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soundczechTitle: "Baby Got Back" 1/2
Author:![[livejournal.com profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/external/lj-userinfo.gif)
soundczech
Rating: R
Disclaimer: I have no association with Johnny's & Associates. No infringement intended. All events depicted herein are fairly obviously fictional.
Summary: Jin accidentally turns Kame into a lady.
WARNING: I mean that literally. There is genderswitch here. I started writing this before Jin's LA tour was even announced, so he's still in the group - consider it semi-AU. An alternate future. Wherein magic is real and Kame turns into a girl, lol.
Author's Notes:![[livejournal.com profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/external/lj-community.gif)
help_haiti fic for happiestwhen!!! I know it's six months late but it did blow well over the intended word limit... Sorry, friend. I'm also sorry because I know you had more lolsy intentions for this prompt but it... didn't turn out that way. I could probably write about 10,000 words of author notes about this fic turned out the way it did.
WARNING #2: I guess there are some things in here that might count as triggers; some violence and sexual harassment contained within. And some uncomfortable gender inequality stuff.
Props tosamenashi for the name and for helping me flesh out the plot. And for listening to me complain constantly. And darlita for being there when I was just about ready to give up.
Kame shrinks four inches overnight. He shows up to work in the morning in a hoodie that swims halfway to his knees, trying to wrench free of KAT-TUN's grabbing hands. "Cut it out," he hisses. "I'm a lady now, you're supposed to act like fucking gentlemen."
"You just look like a short dude with small boobs," Koki says, wincing when Kame's fist catches him around the ear; his hands are still wide and sort of masculine, sharp knuckles rising over short fingers.
Jin looks at him and sees few real changes; it is more like his old body parts have been recycled, like someone has taken him and squished and stretched him into something new. The dependable line of his broad shoulders is still firm and familiar in his sweatshirt, but the swell of small breasts is alien; the angle of his narrow waist looks the same as always, but it has ruptured and exploded into curvy hips and an almost fat ass. Jin can't stop staring at the place where his Adam's Apple has melted away into nothing.
Tentatively, Jin reaches out and prods at Kame's chest, momentarily feeling the softness of breasts - real breasts, Jin can tell the difference - before Kame squawks and slaps his hand away.
"Kamenashi," Jin says. "You're a girl."
His face is still oddly masculine, all broken nose and stark cheekbones over a chin only slightly softer; his short hair is messy and there are dark rings under his eyes, but no hint of stubble.
"I don't know what happened," Kame says, hysteria barely held at bay.
Jin does.
-
Jin locks himself in his car and presses his head against his knuckles, clutching tight to the leather steering wheel. If he holds his breath for long enough he’ll wake up and realise he’s just had some kind of fucked up dream; a flashback, maybe, from that time he dropped acid with Josh, or maybe just some kind of temporary psychotic episode.
After a few seconds his lungs burst and he takes a gasp of air, and it’s still real: Kame is a woman now, and it’s probably Jin’s fault.
He’d almost forgotten the wish; blurted drunkenly at Kiritani Shuuji on tv while clutching Pi’s fucking monkey’s paw, sudden and unexpected and totally inexcusable in the sober light of day.
Things would be so much easier if you were a girl.
-
Kame disappears for a couple of days and comes back with long hair extensions and conservative, bookish clothes; Jin had kind of idly assumed Kame would dress like a 109 shop girl, but he looks more like a librarian, all tweedy skirts and soft, pale pink sweaters that cover his boobs all the way up to his neck. Jin can't stop staring at the austere string of pearls Kame keeps worrying between his fingers, at the neatly polished nails, beigeish and trimmed short. He looks like a teacher from a porno, waiting for someone to mess up his clothes and fuck him over a desk.
"What the hell are you wearing?" Koki asks, crowding into Kame's space like always. Kame neatly sidesteps him, putting some distance between them and sitting in the armchair, hands folded politely in his lap.
"What am I supposed to wear?" he asks, in that measured, composed way Jin recognises from women on the news. He wonders if Kame has been sitting at home studying them, learning every movement and mannerism; learning how to be a whole new person. Then Jin feels stupid for even wondering. Of course he has.
"I don't know," Koki says. "Something more..."
"Something more you," Jin says when it seems like Koki isn't going to finish.
Kame is unable to stop that familiar scowl from crawling out over his perfectly painted peach lips. "What's that supposed to mean?"
Jin refuses to step into that trap, and from Nakamaru’s wide eyes staring back at him, Jin knows he’s not the only one; Kame’s mouth goes thin and flat like he knows they’re making fun of him.
"Something slutty," Ueda says. He’s sitting at the low coffee table leafing through a copy of Rolling Stone.
Kame sighs and the anchorwoman crumbles away until it's just Kame slumped in an armchair trying to smooth the wrinkles out of his skirt. "It's different," he says. "I have to be different, now.”
“That’s stupid,” Jin says, but Kame’s already gone. The anchorwoman stares back at him, impassive eyes in a smooth, blank face.
She makes Jin sick with guilt.
-
He goes home and finds the monkey’s paw under a pile of magazines on his coffee table. The magazines go cascading to the floor as he grabs it, half naked women curling in on themselves as the pages bend.
He holds it to his forehead and says, “I take back the wish,” but nothing changes. He goes to work the next day and Kame is sitting in their dressing room in a pale yellow sundress and white cardigan, sipping demurely at a cup of tea.
--
Jin’s not an idiot. He’d always known, on some level, that his feelings for Kame weren’t normal guy feelings that you have for your best buddy. That sometimes when they got too close it seemed like something momentous was about to happen, like if Jin pushed his body just slightly against Kame’s then something would spark and there’d be like. Fireworks, maybe. Bombs.
He’s not stupid. He just thought he’d left all that in the past, like stupid Shounen Club skits and fuschia coloured pirate costumes. Like his mushroom-cap hair and believing in Santa and wanting to be a championship soccer superstar. That thing in the past where he was maybe in homosexual love with Kame is over, shoved aside because it’s too stupid and too dangerous and Kame would never agree to it anyway. Jin is a man now. Jin makes manly decisions.
As usual, Jin has somewhat overestimated himself.
--
Kame can’t work while he’s like this, so the agency spreads the rumour that he’s vacationing in France and dispatches some grainy photographs of a lookalike in front of the Eiffel Tower as evidence. Kame leafs through the media coverage miserably; speculation is already rife that KAT-TUN have finally had the acrimonious split to which the tabloids always insisted they were headed. The way the papers tell it, Kame and Jin had a screaming match outside the jimusho’s Shibuya offices and Kame walked out and refused to come back.
“Sorry, guys,” he says. KAT-TUN gather together almost every morning now, just to see if he has turned back into himself overnight. Every morning that he doesn’t, hope slips a little further out of reach.
“Stop reading that shit,” Jin says. He isn’t sure how to say, “I made a wish to turn you into a woman because I was afraid of having a gay thing for you and now your life is kind of ruined and I can’t seem to turn you back,” so he doesn’t. It’s probably a little more than Kame could handle right now anyway; he’s still pretending to be serene and composed, but Jin has been with him through years of pretending to be alright and he knows the signs better than anyone.
--
At first, people whisper when Kame walks the halls of the Johnny’s Entertainment offices, but after a while it’s like everybody gets used to it and he becomes just another oddity in a company that is full of them. A couple of times, Jin catches some of the younger juniors discussing it in hushed tones, but they seem to think the whole thing is the result of Kame’s apparent superpowers, so he just lets them go with a sly wink and a ruffle of the hair. A few days later, Nakamaru tells Jin that the filming of Shounen Club was rampant with speculation about Kame’s other gifts; he has the power, some say, to burn a man to ash with only a withering glare.
--
Kame gets tired of just sitting around all day waiting to turn back into a dude. He starts working in Johnny's office doing boring administrative things that Jin doesn't really understand or care about; he seems to spend about half his day in the tiny stuffy copy room, cursing and fighting with the photocopier. Jin finds excuses to drop by often. He starts drinking a lot of coffee because the copy room is two doors down from the kitchen. He has to switch to tea when his heart starts beating funny.
He sits on the bench across from the copier kicking his feet against the cabinet and watching Kame crawl around on the floor trying to free the paper jams that routinely crunch his day into unproductivity. Sometimes he helps Kame compile and staple booklets for big board meetings; it is weird to see his own name amongst dry lists of numbers, sales figures and projected earnings, budgets and deficits and blah blah blah.
Jin starts to come in even on his days off. He's noticed some of the gross old guys from upper management hovering around Kame like vultures. Like disgusting sexual predator vultures. The other guys might think Kame isn't a hot girl, but Jin knows better; everyone said Kame wasn't a good looking kid too, and Jin had always been able to see what they hadn't. He sees it now in Kame's soft eyes and still goofy smile. Underneath all those uptight clothes, Kame's a fox.
There's one guy in particular who skeeves Jin out; about forty years old and slightly paunchy, with salaryman hair and an expensive but dated suit. He thinks he has a chance and always looks disgruntled when he walks into the copy room and sees Jin.
"Good afternoon, Akanishi-san," he says disapprovingly. "At a loose end again, I see."
"I'm helping," Jin says, waving around thick sheaf of papers. He's not helping, he's just been sitting here bitching about Ryo's new girlfriend for at least an hour.
"Aren't there better uses for an idol's time?" Yamato says, and Jin sees Kame's shoulders go absolutely square inside his lilac cashmere sweater. He turns and looks at Jin and he can read the consternation in his face, but also the wistfulness. There are about a thousand ways Kame would rather spend his day.
"We're working together," Jin says. He lifts his chin in this guy's face because really, who does he think he is? "Akakame, like always."
It's been a long time since that name left Jin's lips and Kame's eyebrows shoot up behind Yamato's back. Peach-painted lips roll inwards and Jin watches as the pearls wound around his delicate neck quiver with amusement. Jin shifts his gaze back to Yamato, whose face is flat and hard with rage.
"I'm sure Kamenashi-chan would get more work done alone," Yamato says, and Jin can tell that if they were in a bar, he'd probably sock him – if he were remotely interesting enough to do that kind of thing.
"Yeah?" Jin says, sliding off the bench and stretching to his full height, inches over Yamato's head. "I guess you'll have to take it up with Johnny, then."
"So it seems," Yamato says, and then he's gone.
"Was that really necessary?" Kame asks when they're alone. He faces Jin with hands on his hips. His sweater pulls tight and Jin can make out the roughness of lace beneath; a hint of darkness, like Kame's bra is black, or maybe the colour of wine. It's somewhat a relief to know the real Kame is lingering somewhere beneath the prim exterior.
"I don't like that guy," Jin says.
"He's not so bad," Kame says, which is what he always says when he secretly agrees but thinks it would be irresponsible to admit it.
"He's a pompous dick," Jin says. Kame rolls his eyes and turns back to the photocopier, a thick stack of papers in his fist. Pi's face peeps out at Jin from beneath his fingers. He watches Kame methodically shuffling his papers, smoothing out the creases with his hands.
"Why are you doing this?" Jin asks. He watches the shifting of Kame's back, the tendrils of hair that escape his French twist. From the back he should look like a stranger, but he doesn't. "Kame?"
"What else am I supposed to do?" Kame asks after a while. The room is silent other than the woosh woosh woosh of the printer.
"I don't know," Jin says. "Something more exciting? You're not an OL."
Kame doesn't look at him as he takes a stack of papers and sorts them into piles. "So who am I?" he asks after a while; when he finally does look up, his eyes make Jin's chest throb. "Who am I supposed to be, now?"
Jin swallows and resists the urge to reach out and touch Kame's hair, near the roots where it's still real.
"Be Kamenashi," he says. "That's all."
--
When they were young and still close enough to have sleepovers, Jin awoke one morning to find Kame looking at him, face half buried in blankets and hair falling out of his palm tree ponytail.
"What?" Jin said, swiping his hand over his face to check for drool. "Was I talking in my sleep?"
"Yeah.” Kame’s eyes were coy, gleaming a little in the semi-darkness.
"What was I saying?" Jin asked. He propped himself up on his elbows and fumbled blearily for his phone to check the time. It was only four or five am; Kame often slept over when they had an early call in the morning.
"I can't tell you," Kame said. "It's a secret."
"Oi, that's retarded," Jin protested, starting to tug at Kame's blankets. Guerilla tactics rarely worked with Kame, but Jin liked to watch him fight.
"I'll take it to my grave." Kame pulled the blankets over his head, locking Jin out of his blanket fortress.
"Kame?" Jin said. "KameKameKame?" He slumped over the lump of Kame's body, feeling the squelch of slender limbs beneath his weight. "Where did Kame go?" he wondered. "It's like he just disappeared."
"I think someone dropped an elephant on him," Kame said, muffled through the blankets.
"SHUT UP," Jin squawked, mercilessly stabbing his fingers through the blankets as Kame tried to wriggle free. "MUSCLE WEIGHS MORE THAN FAT."
Jin never did find out what he said that day, but he woke up a few weeks later with his nose pressed to the back of Kame's neck and a handful of Kame's t-shirt in his fist, gasping and hard.
These are the things they don't talk about.
-
Kame comes to their practices sometimes, just to watch. Jin thinks he’s committing their new routines to memory just in case he comes back suddenly, but it’s like he can’t take it for long; he only ever stays for an hour or two, growing crabbier and crabbier and barking orders from his perch on a stool at the front of the room.
As the weeks pass he grows quieter and more withdrawn; he doesn’t tell them what to do anymore. He just looks at them with big, sad eyes and slinks away the moment that practice is over.
-
"Are you busy tonight?" Kame asks one day, when they're quietly trying to reassemble the pages of a 200 page document the printer saw fit to spit out all over the floor.
"Yeah, I'm going out with the boys," Jin says. "We're gonna hit up Kusano's, then–" Jin's brain always catches up with him a minute too late. Kame's made some kind of sour face and is forcefully shaking a stack of pages into alignment. "Oh." Jin swallows. "Did you wanna do something?"
"Forget about it," Kame says. He looks at the clock. "Don't you have a meeting right now?"
"Kame--" Jin starts.
"You're going to be late," Kame grumps, and scoops up another stack of pages to be wrangled into submission.
--
The bar is packed, girls Jin half remembers milling around half dressed. Kusano is run off his feet schmoozing with the customers so he doesn't have time to hang out and help spread outrageous lies about MatsuJun. Josh just keeps trying to tell him about some day trip he went on into the mountains; he's got about a thousand photos on his iPhone and he wants to show Jin every one.
Jin is bored out of his mind.
He mails Kame at 11:30.
From: <jindoggydogg@docomo.ne.jp>
To: <specialk@docomo.ne.jp>
What up?! Come join us
From: <specialk@docomo.ne.jp>
To: <jindoggydogg@docomo.ne.jp>
No thanks
From: <jindoggydogg@docomo.ne.jp>
To: <specialk@docomo.ne.jp>
Y?
From: <specialk@docomo.ne.jp>
To: <jindoggydogg@docomo.ne.jp>
I'd rather not be Akanishi's new Friday girl
From: <jindoggydogg@docomo.ne.jp>
To: <specialk@docomo.ne.jp>
Fuck off
Come on 
From: <specialk@docomo.ne.jp>
To: <jindoggydogg@docomo.ne.jp>
No
From: <jindoggydogg@docomo.ne.jp>
To: <specialk@docomo.ne.jp>
Y
From: <specialk@docomo.ne.jp>
To: <jindoggydogg@docomo.ne.jp>
From: <jindoggydogg@docomo.ne.jp>
To: <specialk@docomo.ne.jp>
Y
From: <jindoggydogg@docomo.ne.jp>
To: <specialk@docomo.ne.jp>
Y
From: jindoggydogg@docomo.ne.jp
To: <specialk@docomo.ne.jp>
WHY
From: <jindoggydogg@docomo.ne.jp>
To: <specialk@docomo.ne.jp>
Answer me!!!!!!!
From: <jindoggydogg@docomo.ne.jp>
To: <specialk@docomo.ne.jp>
Should i take ur silence to mean u r already on ur way?
From: <jindoggydogg@docomo.ne.jp>
To: <specialk@docomo.ne.jp>
Kame?
From: <jindoggydogg@docomo.ne.jp>
To: <specialk@docomo.ne.jp>
u r not on ur way r u
From: <jindoggydogg@docomo.ne.jp>
To: <specialk@docomo.ne.jp>
Im comin over
--
Kame answers the door in a ridiculous burgundy velour dressing gown. He's holding a towel and his hair is loose and wet around his shoulders; the dressing gown is man-sized and swims around the tightly cinched belt. Jin chokes on his greeting as he watches a drop of water spill from his bangs and roll a glistening path down his neck, disappearing into a dark wet patch on his collar.
"Bit late, isn't it?" Kame asks without saying hello. He dabs at his hair with the towel.
"It's Friday, grandpa." Jin says. He locks the door behind himself and toes off his boots. The guest slippers he steps into are black leather but they have been defaced with silver paint; Jin can vaguely make out Koki's handwriting, but none of the words or pictures make sense to him. He feels a hot pulse of hostility. "Besides, you're up."
"I just got out of the bath," Kame says. He turns and pads into the apartment, discarding his towel on the hall table. Jin watches as he moves around the kitchen, flicking on the kettle to boil and dumping some tea leaves into a small brightly coloured pot. While he waits for the water, he twists his long hair into a knot and spears it with a pair of wooden chopsticks, swiping irritably at the wet bangs that curl around his face.
Jin stares. Kame’s cleavage peeks pale and coy out of the loose v of his dressing gown; secretive white skin hiding beneath velvet. Jin imagines untwisting the knot on that cheesy dressing gown and slipping his hands inside.
He distracts himself by peeling off his coat and unwinding his scarf. He pushes the sleeves of his hoodie up and sprawls on Kame’s couch. He looks at his phone and finds five emails from Josh and two from Kusano. He forgot to say goodbye when he left.
He’s just finished typing an email to them (What am I, ur girlfriend?) when Kame wanders over and hands him a black china cup. The tea inside is rich and fragrant. Kame always makes tea too strong for Jin’s tastes, but there’s something comforting about the bitterness.
“I thought you were ‘rolling with your homies’,” Kame says. Jin detects a faint trace of mockery in a smile that is hidden as Kame lifts his own cup to his mouth and drinks. He folds himself onto the couch at Jin’s side, one leg curled beneath him.
“I got bored,” Jin says. As it dries, Kame’s hair escapes the knot, falling and curling piece by piece around his shoulders. It looks like someone has messed him up. Jin wants to give him a swollen mouth to match; he imagines slowly drawing the chopsticks from the twist and watching his hair tumble around naked shoulders, following the line of his neck with his mouth.
“Well you got here just in time for the party,” Kame says, deadpan. “I’m just waiting on the kegs and slutty women.”
“I think the slutty woman is here already,” Jin says, and reaches out to tug at the sleeve of Kame’s robe. “Did you borrow this from Hugh Hefner?”
Kame blinks. “I don’t know who that is.” He frowns, looking down at himself. “What’s wrong with my robe?!”
“Nothing,” Jin says. “It’s better than those boring clothes you’ve been wearing lately.”
Kame frowns. “My clothes are fine,” he says.
“For someone’s mom,” Jin scoffs. “I mean, not that I ever sat around imagining you trying on women’s clothes or anything ¬–“ (That is, Jin realises, a lie) “but if I did I would have pegged you for being way more into leather and cute mini skirts than tweed and boring frumpy spinster clothes.” Jin is probably a bit drunk. “Your guy clothes show more cleavage.”
Kame is quiet for a long time and eventually Jin thinks he isn’t going to respond at all; he’s probably offended him and Kame will let him finish his tea and then kick him out unceremoniously.
“It’s different now,” Kame says.
“You keep saying that,” Jin replies, “but I don’t get how. Your body is different, but you’re not, right?”
“It’s not that simple.” Kame crosses his arms defensively; Jin wants to reach out and press his fingers into the tense muscles of his forearms, smooth his thumbs down and feel the pulse on the inside of this wrist. “If I’m a woman… expectations are different. The way people see you is different.”
“Who cares how people see you?” Jin grumbles, distantly aware of his own hypocrisy. “If you’re happy, then who gives a shit?”
“What exactly do you think I’m going to do with my life, Jin?” his voice is cracking and hoarse, his leg jiggling desperately beneath the dressing gown. “If this is permanent, what am I going to do? They’re not going to let me stay at JE forever. You think any office is going to hire some woman who doesn’t have a high school diploma, or experience, or any history at all?” His breath is shaky and he keeps licking his lips. “Even if I do manage to get an ok job, it’s dead end and you know it. This is Japan. I’ve got no qualifications. I’ll be fetching coffee and running errands, just waiting for someone to come along and marry me and put me out of my misery.”
Jin’s heart seizes. “Bullshit,” he hisses. “That is bullshit.”
“That’s reality,” Kame says. “That’s my reality, now. That’s my best case scenario.”
“This isn’t like you,” Jin says. “You don’t give up like this. You don’t even know how.”
Kame sips his tea. “I don’t know how to fight this,” he says. “I’m sorry. I just don’t know how.”
“Kamenashi doesn’t lose,” Jin says stubbornly.
Kame grimaces. “Maybe this time, he does.”
--
Over the next few days, Kame is even more prim and perfect than before. He doesn’t come to their practices. He is the perfect OL, neat grey skirt and white linen shirt, grey vest, weird silky pink scarf. Jin keeps wanting to grab him and hold him down while he smears black eyeliner along his lashes, while he tears at his collar until he can see some skin.
Once, when they’re passing in the hall, Jin reaches out and grabs Kame’s arm, about to do just that, but Kame just stares at him blankly until Jin lets him go.
Kame’s kind of broken, Jin thinks. Jin kind of broke him.
--
Jin's phone rings minutes after he's crawled into bed and pulled the blankets up over his head. He cracks open his eye to check the display; Kame's old face is looking back at him, all vaguely disgruntled male muscles and bones. He swipes to answer and puts the call on speaker so he doesn't have to expend the energy to hold it to his face.
"What's up?" he asks sleepily.
"Can you come get me?" Kame's voice is a bit croaky, swollen with exhaustion and what sounds a bit like embarrassment.
"What?" Jin sits up, feeling his head spin a little. "What happened? Where are you?"
"Denny's," Kame says. "In Shibuya."
"Why can't you get home?"
Jin is already stumbling out of bed and fumbling around for a sweater. He jams a beanie over his unruly hair.
"I left my purse somewhere," Kame says, hysteria rising in his controlled tone. "And I'm a bit drunk, I think."
"Kame," Jin says, jamming his feat into his sneakers as he runs out the door. "What the fuck happened?"
"Just come," Kame says, and hangs up.
-
When Jin rushes into Denny's it is just past 3am; it is a Wednesday night and the only people around are a groups of drunk college students hunched over parfait and a rumpled salaryman slumped in the corner, looking like he might have been thrown out of his house. Jin tells the girl at the counter he is looking for his friend and winces at the wide eyes and slight intake of breath that mean he has been recognized.
He finds Kame sitting in a booth in the back corner of the restaurant, staring down into a mug of black coffee, hiding his face with one hand held to his temple. At first Jin thinks he’s doing it out of habit; hiding from the paparazzi who probably wouldn’t see Kamenashi Kazuya in his slightly rounded girl’s chin and fuller girl’s lips anyway.
Then Kame drops his hand and Jin sees the three long, thin bruises storming down the curve of his cheekbone, blooming angry and plum-purple near his eye. Someone has left their fingerprints in Kame’s skin.
Jin goes blank with rage.
-
“What happened?” Jin asks on the way home; he’s taking the long way to Kame’s place because he can’t quite stand the thought of letting Kame get out and walk away. In the darkness of the car Jin can’t really see the bruises anymore, but he can’t stop thinking about them. Kame keeps tracing their edges with his fingers, wincing from the pressure but unable to stop.
Kame grimaces. “I said no,” he says, as if that is explanation enough. Jin supposes it is.
“To who?” he asks. He grips the steering wheel so hard it almost feels like he’s about to break it. His forearms ache from the tension.
“Yamato,” Kame says after a minute. He pulls down the visor so he can look at the bruises in the mirror. “What a sleazebag.”
Jin’s hands are trembling and he has to swerve and pull to the side of the road; he’s worried he’s going to cause an accident if he doesn’t just take a minute to breathe. “I’m going to kill him,” Jin says.
Kame sighs and snaps the visor back up. “Jin –“
“I’m serious,” Jin says. “I’m going to fucking kill him.”
“Come on,” Kame says. “Just leave it, please.”
“You can’t expect me to just forget about it,” Jin yells, slapping his palm on the steering wheel. The windscreen wipers come on. Their squeaking noise fills the car. “Who the fuck does that guy think he is? What kind of asshole thinks he can beat up on girls?” The windscreen wipers scream. “Aren’t you angry?”
Kame crosses his arms. “Of course,” he says. “Of course I’m fucking angry. I broke his fucking nose, ok?”
“Kame,” Jin whines. He wants the satisfaction of feeling Yamato’s bones break too; he imagines the feeling of his cheekbone shattering beneath his fist with sociopathic relish.
“I took care of it, so stay out of it.” Kame is deadly serious, using that same autocratic tone he uses when KAT-TUN are threatening to spiral out of control. “You getting in trouble won’t help anybody.”
Jin crosses his arms over the steering wheel and buries his face in them. “It’ll help me,” he grumbles, determined not to feel comforted when Kame reaches out and pets uselessly at his beanie, at the tufts of hair that spill from beneath it.
“Hey,” Kame says. “Thanks for coming to get me.”
“As if I wouldn’t come,” Jin says, voice muffled into his arms.
Kame leans over and kisses his arm by the elbow. Jin barely feels it through his hoodie, but his heart still goes crazy. Their first kiss.
“Yeah, well,” Kame says. “Still, thanks.”
--
Kame doesn’t come to work the next day, but either does Yamato. Jin knows from the hushed whispers that go totally silent as he walks past that word has spread beyond the small group of people that had been at the small gathering; he wonders if word has filtered through to Johnny yet, and hopes it has. He’s not sure if him going directly to Johnny and tattling would count as him staying out of it. He’s not sure if he cares.
He emails Kame, “You ok?” and just gets a thumbs up back. Kame is so annoying.
--
Kame shows up again three days later with a black eye and a tiny mini skirt, all bare legs and motorcycle boots. Jin chokes when he walks into the studio and sees the stretch of bare thigh sloping into crossed knees, and Koki snickers.
“I think Akanishi just came in his pants,” he says. He’s sitting next to Kame on the couch, peering over his shoulder at the magazine he’s reading. Kame looks up at Jin, eyebrows arched over his swollen eye and the line of bruises that slice down his cheek. A distressed sound squeezes out of Jin’s throat.
“Hey,” Kame says. His lips are painted pink and sparkly. He’s wearing a cropped denim jacket and a white tank top and a whole mess of necklaces. His old leather cuff is around his wrist, fastened to the smallest size but still almost comically loose. Jin can see the faint pinkness of his bra through his thin shirt. Somehow, he looks more like himself than he has in ages, bruises and boobs and all.
“Your clothes,” Jin says stupidly.
Kame nods. “I made Nakamaru go shopping with me,” he says. “If he told me I couldn’t leave the house in something, I bought it.”
“What happened to what people think?” Jin asks cautiously; Kame has either had some kind of breakthrough or some kind of breakdown, and he’s honestly not sure which yet.
Kame flips the page of his magazine. He snorts. “Fuck what people think.”
Breakthrough, Jin decides. Definitely a breakthrough.
--
When Ueda comes in a little later, he seems almost impressed by the shiner that has taken over most of Kame’s face. “I can show you how to cover that,” he says, grabbing Kame’s chin and tilting his face to see it in the best light. If Jin just glances at them from the right angle, they look like some kind of weird lesbian porno. He decides not to tell Ueda that.
“I know how to cover it,” Kame says. “Why should I?”
--
He walks through the halls with his head held high, letting people see. The OLs they pass look at him aghast and News’ manager’s face goes bright red and panicked, but Kame doesn’t falter, he doesn’t flinch. Even when they run into Yoko in an elevator and he takes one look at Kame’s face and looks like he’s about to burst into horrified, angry tears, Kame does not relent.
It doesn’t take Jin long to understand what is happening.
Kamenashi is declaring war.
--
He’d been able to let it slide, Kame says, when it had just been him. When it had been a drunken one off, maybe, fueled by the beer they’d been drinking all night and the weirdness of Kame’s own predicament. It had been tolerable when he’d been cornered and propositioned, tolerable even when Yamato had started lecturing him about how he couldn’t be an arrogant idol anymore, he had to be practical, because he wasn’t even that pretty for a woman. He’d endured it when Yamato said he had no future and no hope; that the best a freak like him could hope for was to find a good husband like Yamato and be happy about it. He’d endured it by lashing out and breaking his nose, of course, but he’d decided to leave it there. It was over, he’d decided. He’d be the bigger man. He’d walk away.
Then, less than 48 hours into his self imposed exile, he’d gotten a message from Sachiko, one of the marketing team that Kame had always liked because she was a huge Giants fan and liked to reenact exciting moments of games with him; they’d known her since she was only eighteen and her only job was getting coffee for the boss.
She wanted Kame to know that he shouldn’t blame himself because these things happened; everyone knows Yamato is like that. It sounds like she knows from personal experience. Kame isn’t the first.
“I’ll be the last,” Kame tells Jin. “I swear I’ll be the last. He gets away with it because they’re terrified of losing their jobs.” He swigs his beer. They are sitting in a ramen joint, huddled over plates of gyoza. “He goes for them because he thinks they’re powerless.” He stuffs a gyoza in his mouth and grumbles. “Fuck him, I’m not powerless and neither are they.” He swallows, slapping his palm on the table. “I might not be a guy anymore, but I’m still Kamenashi motherfucking Kazuya. I will not let him fuck with anybody anymore.”
Goosebumps tickle the back of Jin’s neck.
--
Yamato comes back to work the next day. If it’s possible, his face looks even worse than Kame’s; his nose is grotesquely swollen beneath a large square bandage, bruises spreading like Rorschach from the centre of his face and out towards his cheeks. He passes Jin in the hall and stares obstinately back at Jin’s glowering rage; it’s almost like he wants Jin to crush his face in even further.
Jin cracks his knuckle as he walks by, delighting in Yamato’s flinch.
--
Kame finds a flyer for a feminist discussion group in a cramped basement bookshop on the outskirts of Shibuya. He starts to attend the weekly meetings they hold in the studio apartment of their Japanese-American leader, Miki. He comes home with thick stacks of books that Jin privately thinks he'll probably never read; translations of The Beauty Myth and The Female Eunuch. He makes Jin accompany him to a performance of The Vagina Monologues, which isn't nearly as interesting as it sounds.
After, they drive around the city while Kame talks about how things have to change, cheeks flushed with the passion of the newly righteous. There's so much he never realised, he says. So much he'd never seen.
Sometimes, in these moments, when they're alone and safe and reality has become a distant, abstract memory, Jin thinks he would tear the world apart so they could put it back together, and all Kame would have to do was ask.
--
The company grapevine has grown tangled and dense, vines curling and crawling through the halls and winding themselves invisibly around everybody they know. Jin knows if they could trace the tendrils back to their source they’d find Kame, head bent and voice low as he whispers to the women over lunch, as he flirts with the juniors in the halls. They’d find Kame having a quiet drink with Kimura Takuya in a small exclusive bar, Kame singing karaoke with Matchy, Kame bringing Pi a bento on set.
Kame is exploiting all of his considerable resources. If there is anything Johnny’s Entertainment has taught him, it is maintaining the perfect public image, and, perversely, tearing one apart.
The rumours spread like Chinese whispers, each incarnation more epic than the last. Jin hears that Yamato hit on Kame; then he hears that Yamato molested Kame; a junior tearfully tells Jin that he heard Yamato tried to drug Kame and abduct him as a sex slave. He’s afraid for Kamenashi-senpai. Jin tells him, with an almost embarrassing rush of pride, that Kamenashi can look after himself.
People start to talk about how it’s possible Yamato will be fired any day now; Kame’s been firing the office workers up and they’ve started refusing to run his errands or make his coffee, sitting stony and silent in the face of his commands. The head administrative manager Kawamura-san has been leading a quiet mutiny.
It fills Jin with a smug satisfaction to walk past the copy room and see Yamato bent over his own print job, struggling to remove a paper jam and muttering to himself in a rumpled suit. He leans in the doorway and says, “Aren’t there better uses for management’s time?”
Yamato turns and glares at him but seems to swallow his retort; Kame has also been spreading the rumour that Jin is a black belt in karate with connections to the yakuza and has vowed to make Yamato pay with his blood. Of all the rumours, that might be Jin’s favourite.
“You said you wanted to help,” Kame said blankly when Jin confronted him about it. “I tried to spread the same rumour about Nakamaru at first, but it didn’t take.”
“People think I’m badass,” Jin said proudly, but Kame just snickered.
“Nah,” he said. “People just think you’re obsessed with me.”
Sometimes even the craziest rumours prove to be true.
--
“What’s it like?” Jin asks one day. He’s sitting on Kame’s couch in his work clothes, watching Kame carefully painting his toenails. Kame is sitting on the floor wearing a huge Giants t-shirt and a pair of men’s pajama pants.
“What’s what like?” Kame screws the lid back on his nail polish. He sets it aside and pulls his knees to his chest, wriggling his toes to help them dry. They are neon violet, radioactive against his tiny feet.
“You know,” Jin says. “Being a chick.”
Kame rests his chin on his knee and crosses his arms over the front of his legs, fingers sliding underneath his feet. When he speaks, he tilts his head as if the answer is still forming in his brain. “It’s like when you go to stay at a friend’s place,” he says. “And it’s a nice house and they’re a great host and they try to give you everything you need, but it’s... not the same, because it’s not your house. It takes you ages to get to sleep at night because the sheets smell different and the way the light moves through the windows is creepy, and the house makes all these weird sounds that you don’t understand. And you just wish you could go home and sleep in your own bed.” His voice is shaking a little, miserable; it sounds husky and deeper than it has been since he changed, closer to his real voice. Jin kind of missed it but that doesn’t make him happy to hear it almost crack into tears.
“Kame,” Jin murmurs, and crawls down onto the floor so they’re sitting side to side. He puts his arm around Kame. The faint softness of breasts and thighs excites him and makes him sick with misery all at once.
“I want to go home,” Kame says, and lets Jin squeeze him tighter.
--
When Jin first notices him across the floor he’s momentarily certain that he's having a really intense hallucination, probably related to the weird blue cocktails he's been drinking all night. There's no way that Kame is wearing that flimsy black dress that dips so low in the back, no way he'd be laughing and grinding against some TOTAL STRANGER on the dancefloor. The roaring in Jin's ears overpowers the music and he finds himself standing and stumbling out of the VIP area, shoving through the sweaty, drunken crowd to grab Kame's wrist.
He expects Kame to start in fright; to struggle, maybe, but he just turns and fits his hips against Jin's, opens his mouth against Jin's neck.
"I've been waiting for you," he breathes, and Jin wakes up.
Continue...
Author:
soundczechRating: R
Disclaimer: I have no association with Johnny's & Associates. No infringement intended. All events depicted herein are fairly obviously fictional.
Summary: Jin accidentally turns Kame into a lady.
WARNING: I mean that literally. There is genderswitch here. I started writing this before Jin's LA tour was even announced, so he's still in the group - consider it semi-AU. An alternate future. Wherein magic is real and Kame turns into a girl, lol.
Author's Notes:
help_haiti fic for happiestwhen!!! I know it's six months late but it did blow well over the intended word limit... Sorry, friend. I'm also sorry because I know you had more lolsy intentions for this prompt but it... didn't turn out that way. I could probably write about 10,000 words of author notes about this fic turned out the way it did. WARNING #2: I guess there are some things in here that might count as triggers; some violence and sexual harassment contained within. And some uncomfortable gender inequality stuff.
Props to
samenashi for the name and for helping me flesh out the plot. And for listening to me complain constantly. And darlita for being there when I was just about ready to give up. Kame shrinks four inches overnight. He shows up to work in the morning in a hoodie that swims halfway to his knees, trying to wrench free of KAT-TUN's grabbing hands. "Cut it out," he hisses. "I'm a lady now, you're supposed to act like fucking gentlemen."
"You just look like a short dude with small boobs," Koki says, wincing when Kame's fist catches him around the ear; his hands are still wide and sort of masculine, sharp knuckles rising over short fingers.
Jin looks at him and sees few real changes; it is more like his old body parts have been recycled, like someone has taken him and squished and stretched him into something new. The dependable line of his broad shoulders is still firm and familiar in his sweatshirt, but the swell of small breasts is alien; the angle of his narrow waist looks the same as always, but it has ruptured and exploded into curvy hips and an almost fat ass. Jin can't stop staring at the place where his Adam's Apple has melted away into nothing.
Tentatively, Jin reaches out and prods at Kame's chest, momentarily feeling the softness of breasts - real breasts, Jin can tell the difference - before Kame squawks and slaps his hand away.
"Kamenashi," Jin says. "You're a girl."
His face is still oddly masculine, all broken nose and stark cheekbones over a chin only slightly softer; his short hair is messy and there are dark rings under his eyes, but no hint of stubble.
"I don't know what happened," Kame says, hysteria barely held at bay.
Jin does.
-
Jin locks himself in his car and presses his head against his knuckles, clutching tight to the leather steering wheel. If he holds his breath for long enough he’ll wake up and realise he’s just had some kind of fucked up dream; a flashback, maybe, from that time he dropped acid with Josh, or maybe just some kind of temporary psychotic episode.
After a few seconds his lungs burst and he takes a gasp of air, and it’s still real: Kame is a woman now, and it’s probably Jin’s fault.
He’d almost forgotten the wish; blurted drunkenly at Kiritani Shuuji on tv while clutching Pi’s fucking monkey’s paw, sudden and unexpected and totally inexcusable in the sober light of day.
Things would be so much easier if you were a girl.
-
Kame disappears for a couple of days and comes back with long hair extensions and conservative, bookish clothes; Jin had kind of idly assumed Kame would dress like a 109 shop girl, but he looks more like a librarian, all tweedy skirts and soft, pale pink sweaters that cover his boobs all the way up to his neck. Jin can't stop staring at the austere string of pearls Kame keeps worrying between his fingers, at the neatly polished nails, beigeish and trimmed short. He looks like a teacher from a porno, waiting for someone to mess up his clothes and fuck him over a desk.
"What the hell are you wearing?" Koki asks, crowding into Kame's space like always. Kame neatly sidesteps him, putting some distance between them and sitting in the armchair, hands folded politely in his lap.
"What am I supposed to wear?" he asks, in that measured, composed way Jin recognises from women on the news. He wonders if Kame has been sitting at home studying them, learning every movement and mannerism; learning how to be a whole new person. Then Jin feels stupid for even wondering. Of course he has.
"I don't know," Koki says. "Something more..."
"Something more you," Jin says when it seems like Koki isn't going to finish.
Kame is unable to stop that familiar scowl from crawling out over his perfectly painted peach lips. "What's that supposed to mean?"
Jin refuses to step into that trap, and from Nakamaru’s wide eyes staring back at him, Jin knows he’s not the only one; Kame’s mouth goes thin and flat like he knows they’re making fun of him.
"Something slutty," Ueda says. He’s sitting at the low coffee table leafing through a copy of Rolling Stone.
Kame sighs and the anchorwoman crumbles away until it's just Kame slumped in an armchair trying to smooth the wrinkles out of his skirt. "It's different," he says. "I have to be different, now.”
“That’s stupid,” Jin says, but Kame’s already gone. The anchorwoman stares back at him, impassive eyes in a smooth, blank face.
She makes Jin sick with guilt.
-
He goes home and finds the monkey’s paw under a pile of magazines on his coffee table. The magazines go cascading to the floor as he grabs it, half naked women curling in on themselves as the pages bend.
He holds it to his forehead and says, “I take back the wish,” but nothing changes. He goes to work the next day and Kame is sitting in their dressing room in a pale yellow sundress and white cardigan, sipping demurely at a cup of tea.
--
Jin’s not an idiot. He’d always known, on some level, that his feelings for Kame weren’t normal guy feelings that you have for your best buddy. That sometimes when they got too close it seemed like something momentous was about to happen, like if Jin pushed his body just slightly against Kame’s then something would spark and there’d be like. Fireworks, maybe. Bombs.
He’s not stupid. He just thought he’d left all that in the past, like stupid Shounen Club skits and fuschia coloured pirate costumes. Like his mushroom-cap hair and believing in Santa and wanting to be a championship soccer superstar. That thing in the past where he was maybe in homosexual love with Kame is over, shoved aside because it’s too stupid and too dangerous and Kame would never agree to it anyway. Jin is a man now. Jin makes manly decisions.
As usual, Jin has somewhat overestimated himself.
--
Kame can’t work while he’s like this, so the agency spreads the rumour that he’s vacationing in France and dispatches some grainy photographs of a lookalike in front of the Eiffel Tower as evidence. Kame leafs through the media coverage miserably; speculation is already rife that KAT-TUN have finally had the acrimonious split to which the tabloids always insisted they were headed. The way the papers tell it, Kame and Jin had a screaming match outside the jimusho’s Shibuya offices and Kame walked out and refused to come back.
“Sorry, guys,” he says. KAT-TUN gather together almost every morning now, just to see if he has turned back into himself overnight. Every morning that he doesn’t, hope slips a little further out of reach.
“Stop reading that shit,” Jin says. He isn’t sure how to say, “I made a wish to turn you into a woman because I was afraid of having a gay thing for you and now your life is kind of ruined and I can’t seem to turn you back,” so he doesn’t. It’s probably a little more than Kame could handle right now anyway; he’s still pretending to be serene and composed, but Jin has been with him through years of pretending to be alright and he knows the signs better than anyone.
--
At first, people whisper when Kame walks the halls of the Johnny’s Entertainment offices, but after a while it’s like everybody gets used to it and he becomes just another oddity in a company that is full of them. A couple of times, Jin catches some of the younger juniors discussing it in hushed tones, but they seem to think the whole thing is the result of Kame’s apparent superpowers, so he just lets them go with a sly wink and a ruffle of the hair. A few days later, Nakamaru tells Jin that the filming of Shounen Club was rampant with speculation about Kame’s other gifts; he has the power, some say, to burn a man to ash with only a withering glare.
--
Kame gets tired of just sitting around all day waiting to turn back into a dude. He starts working in Johnny's office doing boring administrative things that Jin doesn't really understand or care about; he seems to spend about half his day in the tiny stuffy copy room, cursing and fighting with the photocopier. Jin finds excuses to drop by often. He starts drinking a lot of coffee because the copy room is two doors down from the kitchen. He has to switch to tea when his heart starts beating funny.
He sits on the bench across from the copier kicking his feet against the cabinet and watching Kame crawl around on the floor trying to free the paper jams that routinely crunch his day into unproductivity. Sometimes he helps Kame compile and staple booklets for big board meetings; it is weird to see his own name amongst dry lists of numbers, sales figures and projected earnings, budgets and deficits and blah blah blah.
Jin starts to come in even on his days off. He's noticed some of the gross old guys from upper management hovering around Kame like vultures. Like disgusting sexual predator vultures. The other guys might think Kame isn't a hot girl, but Jin knows better; everyone said Kame wasn't a good looking kid too, and Jin had always been able to see what they hadn't. He sees it now in Kame's soft eyes and still goofy smile. Underneath all those uptight clothes, Kame's a fox.
There's one guy in particular who skeeves Jin out; about forty years old and slightly paunchy, with salaryman hair and an expensive but dated suit. He thinks he has a chance and always looks disgruntled when he walks into the copy room and sees Jin.
"Good afternoon, Akanishi-san," he says disapprovingly. "At a loose end again, I see."
"I'm helping," Jin says, waving around thick sheaf of papers. He's not helping, he's just been sitting here bitching about Ryo's new girlfriend for at least an hour.
"Aren't there better uses for an idol's time?" Yamato says, and Jin sees Kame's shoulders go absolutely square inside his lilac cashmere sweater. He turns and looks at Jin and he can read the consternation in his face, but also the wistfulness. There are about a thousand ways Kame would rather spend his day.
"We're working together," Jin says. He lifts his chin in this guy's face because really, who does he think he is? "Akakame, like always."
It's been a long time since that name left Jin's lips and Kame's eyebrows shoot up behind Yamato's back. Peach-painted lips roll inwards and Jin watches as the pearls wound around his delicate neck quiver with amusement. Jin shifts his gaze back to Yamato, whose face is flat and hard with rage.
"I'm sure Kamenashi-chan would get more work done alone," Yamato says, and Jin can tell that if they were in a bar, he'd probably sock him – if he were remotely interesting enough to do that kind of thing.
"Yeah?" Jin says, sliding off the bench and stretching to his full height, inches over Yamato's head. "I guess you'll have to take it up with Johnny, then."
"So it seems," Yamato says, and then he's gone.
"Was that really necessary?" Kame asks when they're alone. He faces Jin with hands on his hips. His sweater pulls tight and Jin can make out the roughness of lace beneath; a hint of darkness, like Kame's bra is black, or maybe the colour of wine. It's somewhat a relief to know the real Kame is lingering somewhere beneath the prim exterior.
"I don't like that guy," Jin says.
"He's not so bad," Kame says, which is what he always says when he secretly agrees but thinks it would be irresponsible to admit it.
"He's a pompous dick," Jin says. Kame rolls his eyes and turns back to the photocopier, a thick stack of papers in his fist. Pi's face peeps out at Jin from beneath his fingers. He watches Kame methodically shuffling his papers, smoothing out the creases with his hands.
"Why are you doing this?" Jin asks. He watches the shifting of Kame's back, the tendrils of hair that escape his French twist. From the back he should look like a stranger, but he doesn't. "Kame?"
"What else am I supposed to do?" Kame asks after a while. The room is silent other than the woosh woosh woosh of the printer.
"I don't know," Jin says. "Something more exciting? You're not an OL."
Kame doesn't look at him as he takes a stack of papers and sorts them into piles. "So who am I?" he asks after a while; when he finally does look up, his eyes make Jin's chest throb. "Who am I supposed to be, now?"
Jin swallows and resists the urge to reach out and touch Kame's hair, near the roots where it's still real.
"Be Kamenashi," he says. "That's all."
--
When they were young and still close enough to have sleepovers, Jin awoke one morning to find Kame looking at him, face half buried in blankets and hair falling out of his palm tree ponytail.
"What?" Jin said, swiping his hand over his face to check for drool. "Was I talking in my sleep?"
"Yeah.” Kame’s eyes were coy, gleaming a little in the semi-darkness.
"What was I saying?" Jin asked. He propped himself up on his elbows and fumbled blearily for his phone to check the time. It was only four or five am; Kame often slept over when they had an early call in the morning.
"I can't tell you," Kame said. "It's a secret."
"Oi, that's retarded," Jin protested, starting to tug at Kame's blankets. Guerilla tactics rarely worked with Kame, but Jin liked to watch him fight.
"I'll take it to my grave." Kame pulled the blankets over his head, locking Jin out of his blanket fortress.
"Kame?" Jin said. "KameKameKame?" He slumped over the lump of Kame's body, feeling the squelch of slender limbs beneath his weight. "Where did Kame go?" he wondered. "It's like he just disappeared."
"I think someone dropped an elephant on him," Kame said, muffled through the blankets.
"SHUT UP," Jin squawked, mercilessly stabbing his fingers through the blankets as Kame tried to wriggle free. "MUSCLE WEIGHS MORE THAN FAT."
Jin never did find out what he said that day, but he woke up a few weeks later with his nose pressed to the back of Kame's neck and a handful of Kame's t-shirt in his fist, gasping and hard.
These are the things they don't talk about.
-
Kame comes to their practices sometimes, just to watch. Jin thinks he’s committing their new routines to memory just in case he comes back suddenly, but it’s like he can’t take it for long; he only ever stays for an hour or two, growing crabbier and crabbier and barking orders from his perch on a stool at the front of the room.
As the weeks pass he grows quieter and more withdrawn; he doesn’t tell them what to do anymore. He just looks at them with big, sad eyes and slinks away the moment that practice is over.
-
"Are you busy tonight?" Kame asks one day, when they're quietly trying to reassemble the pages of a 200 page document the printer saw fit to spit out all over the floor.
"Yeah, I'm going out with the boys," Jin says. "We're gonna hit up Kusano's, then–" Jin's brain always catches up with him a minute too late. Kame's made some kind of sour face and is forcefully shaking a stack of pages into alignment. "Oh." Jin swallows. "Did you wanna do something?"
"Forget about it," Kame says. He looks at the clock. "Don't you have a meeting right now?"
"Kame--" Jin starts.
"You're going to be late," Kame grumps, and scoops up another stack of pages to be wrangled into submission.
--
The bar is packed, girls Jin half remembers milling around half dressed. Kusano is run off his feet schmoozing with the customers so he doesn't have time to hang out and help spread outrageous lies about MatsuJun. Josh just keeps trying to tell him about some day trip he went on into the mountains; he's got about a thousand photos on his iPhone and he wants to show Jin every one.
Jin is bored out of his mind.
He mails Kame at 11:30.
From: <jindoggydogg@docomo.ne.jp>
To: <specialk@docomo.ne.jp>
What up?! Come join us
From: <specialk@docomo.ne.jp>
To: <jindoggydogg@docomo.ne.jp>
No thanks
From: <jindoggydogg@docomo.ne.jp>
To: <specialk@docomo.ne.jp>
Y?
From: <specialk@docomo.ne.jp>
To: <jindoggydogg@docomo.ne.jp>
I'd rather not be Akanishi's new Friday girl
From: <jindoggydogg@docomo.ne.jp>
To: <specialk@docomo.ne.jp>
Fuck off
Come on From: <specialk@docomo.ne.jp>
To: <jindoggydogg@docomo.ne.jp>
No
From: <jindoggydogg@docomo.ne.jp>
To: <specialk@docomo.ne.jp>
Y
From: <specialk@docomo.ne.jp>
To: <jindoggydogg@docomo.ne.jp>
From: <jindoggydogg@docomo.ne.jp>
To: <specialk@docomo.ne.jp>
Y
From: <jindoggydogg@docomo.ne.jp>
To: <specialk@docomo.ne.jp>
Y
From: jindoggydogg@docomo.ne.jp
To: <specialk@docomo.ne.jp>
WHY
From: <jindoggydogg@docomo.ne.jp>
To: <specialk@docomo.ne.jp>
Answer me!!!!!!!
From: <jindoggydogg@docomo.ne.jp>
To: <specialk@docomo.ne.jp>
Should i take ur silence to mean u r already on ur way?
From: <jindoggydogg@docomo.ne.jp>
To: <specialk@docomo.ne.jp>
Kame?
From: <jindoggydogg@docomo.ne.jp>
To: <specialk@docomo.ne.jp>
u r not on ur way r u
From: <jindoggydogg@docomo.ne.jp>
To: <specialk@docomo.ne.jp>
Im comin over
--
Kame answers the door in a ridiculous burgundy velour dressing gown. He's holding a towel and his hair is loose and wet around his shoulders; the dressing gown is man-sized and swims around the tightly cinched belt. Jin chokes on his greeting as he watches a drop of water spill from his bangs and roll a glistening path down his neck, disappearing into a dark wet patch on his collar.
"Bit late, isn't it?" Kame asks without saying hello. He dabs at his hair with the towel.
"It's Friday, grandpa." Jin says. He locks the door behind himself and toes off his boots. The guest slippers he steps into are black leather but they have been defaced with silver paint; Jin can vaguely make out Koki's handwriting, but none of the words or pictures make sense to him. He feels a hot pulse of hostility. "Besides, you're up."
"I just got out of the bath," Kame says. He turns and pads into the apartment, discarding his towel on the hall table. Jin watches as he moves around the kitchen, flicking on the kettle to boil and dumping some tea leaves into a small brightly coloured pot. While he waits for the water, he twists his long hair into a knot and spears it with a pair of wooden chopsticks, swiping irritably at the wet bangs that curl around his face.
Jin stares. Kame’s cleavage peeks pale and coy out of the loose v of his dressing gown; secretive white skin hiding beneath velvet. Jin imagines untwisting the knot on that cheesy dressing gown and slipping his hands inside.
He distracts himself by peeling off his coat and unwinding his scarf. He pushes the sleeves of his hoodie up and sprawls on Kame’s couch. He looks at his phone and finds five emails from Josh and two from Kusano. He forgot to say goodbye when he left.
He’s just finished typing an email to them (What am I, ur girlfriend?) when Kame wanders over and hands him a black china cup. The tea inside is rich and fragrant. Kame always makes tea too strong for Jin’s tastes, but there’s something comforting about the bitterness.
“I thought you were ‘rolling with your homies’,” Kame says. Jin detects a faint trace of mockery in a smile that is hidden as Kame lifts his own cup to his mouth and drinks. He folds himself onto the couch at Jin’s side, one leg curled beneath him.
“I got bored,” Jin says. As it dries, Kame’s hair escapes the knot, falling and curling piece by piece around his shoulders. It looks like someone has messed him up. Jin wants to give him a swollen mouth to match; he imagines slowly drawing the chopsticks from the twist and watching his hair tumble around naked shoulders, following the line of his neck with his mouth.
“Well you got here just in time for the party,” Kame says, deadpan. “I’m just waiting on the kegs and slutty women.”
“I think the slutty woman is here already,” Jin says, and reaches out to tug at the sleeve of Kame’s robe. “Did you borrow this from Hugh Hefner?”
Kame blinks. “I don’t know who that is.” He frowns, looking down at himself. “What’s wrong with my robe?!”
“Nothing,” Jin says. “It’s better than those boring clothes you’ve been wearing lately.”
Kame frowns. “My clothes are fine,” he says.
“For someone’s mom,” Jin scoffs. “I mean, not that I ever sat around imagining you trying on women’s clothes or anything ¬–“ (That is, Jin realises, a lie) “but if I did I would have pegged you for being way more into leather and cute mini skirts than tweed and boring frumpy spinster clothes.” Jin is probably a bit drunk. “Your guy clothes show more cleavage.”
Kame is quiet for a long time and eventually Jin thinks he isn’t going to respond at all; he’s probably offended him and Kame will let him finish his tea and then kick him out unceremoniously.
“It’s different now,” Kame says.
“You keep saying that,” Jin replies, “but I don’t get how. Your body is different, but you’re not, right?”
“It’s not that simple.” Kame crosses his arms defensively; Jin wants to reach out and press his fingers into the tense muscles of his forearms, smooth his thumbs down and feel the pulse on the inside of this wrist. “If I’m a woman… expectations are different. The way people see you is different.”
“Who cares how people see you?” Jin grumbles, distantly aware of his own hypocrisy. “If you’re happy, then who gives a shit?”
“What exactly do you think I’m going to do with my life, Jin?” his voice is cracking and hoarse, his leg jiggling desperately beneath the dressing gown. “If this is permanent, what am I going to do? They’re not going to let me stay at JE forever. You think any office is going to hire some woman who doesn’t have a high school diploma, or experience, or any history at all?” His breath is shaky and he keeps licking his lips. “Even if I do manage to get an ok job, it’s dead end and you know it. This is Japan. I’ve got no qualifications. I’ll be fetching coffee and running errands, just waiting for someone to come along and marry me and put me out of my misery.”
Jin’s heart seizes. “Bullshit,” he hisses. “That is bullshit.”
“That’s reality,” Kame says. “That’s my reality, now. That’s my best case scenario.”
“This isn’t like you,” Jin says. “You don’t give up like this. You don’t even know how.”
Kame sips his tea. “I don’t know how to fight this,” he says. “I’m sorry. I just don’t know how.”
“Kamenashi doesn’t lose,” Jin says stubbornly.
Kame grimaces. “Maybe this time, he does.”
--
Over the next few days, Kame is even more prim and perfect than before. He doesn’t come to their practices. He is the perfect OL, neat grey skirt and white linen shirt, grey vest, weird silky pink scarf. Jin keeps wanting to grab him and hold him down while he smears black eyeliner along his lashes, while he tears at his collar until he can see some skin.
Once, when they’re passing in the hall, Jin reaches out and grabs Kame’s arm, about to do just that, but Kame just stares at him blankly until Jin lets him go.
Kame’s kind of broken, Jin thinks. Jin kind of broke him.
--
Jin's phone rings minutes after he's crawled into bed and pulled the blankets up over his head. He cracks open his eye to check the display; Kame's old face is looking back at him, all vaguely disgruntled male muscles and bones. He swipes to answer and puts the call on speaker so he doesn't have to expend the energy to hold it to his face.
"What's up?" he asks sleepily.
"Can you come get me?" Kame's voice is a bit croaky, swollen with exhaustion and what sounds a bit like embarrassment.
"What?" Jin sits up, feeling his head spin a little. "What happened? Where are you?"
"Denny's," Kame says. "In Shibuya."
"Why can't you get home?"
Jin is already stumbling out of bed and fumbling around for a sweater. He jams a beanie over his unruly hair.
"I left my purse somewhere," Kame says, hysteria rising in his controlled tone. "And I'm a bit drunk, I think."
"Kame," Jin says, jamming his feat into his sneakers as he runs out the door. "What the fuck happened?"
"Just come," Kame says, and hangs up.
-
When Jin rushes into Denny's it is just past 3am; it is a Wednesday night and the only people around are a groups of drunk college students hunched over parfait and a rumpled salaryman slumped in the corner, looking like he might have been thrown out of his house. Jin tells the girl at the counter he is looking for his friend and winces at the wide eyes and slight intake of breath that mean he has been recognized.
He finds Kame sitting in a booth in the back corner of the restaurant, staring down into a mug of black coffee, hiding his face with one hand held to his temple. At first Jin thinks he’s doing it out of habit; hiding from the paparazzi who probably wouldn’t see Kamenashi Kazuya in his slightly rounded girl’s chin and fuller girl’s lips anyway.
Then Kame drops his hand and Jin sees the three long, thin bruises storming down the curve of his cheekbone, blooming angry and plum-purple near his eye. Someone has left their fingerprints in Kame’s skin.
Jin goes blank with rage.
-
“What happened?” Jin asks on the way home; he’s taking the long way to Kame’s place because he can’t quite stand the thought of letting Kame get out and walk away. In the darkness of the car Jin can’t really see the bruises anymore, but he can’t stop thinking about them. Kame keeps tracing their edges with his fingers, wincing from the pressure but unable to stop.
Kame grimaces. “I said no,” he says, as if that is explanation enough. Jin supposes it is.
“To who?” he asks. He grips the steering wheel so hard it almost feels like he’s about to break it. His forearms ache from the tension.
“Yamato,” Kame says after a minute. He pulls down the visor so he can look at the bruises in the mirror. “What a sleazebag.”
Jin’s hands are trembling and he has to swerve and pull to the side of the road; he’s worried he’s going to cause an accident if he doesn’t just take a minute to breathe. “I’m going to kill him,” Jin says.
Kame sighs and snaps the visor back up. “Jin –“
“I’m serious,” Jin says. “I’m going to fucking kill him.”
“Come on,” Kame says. “Just leave it, please.”
“You can’t expect me to just forget about it,” Jin yells, slapping his palm on the steering wheel. The windscreen wipers come on. Their squeaking noise fills the car. “Who the fuck does that guy think he is? What kind of asshole thinks he can beat up on girls?” The windscreen wipers scream. “Aren’t you angry?”
Kame crosses his arms. “Of course,” he says. “Of course I’m fucking angry. I broke his fucking nose, ok?”
“Kame,” Jin whines. He wants the satisfaction of feeling Yamato’s bones break too; he imagines the feeling of his cheekbone shattering beneath his fist with sociopathic relish.
“I took care of it, so stay out of it.” Kame is deadly serious, using that same autocratic tone he uses when KAT-TUN are threatening to spiral out of control. “You getting in trouble won’t help anybody.”
Jin crosses his arms over the steering wheel and buries his face in them. “It’ll help me,” he grumbles, determined not to feel comforted when Kame reaches out and pets uselessly at his beanie, at the tufts of hair that spill from beneath it.
“Hey,” Kame says. “Thanks for coming to get me.”
“As if I wouldn’t come,” Jin says, voice muffled into his arms.
Kame leans over and kisses his arm by the elbow. Jin barely feels it through his hoodie, but his heart still goes crazy. Their first kiss.
“Yeah, well,” Kame says. “Still, thanks.”
--
Kame doesn’t come to work the next day, but either does Yamato. Jin knows from the hushed whispers that go totally silent as he walks past that word has spread beyond the small group of people that had been at the small gathering; he wonders if word has filtered through to Johnny yet, and hopes it has. He’s not sure if him going directly to Johnny and tattling would count as him staying out of it. He’s not sure if he cares.
He emails Kame, “You ok?” and just gets a thumbs up back. Kame is so annoying.
--
Kame shows up again three days later with a black eye and a tiny mini skirt, all bare legs and motorcycle boots. Jin chokes when he walks into the studio and sees the stretch of bare thigh sloping into crossed knees, and Koki snickers.
“I think Akanishi just came in his pants,” he says. He’s sitting next to Kame on the couch, peering over his shoulder at the magazine he’s reading. Kame looks up at Jin, eyebrows arched over his swollen eye and the line of bruises that slice down his cheek. A distressed sound squeezes out of Jin’s throat.
“Hey,” Kame says. His lips are painted pink and sparkly. He’s wearing a cropped denim jacket and a white tank top and a whole mess of necklaces. His old leather cuff is around his wrist, fastened to the smallest size but still almost comically loose. Jin can see the faint pinkness of his bra through his thin shirt. Somehow, he looks more like himself than he has in ages, bruises and boobs and all.
“Your clothes,” Jin says stupidly.
Kame nods. “I made Nakamaru go shopping with me,” he says. “If he told me I couldn’t leave the house in something, I bought it.”
“What happened to what people think?” Jin asks cautiously; Kame has either had some kind of breakthrough or some kind of breakdown, and he’s honestly not sure which yet.
Kame flips the page of his magazine. He snorts. “Fuck what people think.”
Breakthrough, Jin decides. Definitely a breakthrough.
--
When Ueda comes in a little later, he seems almost impressed by the shiner that has taken over most of Kame’s face. “I can show you how to cover that,” he says, grabbing Kame’s chin and tilting his face to see it in the best light. If Jin just glances at them from the right angle, they look like some kind of weird lesbian porno. He decides not to tell Ueda that.
“I know how to cover it,” Kame says. “Why should I?”
--
He walks through the halls with his head held high, letting people see. The OLs they pass look at him aghast and News’ manager’s face goes bright red and panicked, but Kame doesn’t falter, he doesn’t flinch. Even when they run into Yoko in an elevator and he takes one look at Kame’s face and looks like he’s about to burst into horrified, angry tears, Kame does not relent.
It doesn’t take Jin long to understand what is happening.
Kamenashi is declaring war.
--
He’d been able to let it slide, Kame says, when it had just been him. When it had been a drunken one off, maybe, fueled by the beer they’d been drinking all night and the weirdness of Kame’s own predicament. It had been tolerable when he’d been cornered and propositioned, tolerable even when Yamato had started lecturing him about how he couldn’t be an arrogant idol anymore, he had to be practical, because he wasn’t even that pretty for a woman. He’d endured it when Yamato said he had no future and no hope; that the best a freak like him could hope for was to find a good husband like Yamato and be happy about it. He’d endured it by lashing out and breaking his nose, of course, but he’d decided to leave it there. It was over, he’d decided. He’d be the bigger man. He’d walk away.
Then, less than 48 hours into his self imposed exile, he’d gotten a message from Sachiko, one of the marketing team that Kame had always liked because she was a huge Giants fan and liked to reenact exciting moments of games with him; they’d known her since she was only eighteen and her only job was getting coffee for the boss.
She wanted Kame to know that he shouldn’t blame himself because these things happened; everyone knows Yamato is like that. It sounds like she knows from personal experience. Kame isn’t the first.
“I’ll be the last,” Kame tells Jin. “I swear I’ll be the last. He gets away with it because they’re terrified of losing their jobs.” He swigs his beer. They are sitting in a ramen joint, huddled over plates of gyoza. “He goes for them because he thinks they’re powerless.” He stuffs a gyoza in his mouth and grumbles. “Fuck him, I’m not powerless and neither are they.” He swallows, slapping his palm on the table. “I might not be a guy anymore, but I’m still Kamenashi motherfucking Kazuya. I will not let him fuck with anybody anymore.”
Goosebumps tickle the back of Jin’s neck.
--
Yamato comes back to work the next day. If it’s possible, his face looks even worse than Kame’s; his nose is grotesquely swollen beneath a large square bandage, bruises spreading like Rorschach from the centre of his face and out towards his cheeks. He passes Jin in the hall and stares obstinately back at Jin’s glowering rage; it’s almost like he wants Jin to crush his face in even further.
Jin cracks his knuckle as he walks by, delighting in Yamato’s flinch.
--
Kame finds a flyer for a feminist discussion group in a cramped basement bookshop on the outskirts of Shibuya. He starts to attend the weekly meetings they hold in the studio apartment of their Japanese-American leader, Miki. He comes home with thick stacks of books that Jin privately thinks he'll probably never read; translations of The Beauty Myth and The Female Eunuch. He makes Jin accompany him to a performance of The Vagina Monologues, which isn't nearly as interesting as it sounds.
After, they drive around the city while Kame talks about how things have to change, cheeks flushed with the passion of the newly righteous. There's so much he never realised, he says. So much he'd never seen.
Sometimes, in these moments, when they're alone and safe and reality has become a distant, abstract memory, Jin thinks he would tear the world apart so they could put it back together, and all Kame would have to do was ask.
--
The company grapevine has grown tangled and dense, vines curling and crawling through the halls and winding themselves invisibly around everybody they know. Jin knows if they could trace the tendrils back to their source they’d find Kame, head bent and voice low as he whispers to the women over lunch, as he flirts with the juniors in the halls. They’d find Kame having a quiet drink with Kimura Takuya in a small exclusive bar, Kame singing karaoke with Matchy, Kame bringing Pi a bento on set.
Kame is exploiting all of his considerable resources. If there is anything Johnny’s Entertainment has taught him, it is maintaining the perfect public image, and, perversely, tearing one apart.
The rumours spread like Chinese whispers, each incarnation more epic than the last. Jin hears that Yamato hit on Kame; then he hears that Yamato molested Kame; a junior tearfully tells Jin that he heard Yamato tried to drug Kame and abduct him as a sex slave. He’s afraid for Kamenashi-senpai. Jin tells him, with an almost embarrassing rush of pride, that Kamenashi can look after himself.
People start to talk about how it’s possible Yamato will be fired any day now; Kame’s been firing the office workers up and they’ve started refusing to run his errands or make his coffee, sitting stony and silent in the face of his commands. The head administrative manager Kawamura-san has been leading a quiet mutiny.
It fills Jin with a smug satisfaction to walk past the copy room and see Yamato bent over his own print job, struggling to remove a paper jam and muttering to himself in a rumpled suit. He leans in the doorway and says, “Aren’t there better uses for management’s time?”
Yamato turns and glares at him but seems to swallow his retort; Kame has also been spreading the rumour that Jin is a black belt in karate with connections to the yakuza and has vowed to make Yamato pay with his blood. Of all the rumours, that might be Jin’s favourite.
“You said you wanted to help,” Kame said blankly when Jin confronted him about it. “I tried to spread the same rumour about Nakamaru at first, but it didn’t take.”
“People think I’m badass,” Jin said proudly, but Kame just snickered.
“Nah,” he said. “People just think you’re obsessed with me.”
Sometimes even the craziest rumours prove to be true.
--
“What’s it like?” Jin asks one day. He’s sitting on Kame’s couch in his work clothes, watching Kame carefully painting his toenails. Kame is sitting on the floor wearing a huge Giants t-shirt and a pair of men’s pajama pants.
“What’s what like?” Kame screws the lid back on his nail polish. He sets it aside and pulls his knees to his chest, wriggling his toes to help them dry. They are neon violet, radioactive against his tiny feet.
“You know,” Jin says. “Being a chick.”
Kame rests his chin on his knee and crosses his arms over the front of his legs, fingers sliding underneath his feet. When he speaks, he tilts his head as if the answer is still forming in his brain. “It’s like when you go to stay at a friend’s place,” he says. “And it’s a nice house and they’re a great host and they try to give you everything you need, but it’s... not the same, because it’s not your house. It takes you ages to get to sleep at night because the sheets smell different and the way the light moves through the windows is creepy, and the house makes all these weird sounds that you don’t understand. And you just wish you could go home and sleep in your own bed.” His voice is shaking a little, miserable; it sounds husky and deeper than it has been since he changed, closer to his real voice. Jin kind of missed it but that doesn’t make him happy to hear it almost crack into tears.
“Kame,” Jin murmurs, and crawls down onto the floor so they’re sitting side to side. He puts his arm around Kame. The faint softness of breasts and thighs excites him and makes him sick with misery all at once.
“I want to go home,” Kame says, and lets Jin squeeze him tighter.
--
When Jin first notices him across the floor he’s momentarily certain that he's having a really intense hallucination, probably related to the weird blue cocktails he's been drinking all night. There's no way that Kame is wearing that flimsy black dress that dips so low in the back, no way he'd be laughing and grinding against some TOTAL STRANGER on the dancefloor. The roaring in Jin's ears overpowers the music and he finds himself standing and stumbling out of the VIP area, shoving through the sweaty, drunken crowd to grab Kame's wrist.
He expects Kame to start in fright; to struggle, maybe, but he just turns and fits his hips against Jin's, opens his mouth against Jin's neck.
"I've been waiting for you," he breathes, and Jin wakes up.
Continue...
