Kodoku kara Umareta Ai - Chapter 00 Prologue
Title: 孤独から生まれた愛 (Love Born out of Loneliness)
Author: Mayonaka no Taiyou/Unare Haineko
Pairing: [Juntoshi] Matsumoto Jun x Ohno Satoshi
Rating: PG-13-ish overall, but there will be instances of NC-17-ness for gratuitous, shameless Juntoshi smexing.
Summary: Due to some bizarre coincidence, Ohno unexpectedly wanders into Jun’s company one lonely evening. Jun, in a rare display of his softer side, unknowingly fills some of Ohno’s emotional voids, voids Ohno was not aware he even had in his heart-that is, not until Jun filled them.
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Kodoku kara Umareta Ai (Love Born out of Loneliness) - Chapter 00 Prologue
Matsumoto Jun did not believe in fate and destiny. He did not even believe there was a god. He always told himself that there was no such thing as destiny-only coincidence. He had not been ‘destined’ to be in the group Arashi. He just ‘happened’ to be called by a man named Johnny, who ‘happened’ to take a liking to him. When he first entered the entertainment business, he had only been vaguely aware that they were required to sing, dance, and perform random stage acrobatics. He certainly was not a singer or a dancer (but neither were half the boys that showed up to the audition), but he had a flexible body and a reasonably cute face. With a little work, he was able to do many of the things that the other boys had been trained to do. Of course, had he been forced to audition instead of being called upon personally by Johnny, he would have definitely been cut since he really had no musical or dance training (much less any ‘natural talent’) prior to entering the business. Again, the cards just ‘happened’ to be in his favor.
So how had Matsumoto Jun gotten this far in life? -Surely, by the only things he did believe in-luck and hard work. He was a lucky guy, or more precisely, he was a man with good luck. Jun believed there were three kinds of people when it came to luck. Those who had it, those who did not, and those who had bad luck. When explaining his logic, he always used the example of a supermarket lottery. Usually if customers purchased over 5000 yen, the supermarket would give them a ticket to take to the front of the store, where there would be a small cage that would spit out a pachinko sized ball after turning it once. Since Jun belonged to the first group, he always won something-always. From bars of soap to expensive cuts of meat and baskets of fruit, Jun always won something. A person with no luck would just get the white ball, which meant ‘try again next time’. Nothing lost, nothing gained. A person with bad luck might get his ticket only to find that moments before, someone like Jun had taken the last prize.
However, not all was fair and rosy for Jun. Luck did not equal happiness. If anything, it was a sore spot. In the beginning, it was nice that good opportunities just ‘happened’ to fall in his lap. That was all fine and dandy for his career, but what about love? Placing his love life in the hands of luck and coincidence sounded like a recipe for disaster. He often wondered how he would know when he found ‘the one’ since he never really put himself out there on the market.
Flirting was one thing. He never let it escalate past flirting. Casual sex was not really his thing. The idea of sharing bodily fluids with someone he barely knew was not very appealing to him-it actually disgusted him to a certain degree, which left him with the option of pursuing only serious relationships. But Jun was wary of people and found he could not let his façade down. Girls and boys, men and women left and right told him they were a ‘match made in heaven’ or ‘destined to be together’. Jun found it hard to believe that any single person could possibly bring him happiness. He did not even let his guard down at home when he was with his family (yet another sore spot), which made it increasingly hard to open up to strangers. This was precisely the reason why one of Japan’s sexiest men was also one of Japan’s loneliest men. He was a man who longed to love, but could not even open himself up to be loved. Jun, as a result, spent many nights alone on his veranda sipping his wine while chain smoking as he looked down below at the bright lights of the city that never slept. And, if all things were just a matter of luck and coincidence, then finding and meeting that ‘special somebody’ was going to take a miracle from heaven-and he had already established that he did not believe in god.
The one upside to his dilemma was that he had ample time to think about his ‘ideal lover’. He wanted someone decent looking, preferably already settled in the entertainment industry with their own money, career prospects, and not concerned about ego. He hated to admit it, but his own ego was probably more than enough for the relationship. By this time, he had already limited his choices significantly, but he added more conditions. He wanted someone who had known him for a long time, preferably before he became a celebrity as he had already determined that his heart was not going to be opening up to any strangers any time soon. This immediately eliminated all the women he knew. Most of the female contacts that he had developed were post-debut and post-rise to idol status. They knew him as ‘MatsuJun’ and liked the person he showed to the rest of Japan.
He wanted someone who had seen and accepted the horrific side of him that that was grumpy in the morning and pissy after a long day at work, someone who did not mind that he liked to clean and paint his nails when he was stressed (though the two activities sometimes posed a conflict of interest, which made him the ultimate bitch when he could not decide which he needed to do first) and could deal with the fact that the word ‘tact’ did not exist in his vocabulary. Long story short, he wanted to date one of his band members. That came as the first shock. It was no secret that all the boys employed by the jimusho were not supposed to have girlfriends or date around, much less sleep around and get some poor girl pregnant. But Johnny never said anything about not dating or sleeping with the other boys in the jimusho. He knew everyone did it-sempai coercing juniors into doing it, juniors soliciting themselves for a chance to be part of the ‘in crowd’, or just the natural pairings rooted in deep friendship that seemed to develop over the course of time-except him.
And then came the second shock. When he thought about which member he would want as his lover, the first time, he just closed his eyes and cleared his mind. He told himself to think of the first person whom he thought would make him happy and to just trust his instinct. He thought of Ohno. He told himself that it must be a mistake and tried to reason that another member must be the key to his happiness in the love department. After all, Ohno was lazy, had a mother complex, slept all the time, was always eating when he was supposed to be paying attention, and could not read kanji to save his life. But then he thought about the other members.
Sho was a good friend. He was reliable, smart, mellow, had good leadership skills necessary for keeping the group on task, and a good person to turn to for an objective perspective on a problem. He would have been an ideal candidate to balance out someone like Jun, except for one thing. Sho was a slob. Being the neat freak anal retentive person that he was, living with a slob (particularly one who leaves his newspaper clippings and the rubbish from the clippings all over the place) would be disastrous and dangerous for said potential candidate.
Aiba was the sunshine that brightened everyone’s day. Jun had been certain that no one could be cheerful 24 hours a day, 7 days a week, but after having met Aiba, he began to question his logic. Even if Aiba was not cheerful 100 percent of the time, he was still happy and bouncy like Tigger for enough of the time. There was too much energy in that child that was posing as the only man in the group taller than Jun. In addition, there was something unsettling about considering someone who woke up at the crack of dawn to crow with roosters and do various stupid experiments at full throttle until the second he hit the bed that night.
Nino would have seemed like a logical choice for Jun. After all, Nino was very similar to Jun. They were actors, they both liked manga and games. They both picked up things quickly and were known to be skillful at a number of things. They had a bit of an informal rivalry, but when it came down to it, Nino was a lot of things that Jun admired and wished he could be and have himself. But there were also things about Nino that really bothered him. Nino was a hard core gamer and Jun had this sinking feeling that gaming time might interfere with the time they were supposed to share together. Nevertheless, Nino was messy, not a slob like Sho, but messy. He collected a lot of junk, stuff, memorabilia that he never put into boxes or onto shelves. Unlike Sho, it was not everywhere, as in he had them in piles of ‘organized mess’ as Jun liked to call it, but even that in itself gave Jun rash whenever they all went over to Nino’s apartment.
However, even overlooking the untidiness, Nino was two things Jun was not. He was cheap (read: also risk-averse) and had no interest in food, which was actually a large part of why Jun decided Nino must not be the answer. One of Nino’s hobbies outside of video games was saving money (presumably so that he could buy more video games and so he would be comfortable for the rest of his life). Jun to a certain degree understood the rationale behind wanting to save money. He had seen many celebrities spend themselves into bankruptcy not five years since they made it big. Money that should have set them for the rest of their life was gone as a result of overconsumption and excessive extravagance.
Jun had that same fear initially, but he told himself that if he just had some way to shelter his money in something so that he could not spend all of it at once, but at the same time have it working to make him more money, that he would never run out of money. When he initially told Nino about this idea, Nino laughed at him and told him he was crazy because no such thing existed. Initially, Jun thought that his idea had been possibly too farfetched, but again the lucky guy that he was, he saw an advertisement in the foreign book section at Kinokuniya. He had been looking to brush up on his English when he saw the advertisement for some newly published business book. At the time, his English had not been so good, but he was able to pick out a few words, ‘rich people’, ‘invest’, ‘financial advisor’, and ‘real estate’. He deduced that rich people in America must pay financial advisors to help them invest in real estate.
After his first session with the bilingual business owner turned financial investment advisor he found, Jun already found himself seeing the potential in buying up real estate. Here he had a good lump of money that he certainly was not getting much interest on in the bank, since the Japanese banks offered less than half a percent return on his savings. If he bought a car or a boat, it was highly unlikely that he would be able to sell it for more than he paid for it. But if he bought an apartment and rented it out, it became income for him. If he bought a house and sat on it for a few years, with the scarcity of land situation in Japan, the value of the land would go up and he would make money if he sold it. Thus, he concluded, that even if he dropped out of the world of celebrities, that he would always have ‘money’ as long as he held on to real estate. It was a win-win situation.
And ever since that day, Jun has been an even firmer believer in ‘you get what you pay for’. Whether it was financial advice, prime real estate, flooring for his apartment, or good food, Jun was someone who did not mind paying if the benefits and satisfaction clearly outweighed the costs. Quality was always first and foremost in his mind, whereas Nino was the king of cheap and free if possible. If Nino saw eating as nothing more than a chore that needed to be done every once in awhile to ensure that he would not faint, then Jun suspected that there would be many nights of him eating alone, which was really no different than what he had now.
After thinking about how a mushroom cloud might result if he tried to pursue a hypothetical relationship with one of the other three, he came back to Ohno. It was true that the Arashi leader was lazy, called his mother all the time, and was a total space cadet most of the time. But he was neat, a good listener, he liked food, and he liked to sleep in. Ohno’s hobbies were also quiet ones that usually did not involve messing up the house. Just give him a lump of clay and he could stay quiet and occupied for hours. In fact, the more Jun thought about it, the more he found that Ohno was exactly the kind of person he was looking for and needed in his life.
There was just one tiny detail. Ohno was Nino’s lover. Jun knew that Ohno loved Nino probably more than Nino loved him, not to say that Nino did not love Ohno, but it always seemed that Nino was holding the carrot over the older man to get him to jump through the hoops of their relationship. Not a problem for the man voted one of Japan’s sexiest. Jun was a man of luck and lucky people get better opportunities thrown their way. The trick is to be able to see a good opportunity and exploit it at the right time, two things that have made Jun the successful man he is today.
Goal: Capture the heart of one Ohno Satoshi
Rules: All is fair in love and war.
No time limit.
Jun decided that he would not go and ‘steal’ Ohno from Nino. He would give Nino that much. If Ohno was happy where he was, Jun would not go and tempt him (though he could). He would wait until his luck fed him an opportunity, such as if Ohno suddenly landed in his lap. Now in that case, it would be rude not to accept such a coincidence as perhaps an act of fate (which he did not believe in). Of course, Jun never expected that such a ‘coincidence’ would present itself to him quite so soon…
>> Chapter 01
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