[fic] The Things We Can't Control - Chapter 48 ~The Prosecution's Case~
Title: The Things We Can't Control
Author:
prettyorianna
Pairing: Akame. Others to be added later.
Rating: NC-17.
Genre: crime drama au
Beta by: my cat Gemma. okay, seriously, nobody
Disclaimer: I don't own KAT-TUN, any of its members, any other JE people. I write this for fun and for other fans of these fine folks. But don't steal my
plots, mmkay? I put a great deal of time into them except for when I'm randomly spastically spitting words onto a page. But I value those too...
Summary: Two criminals with vastly different styles meet by chance one day. They immediately clash but is that all they'll ever be? How much is fate and how much choice? And how will their meeting change the world around them?
Author's Note: Well, I said no update but here's one anyway. I just have to ask... please, please don't kill me. Seriously. I enjoy living. It's fun and I'd like to keep doing it.
BANNER BY DESHISORABA!! THE MOST AWESOME BANNER EVER AND I WILL FIGHT ANYONE WHO DISAGREES!
Warning: This gets graphic often occasionally, containing at the very least foul language, character death, nefarious crimes, rape, etc etc.
The Master Posts:
On my journal - The Things We Can't Control Master Post
On the akame_ Community - The Things We Can't Control Master Post
On the akame_fanfics Community - The Things We Can't Control Master Post
On the je_kamenashi Community - The Things We Can't Control Master Post
On the kattun_fanfics Community - The Things We Can't Control Master Post
On the jin_fics Community - The Things We Can't Control Master Post
Chapter 48 ~The Prosecution's Case~
Akira’s words weighed heavily on Kame as he returned to the apartment.
Would he really not see him if he came back?
He said it wasn’t his fault.
He said… he said it was true. Okay, so some of what he’d heard the cops say that night was true. He could admit that. Akira and Aoi, they had sex with him before and he was underage. But, damn it, so had others, more than he could even count. His father sold him to men, again and again, for as long as he could remember, with the last being the worst of them all!
Why wasn’t HE in jail? Why was he free, walking the streets? Damn it, HE belonged in there! The twins, they didn’t. They didn’t!
And the man that tortured him for three days? Where was he? Why was he not in jail after what he did? Kame would have those scars the rest of his life! He… he would never, never be able to forget those eyes… so eager but… lifeless…
Oh, god… even thinking about it… oh, he was going to be sick!
He barely made it to the toilet in time for everything to come up. And then he just sat there on the bathroom floor, crying.
It just wasn’t fair.
Akira and Aoi, they were the best people he’d ever met in the whole of his life. They… Akira talked about Kame’s light, whatever he meant by that, but Akira’s goodness, Kame could see that himself. Hell, Kame had killed people! He beat a man to death with a fucking lamp! Why wasn’t in jail? He deserved it so much more than they did.
But turning himself in wouldn’t get them out of jail, would it? No, it’d just get him sent back to his father’s house. Or… would it even be beyond Papa K’s ability to keep him out of jail? His father couldn’t sell him if he was in prison!
No, he couldn’t… but prison would probably be nearly as bad. That sadistic monster couldn’t get him but he wouldn’t be safe by any stretch of the imagination. He’d heard rumors on the streets about the sorts of things that could happen to you in prison if you weren’t strong enough to stop it.
He… he needed to clear his head. He couldn’t just sit there forever; he was far too restless. Maybe he should hit the boxing gym for a while. He really needed to vent and he’d prefer not to wait until he found himself standing over another body with a lamp clutched tightly…
The restlessness didn’t ease as the days went by, though, despite the fact he started spending most of his time at the gym. If anything, it just got worse. And when he saw the twins’ photo staring back at him from the newspaper on the main desk, it was almost too much.
There was no mention made of Komatsu even though there were references to the police raid. Actually, there wasn’t much mention of Kame, either; some oblique stuff about not finding any of their underage prostitutes during the raid but he wasn’t mentioned by name at all (probably his father’s doing, somehow).
Wait, what was this bit…? How many charges? Where… where were they finding all of these? Kame knew he hadn’t been the first the twins slept with because they’d slept with Ryuichi before he ever met them, but… twelve? They found twelve boys willing to go up on the stand and point an accusing finger, say Akira and Aoi abused them? Even lie and say they pimped them out?
No. No, this wasn’t right! Lies! They… they had to be lies… in the whole time he’d been living with them, he’d never once seen them bring a boy home for sex. He sure as hell knew they didn’t bring underage boys to The Club for sex because he worked almost every day and he’d have known.
It was all lies. It had to be, right? Lie and the past.
But Akira’s own words… “You’ve always viewed us much more kindly than you really should have.”
Would Akira really not see him if he went back?
Well, so he wouldn’t go back to the prison to see them. But… the trial… he could go to the trial, right? He could at least be there, support them. If… if he stayed at the back and didn’t draw attention to himself… that would be okay, right? That would be safe? Or, safe enough, at least?
He was still living in that horrid drug dealer’s building. If he moved out, see, it meant the move wasn’t temporary. It meant the twins weren’t coming back. If he stayed he could still pretend. But this…
If they lost this case, they’d never get out of prison.
Twelve boys…
All pointing fingers…
Kame had worked at the club long enough to have a pretty good understanding of how the world was going to view them just for having that club. Deviants… would a jury believe the word of two deviants in the face of so many accusations?
And so Kame’s restlessness grew.
This trial wasn’t even about him anymore. Nothing he said would help no matter if he did go to the police on the twins’ behalf. There was nothing he could do for them. Just… be there. Go. Watch. Hope.
No more spiky hair for Akira. It was combed down just as neatly as Aoi’s always was. It just looked so out of place on him. Though he imagined it made it even harder to tell which twin was which. Kame wasn’t having a problem (the different colored dragon tattoos helped but really, it was obvious to him just from how they carried themselves) but they really were identical, weren’t they?
This was the first time Kame had ever been inside a courthouse before. He’d had to go through all kinds of security which was why he left his knife at the apartment despite the nervousness he knew he’d face on the bus. All that time spent at the boxing gym had done him some good though so he was able to get through it more or less fine.
He watched the prosecution lawyer stand and address the jury, explaining about all the evidence they had, painting the twins as these horrible perverts with their underage bondage brothel hidden away right in the heart of everyone’s beloved city. He also went on to say how the boys who had bravely come forward would, despite how traumatic it would be for them, spell out in detail every horrible thing the defendants made them do.
It made Kame think back to his own sexual experiences with the twins. He had to admit, he hadn’t enjoyed them. He hadn’t wanted them. They were kind and considerate but the truth was that he needed the money and they were the lesser of many, many evils…
Wait, had he really thought that about them?
He had! He’d almost forgotten…
It was like a sudden plunge in ice water. It took several seconds for Kame to start breathing again.
Even so, Kame wanted to shout the man down. It took every bit of his self control not to.
He thought when the prosecution lawyer finished his speech the defense lawyers would stand up and say something but both of the twins’ lawyers instead chose to defer opening statements until the beginning of the defense’s case. Kame hadn’t realized they could do that.
Glancing over at the jury brought him absolutely no comfort. He didn’t like the way they were eying Akira and Aoi, like they’d already made up their minds.
It was all so unfair.
Kame came back to watch the trial every day. He watched as boys he’d never seen before, never met before, went up on the stand and gave tear-filled confessions of their experiences sleeping with the twins and the horrible thing about it was, they resonated. He didn’t like that. It made him feel ungrateful, like he was such an awful person that took advantage of them for over a year while secretly harboring feelings like that.
Some of what the boys said, he could tell was just lies. Despite giving pretty accurate descriptions of what The Club actually looked like on the inside, not a one of those boys had ever been in the club. He didn’t know how they were able to describe it so well but he was sure they were lying completely. That much he was sure of.
But the rest of it…
“I needed the money…”
“I didn’t want to but his voice, there’s something in it. It… it’s hard to say no to that voice…”
“Never lied about what they were after but it still left me feeling sick and used every time…”
Those parts of their testimony… they weren’t lies.
Kame was crying. He wasn’t the only one in the audience (or whatever it was called in a courtroom) but he was pretty sure he was the only one crying for his reasons. God, he was so confused. Someone had pimped most of those boys out, Kame was sure of it, and that’s probably how they’d ended up in bed with the twins in the first place. Too much of it felt so familiar.
But two of the boys weren’t even claiming the twins pimped them out. Kame listened to both of them as they spun separate stories of two men who approached them one day with such a reasonable, convincing voice and cajoled them into coming home with them. They had never worked the streets, they said. It was happenstance.
“I changed my mind. I told them I didn’t want to anymore… I started crying but he just kept talking to me, calming me down, and I did stop crying… and they didn’t stop.”
And that was worse. It didn’t matter that it was before Kame met them (though admittedly not by much). In fact, it seemed like every part that Kame was sure was truth from the other boys too happened either before he’d moved in with them or very shortly after.
He shouldn’t believe the boys, should he? They were talking about Aoi and Akira, for god’s sake! He knew them! He… he… thought… he knew…
“You’ve always viewed us much more kindly than you really should have.”
The defense cross-examined all of the boys but there wasn’t much they could do. The boys stuck to their stories, even the parts Kame knew had to be lies.
But as the days went on, Kame wasn’t just watching the witnesses. He was watching Akira and Aoi.
And if he didn’t know better, he’d think they were ashamed.
Come to think of it, though he’d been so distracted at the time and so damn tired, Akira has been ashamed a bit when he was talking to him at the prison that day. “But the rest of it, it wasn’t a lie, was it?” he’d said. “Kame, we’re criminals. We’ve been criminals almost all our lives.”
“If we win our trial, then you can seek us out. Though maybe you shouldn’t…”
Akira’s words echoed through him every night as he cried himself to sleep on that filthy couch in that horrible apartment.
God, he was so confused. He didn’t know what to think anymore. He couldn’t reconcile these conflicting images he was getting. They all seemed to be true. But they couldn’t all be true. You can’t be those things at the same time, could you?
What about their rule? The lifestyle, they said… they said they had a rule of not doing actual harm. It’s why they were satisfied to just have sex with him instead of all the rest of it that they liked to do, right? He remembered that well enough, at least. How grateful he’d been because he’d known he couldn’t stop them if they changed their minds. But they’d done what they said they’d do and no more, hadn’t they?
But those two boys, the ones who’d never worked the streets…
They’d been harmed.
They’d been traumatized. They’d never forget. He knew that better than anyone.
He should stop going to the trial. He knew that. He should just go on with his life. It’s what Akira had told him to do. The trial was tearing away bits of him, leaving him raw and scared and angry and confused. Add to that the stress from the fact that Jiro had started to put a lot of pressure on him about his continued presence in the building without buying any of his drugs…
He had somehow figured out Kame had vomited up the first pill he gave him and had become paranoid about it. But Kame was too depressed to leave. When Jiro forced another pill on him, he threw that one up, too. But the third time, Jiro decided to stick around and wouldn’t let him go back to his own apartment so he could be sure Kame didn’t throw that one up.
And by then, he wasn’t all that sure he wanted to. He wasn't sure of anything anymore.
+++++++++++++++++++++++++++++
The story continues:
Chapter 49 ~The Things We Have to Offer~
A/N: Well, there's some hard truths about the twins there. Akira said meeting someone like Kame, it changes you. I think Kame is just having trouble accepting that as fact, though. He's seeing how the twins used to be and it's not what he knows, but how can you really see the good you've made a person strive for if striving for that good is the only way you've ever known them to be? I'm not making excuses for them, I swear. And we did always know they "liked the pretty boys" because Ryuichi said it, yes? I hated him but it didn't mean every word he said was a lie.
Is it bad that I still like the twins?
Maybe it just appeals to me that Kame made them unable to lie to themselves anymore about the real harm they were doing. And so they decided to make a change in their lives, to stop. It wasn't immediate but... they did. They still slept with club members together, but not all that many of them to be honest and none of them were "pretty boys" but rather adult men and women.
I dunno.
But I am intensely interested in knowing your opinions on these things. About how the twins, how they were, how they are. If it's okay because they've changed or if what they've done is so horrible it doesn't matter how much they change? I want to know what you guys think about all of it!
Oh, and please stay strong Kame! Don't turn to drugs! (Teehee, I'm evil because I've -- if I've done my job right -- given you absolutely no hint in the present chapters that would spoil whether he does or not... I mean, it mentions Jin used to do drugs but I'm pretty sure I didn't spoil anything one way or the other for Kame... and, like I said, please don't kill me. I like life. And The Hubby would be lonely.)