fic for prologuesized (1/2)
Title: Jin and the Beanstalk (1/2)
By: notaverse
Pairing: Kame x Jin
Word count: 17,800
Rating: R
Genre/Warnings: Fairytale fluff
Notes: Fic for prologuesized, very loosely based on 'Jack and the Beanstalk'.
Summary: Jin didn't expect to find his biggest fan living at the top of a giant beanstalk.
Jin and the Beanstalk (1/2)
"She was no good for you anyway," Yamapi said, handing Jin the last clean spoon in their apartment so he could indulge in his usual post-break-up ice cream binge. "She didn't like my music."
"How does that make her no good for me?"
"She obviously didn't have any taste at all." Yamapi was nothing if not a supportive roommate to his best friend. "If she did, she wouldn't have ditched you for that American guy."
"I think he's won Oscars," Jin said glumly. "It was no contest."
He popped the lid on the only tub of ice cream to survive last Saturday's party, a thick, swirly chocolate concoction loaded with enough calories to make his doctor weep, and prepared to dig in. He frowned when his spoon scraped the bottom of the container.
"This just isn't my day."
It wasn't his week, really. On Monday he'd tripped over his baggy jeans while trying to show off for his new choreographer. Tuesday their airconditioning went on the fritz and they still couldn't get anyone to take a look at it. Wednesday Mika had dragged him to some stuffy industry party where everyone spoke English far fancier than anything he knew and he'd spent the entire night propping up the bar with some male model, who kept hitting on him in French. On Thursday his manager called him up and told him it wasn't a good idea to be seen out and about with gay French models, in case it damaged his reputation. (Not that Jin had much of a reputation left to damage.) Friday he finally got to see the costumes for his latest PV, and had to assume they'd hired someone who hated his guts to design them.
And now, on Saturday, he'd had the shortest breakfast date in history. He just counted himself lucky Mika hadn't dumped the remains of her coffee in his lap after she'd broken up with him.
"We're out of ice cream?" Yamapi sounded horrified.
Jin considered the state of the tub. "I think we can maybe get a couple of spoonfuls each out of it."
"You've got the last clean spoon." The dishes tended to suffer whenever Jin's life took a turn for the worse. "It's the middle of summer and we have no aircon. We need to restock."
"Whose turn is it to get groceries this week?"
"Yours." Yamapi grabbed the latest shopping list - a sorry-looking scrap of paper on which they'd taken it in turns to scribble down items as they thought of them - and set it on the table to add 'ice cream' to the list. "And try not to go overboard this time. Our freezer's not that big."
"I'll take it easy," Jin promised. He hoped getting out of the apartment for a bit and doing something mundane would make him feel better. He and Mika hadn't been dating long but he'd thought things were going pretty well. Apparently he wasn't qualified to judge. "Are you going out tonight?"
Yamapi shook his head. "I promised my sister I'd help her look at cars tomorrow. I won't be much help if I fall asleep during a test drive. You should come with. We'll have fun."
As far as Jin was concerned, his best friend's family and his own were more or less interchangeable which meant he really would be welcome on the excursion, but somehow he didn't think he'd be in the mood for joking around with his friends. "Maybe."
He shoved the list in his pocket, grabbed his wallet and keys, and made for the door. Somewhere out there was a tub of Cookies & Cream with his name on it.
-----
By the time he returned home with the groceries, Jin felt somewhat cheerier. Part of this was down to his having run into a friend at the supermarket, who'd told him - in the strictest confidence, of course - that the actor at whom his ex-girlfriend was planning to throw herself would never be interested in anyone who didn't have a Y chromosome. The rest of it might've been a sugar high from the block of fudge he'd snaffled on his way round. Free samples were one of the more pleasurable consequences of being an idol.
Yamapi emerged from the latest in a series of cold showers he'd been taking since their airconditioning started to go, just in time to give Jin a hand putting away the shopping. The first bag made him laugh. The second bag made him smile indulgently.
But when he hit the third bag and realised the ones Jin was putting away were no better, he couldn't keep quiet.
"Did you get anything that was on the list at all?"
"Sure I did." Jin held up a bottle of washing-up liquid. "Now we can have clean spoons again!"
"I meant the food, Jin. We're out of eggs, rice, bread...about a million other things. All I'm seeing in these bags is junk."
"I got eggs! Uh...somewhere in here." Jin rummaged frantically through the remaining bags, wondering how he'd gotten so sidetracked in the store. "And the rice is...um..."
Yamapi was a lot more diligent about eating healthily than Jin, whose appetites varied with his moods - and right now he wasn't in the mood for anything remotely good for him. He had enough American DVD boxsets and junk food to keep him going for at least a week, though he'd have to leave the apartment on Tuesday anyway to shoot the PV.
"You didn't get any real food at all, did you?"
"Uh..." In the last bag Jin came up with a handful of beans the weird old guy sitting outside the supermarket had given him - the only free sample he hadn't tried then and there. "I've got these?" he tried, giving Yamapi an optimistic smile.
It didn't work. Yamapi stormed across the kitchen, snatched the beans from Jin's hand and threw them out the open window. "I'm going out to get us something that won't kill us with a sugar overdose," he said, and vanished before Jin could protest.
-----
Jin knew his best friend well enough to be sure of forgiveness at some point - they generally only fell out over the most trivial of matters. Anything serious, they were usually in accord. A kitchen full of junk food wasn't serious, and when Yamapi turned up a couple of hours later with some suitable replacements and an apology for snapping, Jin had an apology of his own ready to go. They spent the evening playing video games and stopping every so often to stick their heads in the freezer, and all was well again.
Not so the next morning, when Jin woke up a lot earlier than planned because Yamapi jumped on him.
"Jin!" he hissed. "Wake up!"
Jin groaned and rubbed his eyes. "It's still dark, Pi. I'm not going anywhere till it's morning."
"It is morning! It's dark because there's a giant plant blocking the windows!"
"A giant...plant?"
He allowed himself to be dragged out of bed and marched across to the window, where he saw nothing whatsoever. "How do you know there's a giant plant?"
"It's on the news," Yamapi said. "A massive beanstalk sprouted in the park overnight. It must've been those beans I threw out the window. I guess it's a good thing we didn't eat them - we'd be dead right now."
"This week just gets better and better all the time," Jin muttered to himself. "It'll probably topple over and crush the building next."
Naturally they had to go outside and take a look for themselves. Hundreds of curious onlookers were doing the same, as were the police supposedly holding them back. You didn't have to be anywhere near the beanstalk to see it, of course. The giant, leafy stalk spiralled up into the clouds, beyond the eye's ability to follow - probably visible from space, Jin thought. He took exception to it blocking out the daylight in his apartment.
"What are you doing?" Yamapi wanted to know.
"I'm going to give it a piece of my mind."
No one tried to stop Jin as he approached the beanstalk, though several reporters began trailing after him, no doubt thinking it was all some sort of publicity stunt if top idols Akanishi Jin and Yamashita Tomohisa were involved. Jin was pretty sure he heard one of the cameramen mumbling about how it was the most awesome CM set he'd ever seen but he couldn't figure out what they were advertising.
When he reached the base, he jabbed the bright green stalk with an extremely indignant index finger and said, "You've got some nerve taking over the park like this. Now where am I supposed to take Pin for walks?"
Behind him, Yamapi groaned and clutched his forehead. "I knew I shouldn't have let you anywhere near the beer last night..."
The beanstalk didn't answer, of course, so Jin grabbed one of the giant leaves and shook it. "You hear me?"
"Of course it can't hear you," Yamapi said. "Now why don't you back off and we'll go to Starbucks where you won't be able to see it."
"I knew there was something weird about the old guy who gave me those beans." Jin grabbed another leaf, surprised by how tough the monstrous plant seemed. He might as well have been touching the Tokyo Tower. "He said to me, 'YOU, take these beans' - like that, with the 'YOU' in English - and when I didn't, he put them straight in my bag. He didn't even tell me what they were free samples of."
"Magic beans," Yamapi said knowingly. "Of course he didn't tell you anything. Nobody ever explains how to use magic stuff properly - you're supposed to figure it out for yourself. You should know that; you read just as much manga as I do."
"Nothing I've ever read involved a giant beanstalk taking over the park. What are we supposed to do with it? Use it to end world hunger?"
"You should do whatever your heart tells you to." Yamapi grinned. "That sounded good, didn't it? Listen to your best friend's sage advice."
Jin grinned back. "Some sage. You don't know what to do either."
But the crowd behind them did. "Climb it! Climb it! Climb it!"
"Climb that thing?" Jin tilted his head back, trying to see where it ended, and almost fell over in the process. "I can't even see the top!"
"Maybe it's one of those manly quest things, where you're supposed to prove yourself by embarking on a journey with an uncertain ending?"
"If I fall off, I'm pretty sure I know what the ending's going to be, Pi."
The reporters clustered around them. "Is it a promotion for your new single, Akanishi-kun?" one lady asked. "Is Yamashita-kun making a guest appearance?"
"Are you using a beanstalk in the PV to disassociate yourself from eggplants?" another one asked. "Are you aware that that the beanstalk is seen as a phallic symbol?"
The more they badgered him, blocking his escape route, the more Jin became convinced he'd have to climb the damned thing just to save himself from mortification. With any luck, by the time he came back down they'd all have scattered.
"I can't confirm anything right now," he said. "You'll have to wait and see along with everyone else." He gave his roommate a pleading look.
Yamapi rose to the occasion, using the crowd-control skills he'd honed in foreign airports. "EVeryone, please step back. Jin is about to challenge himself by climbing the beanstalk and we don't want him to hurt anyone by falling on them."
"What about me getting hurt?" Jin muttered. "Or doesn't that count?"
"You're an idol - of course it doesn't count," Yamapi whispered back. "We all have to make sacrifices in the name of entertainment!"
"I never thought I'd be adding body parts to the list!"
Despite the risk to life and limb, Jin let himself be persuaded that climbing the tall, green monstrosity was just the sort of positive publicity his career could use, having been dented somewhat by his fondness for clubbing, love of alcohol, and tendency to push the boundaries of decency and good taste in his lyrics. (But he insisted Lovejuice really wasn't about that, no matter what people thought.)
If nothing else it would help him work off some of that ice cream, and maybe it would be cooler if he got away from the city heat. He wouldn't have to climb very high to be out of sight of the crowd below. Jin counted himself as fairly athletic - if not always terribly coordinated - and up to the challenge.
He grasped a leaf just above his head and another a little below, then got one foot up on a leaf at knee height. It held his weight surprisingly well, enough that he felt confident leaving the ground altogether. The leaves weren't evenly spaced but appeared at sufficient intervals for climbing.
Jin didn't let himself think about the drop below - looking down would be a mistake he didn't intend to make. Easier to focus on the sky above, the brilliant blue of a summer morning, split by a tower of green wide enough that he could've carved himself a spacious new house, had he the tools to hand. But having started out with nothing save his keys, iPhone and wallet in his pockets, he was hardly equipped to do so. He regretted not provisioning himself properly before setting out. He hadn't had breakfast, hadn't even slipped on his sunglasses to leave the apartment because the beanstalk had been blocking out the sun.
After about half an hour he stopped to rest, straddling a particularly sturdy leaf and leaning back against the stalk to catch his breath. Surely no one on the ground could see him anymore? He must've disappeared from view ages ago. He could sun himself on the leaf for a while, climb back down and tell everyone he'd reached the top and my, didn't Tokyo look small from that height?
But a little voice inside him, sounding suspiciously like one of his senpai, said he couldn't even think about descending. Not until he really had reached the top. No one one the ground would know if he lied, but he'd know.
After five minutes pitting his conscience against the possibility that he might be climbing for hours to come and have to come down in the dark, Jin sighed and resumed his journey upwards.
He stopped keeping track of time after that. Even looking at the sky lost its fascination. Now he'd decided to keep climbing till he reached the top, the only thing he could see was the beanstalk in front of him, no further than the next leaf.
Which is why he almost fell off altogether when he reached up and found not another leaf, but flat stone. He stretched his hand as far over his head as it would go. More stone, cold and hard to the touch. He stepped up to the next leaf, boosting himself higher, and received a second shock.
Where the beanstalk ended a courtyard began, spanning further to each side than Jin's eyes could see. The only thing he could see, about twenty yards ahead, was a castle. A giant castle. A castle big enough that the beanstalk wouldn't have looked out of place in its garden. Grey stone towers stood at either end, looming over freakishly tall fruit trees bearing apples bigger than his car. Bordering the walls, beds of flowers formed impossible, unsolvable labyrinths. Jin hoped there wasn't a duckpond.
He hauled himself up to the courtyard, scooting away from the edge to stretch out sore muscles and wait till his breathing resumed its normal pattern. A giant castle! He couldn't wait to tell Yamapi. Of all the crazy things to find so high in the sky!
But...Pi would definitely ask him what was inside. Jin couldn't go back down without taking a peek. And maybe inside a giant castle there would be giant food, and he could sneak away with an oversized breadcrumb or something to ease the gnawing in his empty belly. He didn't dare try to get an apple from the trees. If one fell on him, he'd be flattened.
A growl from his stomach settled the matter. He had to find food - though after spending so long climbing, his need for water was more critical. He couldn't leave it much longer. The beanstalk couldn't shield him from the sun anymore and he felt parched enough already. The things an idol had to endure...
Jin forced himself to his feet and began to cross the courtyard, hoping to find a way to access the castle that didn't involve knocking on the oversized door - no one would ever hear him. As he approached the apple trees he was lucky enough to find a windfall sitting a little way from the trunk, slightly bruised from landing but otherwise intact. It must've been about six feet tall, he reckoned.
Ordinarily he wouldn't have tried to eat something that was actually a couple of inches taller than himself, but this was an emergency. He could solve both his hunger and thirst problems in one go...if only he could get into it. He circled it a few times, trying to gauge the best angle of approach, then remembered he had one of those miniature toolkits on his keys - a present from his father - complete with a knife. It didn't take him long to gouge out a chunk roughly the size of a normal apple and bite into it.
Oh, nothing had ever tasted so sweet, not even the time when one of his former dancers had invited him home for a taste of her own Lovejuice (and it wasn't that, it really wasn't) and he'd spent the rest of the weekend with mango on his lips. He sucked down the juice greedily and cut himself a second helping, devouring this one with less haste. There was more than enough to go around, after all. True, the giant apple probably had an equally vast owner somewhere inside that castle, but he wouldn't miss a few tiny mouthfuls from a piece of bruised fruit, would he?
Sated, Jin abandoned the apple and contemplated the castle ahead of him. Enormous wooden doors blocked his path, far too heavy for him to even think of opening. He gave them a wide berth; if anyone emerged from inside, he'd be trodden on.
There had to be another way in. He trudged through the trees, alerted by rustling overhead just in time to throw himself out of the path of another falling apple. He got clear of the trees as soon as he could and had to sit down for a moment, shaken by his narrow escape. Compared to this, the things he'd had to do on Hadaka no Shounen as a kid were nothing.
It wasn't often Jin wished for longer legs but at his height, the walk around the castle took forever. He tried to stick to the path after spotting a pair of eyes glinting in the grass - grass that grew to almost his shoulders, mind you, which wasn't exactly inviting to start with. If there were giant insects around he didn't want to encounter them; he had a hard enough time dealing with normal sized ones.
At the base of the rightmost tower his luck improved. He found a side-door latched open - the kitchen, judging by the aroma of curry drifting outside. If only the step were a little shorter! He had to drag a broken twig (a whole tree, from his tiny perspective) below the door in order to ascend. Huffing and puffing, Jin climbed over the doorframe and jumped down to the tiled floor below.
Inside, the curry scent almost overpowered him; the rest of the kitchen proved no less daunting. Cupboards seemed to go on for miles. Jin had to strain to see those above his head; his new point of view limited his vision greatly. If he wanted to see anything more than smooth pine doors and shiny blue handles, he had to get higher.
The solution presented itself in the form of a pink teatowel, which dangled low enough on its hook that Jin could just about reach it. He grabbed a fistful and tugged; it bore his weight easily so he worked his way slowly up the cloth, which was much cleaner than any of his own teatowels, until he reached the counter. After the ridiculous climb up the beanstalk, lesser heights ceased to bother him.
From the counter he had a much better view of the kitchen at large - clearly, the room wasn't just for show. All manner of enormous utensils hung from the pale blue walls, ranging from a frying pan Jin could've used for a swimming pool to wooden spoons the size of trees. Everything had its proper place, neat and clean.
All except the gigantic pot responsible for the curry scent. The cook was nowhere to be seen but he or she had to be coming back for it at some point and Jin didn't want to be out in plain sight when that happened. He'd show up easily on the counter top, with everything so pale and shiny.
Fortunately he had his choice of cover: the saltshaker on the left or the spice-rack on the right. He chose to stick close to the spice-rack as he edged his way across the counter, trying to get a better view of the rest of the room. It wouldn't do to fall in the sink - he'd be sure to slide down the plughole.
Across the kitchen, another door opened and Jin scurried to hide behind a jar of cinnamon before the cook could decide his curry would be improved by a little human flesh. Jin didn't know if giants really ate people or if that was just an old story, but if castles at the top of overgrown beanstalks could exist in reality, he was prepared to believe anything.
Anything, that is, except the identity of the mystery cook. Jin recognised him immediately, still had one of his LIPS posters folded up and tucked away under his bed, where Yamapi didn't know about it. There was no mistaking the giant whose home he'd infiltrated. Reddish-brown hair, curling a little at the edges. A slight lump on his nose from his days of playing baseball. A face that seemed childishly cute from one angle and jaw-droppingly beautiful from another. He'd been Jin's secret crush for years, right up until he went missing six months ago and no one had heard from him since.
But why was former idol Kamenashi Kazuya living in a castle in the sky?
And more importantly, how did he get to be over a hundred feet tall?
Kame, as Kamenashi was affectionately known to the world, didn't seem to be aware that anything was amiss. He stirred his curry, tasted a sample, and reached for the spice-rack. Jin flattened himself against the jar and hoped Kame didn't like cinnamon in his curry. The singer was known for being both eccentric and a keen cook; Jin had no doubt that the dish would be delicious. Even though he'd had the apple not so long ago, he wanted to taste some. Kame's fingers closed around the curry powder instead; Jin marvelled at the fact that the middle finger was probably as long as he was tall.
He watched for a while, smiling to himself about how he'd solved a mystery that had been plaguing the Japanese press for months. He'd been to Kame's final concert, pretended he hadn't been glazing over with bliss during the particularly provocative numbers so his friends wouldn't think he was there for any reason other than the music. Only Yamapi knew - but then, he'd been there when Jin had realised that maybe, he might kind of, just possibly, like men too. It wasn't the sort of thing you could keep from your best friend, especially when you lived together. Pi had been cool about it but Jin had no illusions his other friends would be the same, especially the ones who used to see Kame on TV, with his shaped eyebrows and painted nails, and say things they thought were funny. They'd wonder why Jin wasn't laughing too. Jin couldn't tell them it was because they made him feel boxed-in - small, somehow.
Well, he certainly couldn't feel much smaller at the moment, though for better reasons. From behind the cinnamon he could see Kame dish out a plate of curry and rice, then reach for a spoon. The cutlery drawer sounded like a building being demolished when it closed; Jin had to cover his ears. He should've expected that sounds would be bigger too.
By the time his ears stopped ringing Kame had departed with his food, leaving a ladle next to the pot. Jin scanned the room warily before darting out to try a sample. The ladle was too big for him, of course, but he ran a finger around the edge to swipe some curry. The strength of it knocked him down. Either Kame liked his curry on the volcanic side or Jin's tiny tastebuds couldn't handle such powerful flavours.
Still, the taste was nice, even if he did have to resort to stealing drops of condensation from a half-finished glass of juice at the other end of the counter to cool his burning tongue. From there he could see through the open door, to where Kame sat eating alone at a table, half-hidden behind a laptop. He must've been watching something, listening to something, maybe, because Jin could hear muffled Japanese. It took him a minute to figure out it was the commentary on a baseball game. Apparently things weren't going well for the Hanshin Tigers.
Having done the kitchen as well as he could, he shimmied down the teatowel again and set off on the long march across the floor, bound for the dining room. It looked lonely, with only one chair at the table. Jin clambered over the doorframe and found himself standing in velvet-soft red carpet up to his knees. Comfortable, to be sure, but oh so awkward to walk on. It was like wading through a swimming pool, only no good for floating in.
The dining room and lounge combined to make one large room, with an enormous couch down one end where Kame could lie in front of the fireplace on a cold night. There were no other seats. Landscapes and pictures of puppies decorated the walls but family photographs were conspicuously absent, as were any signs that Kame shared his home with others - or indeed ever received any visitors. But who could visit him all the way up there, anyway?
Certainly not Jin, who stood at the base of the table looking helplessly towards the ceiling. His climbing skills didn't extend to smooth, highly-polished - and therefore slippery - table legs. Everything looked polished, everything looked neat and tidy.
Everything except Kame himself, who merely looked...tired. Even watching his favourite sport didn't seem to animate him. He ate mechanically, one mouthful after another with no care or appreciation for taste. Jin wondered what he did with himself all day - if he had a job to go to (how did giants earn a living, anyway?) or if he even needed one. Did he have any friends, or had they all been left behind? Did he even have anyone to talk to?
The answer to all these questions proved to be 'no', as Jin discovered after watching Kame leave half his dinner, cover it up with clingfilm and leave both it and the remaining contents of the big pot in the fridge for another day before settling down on the couch. Following him around from room to room took forever and Jin felt exhausted by the time he collapsed against the side of the couch. He snuggled into the soft carpet, content just to remain still for a while and listen to the music playing overhead - Eric Clapton, not the cheeriest choice for an evening's listening.
He must've fallen asleep for a bit because the next thing he knew, Kame was on the move again, on his knees on the carpet. Jin saw the enormous gold ring to his left, realised why Kame was now on the floor and scrambled to get himself out of range of those searching fingers.
He almost made it. Kame touched the ring; Jin breathed a sigh of relief and thought he'd escaped...but then Kame bent down to see where it had fallen, and Jin couldn't get out of the way in time.
They stared at each other, two artists of the same generation with a hundred and twenty foot height difference between them. Kame's eyes widened, sparkling with curiosity, and he extended his hand palm-up to Jin. Frozen with the shock of being discovered and having those giant eyes fixed on him, Jin couldn't move, didn't dare to leave the safety of the couch. What if Kame thought he was some weird-looking rodent who had to be thrown out of the castle? What if those enormous fingers crushed the life right out of him?
Then Kame offered him a gentle smile, like Jin was some small, furry, woodland animal he was trying to entice to his hand. That wasn't the smile of an idol-crushing monster; Jin couldn't help but return it, letting Kame bespell him the way he'd done so many times before, on the screen or on the stage.
He took a couple of tentative steps forward, encouraged when Kame's hand didn't immediately snap shut the moment he set foot on it. It felt awkward to be walking on someone else's skin - he still had his boots on, after all - so he sat down in the centre of Kame's palm and waited to see what would happen next. Fingers brushed his back, not to capture but to contain, to protect; Kame's other hand joined the first and then Jin felt them leave the ground. He turned to clutch one of the fingers for safety, just about managing to link his hands around it.
"It's okay," Kame murmured (though it still sounded loud to Jin). "I'm not going to hurt you."
And Jin believed him without question, but that didn't make it any less nausea-inducing when Kame swept him up to the arm of the couch, no matter how slowly he did it. Throwing up on Kame's hand would be impolite, to say the least. When the movement stopped and Jin crawled out, he lay flat on the couch arm for a moment and hoped his stomach would stop turning itself inside out.
"Ah!" Kame squawked. "I should've moved slower; I'm sorry!"
Jin rolled over on his stomach and gave Kame his best unimpressed face. "Can you please stop shouting?"
Kame squinted at him. "Did you say something?"
"Can you hear me?" Jin shouted.
"Just about." Kame dropped to his knees beside the couch so that his face was level with Jin. "Why are-" He broke off suddenly when Jin clapped his hands over his ears, then tried again at a much lower volume. "Why are you in my home? How did you get up here?"
It was still louder than Jin liked, but you couldn't spend so long in nightclubs and concert venues without learning how to deal with noise - not to mention, how to make yourself heard. "Wouldn't you normally ask 'who are you?' first?"
Kame looked entranced, like hearing this tiny creature speak was some kind of miracle. "But I already know who you are. Akanishi Jin, right? But what are you doing here?"
"You know who I am?" Given their respective music genres, Jin found this surprising.
"If I don't, I went to some stranger's concert in January." Kame grinned sheepishly. "I guess I won't be going to any more, though. Not unless you start holding outdoor shows."
Some tiny parts of Jin - and all his parts were tiny, given the company he currently kept - curled in on themselves with secret glee that Kame not only knew who he was, but had been to one of his concerts. The rest of him was still feeling airsick.
"I wouldn't rule it out," he said. "But how did you get like this? And why are you living all the way up here?"
"I asked you first. And how do you know I haven't always been like this?" Kame teased.
"Because I've been to one of your concerts too." More than one, actually - a lot more - but Jin didn't want to come across like some kind of creepy stalker. He didn't think it was a good idea to let Kame know he could tell him apart from even the closest of doppelgangers simply because he knew the exact angles of his eyebrows. That was the sort of admission liable to get him dropkicked off the castle roof. "And I climbed up the beanstalk to get here."
"Beanstalk? I've got a bunch of apple trees, and I grow strawberries, and-"
"Not in your garden," Jin interrupted. "Under it. Kind of."
"Okay," Kame said slowly. "Let's imagine for a second that there is a beanstalk underneath my garden." His tone suggested he thought Jin was either five years old or off his rocker. "How do you think it might have got there?"
Jin sat up in an effort to look more adult and sensible and almost fell backwards off the couch arm. "My roommate sent me out for groceries..."
"So Tokyo's below us?" Kame asked when Jin had finished explaining the beanstalk's origins. "Not just a whole lot of clouds?"
"Straight down the beanstalk," Jin said. "You really didn't know there was land down there?"
"You think I was going to go look over the edge to see what was beneath it?"
"Good point."
"But this is great!" Kame said. "If the beanstalk's that big, I can climb down it and go home!" Then his face fell. "My apartment's too small for me now. Everything's too small for me now."
"Why?" Jin wanted to know. "Everyone thought you'd had some sort of breakdown and run off to another country after that last show at the Budokan. The one with all the gay samurai drama and stuff. The press figured you were trying to make a statement."
Kame frowned. "I keep posting anonymously on forums to try leak a rumour that I'm studying in LA so my family can stop worrying, but it doesn't seem to be working."
Having heard stories about some of Kame's technological failures (all right, he hadn't heard them, he'd read them in idol magazines but he wasn't admitting to anyone that he sometimes bought them for himself), Jin wasn't sure where the problem lay "You are pressing 'post', right?"
"I think so?" Kame didn't seem certain. "I'm not very good with computers, but my laptop's the only connection I've got with the rest of the world, now - via satellite - and if that hadn't been set up when I got here, I don't know what I'd do."
"If you've got a connection then why don't you just email your family to tell them you're - sort of - okay? It's been nearly half a year since you vanished - they've got to be out of their minds by now!"
"And telling them that I've gone from being the shortest male in the family to being a giant is going to make it better? I can't face them like this! They'd be horrified!"
"I'm not," Jin said, "and I'm not even your relative." But then, he'd been surrounded by giant things since that morning, so a giant person wasn't much of a stretch for his imagination. Randomly emailing one's family to announce a growth spurt of over a hundred feet would have rather more impact.
"No," Kame said stubbornly. "Until I find a way to break the spell, I'm not telling anyone where I am...or what I am."
"You're still you, just...bigger," Jin said, trying to make him feel better. "Wait, what spell? Did some weird old man give you those magic beans to eat and now you're like that beanstalk?"
Kame shook his head, laughing a little. "Mine was a weird young woman instead. She caught me backstage after the show. I thought she was there for an autograph but she yelled at me because she thought her boyfriend liked me better than her - I didn't even know her, let alone any guy crazy enough to date her - and apparently the "gay samurai drama stuff", as you put it, was the nail in the coffin of their relationship.
"She held up her hand and the next thing I knew, I was up here in the clouds. I didn't realise I'd grown till an aeroplane went past and I almost knocked it out of the sky when I tried to flag it down."
"I don't remember hearing any reports of passengers seeing giants in the sky," Jin said. "Or castles."
Kame shrugged. "Maybe it's all invisible unless you're actually here, I don't know. It's obviously a magic castle - the kitchen restocks itself every day, and there's a wishing well in the back garden that provides me with everything else. Everything except a way to give me my life back, anyway."
"You have a wishing well?" Jin couldn't believe his ears. "Cool! It really works?"
He didn't understand why but Kame blushed as he said, "I think so."
Magic castles. Wishing wells. Giant idols. Jin wished his phone had a better camera. Yamapi was never going to believe him about all this. He sat back against the couch arm, smiling to himself and trying not to feel too self-conscious under Kame's gaze. Warm brown eyes stared at him, friendly but oh, so large!
"I'm a bad host," Kame said when he eventually turned away. "I haven't even offered you anything to eat or drink."
"I'm not hungry but have you got any beer?" Jin asked.
"Sure, I've-"
It hit them more or less simultaneously that even the smallest can of beer in Kame's fridge would be tall enough for Jin to climb inside.
"I'll see what I can do," Kame said. "Maybe I've got a straw around here somewhere."
Jin gave him a dubious look. "I think even a straw might be too big, if it's one of yours. There's a limit to what I can fit in my mouth."
"I'll find something," Kame assured him. "Give me a few minutes and try not to move."
"I'm not going to fall off."
Despite this claim, Jin ended up sliding down the arm anyway and Kame returned to find him struggling to climb out from between the arm and a cushion.
"Your couch is made of quicksand," Jin grumbled as Kame fished him out and deposited him on the cushion. "It tried to eat me."
"I'm sure it wasn't personal." He sat beside the couch so he could hear Jin and popped open a can of beer twice Jin's height. "I found this in my sewing kit." He held out a china thimble. "I've never used it; I washed it out for you."
The thimble made a rather large cup. Kame half-filled it with beer and passed it down; Jin could just about hold it steady with both hands. He held it up in Kame's general direction and said, "Cheers!"
Kame didn't even attempt to clink their drinks together - the impact would bowl Jin over. "Cheers!"
Jin couldn't quite finish what amounted to a pitcher of beer; Kame had to take it away from him since he couldn't set it down without it falling over. Drinking from a curved container was by no means ideal.
"I'll have to go out and ask the well for some doll teacups or something," Kame said. "I can't give you a thimble of coffee with breakfast."
"Breakfast?" Jin said muzzily. He felt like he'd been drinking for hours.
"You know, that thing you have in the morning? You are staying here tonight, right?"
"I..." Jin looked at his watch, realised he'd been in the castle a lot longer than he thought, and resigned himself to spending the night. "I guess so. I can't climb back down the beanstalk like this." When he stood up the room spun so badly he had to sit down again, which set Kame laughing at him.
"I'd better find you somewhere safe to sleep," Kame said through his giggles; clearly, Jin wasn't the only one feeling tipsy. "Where you won't fall off anything!"
It was easier, this time, to settle down in Kame's cupped hands and enjoy the ride through the air. Jin lay back against strong, supportive fingers to watch the world whip past until they reached the bedroom, where Kame's well-documented love of baseball was evident. He found the Yomiuri Giants jersey somewhat ironic, though.
Kame shrugged. "I was wearing it when the crazy lady broke into my dressing room. Maybe she was inspired."
"Good thing you're not an Orix Buffaloes fan." Jin knelt up over Kame's fingers to peer around the room, taking in the posters and charts covering most of the walls. "Were these here when you arrived?"
"Wishing well," Kame said. "I tried to ask for my own baseball team once but it doesn't do anything if I'm not specific enough. That or it doesn't work with people." He paused, then added, "At least, I didn't think it did..."
Jin thought that sounded vaguely curious but the beer had too great a hold on his brain to let him take the thought any further. He sat in the middle of Kame's bed, well away from any edges, while Kame fussed over his sleeping arrangements.
"How about this?" Kame asked at length after trying and rejecting half a dozen options. "If I pull out the drawer of my nightstand, it's shallow enough that you can climb out, but deep enough that you can't possibly fall over the edge."
He emptied out the drawer, replacing the pair of magazines inside with a comfortable nest of cotton wool which he sheeted with a red silk handkerchief - fresh from the wash, he assured Jin. Covers were unnecessary in such warm weather; Jin thought he could manage very nicely without.
But before he settled down to enjoy what looked to be the most luxurious night of his life, he wanted a bath. A day of climbing and traversing giant castle grounds had left him feeling far too grubby to lie on silk.
Before Kame got close enough for Jin to relay this fact, he headed off the problem himself.
"I spent most of the day in the kitchen and you spent it climbing - I think we could probably both use a bath." He dropped down by the bed and set one hand on the mattress, which had the unfortunate effect of bouncing Jin into the air. Not very far, luckily. "Oops. Sorry about that. So how about it?"
"I'm not much of a swimmer when I'm drunk..."
Kame grinned. "You won't have to swim; I've got an idea."
Jin hoped it didn't involve sitting on Kame's knee in the bath, because as entertaining as that could've been under other circumstances, it would just be ridiculous now - not to mention, embarrassing. He let Kame scoop him up again and deposit him on the marble counter in the bathroom, which was just as neat as the rest of the rooms he'd seen so far and refreshingly cool, though not for long as Kame plugged the bath and turned on the taps, filling the air with steam and the scent of strawberry bubble bath.
"Try not to move this time," Kame advised. "I'll be back in a second."
Mindful of the couch incident, Jin didn't move more than a few fingers and that was only so he could check his phone. He had several emails from Pi asking where he was, but before he could answer Kame returned with an eggcup, which he held out for Jin to inspect.
"Don't laugh," Kame said when he smiled at the turtle pattern on the eggcup. "It wasn't my choice. The well has a sense of humour."
Though the eggcup was as tall as Jin, the stand made up half of it and the rest formed a usable - if unusually deep - bath. Kame dipped it in his own strawberry bathwater and set it down on the counter, placing a tub of moisturiser next to it as a crude step.
Jin beamed up at him. "Don't suppose you've got a tiny towel?"
The smallest flannel Kame could find would've served Jin better as a picnic blanket - to seat a family of two dozen - but he set it down next to the improvised bath anyway, folding it over several times so Jin could jump straight out of the bath and onto a soft cushion if he so desired.
He ducked behind the eggcup to slip out of his clothes, which gave Kame a much-needed hint to take his eyes off him. Jin was used to changing in crowded dressing rooms and showering with strangers, but more often than not he had the height advantage, which he certainly didn't have here, and Kame's focus unnerved him. He hadn't felt so much like an insect under a microscope since the first time he'd appeared on television.
Fortunately Kame caught on soon enough and turned away to disrobe, leaving Jin to climb into the eggcup, lowering himself slowly down into the hot, sweet-scented water. He settled in with a contented sigh, just in time to see Kame disappearing into his own bath.
Even in an industry full of skinny people Kame had always stood out as having sharper hipbones than the rest, but his forced hiatus seemed to have agreed with him, allowing him to fill the gaps between fine lines with graceful curves, making him no less beautiful but much more real than the half-starved waif he'd once been. Jin had flipped through photoshoots in fashion magazines and longed to take him out to dinner, if only to put some meat on his bones.
No need for that now, though. Kame looked strong and solid and healthy enough to take on the world by himself. Even the shadows under his eyes seemed to have lessened in the few hours Jin had spent with him, talking and drinking, sharing stupid stories about common acquaintances in the industry. Much happier than the subdued young man who'd left half his dinner in favour of moping on the couch.
Jin didn't know how much the alcohol filtered his perceptions of Kame or how much of the image he now saw was due to the significant height difference, but he got quite an eyeful when Kame sat down in the bath, prompting a brief surge of jealousy. No matter what the magazines said, size did matter.
They couldn't talk while they bathed - something Kame only realised when he asked a question and couldn't hear Jin's answer - but the silence was companionable rather than awkward, allowing them to relax in comfortable warmth. The hot water eased Jin's sore muscles and left him mellow to the point of falling asleep, which he would've done had Kame not suddenly loomed over him in a bathrobe, wet hair dripping all over the eggcup.
"You didn't drown!" Kame sounded relieved. "I couldn't tell."
Jin rubbed water from his eyes where Kame had dripped on him. "I'm not two years old," he pointed out. "I can swim, I can climb, and if I'd called for help you'd definitely have heard me."
"I know, I know. But you're so tiny, I can't help worrying."
"You'll get wrinkles."
"Yeah, but it's not like they'll destroy my career," Kame said. "Not anymore."
Jin gave him a sympathetic smile and made him hold the eggcup steady so he could throw himself over the edge. The flannel mountain welcomed him in, and he took a certain primitive pleasure in rolling around on the counter wrapped in his super-size towel. If nothing else, it distracted Kame. Jin didn't like it that his host had lost hope. Mystery hiatuses didn't necessarily kill careers - Jin should know, he'd taken one himself a while back - but Kame had a reputation as a workaholic and it had to be killing him that he no longer had a reason to get up in the mornings.
Now dry, Jin reluctantly redressed, wishing he had a change of clothes with him. "You think the well could handle clothing?"
"If you like your jeans that baggy, try some of mine," Kame teased. "Should we go ask it?"
This time Jin rode in the breast pocket of Kame's bathrobe, which made for a brisk but rough journey through the castle and out into the garden, where the well was illuminated by an outside light. Far above the city lights the night sky stretched clear and dark beyond the castle grounds, peaceful without flashing neon and the rumble of trains. It brought home to Jin just how alone Kame must have felt.
He could hear Kame's heart beating through the white towelling robe, steady as his footsteps down the path. The constant jolting was an irritation, but at least it was even, and Jin soon learned when to cling on, when it was safe to lean over, and when it was best simply to curl up inside the pocket and wait for them to stop moving.
When they eventually came to a halt, Kame patted the pocket gently. "You okay in there?"
"I miss my car," Jin mumbled, peering out over the fabric to see where they'd stopped. "At least that has seatbelts."
Kame held out his hand so Jin could climb on and take a proper look at the well. "Try not to fall in."
Jin gave him a disparaging look, wishing it wasn't too small to be effective. He didn't know what to make of the wishing well. Ones in shopping malls tended to be ornate; festive, even. Not so Kame's, which didn't have so much as copper trim.
Or a winch, come to that.
"How do you get things out of it?" Jin asked. "I'm not seeing a bucket."
"I make a wish and stuff appears," Kame said. "Eventually. Sometimes it takes a while. It took a couple of days before it would give me a change of clothes. All I had was an apron; you have no idea how glad I was the press couldn't see me cooking."
Jin fervently hoped the well would be more cooperative in his case. Improvising a bath? Manageable. Improvising a set of clothes in his size? Not so much.
Since Kame advised him to be as specific as possible, Jin outlined his requirements right down to how baggy he wanted his jeans to be. While he was at it he threw in a necklace he'd always wanted - nothing wrong with trying for a few freebies. Kame added in a new silver hoop earring for himself.
"You can always use it for a hula hoop?" he suggested to Jin, who was less than amused.
"It'd probably crush me," Jin said. "How do we know if the well's worked?"
"We go to sleep and hope something shows up in the morning - that's what usually happens."
Sleep sounded appealing to Jin after such a long day. He let Kame tuck him back in the pocket and curled up at the bottom rather than watch the world sway on the walk back. But they didn't return immediately. He fell into a light doze while Kame made some additional requests, which filtered through to Jin as muffled babbling. He barely noticed the bumpy ride back to the castle, though he came a little closer to consciousness when Kame's fingers closed gently around him, scooping him up to deposit him on a mattress of silk and cotton wool.
Jin sprawled out on his unconventional bed and fell asleep smiling to himself, knowing he'd dream of magic.
Part 2
By: notaverse
Pairing: Kame x Jin
Word count: 17,800
Rating: R
Genre/Warnings: Fairytale fluff
Notes: Fic for prologuesized, very loosely based on 'Jack and the Beanstalk'.
Summary: Jin didn't expect to find his biggest fan living at the top of a giant beanstalk.
Jin and the Beanstalk (1/2)
"She was no good for you anyway," Yamapi said, handing Jin the last clean spoon in their apartment so he could indulge in his usual post-break-up ice cream binge. "She didn't like my music."
"How does that make her no good for me?"
"She obviously didn't have any taste at all." Yamapi was nothing if not a supportive roommate to his best friend. "If she did, she wouldn't have ditched you for that American guy."
"I think he's won Oscars," Jin said glumly. "It was no contest."
He popped the lid on the only tub of ice cream to survive last Saturday's party, a thick, swirly chocolate concoction loaded with enough calories to make his doctor weep, and prepared to dig in. He frowned when his spoon scraped the bottom of the container.
"This just isn't my day."
It wasn't his week, really. On Monday he'd tripped over his baggy jeans while trying to show off for his new choreographer. Tuesday their airconditioning went on the fritz and they still couldn't get anyone to take a look at it. Wednesday Mika had dragged him to some stuffy industry party where everyone spoke English far fancier than anything he knew and he'd spent the entire night propping up the bar with some male model, who kept hitting on him in French. On Thursday his manager called him up and told him it wasn't a good idea to be seen out and about with gay French models, in case it damaged his reputation. (Not that Jin had much of a reputation left to damage.) Friday he finally got to see the costumes for his latest PV, and had to assume they'd hired someone who hated his guts to design them.
And now, on Saturday, he'd had the shortest breakfast date in history. He just counted himself lucky Mika hadn't dumped the remains of her coffee in his lap after she'd broken up with him.
"We're out of ice cream?" Yamapi sounded horrified.
Jin considered the state of the tub. "I think we can maybe get a couple of spoonfuls each out of it."
"You've got the last clean spoon." The dishes tended to suffer whenever Jin's life took a turn for the worse. "It's the middle of summer and we have no aircon. We need to restock."
"Whose turn is it to get groceries this week?"
"Yours." Yamapi grabbed the latest shopping list - a sorry-looking scrap of paper on which they'd taken it in turns to scribble down items as they thought of them - and set it on the table to add 'ice cream' to the list. "And try not to go overboard this time. Our freezer's not that big."
"I'll take it easy," Jin promised. He hoped getting out of the apartment for a bit and doing something mundane would make him feel better. He and Mika hadn't been dating long but he'd thought things were going pretty well. Apparently he wasn't qualified to judge. "Are you going out tonight?"
Yamapi shook his head. "I promised my sister I'd help her look at cars tomorrow. I won't be much help if I fall asleep during a test drive. You should come with. We'll have fun."
As far as Jin was concerned, his best friend's family and his own were more or less interchangeable which meant he really would be welcome on the excursion, but somehow he didn't think he'd be in the mood for joking around with his friends. "Maybe."
He shoved the list in his pocket, grabbed his wallet and keys, and made for the door. Somewhere out there was a tub of Cookies & Cream with his name on it.
-----
By the time he returned home with the groceries, Jin felt somewhat cheerier. Part of this was down to his having run into a friend at the supermarket, who'd told him - in the strictest confidence, of course - that the actor at whom his ex-girlfriend was planning to throw herself would never be interested in anyone who didn't have a Y chromosome. The rest of it might've been a sugar high from the block of fudge he'd snaffled on his way round. Free samples were one of the more pleasurable consequences of being an idol.
Yamapi emerged from the latest in a series of cold showers he'd been taking since their airconditioning started to go, just in time to give Jin a hand putting away the shopping. The first bag made him laugh. The second bag made him smile indulgently.
But when he hit the third bag and realised the ones Jin was putting away were no better, he couldn't keep quiet.
"Did you get anything that was on the list at all?"
"Sure I did." Jin held up a bottle of washing-up liquid. "Now we can have clean spoons again!"
"I meant the food, Jin. We're out of eggs, rice, bread...about a million other things. All I'm seeing in these bags is junk."
"I got eggs! Uh...somewhere in here." Jin rummaged frantically through the remaining bags, wondering how he'd gotten so sidetracked in the store. "And the rice is...um..."
Yamapi was a lot more diligent about eating healthily than Jin, whose appetites varied with his moods - and right now he wasn't in the mood for anything remotely good for him. He had enough American DVD boxsets and junk food to keep him going for at least a week, though he'd have to leave the apartment on Tuesday anyway to shoot the PV.
"You didn't get any real food at all, did you?"
"Uh..." In the last bag Jin came up with a handful of beans the weird old guy sitting outside the supermarket had given him - the only free sample he hadn't tried then and there. "I've got these?" he tried, giving Yamapi an optimistic smile.
It didn't work. Yamapi stormed across the kitchen, snatched the beans from Jin's hand and threw them out the open window. "I'm going out to get us something that won't kill us with a sugar overdose," he said, and vanished before Jin could protest.
-----
Jin knew his best friend well enough to be sure of forgiveness at some point - they generally only fell out over the most trivial of matters. Anything serious, they were usually in accord. A kitchen full of junk food wasn't serious, and when Yamapi turned up a couple of hours later with some suitable replacements and an apology for snapping, Jin had an apology of his own ready to go. They spent the evening playing video games and stopping every so often to stick their heads in the freezer, and all was well again.
Not so the next morning, when Jin woke up a lot earlier than planned because Yamapi jumped on him.
"Jin!" he hissed. "Wake up!"
Jin groaned and rubbed his eyes. "It's still dark, Pi. I'm not going anywhere till it's morning."
"It is morning! It's dark because there's a giant plant blocking the windows!"
"A giant...plant?"
He allowed himself to be dragged out of bed and marched across to the window, where he saw nothing whatsoever. "How do you know there's a giant plant?"
"It's on the news," Yamapi said. "A massive beanstalk sprouted in the park overnight. It must've been those beans I threw out the window. I guess it's a good thing we didn't eat them - we'd be dead right now."
"This week just gets better and better all the time," Jin muttered to himself. "It'll probably topple over and crush the building next."
Naturally they had to go outside and take a look for themselves. Hundreds of curious onlookers were doing the same, as were the police supposedly holding them back. You didn't have to be anywhere near the beanstalk to see it, of course. The giant, leafy stalk spiralled up into the clouds, beyond the eye's ability to follow - probably visible from space, Jin thought. He took exception to it blocking out the daylight in his apartment.
"What are you doing?" Yamapi wanted to know.
"I'm going to give it a piece of my mind."
No one tried to stop Jin as he approached the beanstalk, though several reporters began trailing after him, no doubt thinking it was all some sort of publicity stunt if top idols Akanishi Jin and Yamashita Tomohisa were involved. Jin was pretty sure he heard one of the cameramen mumbling about how it was the most awesome CM set he'd ever seen but he couldn't figure out what they were advertising.
When he reached the base, he jabbed the bright green stalk with an extremely indignant index finger and said, "You've got some nerve taking over the park like this. Now where am I supposed to take Pin for walks?"
Behind him, Yamapi groaned and clutched his forehead. "I knew I shouldn't have let you anywhere near the beer last night..."
The beanstalk didn't answer, of course, so Jin grabbed one of the giant leaves and shook it. "You hear me?"
"Of course it can't hear you," Yamapi said. "Now why don't you back off and we'll go to Starbucks where you won't be able to see it."
"I knew there was something weird about the old guy who gave me those beans." Jin grabbed another leaf, surprised by how tough the monstrous plant seemed. He might as well have been touching the Tokyo Tower. "He said to me, 'YOU, take these beans' - like that, with the 'YOU' in English - and when I didn't, he put them straight in my bag. He didn't even tell me what they were free samples of."
"Magic beans," Yamapi said knowingly. "Of course he didn't tell you anything. Nobody ever explains how to use magic stuff properly - you're supposed to figure it out for yourself. You should know that; you read just as much manga as I do."
"Nothing I've ever read involved a giant beanstalk taking over the park. What are we supposed to do with it? Use it to end world hunger?"
"You should do whatever your heart tells you to." Yamapi grinned. "That sounded good, didn't it? Listen to your best friend's sage advice."
Jin grinned back. "Some sage. You don't know what to do either."
But the crowd behind them did. "Climb it! Climb it! Climb it!"
"Climb that thing?" Jin tilted his head back, trying to see where it ended, and almost fell over in the process. "I can't even see the top!"
"Maybe it's one of those manly quest things, where you're supposed to prove yourself by embarking on a journey with an uncertain ending?"
"If I fall off, I'm pretty sure I know what the ending's going to be, Pi."
The reporters clustered around them. "Is it a promotion for your new single, Akanishi-kun?" one lady asked. "Is Yamashita-kun making a guest appearance?"
"Are you using a beanstalk in the PV to disassociate yourself from eggplants?" another one asked. "Are you aware that that the beanstalk is seen as a phallic symbol?"
The more they badgered him, blocking his escape route, the more Jin became convinced he'd have to climb the damned thing just to save himself from mortification. With any luck, by the time he came back down they'd all have scattered.
"I can't confirm anything right now," he said. "You'll have to wait and see along with everyone else." He gave his roommate a pleading look.
Yamapi rose to the occasion, using the crowd-control skills he'd honed in foreign airports. "EVeryone, please step back. Jin is about to challenge himself by climbing the beanstalk and we don't want him to hurt anyone by falling on them."
"What about me getting hurt?" Jin muttered. "Or doesn't that count?"
"You're an idol - of course it doesn't count," Yamapi whispered back. "We all have to make sacrifices in the name of entertainment!"
"I never thought I'd be adding body parts to the list!"
Despite the risk to life and limb, Jin let himself be persuaded that climbing the tall, green monstrosity was just the sort of positive publicity his career could use, having been dented somewhat by his fondness for clubbing, love of alcohol, and tendency to push the boundaries of decency and good taste in his lyrics. (But he insisted Lovejuice really wasn't about that, no matter what people thought.)
If nothing else it would help him work off some of that ice cream, and maybe it would be cooler if he got away from the city heat. He wouldn't have to climb very high to be out of sight of the crowd below. Jin counted himself as fairly athletic - if not always terribly coordinated - and up to the challenge.
He grasped a leaf just above his head and another a little below, then got one foot up on a leaf at knee height. It held his weight surprisingly well, enough that he felt confident leaving the ground altogether. The leaves weren't evenly spaced but appeared at sufficient intervals for climbing.
Jin didn't let himself think about the drop below - looking down would be a mistake he didn't intend to make. Easier to focus on the sky above, the brilliant blue of a summer morning, split by a tower of green wide enough that he could've carved himself a spacious new house, had he the tools to hand. But having started out with nothing save his keys, iPhone and wallet in his pockets, he was hardly equipped to do so. He regretted not provisioning himself properly before setting out. He hadn't had breakfast, hadn't even slipped on his sunglasses to leave the apartment because the beanstalk had been blocking out the sun.
After about half an hour he stopped to rest, straddling a particularly sturdy leaf and leaning back against the stalk to catch his breath. Surely no one on the ground could see him anymore? He must've disappeared from view ages ago. He could sun himself on the leaf for a while, climb back down and tell everyone he'd reached the top and my, didn't Tokyo look small from that height?
But a little voice inside him, sounding suspiciously like one of his senpai, said he couldn't even think about descending. Not until he really had reached the top. No one one the ground would know if he lied, but he'd know.
After five minutes pitting his conscience against the possibility that he might be climbing for hours to come and have to come down in the dark, Jin sighed and resumed his journey upwards.
He stopped keeping track of time after that. Even looking at the sky lost its fascination. Now he'd decided to keep climbing till he reached the top, the only thing he could see was the beanstalk in front of him, no further than the next leaf.
Which is why he almost fell off altogether when he reached up and found not another leaf, but flat stone. He stretched his hand as far over his head as it would go. More stone, cold and hard to the touch. He stepped up to the next leaf, boosting himself higher, and received a second shock.
Where the beanstalk ended a courtyard began, spanning further to each side than Jin's eyes could see. The only thing he could see, about twenty yards ahead, was a castle. A giant castle. A castle big enough that the beanstalk wouldn't have looked out of place in its garden. Grey stone towers stood at either end, looming over freakishly tall fruit trees bearing apples bigger than his car. Bordering the walls, beds of flowers formed impossible, unsolvable labyrinths. Jin hoped there wasn't a duckpond.
He hauled himself up to the courtyard, scooting away from the edge to stretch out sore muscles and wait till his breathing resumed its normal pattern. A giant castle! He couldn't wait to tell Yamapi. Of all the crazy things to find so high in the sky!
But...Pi would definitely ask him what was inside. Jin couldn't go back down without taking a peek. And maybe inside a giant castle there would be giant food, and he could sneak away with an oversized breadcrumb or something to ease the gnawing in his empty belly. He didn't dare try to get an apple from the trees. If one fell on him, he'd be flattened.
A growl from his stomach settled the matter. He had to find food - though after spending so long climbing, his need for water was more critical. He couldn't leave it much longer. The beanstalk couldn't shield him from the sun anymore and he felt parched enough already. The things an idol had to endure...
Jin forced himself to his feet and began to cross the courtyard, hoping to find a way to access the castle that didn't involve knocking on the oversized door - no one would ever hear him. As he approached the apple trees he was lucky enough to find a windfall sitting a little way from the trunk, slightly bruised from landing but otherwise intact. It must've been about six feet tall, he reckoned.
Ordinarily he wouldn't have tried to eat something that was actually a couple of inches taller than himself, but this was an emergency. He could solve both his hunger and thirst problems in one go...if only he could get into it. He circled it a few times, trying to gauge the best angle of approach, then remembered he had one of those miniature toolkits on his keys - a present from his father - complete with a knife. It didn't take him long to gouge out a chunk roughly the size of a normal apple and bite into it.
Oh, nothing had ever tasted so sweet, not even the time when one of his former dancers had invited him home for a taste of her own Lovejuice (and it wasn't that, it really wasn't) and he'd spent the rest of the weekend with mango on his lips. He sucked down the juice greedily and cut himself a second helping, devouring this one with less haste. There was more than enough to go around, after all. True, the giant apple probably had an equally vast owner somewhere inside that castle, but he wouldn't miss a few tiny mouthfuls from a piece of bruised fruit, would he?
Sated, Jin abandoned the apple and contemplated the castle ahead of him. Enormous wooden doors blocked his path, far too heavy for him to even think of opening. He gave them a wide berth; if anyone emerged from inside, he'd be trodden on.
There had to be another way in. He trudged through the trees, alerted by rustling overhead just in time to throw himself out of the path of another falling apple. He got clear of the trees as soon as he could and had to sit down for a moment, shaken by his narrow escape. Compared to this, the things he'd had to do on Hadaka no Shounen as a kid were nothing.
It wasn't often Jin wished for longer legs but at his height, the walk around the castle took forever. He tried to stick to the path after spotting a pair of eyes glinting in the grass - grass that grew to almost his shoulders, mind you, which wasn't exactly inviting to start with. If there were giant insects around he didn't want to encounter them; he had a hard enough time dealing with normal sized ones.
At the base of the rightmost tower his luck improved. He found a side-door latched open - the kitchen, judging by the aroma of curry drifting outside. If only the step were a little shorter! He had to drag a broken twig (a whole tree, from his tiny perspective) below the door in order to ascend. Huffing and puffing, Jin climbed over the doorframe and jumped down to the tiled floor below.
Inside, the curry scent almost overpowered him; the rest of the kitchen proved no less daunting. Cupboards seemed to go on for miles. Jin had to strain to see those above his head; his new point of view limited his vision greatly. If he wanted to see anything more than smooth pine doors and shiny blue handles, he had to get higher.
The solution presented itself in the form of a pink teatowel, which dangled low enough on its hook that Jin could just about reach it. He grabbed a fistful and tugged; it bore his weight easily so he worked his way slowly up the cloth, which was much cleaner than any of his own teatowels, until he reached the counter. After the ridiculous climb up the beanstalk, lesser heights ceased to bother him.
From the counter he had a much better view of the kitchen at large - clearly, the room wasn't just for show. All manner of enormous utensils hung from the pale blue walls, ranging from a frying pan Jin could've used for a swimming pool to wooden spoons the size of trees. Everything had its proper place, neat and clean.
All except the gigantic pot responsible for the curry scent. The cook was nowhere to be seen but he or she had to be coming back for it at some point and Jin didn't want to be out in plain sight when that happened. He'd show up easily on the counter top, with everything so pale and shiny.
Fortunately he had his choice of cover: the saltshaker on the left or the spice-rack on the right. He chose to stick close to the spice-rack as he edged his way across the counter, trying to get a better view of the rest of the room. It wouldn't do to fall in the sink - he'd be sure to slide down the plughole.
Across the kitchen, another door opened and Jin scurried to hide behind a jar of cinnamon before the cook could decide his curry would be improved by a little human flesh. Jin didn't know if giants really ate people or if that was just an old story, but if castles at the top of overgrown beanstalks could exist in reality, he was prepared to believe anything.
Anything, that is, except the identity of the mystery cook. Jin recognised him immediately, still had one of his LIPS posters folded up and tucked away under his bed, where Yamapi didn't know about it. There was no mistaking the giant whose home he'd infiltrated. Reddish-brown hair, curling a little at the edges. A slight lump on his nose from his days of playing baseball. A face that seemed childishly cute from one angle and jaw-droppingly beautiful from another. He'd been Jin's secret crush for years, right up until he went missing six months ago and no one had heard from him since.
But why was former idol Kamenashi Kazuya living in a castle in the sky?
And more importantly, how did he get to be over a hundred feet tall?
Kame, as Kamenashi was affectionately known to the world, didn't seem to be aware that anything was amiss. He stirred his curry, tasted a sample, and reached for the spice-rack. Jin flattened himself against the jar and hoped Kame didn't like cinnamon in his curry. The singer was known for being both eccentric and a keen cook; Jin had no doubt that the dish would be delicious. Even though he'd had the apple not so long ago, he wanted to taste some. Kame's fingers closed around the curry powder instead; Jin marvelled at the fact that the middle finger was probably as long as he was tall.
He watched for a while, smiling to himself about how he'd solved a mystery that had been plaguing the Japanese press for months. He'd been to Kame's final concert, pretended he hadn't been glazing over with bliss during the particularly provocative numbers so his friends wouldn't think he was there for any reason other than the music. Only Yamapi knew - but then, he'd been there when Jin had realised that maybe, he might kind of, just possibly, like men too. It wasn't the sort of thing you could keep from your best friend, especially when you lived together. Pi had been cool about it but Jin had no illusions his other friends would be the same, especially the ones who used to see Kame on TV, with his shaped eyebrows and painted nails, and say things they thought were funny. They'd wonder why Jin wasn't laughing too. Jin couldn't tell them it was because they made him feel boxed-in - small, somehow.
Well, he certainly couldn't feel much smaller at the moment, though for better reasons. From behind the cinnamon he could see Kame dish out a plate of curry and rice, then reach for a spoon. The cutlery drawer sounded like a building being demolished when it closed; Jin had to cover his ears. He should've expected that sounds would be bigger too.
By the time his ears stopped ringing Kame had departed with his food, leaving a ladle next to the pot. Jin scanned the room warily before darting out to try a sample. The ladle was too big for him, of course, but he ran a finger around the edge to swipe some curry. The strength of it knocked him down. Either Kame liked his curry on the volcanic side or Jin's tiny tastebuds couldn't handle such powerful flavours.
Still, the taste was nice, even if he did have to resort to stealing drops of condensation from a half-finished glass of juice at the other end of the counter to cool his burning tongue. From there he could see through the open door, to where Kame sat eating alone at a table, half-hidden behind a laptop. He must've been watching something, listening to something, maybe, because Jin could hear muffled Japanese. It took him a minute to figure out it was the commentary on a baseball game. Apparently things weren't going well for the Hanshin Tigers.
Having done the kitchen as well as he could, he shimmied down the teatowel again and set off on the long march across the floor, bound for the dining room. It looked lonely, with only one chair at the table. Jin clambered over the doorframe and found himself standing in velvet-soft red carpet up to his knees. Comfortable, to be sure, but oh so awkward to walk on. It was like wading through a swimming pool, only no good for floating in.
The dining room and lounge combined to make one large room, with an enormous couch down one end where Kame could lie in front of the fireplace on a cold night. There were no other seats. Landscapes and pictures of puppies decorated the walls but family photographs were conspicuously absent, as were any signs that Kame shared his home with others - or indeed ever received any visitors. But who could visit him all the way up there, anyway?
Certainly not Jin, who stood at the base of the table looking helplessly towards the ceiling. His climbing skills didn't extend to smooth, highly-polished - and therefore slippery - table legs. Everything looked polished, everything looked neat and tidy.
Everything except Kame himself, who merely looked...tired. Even watching his favourite sport didn't seem to animate him. He ate mechanically, one mouthful after another with no care or appreciation for taste. Jin wondered what he did with himself all day - if he had a job to go to (how did giants earn a living, anyway?) or if he even needed one. Did he have any friends, or had they all been left behind? Did he even have anyone to talk to?
The answer to all these questions proved to be 'no', as Jin discovered after watching Kame leave half his dinner, cover it up with clingfilm and leave both it and the remaining contents of the big pot in the fridge for another day before settling down on the couch. Following him around from room to room took forever and Jin felt exhausted by the time he collapsed against the side of the couch. He snuggled into the soft carpet, content just to remain still for a while and listen to the music playing overhead - Eric Clapton, not the cheeriest choice for an evening's listening.
He must've fallen asleep for a bit because the next thing he knew, Kame was on the move again, on his knees on the carpet. Jin saw the enormous gold ring to his left, realised why Kame was now on the floor and scrambled to get himself out of range of those searching fingers.
He almost made it. Kame touched the ring; Jin breathed a sigh of relief and thought he'd escaped...but then Kame bent down to see where it had fallen, and Jin couldn't get out of the way in time.
They stared at each other, two artists of the same generation with a hundred and twenty foot height difference between them. Kame's eyes widened, sparkling with curiosity, and he extended his hand palm-up to Jin. Frozen with the shock of being discovered and having those giant eyes fixed on him, Jin couldn't move, didn't dare to leave the safety of the couch. What if Kame thought he was some weird-looking rodent who had to be thrown out of the castle? What if those enormous fingers crushed the life right out of him?
Then Kame offered him a gentle smile, like Jin was some small, furry, woodland animal he was trying to entice to his hand. That wasn't the smile of an idol-crushing monster; Jin couldn't help but return it, letting Kame bespell him the way he'd done so many times before, on the screen or on the stage.
He took a couple of tentative steps forward, encouraged when Kame's hand didn't immediately snap shut the moment he set foot on it. It felt awkward to be walking on someone else's skin - he still had his boots on, after all - so he sat down in the centre of Kame's palm and waited to see what would happen next. Fingers brushed his back, not to capture but to contain, to protect; Kame's other hand joined the first and then Jin felt them leave the ground. He turned to clutch one of the fingers for safety, just about managing to link his hands around it.
"It's okay," Kame murmured (though it still sounded loud to Jin). "I'm not going to hurt you."
And Jin believed him without question, but that didn't make it any less nausea-inducing when Kame swept him up to the arm of the couch, no matter how slowly he did it. Throwing up on Kame's hand would be impolite, to say the least. When the movement stopped and Jin crawled out, he lay flat on the couch arm for a moment and hoped his stomach would stop turning itself inside out.
"Ah!" Kame squawked. "I should've moved slower; I'm sorry!"
Jin rolled over on his stomach and gave Kame his best unimpressed face. "Can you please stop shouting?"
Kame squinted at him. "Did you say something?"
"Can you hear me?" Jin shouted.
"Just about." Kame dropped to his knees beside the couch so that his face was level with Jin. "Why are-" He broke off suddenly when Jin clapped his hands over his ears, then tried again at a much lower volume. "Why are you in my home? How did you get up here?"
It was still louder than Jin liked, but you couldn't spend so long in nightclubs and concert venues without learning how to deal with noise - not to mention, how to make yourself heard. "Wouldn't you normally ask 'who are you?' first?"
Kame looked entranced, like hearing this tiny creature speak was some kind of miracle. "But I already know who you are. Akanishi Jin, right? But what are you doing here?"
"You know who I am?" Given their respective music genres, Jin found this surprising.
"If I don't, I went to some stranger's concert in January." Kame grinned sheepishly. "I guess I won't be going to any more, though. Not unless you start holding outdoor shows."
Some tiny parts of Jin - and all his parts were tiny, given the company he currently kept - curled in on themselves with secret glee that Kame not only knew who he was, but had been to one of his concerts. The rest of him was still feeling airsick.
"I wouldn't rule it out," he said. "But how did you get like this? And why are you living all the way up here?"
"I asked you first. And how do you know I haven't always been like this?" Kame teased.
"Because I've been to one of your concerts too." More than one, actually - a lot more - but Jin didn't want to come across like some kind of creepy stalker. He didn't think it was a good idea to let Kame know he could tell him apart from even the closest of doppelgangers simply because he knew the exact angles of his eyebrows. That was the sort of admission liable to get him dropkicked off the castle roof. "And I climbed up the beanstalk to get here."
"Beanstalk? I've got a bunch of apple trees, and I grow strawberries, and-"
"Not in your garden," Jin interrupted. "Under it. Kind of."
"Okay," Kame said slowly. "Let's imagine for a second that there is a beanstalk underneath my garden." His tone suggested he thought Jin was either five years old or off his rocker. "How do you think it might have got there?"
Jin sat up in an effort to look more adult and sensible and almost fell backwards off the couch arm. "My roommate sent me out for groceries..."
"So Tokyo's below us?" Kame asked when Jin had finished explaining the beanstalk's origins. "Not just a whole lot of clouds?"
"Straight down the beanstalk," Jin said. "You really didn't know there was land down there?"
"You think I was going to go look over the edge to see what was beneath it?"
"Good point."
"But this is great!" Kame said. "If the beanstalk's that big, I can climb down it and go home!" Then his face fell. "My apartment's too small for me now. Everything's too small for me now."
"Why?" Jin wanted to know. "Everyone thought you'd had some sort of breakdown and run off to another country after that last show at the Budokan. The one with all the gay samurai drama and stuff. The press figured you were trying to make a statement."
Kame frowned. "I keep posting anonymously on forums to try leak a rumour that I'm studying in LA so my family can stop worrying, but it doesn't seem to be working."
Having heard stories about some of Kame's technological failures (all right, he hadn't heard them, he'd read them in idol magazines but he wasn't admitting to anyone that he sometimes bought them for himself), Jin wasn't sure where the problem lay "You are pressing 'post', right?"
"I think so?" Kame didn't seem certain. "I'm not very good with computers, but my laptop's the only connection I've got with the rest of the world, now - via satellite - and if that hadn't been set up when I got here, I don't know what I'd do."
"If you've got a connection then why don't you just email your family to tell them you're - sort of - okay? It's been nearly half a year since you vanished - they've got to be out of their minds by now!"
"And telling them that I've gone from being the shortest male in the family to being a giant is going to make it better? I can't face them like this! They'd be horrified!"
"I'm not," Jin said, "and I'm not even your relative." But then, he'd been surrounded by giant things since that morning, so a giant person wasn't much of a stretch for his imagination. Randomly emailing one's family to announce a growth spurt of over a hundred feet would have rather more impact.
"No," Kame said stubbornly. "Until I find a way to break the spell, I'm not telling anyone where I am...or what I am."
"You're still you, just...bigger," Jin said, trying to make him feel better. "Wait, what spell? Did some weird old man give you those magic beans to eat and now you're like that beanstalk?"
Kame shook his head, laughing a little. "Mine was a weird young woman instead. She caught me backstage after the show. I thought she was there for an autograph but she yelled at me because she thought her boyfriend liked me better than her - I didn't even know her, let alone any guy crazy enough to date her - and apparently the "gay samurai drama stuff", as you put it, was the nail in the coffin of their relationship.
"She held up her hand and the next thing I knew, I was up here in the clouds. I didn't realise I'd grown till an aeroplane went past and I almost knocked it out of the sky when I tried to flag it down."
"I don't remember hearing any reports of passengers seeing giants in the sky," Jin said. "Or castles."
Kame shrugged. "Maybe it's all invisible unless you're actually here, I don't know. It's obviously a magic castle - the kitchen restocks itself every day, and there's a wishing well in the back garden that provides me with everything else. Everything except a way to give me my life back, anyway."
"You have a wishing well?" Jin couldn't believe his ears. "Cool! It really works?"
He didn't understand why but Kame blushed as he said, "I think so."
Magic castles. Wishing wells. Giant idols. Jin wished his phone had a better camera. Yamapi was never going to believe him about all this. He sat back against the couch arm, smiling to himself and trying not to feel too self-conscious under Kame's gaze. Warm brown eyes stared at him, friendly but oh, so large!
"I'm a bad host," Kame said when he eventually turned away. "I haven't even offered you anything to eat or drink."
"I'm not hungry but have you got any beer?" Jin asked.
"Sure, I've-"
It hit them more or less simultaneously that even the smallest can of beer in Kame's fridge would be tall enough for Jin to climb inside.
"I'll see what I can do," Kame said. "Maybe I've got a straw around here somewhere."
Jin gave him a dubious look. "I think even a straw might be too big, if it's one of yours. There's a limit to what I can fit in my mouth."
"I'll find something," Kame assured him. "Give me a few minutes and try not to move."
"I'm not going to fall off."
Despite this claim, Jin ended up sliding down the arm anyway and Kame returned to find him struggling to climb out from between the arm and a cushion.
"Your couch is made of quicksand," Jin grumbled as Kame fished him out and deposited him on the cushion. "It tried to eat me."
"I'm sure it wasn't personal." He sat beside the couch so he could hear Jin and popped open a can of beer twice Jin's height. "I found this in my sewing kit." He held out a china thimble. "I've never used it; I washed it out for you."
The thimble made a rather large cup. Kame half-filled it with beer and passed it down; Jin could just about hold it steady with both hands. He held it up in Kame's general direction and said, "Cheers!"
Kame didn't even attempt to clink their drinks together - the impact would bowl Jin over. "Cheers!"
Jin couldn't quite finish what amounted to a pitcher of beer; Kame had to take it away from him since he couldn't set it down without it falling over. Drinking from a curved container was by no means ideal.
"I'll have to go out and ask the well for some doll teacups or something," Kame said. "I can't give you a thimble of coffee with breakfast."
"Breakfast?" Jin said muzzily. He felt like he'd been drinking for hours.
"You know, that thing you have in the morning? You are staying here tonight, right?"
"I..." Jin looked at his watch, realised he'd been in the castle a lot longer than he thought, and resigned himself to spending the night. "I guess so. I can't climb back down the beanstalk like this." When he stood up the room spun so badly he had to sit down again, which set Kame laughing at him.
"I'd better find you somewhere safe to sleep," Kame said through his giggles; clearly, Jin wasn't the only one feeling tipsy. "Where you won't fall off anything!"
It was easier, this time, to settle down in Kame's cupped hands and enjoy the ride through the air. Jin lay back against strong, supportive fingers to watch the world whip past until they reached the bedroom, where Kame's well-documented love of baseball was evident. He found the Yomiuri Giants jersey somewhat ironic, though.
Kame shrugged. "I was wearing it when the crazy lady broke into my dressing room. Maybe she was inspired."
"Good thing you're not an Orix Buffaloes fan." Jin knelt up over Kame's fingers to peer around the room, taking in the posters and charts covering most of the walls. "Were these here when you arrived?"
"Wishing well," Kame said. "I tried to ask for my own baseball team once but it doesn't do anything if I'm not specific enough. That or it doesn't work with people." He paused, then added, "At least, I didn't think it did..."
Jin thought that sounded vaguely curious but the beer had too great a hold on his brain to let him take the thought any further. He sat in the middle of Kame's bed, well away from any edges, while Kame fussed over his sleeping arrangements.
"How about this?" Kame asked at length after trying and rejecting half a dozen options. "If I pull out the drawer of my nightstand, it's shallow enough that you can climb out, but deep enough that you can't possibly fall over the edge."
He emptied out the drawer, replacing the pair of magazines inside with a comfortable nest of cotton wool which he sheeted with a red silk handkerchief - fresh from the wash, he assured Jin. Covers were unnecessary in such warm weather; Jin thought he could manage very nicely without.
But before he settled down to enjoy what looked to be the most luxurious night of his life, he wanted a bath. A day of climbing and traversing giant castle grounds had left him feeling far too grubby to lie on silk.
Before Kame got close enough for Jin to relay this fact, he headed off the problem himself.
"I spent most of the day in the kitchen and you spent it climbing - I think we could probably both use a bath." He dropped down by the bed and set one hand on the mattress, which had the unfortunate effect of bouncing Jin into the air. Not very far, luckily. "Oops. Sorry about that. So how about it?"
"I'm not much of a swimmer when I'm drunk..."
Kame grinned. "You won't have to swim; I've got an idea."
Jin hoped it didn't involve sitting on Kame's knee in the bath, because as entertaining as that could've been under other circumstances, it would just be ridiculous now - not to mention, embarrassing. He let Kame scoop him up again and deposit him on the marble counter in the bathroom, which was just as neat as the rest of the rooms he'd seen so far and refreshingly cool, though not for long as Kame plugged the bath and turned on the taps, filling the air with steam and the scent of strawberry bubble bath.
"Try not to move this time," Kame advised. "I'll be back in a second."
Mindful of the couch incident, Jin didn't move more than a few fingers and that was only so he could check his phone. He had several emails from Pi asking where he was, but before he could answer Kame returned with an eggcup, which he held out for Jin to inspect.
"Don't laugh," Kame said when he smiled at the turtle pattern on the eggcup. "It wasn't my choice. The well has a sense of humour."
Though the eggcup was as tall as Jin, the stand made up half of it and the rest formed a usable - if unusually deep - bath. Kame dipped it in his own strawberry bathwater and set it down on the counter, placing a tub of moisturiser next to it as a crude step.
Jin beamed up at him. "Don't suppose you've got a tiny towel?"
The smallest flannel Kame could find would've served Jin better as a picnic blanket - to seat a family of two dozen - but he set it down next to the improvised bath anyway, folding it over several times so Jin could jump straight out of the bath and onto a soft cushion if he so desired.
He ducked behind the eggcup to slip out of his clothes, which gave Kame a much-needed hint to take his eyes off him. Jin was used to changing in crowded dressing rooms and showering with strangers, but more often than not he had the height advantage, which he certainly didn't have here, and Kame's focus unnerved him. He hadn't felt so much like an insect under a microscope since the first time he'd appeared on television.
Fortunately Kame caught on soon enough and turned away to disrobe, leaving Jin to climb into the eggcup, lowering himself slowly down into the hot, sweet-scented water. He settled in with a contented sigh, just in time to see Kame disappearing into his own bath.
Even in an industry full of skinny people Kame had always stood out as having sharper hipbones than the rest, but his forced hiatus seemed to have agreed with him, allowing him to fill the gaps between fine lines with graceful curves, making him no less beautiful but much more real than the half-starved waif he'd once been. Jin had flipped through photoshoots in fashion magazines and longed to take him out to dinner, if only to put some meat on his bones.
No need for that now, though. Kame looked strong and solid and healthy enough to take on the world by himself. Even the shadows under his eyes seemed to have lessened in the few hours Jin had spent with him, talking and drinking, sharing stupid stories about common acquaintances in the industry. Much happier than the subdued young man who'd left half his dinner in favour of moping on the couch.
Jin didn't know how much the alcohol filtered his perceptions of Kame or how much of the image he now saw was due to the significant height difference, but he got quite an eyeful when Kame sat down in the bath, prompting a brief surge of jealousy. No matter what the magazines said, size did matter.
They couldn't talk while they bathed - something Kame only realised when he asked a question and couldn't hear Jin's answer - but the silence was companionable rather than awkward, allowing them to relax in comfortable warmth. The hot water eased Jin's sore muscles and left him mellow to the point of falling asleep, which he would've done had Kame not suddenly loomed over him in a bathrobe, wet hair dripping all over the eggcup.
"You didn't drown!" Kame sounded relieved. "I couldn't tell."
Jin rubbed water from his eyes where Kame had dripped on him. "I'm not two years old," he pointed out. "I can swim, I can climb, and if I'd called for help you'd definitely have heard me."
"I know, I know. But you're so tiny, I can't help worrying."
"You'll get wrinkles."
"Yeah, but it's not like they'll destroy my career," Kame said. "Not anymore."
Jin gave him a sympathetic smile and made him hold the eggcup steady so he could throw himself over the edge. The flannel mountain welcomed him in, and he took a certain primitive pleasure in rolling around on the counter wrapped in his super-size towel. If nothing else, it distracted Kame. Jin didn't like it that his host had lost hope. Mystery hiatuses didn't necessarily kill careers - Jin should know, he'd taken one himself a while back - but Kame had a reputation as a workaholic and it had to be killing him that he no longer had a reason to get up in the mornings.
Now dry, Jin reluctantly redressed, wishing he had a change of clothes with him. "You think the well could handle clothing?"
"If you like your jeans that baggy, try some of mine," Kame teased. "Should we go ask it?"
This time Jin rode in the breast pocket of Kame's bathrobe, which made for a brisk but rough journey through the castle and out into the garden, where the well was illuminated by an outside light. Far above the city lights the night sky stretched clear and dark beyond the castle grounds, peaceful without flashing neon and the rumble of trains. It brought home to Jin just how alone Kame must have felt.
He could hear Kame's heart beating through the white towelling robe, steady as his footsteps down the path. The constant jolting was an irritation, but at least it was even, and Jin soon learned when to cling on, when it was safe to lean over, and when it was best simply to curl up inside the pocket and wait for them to stop moving.
When they eventually came to a halt, Kame patted the pocket gently. "You okay in there?"
"I miss my car," Jin mumbled, peering out over the fabric to see where they'd stopped. "At least that has seatbelts."
Kame held out his hand so Jin could climb on and take a proper look at the well. "Try not to fall in."
Jin gave him a disparaging look, wishing it wasn't too small to be effective. He didn't know what to make of the wishing well. Ones in shopping malls tended to be ornate; festive, even. Not so Kame's, which didn't have so much as copper trim.
Or a winch, come to that.
"How do you get things out of it?" Jin asked. "I'm not seeing a bucket."
"I make a wish and stuff appears," Kame said. "Eventually. Sometimes it takes a while. It took a couple of days before it would give me a change of clothes. All I had was an apron; you have no idea how glad I was the press couldn't see me cooking."
Jin fervently hoped the well would be more cooperative in his case. Improvising a bath? Manageable. Improvising a set of clothes in his size? Not so much.
Since Kame advised him to be as specific as possible, Jin outlined his requirements right down to how baggy he wanted his jeans to be. While he was at it he threw in a necklace he'd always wanted - nothing wrong with trying for a few freebies. Kame added in a new silver hoop earring for himself.
"You can always use it for a hula hoop?" he suggested to Jin, who was less than amused.
"It'd probably crush me," Jin said. "How do we know if the well's worked?"
"We go to sleep and hope something shows up in the morning - that's what usually happens."
Sleep sounded appealing to Jin after such a long day. He let Kame tuck him back in the pocket and curled up at the bottom rather than watch the world sway on the walk back. But they didn't return immediately. He fell into a light doze while Kame made some additional requests, which filtered through to Jin as muffled babbling. He barely noticed the bumpy ride back to the castle, though he came a little closer to consciousness when Kame's fingers closed gently around him, scooping him up to deposit him on a mattress of silk and cotton wool.
Jin sprawled out on his unconventional bed and fell asleep smiling to himself, knowing he'd dream of magic.
Part 2