JE/NEWS- "One Thousand and One NEWS Nippon Nights" (7/8)

[peroxide_fic]

*****

The next morning, Ryo’s cryptic words all makes sense.

And by that, Shige means horrible sense, because everything is fine up until they get to the Dome, up until Ryo steps into the backstage area and randomly starts glaring at people, that one PA who had lost his guitar in particular (even though he’d called the disposal company and gotten his guitar back and it is secretly being repaired as they speak). Ryo doesn’t say or do anything out of the ordinary beyond that, just kind of glowering intensely the whole time, and as he does, the aura around him is suddenly unpleasant and awkward. Most of NEWS wonders if maybe Ryo had had some awful nightmares the night before, or think that maybe he hadn’t been able to sleep, or got depressed about his guitar again.

Shige knows better than them. “Stop it,” he says through gritted teeth, glaring right back at a silent Ryo. “I know what you’re doing. It’s not going to work.”

Ryo doesn’t answer; he just turns the laser-beam eyes on one of the new-hire stagehands and sends him scampering across the stage, studiously avoiding any more eye-contact.

Then Ryo walks away from Shige wordlessly, prompting Shige to glare after him and yell, “You suck!” This, of course, earns him wildly incredulous looks from the rest of the members and the staff, some of which are vaguely (or blatantly) accusatory.

“It wasn’t me!” Shige tells them, defensively. “This is not my fault.”

Except, he supposes, it totally is. This is classical psychology. He made the mistake of rewarding the monkey with treats whenever it threatened to throw poo at someone, and now, whenever the monkey wants more treats, it knows that all it has to do is throw more poo.

A few feet away, Ryo might actually snarl at a junior. Usually he’s pretty nice to cute kids, but for some reason he’s convinced the Kansai Juniors are all ugly. Said junior, who really isn’t that ugly (except for some teeth that need straightening), yelps and ducks under a row of seats.

Ryo pads off the stage and back to the dressing room, where the others are, doing costume check before the first show of the day.

Shige, still standing on the stage, blinks when a spotlight comes out of nowhere and lands squarely on him like one of those interrogation lights in spy movies. “What the heck?!” he demands, and holds up his hands to shield his face from the sudden onslaught.

The director’s voice comes on over the PA system. “Kato-kun,” he says, politely but with an edge of authority to it all the same, “Fix whatever you did.”

Shige gapes. “I didn’t…”

“FIX IT,” everyone currently in the auditorium says, in unison.

Shige arghs, but throws his hands up in surrender. “Okay! Okay, I’ll fix this! Just…stop already!”

The spotlight turns off.

Shige mutters darkly to himself and follows Ryo downstairs.

Where the rest of his group is already gathered on the couches, looking hopeful. Ryo smirks, leans back with his arm around Yamapi’s shoulder, and invites Shige to join them by patting the empty space on the sofa beside him. “Hey, tell us a story,” he says, sounding perfectly cheerful.

Shige glares, plops down in-between Ryo and Tegoshi, and crosses his arms.

“Fine! It worked. Congratulations on being ace at emotional terrorism,” he drawls.

“Just tell the story,” Ryo says.

Shige takes a deep breath. “So I guess this is the story of Nishikido-kun, who one day, found himself in a fight with KAT-TUN, because he’s good at provoking people like that…”

*****

Ali Baba and the 40 Thieves (or NEWS Is Full of Good-Intentions)

Ryo is headed off to work one morning to his usual room when suddenly, in the distance, he spies what looks like a cloud of dust rolling towards him. A little alarmed and a little disgusted, he sidesteps into a hallway off to the side of the main corridor to avoid the dust, wondering what it is; he thinks maybe locusts, because that is what they’d looked like on all of the end-of-the-world, Biblical-plague movies he’d ever seen, at least, from a distance.

It’s not locusts but it’s close enough; it’s KAT-TUN, and they are busy arguing with one another as they head to the main meeting room at the front of the hall.

“TOKIO is full of really good pranksters,” Taguchi whines, and upon closer inspection, Ryo can see that they’re actually covered in flour. “How was I supposed to know they rigged that bucket over the dressing room?!”

Kame is not pleased. “Maybe you shouldn’t ask them to show you some good pranks they know,” he says, voice calm but cold like ice.

Nakamaru sneezes. “At least it’s not anything worse,” he says. “If they’re the best pranksters in the jimusho then we don’t have to worry too much, I guess?”

Ryo thinks that flour over the door is kind of unimpressive, really. As it stands, TOKIO had probably been pulling their punches because everyone knows how Kame has no sense of humor.

Ryo grins; luckily, he has no such qualms.

Once the ghosts of KAT-TUN past filter into the meeting room, Ryo slips out of the hallway and heads to their dressing room, which he opens by punching in the security code on the lock (Jin told him what it was once, some months before he’d left for America and needed Ryo to grab some money he’d left in the room before Koki thought Jin had left it there to pay Koki back that money he loaned Jin five years ago). Upon getting into the room, Ryo is once again impressed by the sheer opulence of KAT-TUN’s dressing room; leather couches, lamps, the kinds of tables that don’t have folding legs. It’s spacious and there is a nice rug on the floor, the kind that comes from the Middle East and costs more than two weeks of Ryo’s pay (which is a lot, considering the whole two bands thing). There is a fresh fruit bowl sitting in the middle of the table, some fancy boxed mochi, and what looks to be someone’s untouched yakisoba bento, still warm.

He takes a moment to look around before he finds what he wants; Kame’s cell phone, exactly where he expected it to be (Kame’ man-purse) because Kame is a good little boy and doesn’t bring his personal phone with him on jobs, just his professional contacts one.

Grinning, Ryo flips it open and punches in the key code there to unlock it (which is another one of those things he’d learned from Jin, when Jin had been bragging about how smart he is by figuring out that Kame finds his own birthday really important). From there, he alters every phone number in the phonebook by one random digit either up or down, and then sticks the cell back into Kame’s gross man-purse.

On his way out he steals the soba and a banana and considers himself the new jimusho king of pranks.

*****

Upon their return from their meeting, and still caked in a light dusting of flour, Koki calls first shower and gets ignored by Ueda who marches straight to the bathroom with a look that dares the younger idol to try usurping his place on top of the I-Can-Knock-You-Unconscious hill.

Koki sulks, Taguchi plops down on the fancy couch, flour and all, and in his bag, Kame’s phone starts to ring. Nakamaru goes to wash his face while he waits for Ueda to get out of the shower.

“My lunch is gone,” Taguchi whines, while Kame examines his phone and realizes that the call is from an “Unknown Caller.” He ignores it, silences his phone, and tells Taguchi not to sit on the couch when he’s dirty like that, because they aren’t allowed to request a new one until later in the summer.

“My yakisoba is gone,” Taguchi repeats, in case no one had heard him (they had).

“Where’s that banana I was saving?” Koki asks, as Kame’s phone rings again.

He frowns when it’s another “Unknown Caller” and he ignores it again. “You didn’t eat your lunch?” he asks eventually, when Taguchi starts giving those sad puppy-eyes he gets, accusing everyone else of not caring about him.

Taguchi smiles at that. “Yes. I left it right here because I wasn’t hungry before the meeting but now I’m hungry and it’s not here.”

“Maybe the janitor came in and took it or something,” Kame offers, while Koki menaces the fruit basket in search of the banana he’d called dibs on when it had been delivered today.

“Did you eat my banana before the meeting?” Koki accuses Taguchi, when all the fruit is out of the basket and none of it is a banana.

Taguchi looks wounded again, despite Kame’s best efforts. “Didn’t you hear me just say I wasn’t hungry before the meeting?”

“Give me back my banana!” Koki demands, while Kame’s phone rings again.

Nakamaru wanders back into the room then, face and hands now clean of flour but hair and clothes still ghastly white. “You should have just eaten it when you claimed it,” he tells Koki, reasonably.

Koki stares at him. “Are you saying you ate my banana?”

“No,” Nakamaru says. “I didn’t want a banana.”

Kame scowls down at his phone and finally clicks it open. “Who is this?” he demands, eyes narrowed. “How did you get this nu…”

He freezes abruptly and the cold look on his face fades. “Uh… hello, mom,” he starts, sounding as contrite as the rest of his groupmates have ever heard him. It’s enough to distract them from their own issues; they all turn to stare at Kame as he flounders on the phone. “No, I haven’t been avoiding your calls. I didn’t know it was you, my phone said…” He pauses, quickly backtracks. “Of course I didn’t delete your number from my contacts… it must be a glitch. Okay. Yes, of course I’ll be down this weekend. Please don’t be mad, I promise… yes. Goodbye.”

He hangs up and then looks at his phone oddly, like it has somehow tricked or betrayed him.

“You erased your own mother’s phone number?” Koki whistles, while Kame scrolls through his contact list. “Dude, that is cold.”

“She’s right here,” Kame snaps, showing them the phone. “She must have changed…”

He frowns when he compares the number in his contacts to the number his mother had called from. “That’s…not right,” he says, and starts to get suspicious. “Koki, what’s your number?”

Koki looks even more incredulous at the thought of Kame not having his number than he’d been at the thought of Kame erasing his mother’s contact. “You erased my phone number too?”

Kame is starting to lose patience. “What’s your number?” he repeats, and the ice is back in his voice.

Koki rattles it off. Kame scowls. “It’s wrong in my book too. Nakamaru, what’s yours?”

Nakamaru tells him. Kame is so annoyed at this point that he looks constipated.

Taguchi clears his throat. “Do you want to know my number?”

“Someone changed all the phone numbers in my contact list,” Kame announces.

Nakamaru and Koki quickly touch their index fingers to their noses. Taguchi catches on a minute later and does it too, but no one would suspect him of something so thoughtfully devious anyway.

“It was working fine this morning,” Kame theorizes out loud. “I was talking to my brother about my mom’s birthday present.”

“D’aww, not as heartless towards women as the world thinks,” Koki grouses, and earns himself a glare.

“So it must have been while we were gone for the meeting,” Nakamaru points out. “Or while TOKIO was pranking us, but that’s kind of the same window of time.”

“TOKIO’s not crafty enough for this,” Kame says, point-blank. “They like immediate gratification.”

“True,” Nakamaru agrees. “Plus I doubt they have access to our dressing room.”

“Your manager?” Koki offers. “Maybe he wants you to stop hooking up with housewives, dude.”

Kame decides to ignore him too, and for once, turns to Taguchi. “Your lunch is gone?”

Taguchi nods. “And Koki’s banana.”

Kame looks thoughtful. “So, someone who knows our code came in here, messed with me, took Taguchi’s food, and stole Koki’s banana. I’m pretty sure all of our management team knows not to mess with our personal stuff.”

He and Nakamaru consider this for a while, while Taguchi and Koki both look kind of confused.

“Jin?” Nakamaru offers, a bit incredulously. He goes to his bag to check and see if any money is missing out of his wallet. “Nope.”

“No, not Jin,” Kame murmurs, catching on. “The next best thing.”

“Matsumoto?” Taguchi asks, and earns himself a slap on the back of the head from Koki.

“Arashi gets special luxury items delivered to their dressing room every day. They don’t care enough about you to steal your lunch,” Koki says.

Nakamaru and Kame share an understanding look. “NEWS,” they say.

Kame pockets his phone, looking determined. “Probably Ryo. If Yamapi wanted to punish us he’d just ignore us at Countdown and make all the fangirls think we’re not friends.”

“It could be Koyama and Shige just clowning around,” Koki points out.

“They’re not brave enough to steal anything,” Nakamaru says. “Or do anything malicious like keep someone from eating.” Pause. “It might have been Tegoshi being unholy.”

“He wouldn’t steal my banana,” Koki shoots back, defensively. Kame is inclined to agree. “It has to be Ryo.”

Nakamaru shrugs. “You can say that all you want, but we have to prove it first either way. Otherwise we just look like jerks.”

Kame agrees, but more than that, he would like to please get even now. He says as much.

Which prompts Koki to throw his hands up in the air in excitement. “Prank war!!” he shouts, and forgets about his pilfered banana completely.

Meanwhile, Taguchi is still hungry.

*****

“These are the rules,” Koki says, solemnly, because the law of Prank Wars is sacred. “Each of us gets one chance to prank Ryo and get him to apologize for taking my banana. First one to do it wins. We draw straws for order.”

“If he was the one who even did it,” Nakamaru stresses.

“I don’t want to play,” Ueda says, fresh out of the shower and going through his moisturizing regime and a boxing magazine as he sits by the vanity.

“Nakamaru’s right,” Kame concedes. “We probably ought to make sure first; for all we know it’s a prank for Arashi’s TV show and our manager gave them the code.”

Everyone turns to look at Nakamaru. He sighs.

“Yeah okay, I’ll go figure it out,” he says eventually, and heads for the door. At least this way he’ll be able to see Massu, and as far as he can tell, it won’t be difficult to figure out who had the stolen yakisoba for lunch. It’s not like Massu would lie to him.

“If you fail you’re out of the war!” Koki calls after him.

“Oh tragedy,” he says.

*****

Meanwhile, while KAT-TUN had been carefully establishing the rules of this prank war, the other members of NEWS are busy walking into their dressing room. When they arrive, Koyama sees that Ryo is about to snack on a box of nice-looking yakisoba that he has just warmed up in the microwave. The smell permeates the dressing room in all the best sort of ways, and feeling kind of hungry at that moment, Koyama decides that yakisoba for lunch for everyone is a good idea, because he never passes up an opportunity for the six of them to eat together. That decided, Koyama and Massu offer to go to the commissary to pick it up (on Koyama of course), and before long, all six members are sitting on their very not-leather couches and eating a pleasant lunch together while chatting about the day’s work.

None of them know what’s coming.

*****

When Nakamaru calls Massu an hour after lunchtime and asks him if he wants to go get some shaved-ice together, he is pretty certain his plan is fool-proof.

Massu, as always, enthusiastically agrees to come with him and hopes (subtly) that they can get an extra scoop of green tea ice cream on top of their shaved ice in lieu of vanilla, and when they get to the shaved ice shop, he carefully steers Massu away from the table where Koki, Taguchi, and Kame are sitting, Koki and Taguchi trying to look inconspicuous behind newspapers while Kame glares at his phone some more and attempts to fix all the broken contacts. Luckily Massu doesn’t notice, and as they sit down, Nakamaru casually asks Massu about how his day is going, what his groupmates are up to, and his plans for the weekend.

After Massu cheerfully answers all of these questions and a few minutes later, they are eating shaved ice together and the atmosphere seems natural enough to bring up food without seeming too much like a freak. So Nakamaru clears his throat and very subtly says, “So I thought I smelled yakisoba in the hallway around your meeting room when I walked by earlier.”

Massu grins. “Nakamaru has a good nose. It was yakisoba!”

“Oh yeah? Who had it?”

Massu doesn’t seem to consider this an odd question, but then again, he’s happily digging through the shaved ice dish to get a perfect mixture of red bean, mochi, strawberry, and ice cream on his spoon. “All of us,” he answers eventually, as he goes chasing after a mochi drenched in condensed milk.

Nakamaru stops chewing on his sliced strawberry. “What?”

“All of us had yakisoba,” Massu repeats cheerfully, and when he sees that Nakamaru has stopped eating, happily helps himself to the rest of the ice cream on top of the shaved ice. “Koyama thought it would be nice if we all had a group lunch together.”

Nakamaru sighs. Of course that’s why it happened.

“What did you have for lunch?” Massu asks in return, because Massu is polite.

“Chicken,” Nakamaru answers, and wonders if this means he’s out of the prank war.

Over at the table where the other members of Nakamaru’s group are sitting, Koki slowly draws his thumb across his neck in a slicing motion, which probably means yes, he is. The text message he gets saying, “Out!” from Koki thirty seconds later confirms it (Koki is subtle like that).

Nakamaru finishes eating with Massu and knows that Ueda’s already gone home for the day; he thinks he might do the same.

*****

The next day Koki decides it’s his turn to try and get NEWS back for the sabotage, but he wants to be sneaky and artistic about it by slowly scaring Ryo into thinking he has a crazy stalker or that some ghost of vendettas past is haunting him, watching his every move.

“Don’t you have work to do?” Ueda asks him.

“We do come here for that,” Nakamaru recalls, absently. “I think. Sometimes.”

“Shut up,” Koki says, and squirts a liberal amount of red pepper sauce onto a plate, before dipping the end of a straw into it.

“What is that?” Nakamaru asks, and wrinkles his nose in distaste.

Koki grabs a sheet of paper. “You ever see that American movie with Redrum and stuff?”

“No,” Nakamaru answers, flatly. He doesn’t like horror movies.

“You’re all culturally challenged,” he sighs, before starting to write with the pepper-dipped end of his straw onto the paper. He starts to write “I KNOW ABOUT THE BANANA” on it, as creepily as he can.

“Isn’t that supposed to be blood, then?” Taguchi asks him, leaning over his shoulder, creepily close. Koki elbows him to get him to back up. But when he does, he ends up making a splotch in hot sauce on the paper so it looks more like, “I KNOW ABOUT THE XX BANANA,” but rather than get a new piece of paper, he squiggles over the blotch a few more times with pepper sauce before deciding that’s good enough.

“How is this a prank again?” Kame asks, looking at the writing dubiously.

Koki grins. “I’m going to slip this into his locker. He’ll get freaked out about it. Tomorrow I’m going to slip one in his mailbox at his apartment, and then the day after that, I’ll call him from a payphone and leave creepy messages on his answering machine until he’s paranoid.”

“That’s pretty nasty,” Nakamaru murmurs.

Koki snickers. “I know,” he says, and once convinced that his masterpiece is dry, dashes off with Taguchi in tow to pay NEWS’s backstage reception area a special visit.

When he gets there he jimmies open the door with a credit card (NEWS doesn’t have a key code input system because they’re expensive and NEWS would probably tell everyone and their mother the code anyway), before strolling directly over to Ryo’s locker.

Which is padlocked.

He frowns. Who the hell in the jimusho padlocks their locker?

This had not been part of the plan at all, but with Taguchi not-so-inconspicuously keeping watch for him in the hallway, Koki is forced to improvise, and as such, instead of getting inside Ryo’s locker, he is forced to leave the creepy hot sauce message leaning against it instead, which is not nearly as creepy so much as a little weird. But whatever, he tells himself it will be the harmless-seeming prelude to his grand machinations for later. That decided, he darts out of the room before the members get back from their interviews.

Satisfied with a job well done for the day, he goes back to his own dressing room to practice his mouth-breathing, for when he calls Ryo’s apartment later in the plan.

*****

Meanwhile, NEWS trickles back into their dressing room in pairs as they finish their crosstalks one after another. First are Yamapi and Tegoshi, who wander into the room, Yamapi concentrating on writing his nikki and Tegoshi listening to music. Yamapi walks right past Koki’s slightly ominous, spicy-smelling message, while Tegoshi pauses when he sees it.

“Leader,” he says, pulling his earbuds out, “Look.”

Yamapi looks. “That’s…interesting,” he says, after a beat.

Tegoshi studies it carefully. “Do you think it’s a message from housekeeping? The interns?” He goes over and picks it up, wrinkling his nose at the smell. “I think it’s a shopping list, ne.”

Yamapi joins him. “What makes you say that?”

“We’ve been out of company pens for a while, which might explain why this I written in hot sauce,” Tegoshi theorizes. “And it says I know about the six… bananas?”

“That’s not a six,” Yamapi insists.

Tegoshi studies the blob in-between letters. “What do you think it is?”

Yamapi looks very serious. “Five,” he says, eventually.

Tegoshi tilts his head. “Okay, I guess I could see that.”

“Should we go ahead and fill in the other supplies we need?” Yamapi suggests next. “That must be why this was left here, right? Whoever left it knows about the five bananas they need to buy, but not about anything else?”

Tegoshi grins. “It makes sense. I mean, I seriously doubt someone would leave it here to be an intimidating letter or something, leader. Five bananas isn’t a very threatening message, you know.”

“It could be a carefully coded love letter, too,” Yamapi offers.

Tegoshi blinks.

“If that’s the case,” he begins, “then saying something about five bananas has a very creepy context.”

Yamapi nods in embarrassed agreement, and from there, Tegoshi grabs a pink sparkly pen from his bag and goes to write, “two boxes granola bars” on the paper, before passing it to Yamapi, who writes, “one case protein drinks.”

After that, Koyama and Massu wander in arm-in-arm and see the list as well; ecstatic that they’re finally ordering more supplies, Koyama asks for a new chair to replace the one that creaks when you lean against the backing, a new shower head, and a box of those Calbee shrimp chips that Tegoshi did that adorable dance commercial for. Massu asks for six bananas, because it would suck if one of them couldn’t have a banana, and also requests a humidifier for the room, meat buns, and a new mini-fridge (that is bigger than the current mini-fridge).

Which is why, when Koki sidles up to Tegoshi later and asks if anything interesting happened today, Tegoshi simply smiles and says, “The jimusho finally cared enough to let us request our own supplies!”

From where they are listening to the exchange around the corner, KAT-N snickers.

Meanwhile, Koki frowns, first because no, the jimusho doesn’t care, and second, because he’d accidentally gotten hot sauce on his hand earlier and rubbed at his eyes and spent a good twenty minutes flushing out his burning retinas with water in the bathroom while Nakamaru laughed at him. And he’d done it all so Ryo could have a suitably creeped out, confused reaction to his ominous letter. Which he is not getting.

Naturally, he prods for more details. “Did Nishikido-kun get any interesting messages today?”

“His sister called,” Tegoshi answers, and already looks bored with the topic. Then pauses. “Did you leave him a weird love letter or something?”

Koki chokes. “What? No! I…”

A forcibly cleared throat from around the corner that sounds like Nakamaru silences Koki before he can confess to leaving a threatening and ominous letter. Right. He schools his features, plasters on a smile. “A love letter? Someone left Nishikido-kun a love letter?”

Tegoshi shrugs absently. “Well, leader said it could have been, but we all agreed it was a shopping list. Who writes about bananas in letters otherwise, right?”

There is a distinct sound of something a lot like “pffffffft” from around the corner as Koki gapes openly at Tegoshi.

He ends up trudging back to his dressing room feeling kind of let down by the world.

“Out!” Taguchi declares loudly, when Koki walks into the door.

“I could still call him tonight and mouth-breathe through the phone!” Koki protests.

“Yeah but at this point he’d just think it was a fangirl,” Kame points out.

“Koki-kun as a fangirl would be a pretty creepy prank,” Taguchi theorizes, obligingly.

Koki glares and kicks him in the calves.

*****

“And that,” Shige ends, when he sees the way the stage manager is now pointing anxiously at his watch from over Yamapi’s shoulder and mouthing that the first show is going to start in less than thirty minutes, “is how Nakamaru and Koki were both thwarted and subsequently kicked out of the prank war.” He looks at Ryo. “Happy?”

Ryo grins. “For now.”

Shige rolls his eyes, but accepts Ryo’s hand up as they stand to go and get back to work. From there, Ryo stops glaring and being creepy, and throughout the remainder of the day, many members of the staff come up to Shige and congratulate him on so quickly fixing whatever it was that he’d done wrong the night before.

Shige realizes he will probably have to come up with the rest of the story for after tonight’s concert.

*****

He’s right.

“Let’s have a late dinner,” Yamapi suggests, “in my room tonight, since it’s bigger than Shige’s, ne.”

“And because I’m broke after everything you charged to my room the last time,” Shige feels the need to point out, even though he’d gotten flak from the others for mentioning it out loud after it had happened.

Yamapi smiles coolly. “I’ll even pay for alcohol,” he offers, and earns himself appreciative praise from the other members for being so cool and for making Shige look so lame again.

“Don’t worry, Shige,” Koyama says, patting him on the shoulder even as he laughs at him-fondly of course-with those fox-like eyes. “You can make up your coolness with another story tonight.”

Shige crosses his arms. “I’m only telling you a story tonight if our remaining Osaka shows go smoothly, do you hear me?” He gives Ryo as stern a glance as he can muster as he says this.

Ryo answers with a smile that says butter wouldn’t melt in his mouth. “We’ll see.”

And so, NEWS gathers into Yamapi’s dressing room that night, spread out and comfortable in the living-room like area of his suite as they sip wine and eat pasta and listen to the rest of Shige’s story.

“And so, with Koki and Nakamaru out, Taguchi decides to try his hand at getting Nishikido-kun back next…”

*****

Taguchi’s idea is to infiltrate the heart of NEWS’s dressing room and attack when they least expect it. As such, he calls to order special catering and when the food arrives, has a cart ready; he spreads a nice red tablecloth over it and arranges the food beautifully, with a card on top of it that reads, “To: Nishikido-kun, From: Management” on it and climbs underneath the cart so that he is obscured by the red tablecloth.

Then he wheels himself down the hallway and parks out in front of NEWS’s dressing room, reaching out to knock on the door before quickly withdrawing his hand.

When the door opens a few seconds later, Massu lets out a delighted noise at the sight of so much fancy food.

Taguchi and the food are wheeled into the room after that, the door closed behind him.

He is parked up against the back wall, and hears Shige’s voice warning Massu, “It says it’s for Nishikido-kun, so you probably shouldn’t eat it.”

“I just want to test it,” Massu says, and doesn’t even question why the management would provide Nishikido-kun with special catering but no one else. Taguchi thinks Nakamaru is right; Massu seems like a pretty nice guy.

Shige, on the other hand, sounds suspicious. “What I want to know is why he’s getting mysteriously delivered food sent from management to our group resting area,” he says out loud, while Taguchi can hear Massu hovering in close vicinity to his cart. He hopes Massu moves before Ryo gets here; it will be hard to jump out and tickle-attack Ryo if Massu is standing in the way like that.

Koki had said tickling is a retarded prank, but Taguchi thinks it’s much more direct than pretending to be a stalker, plus, when you’re tickling someone, you can get them to admit to anything. And to apologize for it too.

“Maybe they’re rewarding him for good movie returns on the pudding film,” Massu offers, sounding hungry at the thought of pudding.

“I’m pretty sure they would have said that on the card if it were the case,” Shige insists. “Positive reinforcement has no point if the person you’re trying to encourage it in has no idea what behavior you’re reinforcing.”

Massu doesn’t respond, and with good reason; Taguchi thinks that last sentence had been really confusing.

After a moment, Taguchi hears some of the silverware above him clink.

“You’re going to eat his food, aren’t you?” he asks Massu, not sounding annoyed so much as resigned.

“There’s a lot of it, and it’s getting cold,” Massu answers, reasonably. “I’ll just taste some and see which ones are better, and then give Nishikido-kun my recommendations when he gets back.”

“Right,” Shige answers. “Sure.”

Taguchi is dismayed when he hears Massu attack the plates with gusto over his head.

*****

Fifteen minutes later, the sound of food being devoured finally stops. Shige’s amused voice asks, “So, you’ll recommend him the air and the shortrib bones? Some of the parsley garnish, perhaps?”

Massu sounds vaguely guilty when he answers, “Everything was so good I forgot to stop.”

The sound of a newspaper being folded is followed by Shige’s footsteps up to Massu’s side. “Just remember that time he made you cry.”

Massu jerks at the memory as if he’d been struck, and as such, jostles the cart a little, sending Taguchi’s legs (which are falling asleep) out from under him a little. He stumbles slightly, causing a bit of a clang against the wall behind him as he attempts to regain his balance.

Silence.

“Did you hear that?” Shige asks, and makes Taguchi hold his breath and pray that Massu didn’t.

Massu is too preoccupied to hear anything. “Shige, quick, help me find a restaurant that will have this food so I can get it delivered again…”

Shige sighs. “If you really want to replace it, go to the security office and see what restaurant signed in to deliver it. It will have to have come within the last hour since it was still hot when you got it, right? Then you can just call them and reorder.”

Massu grins. “Shige’s so smart!” he chirps, visibly cheered by the thought of replacing the food (and possibly ordering a little more for himself). The sound of the door opening and closing prompts Taguchi to give a sigh of relief at not getting caught just now.

Maybe Koki had been right; this might not have been one of his better ideas.

*****

Shige, in the meantime, continues to look down at the cart suspiciously as Massu disappears down the hallway on his mission of redemption. After a minute, Shige silently turns around, goes into the bathroom, and closes the door behind him.

He starts to think.

And when he does, he realizes that yesterday had been a little bit weird, because when NEWS had completed their bizarre shopping list and handed it over to one of the PAs, the PA had just looked really confused before accepting it, which had led Shige to believe that maybe it hadn’t been a shopping list after all. It’s not like the jimusho offers to buy them things very often, and as far as he’d known, no one in NEWS had asked for bananas, and would never ask for just five if the opportunity arose. Plus who the hell writes anything down in hot sauce? Pens might be hard to come by in the offices lately, but it’s not as if you can’t just ask to borrow one if you really need to.

Shige thinks a little bit more, and finds that the last time he’d seen a banana of any sort in the dressing room had been two days ago, when Ryo had been eating one for dessert after they’d all finished their yakisoba. Well, as five of the six members had finished their mediocre commissary yakisoba and Ryo had been eating something much fancier, though Shige had no idea when he’d had the time to get it considering; it’s not like they’re KAT-TUN and can have these things delivered on a regular basis from management because they’re the biggest selling…

Shige blinks. Come to think of it, he had seen KAT-N lurking around in the hallway near NEWS’s dressing room yesterday afternoon, and Ryo had looked incredibly smug while he’d been eating his yakisoba. Also, Massu had said something about Nakamaru asking about what they’d had for lunch that one day, because Nakamaru is nice and cares about little things from Massu’s day like that.

Shige sighs after a moment and has a bad feeling about everything. His groupmates sometimes chastise him for being negative, but he likes to think that every once in a while, it’s justified.

He pulls out his cell phone and calls the security office instead (he probably could have told Massu to do this as well, but then Massu would still be here and it would be difficult for Shige to think).

When he hangs up a few seconds later, he has all the confirmation he needs about who had ordered food in the last hour, because the security guards aren’t all that secretive about telling you who signed for certain deliveries.

Shige puts his cell phone back in his pocket and exits the bathroom very, very quietly.

He stops in the main stretch of the dressing room to consider the food cart again, and sees the red tablecloth twitch a little bit.

Shige decides to go straight to the closet, where he pulls out the space heater that Tegoshi and Koyama like to use in the winter because Massu and Yamapi have higher internal body temperatures or something, and as such they can’t turn the central heating up too high with those two around without making them uncomfortable and moody.

He drags the heater out, plugs it into the socket right beside the cart, aims it at the tablecloth, and turns it on full blast.

Then he goes to sit on the couch, next to the cooling fan they have set up for Massu and Yamapi in the summer, and enjoys the cool breeze while he finishes reading the newspaper.

*****

Taguchi is not sure why Shige decided to turn on the heater and aim it towards his side of the room, but before long, he starts to feel very, very uncomfortable.

In the background, the methodical flipping of newspaper pages tells him that Shige is still here, even as Taguchi imagines that the room is getting unbearably hot and he is going to die from being burned to death by the metal underneath him heating up, or the bottle of sesame oil sitting on top of the cart getting so hot it melts through the table and scalds him into ugly oblivion before he can spring his trap.

But before any of that happens he just starts to sweat, and Shige won’t leave the room.

*****

Five minutes later Taguchi begins to weigh his options. On the one hand, he’s fairly certain he will die soon, because there is heater on, aimed directly at him, and they are in the middle of a Japanese summer. On the other hand, if he fails this he’ll be forced out of the prank war.

On the third hand (or foot, he supposes, in this case), the food is gone, Ryo’s not here, and the chances of being discovered when Massu gets back are pretty high.

Plus he’s getting kind of dizzy.

He makes a decision.

*****

Shige doesn’t even look up from his newspaper as a form crawls out from under the catering cart, dog-crawls to the door, and then leaps up, throws the door open, and darts out of the room like they’ve been burned.

He just flips the page to the financial section and wonders if Ryo even knows he’s apparently at war with KAT-TUN. As far as Shige is concerned, Ryo probably started it.

*****

When Taguchi returns to his groupmates, sweaty, uncomfortable, and an absolute failure, Koki points and laughs at him and declares that he’d told him that surprise tickling had been a retarded idea.

Taguchi agrees and goes to take a cool shower while Koki declares Kame the only one left who has a shot at redemption.

Meanwhile, Massu arrives back to NEWS’s room and gives Shige the weirdest look he has in his arsenal when he toddles in. “Shige,” he asks, “are you sick? Why do you have the heater on in the middle of summer?”

“No reason,” Shige answers, and gets up to turn it off. Massu continues to give him weird looks, but thirty minutes later the replacement food arrives, and it turns out to be enough for everyone instead of just Ryo.

Shige and Massu wheel the cart out of the room, carry in a folding table instead, and when the rest of their groupmates trickle in that afternoon, they get to share an uncharacteristically fancy and incredibly peaceful lunch together while unbeknownst to them, Kame, who has never been particularly confident in his pranking skills, paces around his dressing room trying to come up with a plan that will work.

*****

Shige finishes the story with a self-satisfied grin, and finishes off his second glass of wine. “And so, thanks to Shige’s smarts and Massu’s appetite, not only did Nishikido-kun avoid another of KAT-TUN’s reprisals, he also got another free meal out of it as well.”

“You sound so smug, Shige,” Koyama clucks, around his own grin. “Wasting heat is bad for the environment, you know.”

Shige snorts. “Nishikido-kun getting jumped and tickled would be bad for our environment too. More specifically, ours.”

“Point,” the others concede.

“Still, that one was kind of full of self-pride, wasn’t it?” Ryo says. “I’m supposed to be the title character and I was barely in it at all.”

Tegoshi rests his head on Ryo’s shoulder and looks up at him. “Your spirit was haunting Taguchi-kun the entire time,” he says. “Me, leader, and Kei-chan were barely even mentioned at all.”

Massu, finishing off the others’ pasta and garlic bread, grunts in satisfaction for the role he had gotten to play. “I looked like a hero,” he preens.

Koyama laughs at him. “It was nice of you to treat everyone, Massu. Will you ever do it in real life?”

Massu blushes. “Maybe!” he says. “I’d offer tonight, but Yamashita-kun already did, and it would be rude to try and take that from him, ne.” Pause. “Maybe tomorrow? It’s our last day in Osaka.”

Everyone sobers slightly at that, thinking that this year’s tour is going to be far too short for their comfort, given that after tomorrow, everything will be halfway done.

“For our last day,” Tegoshi pipes up, sounding optimistic, “we’ll have to go out with a bang! So we’ll put all our energy into the show, and then Shige will tell us a great story on the train ride back to even it all out.”

“Don’t volunteer other people for work,” Shige says, though he doesn’t say he won’t tell a story. There’s still one last member of KAT-TUN to deal with for the big finale, after all.

Tegoshi ignores his admonishments easily. “Shige,” he intones, lowering his voice into a conspiratorial whisper, “tomorrow make sure everyone is in it all together, okay?”

Shige shoves him a little bit. “You’ve had too much wine,” he grunts, as they all begin to help clean up plates and clear platters so they can part ways and get ready for bed.

Well, the others get ready for bed.

Shige stays up a little while longer and gets his last story ready.

One that will have everyone in it, all together.

And some cross-dressing. Because it probably wouldn’t be NEWS without at least a little bit of that.

*****

The next day marks their grand finale in the Kyocera Dome before they return to Tokyo and four days of Tokyo Dome concerts. It’s exciting and bittersweet all at the same time, because everyone in the group knows that if they’re performing at Tokyo Dome it means it’s almost time for the grand, grand finale, and that it might be another year or two before they can do this again, before they can all come out on stage for a complete show like this again, before they’ll have hotel rooms far from home and sneak back and forth between them like kids on a class trip, or have the excuse to go out with all of them together for dinner and lounge around in private dining rooms chatting and listening to ridiculous stories about things that have never happened but that could have happened, or might still happen, maybe in another world, or at another time.

And that is why, when the final curtain closes on their last Osaka show, the members all take their time packing their things in the dressing room, cleaning up, getting ready to go. That’s why they walk slowly out to the van once everything is done, and why they stop to grab dinner at a restaurant near the station before boarding the train that will take them back to Tokyo that night.

It’s why, on the train, they all lean their chairs back, and despite being exhausted from performing, intone to Shige that they would like to hear a story, because as long as they don’t fall asleep they won’t miss a moment.

Shige leans back in his chair and begins to talk. “So, over the next few days, Kame learns that because Koyama had treated everyone to lunch and that Massu had treated everyone to lunch, Nishikido-kun feels compelled to step up next and invite everyone out to dinner on him. Hearing this, Kamenashi-san approaches Tegoshi and…”

*****

Tegoshi frowns when he hears Kame’s offer. “Sorry, but I can’t go out with you tonight, ne,” he says, and is genuinely regretful because they haven’t had a drink or meal together since their drama finished airing. “Ryo-kun is buying everyone in NEWS dinner tonight!”

Kame nods in understanding. “Ah, I haven’t gotten to spend any time with Yamapi in a long time either,” he sighs, and looks genuinely regretful. “I just thought I’d ask, since tonight is the only free time I’m going to get for a long time.”

Tegoshi, sympathetic to this, doesn’t even think about what Ryo might do when he says, “Well, why don’t you come with us? I’m sure Ryo-kun won’t mind. You and I put together still eat less than Massu anyway.”

Kame brightens considerably at the offer. “Really? That’d be great. I like talking to everyone in your group.”

As he says this Tegoshi doesn’t think about how Kame has never really ever said a word to Massu or Shige, but takes it at face value (why would anyone ever lie to him?) and brings Kame to NEWS’s dressing room, where the others are preparing to leave for dinner.

“I hope you don’t mind, Ryo-kun,” Tegoshi begins, sweet and bouncy, “but Kame-chan seemed lonely so I invited him to dinner with us.”

There is a brief silence from the others, before Koyama quickly intervenes. “How nice of you, Tego-nyan!” he says, loudly. “The more the merrier, right?”

Everyone looks anxiously at Ryo, who is looking at Tegoshi, whose eyes are huge and hopeful; he’s definitely doing his stupidly cute face right now.

Ryo sighs. “Yeah, that’s cool. We’re eating at this swanky Persian place, so just make sure not to look idiotic and uncool.”

“Yay, Ryo-kun’s so nice,” Tegoshi sparkles, while Shige stands in the back and eyes Kame with no small amount of suspicion.

Ryo thinks he looks cross-eyed and tells him to stop making that retarded face on their way out the door. “It’s really not a big deal,” he says, with a very cool and manly shrug. “He looks like he could use a decent meal anyway.”

*****

Kame’s prank plan is this:

-Get Ryo pissed.
-Offer to buy Ryo a ton of alcohol to make up for it.
-Get Ryo drunk.
-Take incriminating photos of Ryo with the very phone that he’d vandalized.
-Win the prank war (especially because Koki had spent the entire afternoon giving him uncertain looks and asking if Kame needed any help with anything, because clearly he was out of his element).

They head out right after that, to this upscale Persian restaurant complete with Kasbah lounge and dancing girls; exotic rugs line the walls as Japanese businessmen eat cuts of skewered meat and smoke hookah as they ogle the dancers and complain about the economy. The restaurant is dim, the music is foreign, and the clientele obviously exclusive.

Upon reaching their private dining room in the back, Kame quickly insinuates himself between Yamapi and Ryo before grabbing a menu and cheerfully opening it. “Oh,” he adds, as the others take their seats around him, “I forgot to tell you all, I’m on a no-salt, no-sugar diet.”

Massu looks at him dubiously. “You’ll disappear,” he says after a moment, and looks truly concerned for Kame’s future. “Or die.”

Kame coughs. “It’s um, for a drama role in a sports show,” he says, offhandedly. “It’s kind of like the diet Yamapi did for Ashita no Joe.”

“Oh,” the others say, but still look kind of dubious. But then again, Kame’s played boxers just as inexplicably before, so it makes sense in its own weird way that he’d do it again, though none of them know if there’s a weight class below featherweight.

But Yamapi looks sympathetic, and says, “I don’t mind eating unsalted dishes, ne.”

“That’s fine!” Koyama agrees as well, “I like the plain taste of meat best anyway.”

Massu looks a little bit sad, but knows how tough dieting can be (from watching the others do it). He agrees.

Tegoshi doesn’t mind so long as he can eat the gross pickled seaweed from the jar he takes with him everywhere, and with all the others looking up at him with big eyes for the final word, Ryo eventually shrugs and says, “Whatever,” even though it’s annoying and he thinks Kame is a dill-hole.

Shige just continues to make his stink face until Koyama elbows him in the ribs and exclaims. “Shige’s fine with it too! Shige needs to lower his blood pressure anyway!”

Shige turns his stink face on Koyama, but Koyama does that thing with his eyes that mean “be nice” and Shige knows his best friend hates it more than anything when there are awkward situations between Johnnies. Shige also knows that Kame is technically the guest in this situation, while the rest of them are-he supposes-the family that’s forced to behave while the guest is eating with them.

“Yeah, fine,” he says, and leans back against his chair sullenly.

Kame seems pleased. “I’ll buy everyone rounds of alcohol as thanks,” he promises.

Shige frowns, and wants to say, “Isn’t drinking alcohol beside the point of a diet?!” but before he can, Koyama gives him another one of those looks, Shige’s jaw snaps shut, and before long, the waitress comes by and they order.

Dinner from there goes pretty pleasantly despite the fact that Kame keeps asking Ryo stupid questions and complaining about how weird the rice is. He also keeps pointing out that the dancers in their quote-un-quote “Aladdin” outfits were pretty cool, but kind of shameless, and wondering if they could get one of them to come over here and show them how to belly dance.

He also keeps hitting Ryo with his elbow at the table, and at one point, sneezes into Ryo’s rice on accident. He apologizes every time though, and always tries to make amends by ordering Ryo more beer.

Ryo’s eyebrow starts to twitch in that way that mean someone’s going to get a shish to the face, and when Koyama sees it, he takes a break from eating to praise how much he loves the food and the atmosphere and how cool Ryo is for finding a place like this and trying it out before anyone.

Ryo seems to simmer down a little bit after that, and before long, even turns to address Kame.

“So,” Ryo starts, through slightly gritted teeth, “you heard anything from Akanishi lately?”

Kame stills for a moment. Then blinks. “No. Why would I?” He flags the waitress down for more beer for Ryo.

An expression that reads curses, foiled again filters over Ryo’s face before he changes the subject, a half-empty beer bottle from the last round still in his hand. “So, cell phones. Funny things, aren’t they?”

That makes Kame’s eyes narrow slightly, which makes Ryo grin while everyone else wonders what the heck he’s talking about. The next round of beer comes, and even as the waitress is setting the glasses down, Kame tells her to keep his friends’ glasses really full all night. Then he turns back to Ryo and says, “I don’t know what you mean.”

Ryo smirks. “Sure you don’t,” he says, and keeps drinking.

Kame just orders him more beer.

Shige watches this all from the seat on Ryo’s other side and thinks he sees a pattern. Kame is plying Ryo with alcohol and every time Ryo moves, Kame’s arm tenses under the table. At one point Shige drops his fork on purpose so he can dive under the table to see what’s going on there; what he finds is Kame is holding his cell phone tightly, the screen very clearly on camera mode.

Shige finds that weird, and wonders what Kame could possibly want to take a picture of so badly.

He gets up from under the table with his dirty fork and is so immersed in thought that he almost uses it again, except that Koyama reaches across the table to yank it out of his hands before he can, giving Shige a worried look.

“Ahaha, I…forgot,” Shige explains, while everyone laughs at him for being a moron.

Shige is not a moron though; Shige is just preoccupied trying to figure out what Kame’s endgame is.

And that doesn’t take very long, because there are only so many things that require a drunk idol and photographic equipment. All of them involve incriminating photos posted either on the internet or printed in trashy gossip magazines.

Shige thinks that Kame is playing some dirty fucking pool.

And so, halfway through dinner he starts taking Ryo’s beer glass while no one’s looking and empties it into the potted plant behind their table. In the meantime, he flags the waitress down and tells her to just leave him the pitcher from now on. She does, he grabs it, and plastering on a smile, moves to refill Kame’s glass instead of Ryo’s. “It’s not fair if you keep buying all the alcohol and not drinking any of it yourself,” he points out calmly. “Let’s drink together like friends, right?”

Kame looks a bit uncomfortable at that, but nods, and when Shige raises his glass at him, Kame is forced to do the same. “Bottoms up!”

“Chug, chug, chug!” Yamapi starts to chant, as he gets deeper and deeper into his cups as well.

Shige, in the meantime, continues to dump his own glass and much of Ryo’s into the plant behind them while filling Kame’s as often as possible; luckily no one really pays all that much attention to him anyway so they don’t see him do it.

Well, Tegoshi sees him do it, and blinks before leaning against Shige’s shoulder and saying, “Shige, is something the matter?”

Shige turns to whisper into Tegoshi’s ear, but doesn’t answer the question so much as pose an idea. “Kamenashi-kun sure seemed interested in those dancing girls earlier, didn’t he?”

Tegoshi grins and nods. “He can actually be kind of a pervert sometimes.”

Shige is not surprised. “Hey,” he says, “want to pull a prank on him?”

Tegoshi, the group’s natural prankster, is instantly intrigued. “What kind of prank?”

Shige lowers his voice and leans closer to divulge the plan.

Which Tegoshi instantly loves (of course he loves it), and before long, he excuses himself to the bathroom to make the necessary preparations.

In the meantime, Shige keeps pouring Kame beer.

And before long, Kame not only catches up with Ryo in terms of alcohol consumed, he surpasses it. And quickly. It’s like the drunker he gets the more belligerent and less careful he gets; he stops hesitating with every drink and starts demanding more, voice getting louder, manner getting looser. It’s like he’s a different person. Shige had heard rumors about this of course, some involving transvestites and some involving taxi drivers, but he’d never imagined getting to see Kamenashi’s black side in person.

Fascinated, Shige continues to pour him drinks until he forgets about the phone in his hand and the picture he wants to take with it entirely; abandoning his cell on the table top in lieu of shooting for the world’s record for beer consumption in less than half an hour.

It lasts up until the chime of the music in the doorway distracts them.

They all turn at the sudden noise, and see a man playing a tabor, and a veiled dancing girl perched in the threshold.

“A dance, for the gentlemen?” the musician asks, smile wide.

“Yeah, a dance!” Yamapi shouts, throwing his hands up in the air. Shige very obviously hadn’t been able to control his alcohol intake for the night.

Or Koyama’s either, as the eldest member is currently red-faced and cheerful as he sits across from Yamapi, high-fiving the group leader in giddy agreement. “Dancing girls!” he echoes.

The man smiles and bows once before he starts to play, and in the doorway, the dancer sways forward, hips on a swivel as she wriggles step-by-step into the room, veils elegant and flowing as the bells on the chains around her ankles and midriff jangle melodically in time with the music.

The sight and sound of it is enough to shut up even the two most boisterous drunks there, and as the music swells the dancer finds new and innovative ways to bend, pulling veils one by one from her body, dark eyes twinkling as she leans forward and wraps one around Koyama’s neck, fingers tracing the side of his cheek before she pivots and slinks away, onto the next veil, the next idol. Massu gets caught with a mouthful of bread when she rolls her hips at him and drops the second veil to float over his head; Yamapi gets an eyeful of perky ass, covered in flowing pink fabric, before the third veil is slowly pulled out from her left sleeve and waved tantalizingly under his nose. Shige gets flicked at the very tip of his chin by the fourth, before the dancer winds her way in-between Ryo and Kame, rolling her body from side to side as the sixth veil emerges from inside her right sleeve and is rubbed against the curve of his throat, making Ryo swallow and stare. The dancer’s eyes laugh at him brightly, and she winks, before flipping around and finding Kame, who has a strange, incredibly perverted look on his face that the alcohol is no doubt making him forget to hide. She sees this and goes all out on him, swinging her leg over his lap and perching into it, shimmying and arching and sighing before reaching into her top for a sixth veil and slowly, teasingly pulling it out. It rests in her hands before she reaches down for Kame’s belt, pulling it forward and tucking the edge of the glittering pink fabric into the waistband of his jeans.

And that is when Kame loses it and surges forward with a drunken “Banzai!!” one hand going up to grope her ass, and one hand going up to grab her chest.

Luckily Shige is not as impressed as any of the others are with the dancer’s show; he has his cell phone out and the camera ready and at that exact moment, snaps a truly incriminating photo of Kame feeling up a performer at an upscale restaurant. He also happens to be making an incredibly confused, incredibly drunk, incredibly awful face at that moment.

Kame, bewildered, stares at the dancer that he’s grabbing. The hand on her breast squeezes, uncertainly.

And then, in a perfectly calm voice, she says, in Tegoshi’s voice, “You’re kind of a pervert, aren’t you, Kame-chan?”

“Woah!!” everyone shouts all at once (except for Yamapi, who just falls out of his chair in a bout of hysterical giggles).

“Tego-nyan?” Koyama breathes, voice sounding dry.

Laughing in what is unmistakably a Tegoshi laugh, the dancer jumps off of Kame’s lap lightly as he pulls off the final veil, the one obscuring his face. “Yup!” he declares, and stretches happily. “Fooled you all, didn’t I?”

“Uh…” Kame murmurs, still kind of not-following.

“Shige thought it would be fun prank,” Tegoshi exclaims, and goes back to his seat-still in that ridiculous belly-dancing outfit-to finish his dinner.

Everyone looks at Shige, dumbfounded. Shige shrugs. “Ha, ha, I’m really drunk?” he offers.

Yamapi, still on the ground, bursts out into fresh hysterics.

“Kame-chan definitely fell for it the most in the end, didn’t he?” Tegoshi offers next, and pours himself a refill of beer, not noticing how Massu and Koyama are still kind of staring at his stuffed top and his bared midriff.

Kame rubs his head when he hears that, like he’s trying to remember something important. “But I was supposed to pull a prank on you,” he begins, and frowns. “This isn’t right. I’m getting Nishikido back for the phone thing. And bananas.”

Everyone looks at Kame now. “Huh?” they say.

“He’s talking gibberish, clearly,” Ryo explains.

“I think he’s had enough,” Shige agrees.

“No, I’m not done. Nishikido has to do something embarrassing…” Kame pauses to grope the table for his phone (apparently he’s fated to do lots of groping tonight), “I’m supposed to take a picture and paste it all over the walls of the jimusho early tomorrow. For stealing yakisoba.”

“Really, really drunk,” Ryo repeats.

“We should call him a cab,” Shige suggests. “It sounds like he’s saying he has to be at work early tomorrow.

Yamapi, from the floor, throws up a hand. “I’ll pay for it!” he offers. “Because I’m cooler than Shige!”

He giggles some more as he tries to remember which pocket his wallet is in.

“Leader is so generous!” everyone else says, automatically, and as Shige pulls out his phone to call for a cab, he sighs and wishes his efforts could be a little more appreciated here.

The cab comes fifteen minutes later and Shige and Ryo both pile a groggy Kame into it while Yamapi attempts to write down Kame’s address. He fails to remember it correctly though, and so instead, Massu writes down Nakamaru’s address and calls Nakamaru to tell him that he needs to be outside his apartment in approximately twenty-five minutes.

“It’s late and I have to be at work in the morning,” Nakamaru complains.

“You know Kamenashi-kun’s address, right?” Massu explains very clearly, before hanging up.

Yamapi advances an extra seven thousand yen to the cab driver, as well; “In case he punches you,” he explains with a grin and a nod towards Kame as he lolls in the backseat. He presses the money into the bewildered man’s hands without any further explanation (apparently NEWS is bad at clarifying things while intoxicated) and waves as the doors close and the cab pulls away from the curb.

From there, Kame safely rides away into the night towards Nakamaru’s apartment and NEWS returns to their table at the restaurant, where Ryo orders more food (with salt this time) and dances (from real girls).

Shige saves the picture he’d taken of Kame on his phone just in case.

And all in all, NEWS has a very pleasant evening together, as they often do.

Nakamaru on the other hand, doesn’t have as pleasant an evening as his friend Massu; he goes outside his apartment building exactly twenty-five minutes after Massu had hung up on him, just as instructed, only to have a cab pull up in front of him and an unconscious groupmate thrust at his feet.

From there, he discovers that one, he has no idea where Kame lives either, and two, he has to pay the cabbie an extra ten thousand yen out of his own pocket on top of everything that Yamapi had covered because, for God only knows what reason, Kame had decided to grope the driver during the ride over.

It is as that moment when Nakamaru decides that prank wars are stupid.

END

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