond.
→
---
The person who holds the Roppongi Golden Pond together is Noda, Kazuya’s former classmate and now head chef of his exclusive restaurant. They didn’t particularly share a friendly relationship back then, but Kazuya was barely friends with anyone at that time in school. He was Kamenashi Kazuya after all, an ex-Johnny’s idol, a failure who shouldn’t have a place in an elite school like that with such a shameful past.
Yet, Kazuya wanted the best chef available for the exclusive place, thus gave Noda a call three months after graduation, offering him a role a fresh graduate would never obtain so soon in any other classy place. They worked out the first version of the menu together, integrated Noda’s knowledge in Italian cuisines into Kazuya’s passion for everything French, Chinese and Japanese, and even helped in picking the kitchen crew from the Sous-chef to the very last Chef de partie. Along the way, Noda and Kazuya came to honestly like each other, and by the time the restaurant opened, they made a good team when they needed a job to be done.
Even though Kazuya hardly ever works with food there, he visits the place on a weekly basis to discuss the weekly specialty with Noda and to handle occasional VIP customers. He doesn’t miss the luxury in Ueno, because he didn’t want it in the first place. But whenever he dresses into fancy, expensive suits with matching neckties, walks down on the marble floor, arranges silver cutleries, prints the upgraded version of the menu with ink which has real gold powder in it, listens to Chopin being played at the elegant black piano in the corner of the dining room, and makes sure the place is safe under Noda’s careful directing, he’s happy and satisfied.
---
←
Kazuya had pulled all the curtains closed before they went to bed and turned every source of light off, except for the TV. He didn’t want to draw any kind of attention onto his apartment from the street, and it didn’t matter that it was on the twenty-second floor, with windows absolutely unrecognizable from the parking lot. Jin called him paranoid three times that night, but Kazuya wasn’t able to fight that feeling. He, at least, had good motives; he just didn’t want to put Jin into trouble, didn’t want Johnny to discover that Jin had broken his rules on the first night already.
The TV screen kept flickering in the background, muted. Some old dorama was on a rerun, but neither of them were paying attention. They just needed the light because Jin wanted to see Kazuya while they had passionate good-bye sex.
“Five years is too much,” Jin sighed. He was sprawled out on the wide mattress with his face an inch away from his lover’s sweaty temple, at most, with his hand stroking a bony shoulder gently.
“I’m sorry,” Kazuya murmured back, face stubbornly turned towards the ceiling, avoiding Jin’s eyes.
“It’s not your fault,” Jin replied. “Anyone else would have gotten only a single scold.”
“Yeah…” But isn’t that reason a contradiction? Even if Jin meant that Kazuya just wasn’t ‘anyone else’, that he was Kamenashi, thus regularities didn’t apply to him? Because, for some unfair reason, Johnny expected way more from a small number of his idols than from the rest of the agency.
“I still am,” sorry, he meant. “I don’t expect you to become a nun or something for me, you know…” he pressed through his throat in the end. He kind of wanted Jin to become one, that’s what normal people expected of their lovers after all, but in the end, who believed that it was as easy to live up to that kind of expectation?
Kazuya didn’t even trust himself that much, at the threshold of becoming an adult and with Jin owning the whole of his heart at that moment.
Jin stayed silent. He wasn’t naïve either.
Johnny made sure Kazuya moved out of his apartment within a week to dismiss the last chance for contact between him and KAT-TUN.
→
---
←
Though anxiety for disclosure seemed to have nestled in his mind comfortably, it was still Kazuya who texted Jin a week after he had the meal with KAT-TUN. It was just a nervous little message with a sorry attempt to put a dose of humor in it, even though Kazuya’s lame jokes were usually more embarrassing than funny. Hey, want to try my Bolognese sauce? Promise I’m not burning the tomatoes anymore :Db He was referring to all those experiments in the past when he felt like surprising Jin with his favorite foreign food on tired nights, and the food tasted more like coal than anything digestible.
He didn’t know what to expect at that time - didn’t even know what he wanted. Was he still in love or was it just an illusion because the two of them had never truly put an end to their relationship? He knew that Jin had had a few girlfriends and Kazuya had his own share of relationships too after disappearing, even if none of them were very steady.
→
---
“I don’t understand you,” Jin muses loudly as he scans through a dozen brochures and pamphlets lying in a neat pile on Kazuya’s coffee table. “You want to study abroad, but you don’t want to benefit from your knowledge.”
“That’s not true,” Kazuya declines from where he’s leaning above his notebook, updating the Roppongi restaurant’s online menu for May. May’s gonna be the month of salmon, so he’s arranging a twin page for special salmon dishes available only in that month.
“Yeah, but when are you going to, like, serve Escargot in your bistro?” Jin reads out a random word in italics which he hopes is at least a French dish. “Or Bouillabaisse?” he adds in a horrible accent while he tries to keep up the face of someone who totally speaks Chef.
“It’s enough if I know how to make them.”
Jin thinks he might look like a breathing question mark, but he really honestly doesn’t get Kazuya’s logics here. He arches an eyebrow at him. True, the guy loves to show off his cooking skills, but there should be different motivations as well.
“Well, okay,” Kazuya sighs. “Maybe I’ll want to open a third restaurant sometime? Which isn’t as famous as the one in Roppongi is, but it’s more adequate than my Golden Pond?”
Jin finally nods, approving. That makes sense, and Kazuya can be shy enough to keep such ideas to himself sometimes. Explanation accepted.
But does this mean Kazuya doesn’t plan on returning to KAT-TUN at all? There’s only four months left until Johnny’s supposed to lift the ban from his name.
…
”Hey, when do these courses start, again?” Jin searches for the info after a long pause with his eyebrows furrowed.
---
No, Kazuya’s not chickening out; he’s never been that kind of person. He just considers his options wisely. He knows how to cook now, but he never cared to keep his voice trained, and the last time he acted he was Kiritani Shuuji, almost six years ago. He moved forward in his life, accomplished numerous things and he’s proud of the person he became through the years. KAT-TUN moved forward as well, but in a completely different direction. Yes, he misses being in the show-business, yes, he misses the guys and the fans, and he knows he is still being missed as well. Some fans are anticipating his return on twitter and in blogs and forums. He just doesn’t know whether he still fits into a boyband, even if said boyband’s members are childhood friends. The slight jealousy stringing his heart when Jin’s telling him about his projects isn’t enough to decide.
Plus, who knows what’s still up Johnny’s sleeve for him. As much as he likes Hiroki, and as much as they remained friends through the recent years, Kazuya doesn’t want to be the next Uchi Hiroki. Being promised a place in one of his bands upon returning, and in the last minute degraded into a trainee for yet to be decided how long.
Had it been five years ago, Kazuya would have gladly accepted the offer, but he’s not that kind of person anymore.
Jin’s not telling him what to do either. He tells Kazuya to do the one thing he loves the most, and the problem is, he can’t choose. If he moves to France for six month to be tutored by a famous French chef, he will miss the chance of reunion with KAT-TUN. If he chooses the reunion, he doubts he’ll get a six month holiday from Johnny within the next ten years.
---
←
Umm, wow.
Kazuya felt impossibly massive under his hands. Probably even more massive than Jin himself, as unbelievable as it sounded. Felt definitely better than those times Jin had been afraid of gripping too hard and breaking bones. The muscles, and even the fat on his arms and on his stomach, felt incredibly sexy and arousing when Kazuya used them against Jin to pull him closer, to turn him around, to pin him to bed…
In the past, it had been Jin on the top most of the times, because his man pride hadn’t let him be on the receiver side very often. Kazuya happily filled that place for him, because he loved Jin that much. Five years later though, mentally an adult as well, he wouldn’t mind letting the control out of his hands, and it seemed Kazuya hadn’t planned on spreading his legs tonight as well.
Jin had never seen this possessive side of Kazuya before. He liked it, just as much as he liked the hungry, wet kisses, the impatient struggle against clothes and the urging moans sounds they both made.
→
---
←
“So what, are you dating again?” Koki asked one day, when Jin confessed for the third time within a month that sorry, he had already made plans with Kazuya and didn’t want to stand him up in the last minute, so he couldn’t go with Koki wherever he wanted to spend his time off.
“Maybe,” Jin answered with a little pride noticeable in his voice.
Koki wouldn’t mind, he was only concerned for Jin and Kazuya’s safety. Out of KAT-TUN, the paparazzi were most keen on tailing Jin. Koki wasn’t surprised by Jin’s recklessness, but he didn’t think that Kazuya, who had used to be so anal about those things, would follow Jin down that road.
Well, yes. On the sunnier side, Jin was happy Kazuya had managed to remove that stick from up his ass along the years.
They’d been good, obedient boys for so long, and that’s a record for Jin. He surpassed all of Johnny’s honest expectations, so madness is already queued under his name in Johnny’s diary of troublesome idols.
Even with all the expectation, Johnny had never realized he and Kazuya were playing him all along.
→
---
Kazuya contacts a school in Paris and applies for their program which will be starting in September. Jin’s by his side, holding his hand and trying to get him through his sudden burst of inferiority until he’s contacted by someone going with the name ‘Frédéric’. His application’s accepted, and he gets to work under an internationally recognized head chef in a five star restaurant.
Jin misses him when he’s not even gone yet, but he knows he’ll be able to deal with it. He lived without Kazuya five times longer than six months, and six months feels like nothing compared to that.
The rest of KAT-TUN takes the news well enough. They even dwell less upon Kame choosing snails over them than Jin. Apparently, they’re less delusional than Jin as well, and they have never let their hopes down about Kazuya’s possible return.
Johnny’s not mourning as well, when all Kazuya asks from him is to be able to contact his friends whenever he wants to. He can do that, Kitagawa nods.
“I promise I won’t cheat on you with snails,” Kazuya promises Jin the night before his departure.
“I’m more worried about that Frédéric dude,” Jin grumbles back. In all the movies Jin has seen, Frédérics were always played by handsome males in the thirties, and he knows Kazuya’s weak for those kind of people. His lover just laughs at him, doesn’t even find his whine worthy to recognize.
---
Turns out, Frédéric is not handsome at all, and he’s been married for, like, twelve years.
Also turns out, Johnny suddenly thinks cooking idols will sell well, so when Kazuya returns to Japan with a freshly framed certification in his luggage, he’s being offered a weekly late night cooking show at one of the leading TV stations.
It’s getting busier for him again, and the number of nights he can spend with Jin decreases noticeably. Jin thinks he’s going to be able to fully convince Kazuya to just pack his stuff and move in to Jin’s apartment soon enough, if they want to see each other sometimes in person too, not only through LCD screens in the living room. Just until they find a bigger place which both of them like enough to rent.
-----
The End