fic for prologuesized (2/2)
Part 1
Jin and the Beanstalk (2/2)
Whether Jin dreamt of magic or not, he couldn't remember. He woke up to find a pair of giant eyes peering down at him and since they didn't belong to either his roommate or their dogs, he screamed.
The giant eyes blinked at him. "Good morning to you too," their owner said.
Jin uncurled himself from the ball of cotton wool he'd somehow clasped to his chest during the night and took a calming breath. Kame. Of course.
"I'm not really a morning person," he said, yawning for emphasis. "More of a night owl."
Kame grinned. "So I hear. I hope your head's all right after last night because there's no way I can cut down painkillers small enough for you to swallow."
"My head's fine, I'm just...disoriented. I'm not used to waking up in someone's nightstand drawer." It wasn't the first time he'd woken up in someone else's home, but he'd never been in a situation quite like this before. He rubbed sleep from his eyes and sat up; Kame dropped to the floor to put them on the level. "Did the well work?"
"Shall we go find out?" Kame extended a hand - but sideways, as if inviting Jin to hold hands with him. He realised his mistake when Jin didn't move and turned it palm up for travel. "Sorry. Even though I can see you're that small, it sometimes takes a while to sink in."
"It's not that I'm small," Jin said, indignant. "You're the one who had the growth spurt from hell."
Pain flashed through Kame's eyes, quick enough that Jin might've missed it if he hadn't been watching, and he felt instantly contrite. It wasn't Kame's fault he was stuck like this. Jin had been on the receiving end of crazy fan activity himself, ranging from having his phone bill stolen to people posting comestibles through his mailbox, and there was just no stopping someone if they decided to make your life a misery. Admittedly Kame could now sit on any troublemakers and squash them flat, but still...
"I guess I could stand to gain a few inches," Jin said, trying to make amends. "Some of my American friends dwarf me."
"I've got plenty to spare," Kame said. "Help yourself."
Jin couldn't, of course, but he held Kame's pinky tight - for safety - as they headed for the dining room, and Kame seemed to appreciate that. When they reached the table it looked like Christmas had come half a year early. Boxes of all shapes and sizes buried Kame's red plaid tablecloth.
"You think the well finally gave you your baseball team?" Jin said nervously, hoping the boxes didn't contain body parts. "I didn't wish for that much stuff."
"I might've thrown in a few extras while you were napping in my pocket," Kame said. "I've never been able to master impulse control when it comes to shopping."
Fortunately for Jin, who couldn't handle haunted houses and would've run away screaming from dismembered baseball players, the boxes dripped not with blood but with small blue chunks of polystyrene.
"No wonder they're so big," Kame said in disgust. "It's all this padding!"
Jin sat on one of the chunks and watched as Kame tore into the boxes, not being in a position to help, though he did occasionally have to chase after a stray piece and throw it in the bag Kame had hung from the table. At least it didn't weigh much.
He found the box contents fascinating. The first one Kame opened held clothing - albeit not quite what Jin had wished for.
"You can see my legs in these jeans," he mourned, holding up a pair that, far from being baggy, would cling to him at every opportunity.
"Look at it this way," Kame said. "At least you won't trip over them and fall off the table?
"Besides, it wouldn't kill you to wear clothes that actually fit for a change."
"I like to wear comfortable things. I had enough of skintight stuff when I was starting out." Jin didn't like the look of some of the T-shirts in the clothing pile, either. One of them would definitely show off his ribs. People kept telling him he had a nice figure but he wanted them to pay more attention to his music than his looks. Unfortunately, one couldn't maintain a career in the entertainment industry without spending considerable time under the spotlight.
"Been there," Kame sympathised. "When I think about some of the things I've had to wear over the years..." He shuddered and set to work on the next box while Jin took the chance to slip under an overturned box and change into fresh clothing.
When he emerged in jeans, sandals and a black V-neck T-shirt, Kame stopped to give him a nod of approval.
"Was the underwear okay?"
"I wasn't expecting pink," Jin admitted, "but I can live with it."
"Just be grateful it didn't give you panties," Kame said. "It tried that with me once. I had to threaten to dump a bottle of olive oil in it to make it cooperate."
Jin murmured a few words of thanks under his breath and wandered off to investigate the next box, which Kame had left open. This one looked like a start-up kit for newlyweds, full of cutlery and crockery, all of it in Jin's size.
"I'll put the kettle on," Kame said, clearly charmed by the miniature utensils. "I might need an eyedropper to fill your coffee cup, though."
It didn't matter how the coffee got in the cup, so long as it wasn't decaf - though Jin did wonder, after Kame handed him the tiny cup, if perhaps drinking anything stronger than water was a good idea. He didn't want to be bouncing off the walls.
When it turned out to be weaker than he'd expected Kame explained that he'd watered it down, just to be on the safe side. "I'm sure your fans would get a kick out of seeing you hyper but I don't think it's a good idea."
Jin feigned a pout. "But aren't you my fan too?"
"Oh yeah." Kame laughed over the rim of his own coffee cup. "I'm your biggest fan."
There was no disputing that fact, but Jin had always found it weird meeting fellow celebrities for the first time. There were people he'd known for years, like Yamapi, who weren't "famous" in his eyes because they were his friends and therefore just as human as he was. Then there were people he considered to be his juniors in the entertainment world, who by definition couldn't be classed as intimidating. There were glamorous foreign singers and actors he'd met through work, some of whom had been kind and patient with his halting English conversation while others had barely deigned to notice him.
And then there was Kamenashi Kazuya, who'd joined the entertainment world at the same time as Jin and grown up in front of the cameras, morphing from a spiky-haired, beetle-browed brat to a silk-smooth shining star. Kame had many faces, from the baseball boy who took pride in his wounds, to the fashionable diva who owned enough designer gear to feed a third-world country; from the serious, hard-working actor to the gentle, considerate friend beloved by everyone who knew him; from the guitar-strumming balladeer to the eyeliner-wearing rock god. Oh yes, Jin had seen them all.
But he'd never seen this particular incarnation of Kame, who lounged about in his boxers and laughed at his own lame jokes. Jin couldn't help laughing too.
They'd never met before. Jin had toyed with the idea of slipping backstage after a concert, maybe getting a mutual friend to introduce them so he didn't look quite so desperate, but somehow he'd always managed to talk himself out of it. How did one approach a chameleon, no matter how friendly he seemed? Jin had no idea, couldn't figure out what to say without making a complete fool of himself.
But when they'd finally met he'd had no trouble, perhaps because the whole situation was simply so ridiculous that he couldn't have kept quiet if his life had depended on it. Talking to someone who could crush him with one hand shouldn't have been so easy, so comfortable, but Jin couldn't bring himself to feel awkward or cowed in the slightest and hadn't done since the first time he'd allowed Kame to coax him to his hand.
He did feel a bit embarrassed when his stomach growled loud enough for Kame to hear, though.
"I can take a hint," Kame said. "Now to see what I can fit on these tiny plates of yours."
They decamped to the kitchen where Jin rinsed and dried his unpacked eating implements in the lid of an empty spice jar, upturned and filled with a mix of hot water and washing up liquid. It was a bit like doing the dishes in the bathtub, he thought. Meanwhile, Kame made them an omelette to share. Jin's share, of course, would be a tiny fraction of Kame's.
Kame did his best to cut a piece for Jin but even so, it ended up hanging off the edges of the plate. Jin enjoyed it nevertheless but resisted Kame's attempts to give him a refill.
"You should eat more," Kame said firmly. "You're too skinny."
Jin sighed. Another reason he hated wearing clothes that actually fit. People started worrying about his health. "An elephant would look skinny to you right now. Anyway, I eat tons. I've just been dancing a lot lately."
"I miss dancing." Kame slipped another sliver on Jin's plate despite his protests. "I miss devising complicated performances or just sitting on the stage with my guitar. I miss my family, and my friends, and my dogs.
"I miss my life."
Against his better judgement Jin cleaned his plate again. If it made Kame feel better to feed him up, who was he to argue?
"I'm pretty sure your life misses you too," was what he tried to say, but it emerged as a croak. Constantly projecting his voice had finally caught up with him.
Kame lowered his head to bring his ears within range. "Did you say something?"
"I tried." Jin cleared his throat a couple of times. It didn't seem to help much, only taking him from "jackdaw" to "frog". He pointed to his throat and shook his head.
"I think I've got something that'll help, if the well granted my wish. We'll have to check the other boxes." Kame held out his hand again. Breakfast was over.
Back in the dining room Jin sat on a chunk of polystyrene and sipped his tiny glass of orange juice while Kame tore into the remaining boxes. If the second one had contained a kitchen set for newlyweds, the next held the rest of the house. A small table and chair, doll-sized to Kame but just right for Jin, replaced the polystyrene seat. Then came a proper bed, complete with fluffy pillows and a mattress so springy Jin had to resist the urge to leap on it immediately. A long, luxurious couch with enormous cushions. A shiny white standalone bathtub with matching mirrored washstand. A chest of drawers to hold all the clothes from the first box.
And finally, half a dozen stepladders on wheels, all of which extended far enough for Jin to climb up and down the furniture with ease.
It was more furniture than he'd had in his first apartment. The well must've been incredibly powerful, to be able to produce so much overnight.
Kame didn't seem nearly as thrilled as Jin, though. "I figured the toiletries kit would be in here," he said with a frown. "Deodorant, razor, stuff like that. I asked for it especially."
Since Jin had shaved yesterday and it took him days to grow even the faintest hint of stubble, he didn't mind too much about the lack of razor. Kame, on the other hand, looked like he needed to shave at least twice a day - more, if his legs were any indication.
He started to respond but Kame gestured for him to save his voice, so he stretched out on his brand new couch and waited to see what else the well had brought.
The toiletries kit fell out of the next box as Kame opened it, so Jin made use of the mirror on his washstand and attacked his tangled hair with the brush. It was too bad they couldn't hook the furniture up to the water supply - he'd have to wait to make use of the toothbrush. Fortunately, Kame had thought to wish for some gum.
In the last box Kame finally found what he'd been searching for - a microphone, which, unlike everything else, wasn't in Jin's size. It came up to his knees.
"We can plug it into my laptop and switch on the speakers," Kame explained. "Then you don't have to speak up all the time for me to hear you."
This idea met with Jin's hearty approval. He waited for Kame to break all the boxes down and stack them neatly beside the bin, and remove every last scrap of polystyrene from the table before setting up his laptop. It took Kame a few minutes to remember his password, and then Jin had to plug the microphone in himself since Kame couldn't find the port...
Jin tested the mic with the first couple of lines of 'Kizuna', Kame's most well-known song, and got a real kick out of watching him break into an embarrassed smile. He still sounded a little croaky, sure, but it was a hard song to ruin - sweet, stirring and beautiful.
Kame harmonised with him on a line and stopped, shaking his head but still smiling. "Don't strain yourself. I'm going to set these ladders on the floor," he moved as he spoke, extending one of them so Jin could climb down from the table if he wanted, "and go get dressed. I could put on the radio or something if you want?"
"I need to check my messages anyway." Jin pulled out his phone. It felt so good to be able to speak at normal volume again and know Kame could hear him without straining.
He ignored the racket coming from the bathroom and opened his inbox. Yamapi had sent another couple of mails, as it turned out, with the worry content increasing in magnitude. They started off reporting how he'd baffled the press by vanishing up the beanstalk, and how it was a great laugh but could Jin please come back down now because it was his week to do laundry and the situation was getting critical? Then Pi wanted to know if Jin was still up the beanstalk at all: had he maybe slipped back down and gone out for the night?
By the next one he was enquiring whether or not he should call the fire department for a rescue, thinking that perhaps Jin was stuck a mile above Tokyo and unable to climb down.
The final email just asked if Jin was okay, followed by ice cream emoji. Jin rolled his eyes at the imaginary figure of his best friend and closed the message. As if he'd go that far just because he'd been dumped and was otherwise having a pretty lousy week. The mail from his mother didn't help matters - it took him a while to decipher it, since half of it was in Korean, but she also implied that if her eldest son needed to talk, she was always available.
He'd just started to compose a reply to Yamapi when Kame returned, shaven and dressed in artfully torn denim cut-offs and a plain white V-neck.
"What were you doing in there?" Jin asked, sitting next to the microphone. "It sounded like you had a lawnmower going in your bathroom!"
"Close." Kame rubbed a hand over his now-smooth cheek. "That was my shaver. And then the electric toothbrush."
Just like in the ads for Kame's many endorsements, Jin thought. He only got to do skincare products these days. At least they were for men. He'd been offered the chance to advertise sanitary towels once after making a bad joke during a concert about having his period, but even his manager couldn't blame him for turning it down. Ryo would've ribbed him about it for the rest of his life.
"Did you have many messages?" Kame asked.
"Mostly from my best friend wondering where the hell I am. I really need to answer him." The instant Jin started typing a reply his battery died. He swore under his breath and had a moment of shock when the microphone picked it up and broadcast it all over the room. "I don't suppose the well can handle iPhone chargers?"
"I don't know what kind of adaptor would allow you to plug your phone in up here..."
He had to concede Kame had a point, and resigned himself to leaving Pi in the dark a while longer.
"If you've got a webmail account you could use my laptop to email him?" Kame suggested.
Jin shot him a look of undying gratitude. By the time he made it down the beanstalk his best friend would be frantic, and Jin just couldn't do that to him. It wasn't like they had to talk every day or anything - though since they'd moved in together, it happened anyway - and because of their different schedules sometimes they didn't connect for a while, but they tried not to make each other worry.
It wasn't until Kame opened up Gmail and sat back to let Jin type in his username and password that they realised things weren't going to be quite so straightforward. While not enormous, the keyboard of Kame's laptop was about four times as long as Jin, with each individual key approximately two square feet. Even stretching as carefully as he could, Jin struggled to hit keys on the top row without leaning on anything lower down.
"That's your username?" Kame said. "How do you pronounce it?"
Jin looked up at the screen to discover he'd accidentally thrown in three extra letters. At least he could walk up the keyboard to reach the backspace. If he managed to type his password right it'd be a miracle.
After two failed attempts he successfully logged in, ignoring Kame snickering in the background, and realised he'd have to use keyboard shortcuts for everything unless he wanted to give himself a hernia moving the mouse.
"I'll hit 'Compose mail', shall I?" Kame helpfully opened up a new mail for him and set the cursor in place.
Jin wasn't sure what to type. The thing about the castle at the top of the beanstalk, that worked well as a story told in person, but if he emailed Yamapi to tell him about it he'd sound crazy. Not that the giant beanstalk itself wasn't strange, but there were limits.
In the end he decided to say simply that his phone was out of charge but he was okay, and not hiding away from the press to nurse the broken heart he didn't have, and that nobody had any reason to worry about him.
Easier said than done.
"Wow, your spelling is horrible." Kame voice dripped with awe. "I thought that thing about fans sending you dictionaries was just a rumour, but-"
"Shut up," Jin said. "I can spell - I just can't type." He reached for an "E", slipped, and fell flat on the keyboard. A line of "D"s raced across the screen. "Do you have a pencil?"
The pencil, when Kame found one, proved too heavy for Jin to wield easily, but a toothpick made a better stylus and within the hour they had a complete email waiting to be sent. Jin typed his name and collapsed from the combined exertion of clambering all over the keyboard and contorting himself into strange shapes to reach far-off keys, while trying not to spear himself in the foot with the toothpick. Kame helpfully selected Yamapi's address for him and sent the message before logging Jin out of Gmail.
"There," Jin wheezed into the microphone, still leaning against the laptop. "Now maybe he won't send a rescue team after me."
"I didn't wish for a rescue team," Kame said, deadpan. "They can't come in."
"Did you wish for me?" Jin said lightly.
"Um..." Kame stared at the ceiling.
"You did? Seriously?" Jin didn't know whether to be flattered or creeped out.
"Not exactly." Kame still wouldn't look at him, and the colour rose in his cheeks as he spoke. "The well's never sent me a person before. I wasn't kidding about the baseball team, but I've tried wishing for someone to break the spell, I've tried wishing for the woman who cast it in the first place...I've even tried wishing for my dogs. I figured it only worked on inanimate objects.
"But a couple of days ago I was watching TV online and commercials came on with some of my friends, and I just..." Kame shrugged. "It's so lonely up here. You're the first person I've spoken to in half a year - if I didn't sing to myself in the kitchen, I think I'd have forgotten how to use my voice by now.
"So I went out to the well and wished for a friend. I think it sent me you."
Friend. Jin loved that word. To him it meant warmth and safety, someone with whom he could have stupid fights over who got the last slice of pizza and battle it out for supremacy on the Wii. Someone who'd hit the clubs with him and stop him going home with the wrong girl; someone to sympathise with him when his manager got mad over a trifle. Someone to comfort him when he felt upset, and answer those three a.m. phone calls when he didn't know what to do or where to go.
He wasn't sure what the word meant to Kame, but he kind of liked the idea that it might apply to him. The well seemed to think so, at any rate.
"Friend," Jin said slowly. "You ask for a friend and the well sends you someone you've never even met before?"
Kame finally met his eyes. "Wishing wells work in mysterious ways, I guess."
"I think I like the way this one works." Jin knew his own face had to be about as red as Kame's by now. Maybe he could use the summer heat as an excuse.
The rest of the day flew by. Jin completely forgot he had a PV to shoot the next day, couldn't care less about work or the fact that the laundry back in his apartment had likely evolved into a new lifeform by now. He was having too much fun with his new friend.
They started off by finding the best spots to position the ladders and Jin's furniture. Jin thought it made sense to put the bed by Kame's own bed, and so on, but Kame liked the idea of setting aside a separate area, perhaps on the lowest shelf of his bookcase, and putting it all there.
"Like a dollhouse," Jin said.
"I've got a niece, okay?"
Kame relented when Jin pointed out that while it might be easier for him to get to, he still couldn't fill his bath with water unless it was actually in the bathroom. After that, they placed everything in the appropriate rooms.
Then they went around the castle rigging up elaborate pulley systems wherever Jin decided he wanted to be able to get into things - such as the kitchen cupboards - though whenever conversation became too awkward they had to return to the microphone. Kame couldn't have been happier, throwing himself into the project like he'd been waiting all his life for it.
"How do you normally keep yourself busy?" Jin asked when they sat down to polish off yesterday's curry - now sweetened for his benefit. He had his own plate and spoon, and sat at his little table and chair atop Kame's dining room table with the microphone beside him.
"I play a lot of solitaire." Kame took another spoonful of curry. "Not really. Sometimes I write songs that no one will ever hear, or I take myself on trips around the world over the Internet and think about all the places I'll never get to go because I'd scare the locals if I tried.
"I cook, I watch a lot of streaming baseball games and bad dramas - including yours - and I clean. I clean a lot, actually."
Jin homed in on the most embarrassing part. "You watch my dramas? I wish you hadn't said that."
"I said the dramas were bad, not you specifically. I liked your last one a lot, the one where you were a rookie cop who had to go undercover in a nunnery? I thought you were pretty convincing."
"As a girl or a nun?"
Kame winked. "Just be glad we're not the same size or your virtue would be in serious danger, Sister."
They both pretended their faces were red from the curry, rather than acknowledge that the temperature in the room was rising from something other than summer's heat. Jin wondered if Kame had wished for something more than a friend. After six months with no human contact whatsoever the poor guy was probably desperate for any form of interaction, no matter how innocent, but that last comment was flirting any way you looked at it.
Which meant that maybe Jin's secret crush wasn't entirely hopeless.
But Kame had a history of having chemistry with anyone and anything, animate or otherwise, regardless of gender. (As several deflowered chairs could testify.) Maybe he flirted on autopilot and Jin just happened to be in the right place at the right time. Despite all the rumours about Kame's preferences he'd never heard anything concrete - except that when it came to women, he liked them to be about twice his age. How old he liked men, and even if he liked men, remained to be seen.
An opportunity for investigation arose when Kame decided he wanted to paint his nails that evening. After another strawberry-scented bath, this time with Jin in his own tub, the two of them sat next to the laptop in matching robes - another item from Kame's wishing spree - with an army of nail polish bottles spread before them.
"Red, white and blue," Kame decided, selecting the colours from the line-up.
"American flag!"
"British flag!"
After bickering about this for a few minutes the only thing they could agree on was that it wasn't going to be the French flag.
"I can't do an American flag anyway," Kame said. "The stars are too small for me to paint."
Jin had the perfect solution to this problem in the form of a brush he'd found in the toiletries kit, which was either supposed to be unisex or aimed at men who wore make-up. Using it for nail polish would probably ruin it for eye shadow but Jin didn't care, he only needed it to last long enough to paint the stars. Kame tipped a few drops of white polish into a saucer for him, once the blue background was dry.
They both worked on the nails of Kame's left hand at once; Jin painting stars on the pinky while Kame painted stripes on the thumb. Total accuracy was impossible but they gave it a good shot. Jin sat crosslegged on the table with Kame's little finger across his lap, marvelling at how unexpectedly normal the situation seemed when it should've been a disturbing hybrid between horror and Disney movies. Perhaps the curry had messed with his mind.
"You still paint your nails even when there's no one around to see it?" he asked.
"You're here, aren't you? And I do it for me, for fun."
"See, this is why some of my friends think you're kind of...strange."
"Hmm?" Kame paused in the middle of a red stripe. "Strange how?"
Jin took a deep breath, then wished he hadn't when the nail polish fumes hit him. "Like, one of your PVs will play on TV and they'll start saying, 'Oh, he plucks his eyebrows and paints his nails like a girl, he's so gay'; stuff like that."
"And they're right," Kame said mildly, going back to working on his stripe, "but I don't paint my nails because I'm gay. I paint my nails because I'm a rock star."
"You're not a rock star!"
"I am sometimes," Kame said, and Jin had to admit that after LIPS had come out, the entire country had worshipped Kame as a rock god. "And if I didn't do something about my eyebrows, my career would never have gone anywhere.
"Not that it's going anywhere now..."
Best to avoid that line of thought. Jin squeezed Kame's pinky tightly and hoped he could feel it. There had to be a way to shrink Japan's "biggest" idol down to normal size again. What went up had to come down, right?
"You're smearing the stars," Kame said.
Jin sighed and started over again with the brush.
-----
By the next morning Kame's second bathroom looked like it had been taken over by fishermen - or physics teachers - because there were nets and pulleys everywhere, a result of their combined ingenuity relating to matters of personal hygiene. (After almost falling in the oversized toilet twice, Jin had decided enough was enough and something had to be done about it.)
"It's like you're moving in!"
Kame's smile had rarely left his face since the previous night. They'd taken it in turns to embarrass each other by finding old drama clips on YouTube, and Jin had spent half the evening burying his head in the cushions of his little couch. Watching Kame play a binge-eating boxer in love with a nun? Okay. Watching himself play a rookie cop undercover as a nun? Okay, if somewhat mortifying.
Listening to Kame dream up a crossover where he played a binge-eating boxer in love with a nun who happened to be an undercover cop? Jin wasn't sure whether to bury his head in the cushions or throw himself off the table and be done with it. But Kame's enthusiasm was infectious, and before long he had Jin working on the story too, making it spiral wildly out of control as the two of them teamed up to fight crime and eat delicious food. They glossed over whether or not Kousaku ever noticed the gender discrepancy.
Jin wanted to say that he didn't have time to move in, that he was supposed to be shooting a PV right now and his manager probably wanted his head on a platter...but he couldn't. If he left now, Kame would be lonely again, all by himself at the top of the beanstalk with no one to talk to. No one to laugh with.
No one to scramble across the wide gulf between nightstand and bed (which must've been all of an inch to Kame) to curl up on his pillow. Kame hadn't said anything when he'd found Jin clinging to his hair in the morning, but he hadn't needed to.
Jin couldn't help it. For years, he'd been watching Kame from afar, always wanting to approach him but never even trying, and now he had this wonderful opportunity he wanted to get as close as possible. It still didn't seem real, wouldn't seem real unless they touched. If they didn't, Kame might be nothing more than a figment of his imagination.
He didn't know what to do about it, so after breakfast he had a look at his emails on Kame's laptop. Yamapi's reply made him realise his attempt at reassurance hadn't gone down very well.
"Now he thinks I've been kidnapped," Jin explained when Kame asked why he looked so exasperated. "He thinks my kidnappers forced me to type that, and that he's going to get a demand for ransom to be delivered to the base of the beanstalk. I need to talk to him."
Kame tapped the microphone. "You're too small to use the webcam, but how about this?"
After establishing that Kame didn't have Skype installed, Jin talked him through downloading the program and setting it up. Wonder of wonders, Yamapi was on-line.
"I'm going outside to pick apples," Kame said. "Will you be okay to press buttons by yourself?"
Jin waved his toothpick and waited till he heard the door close before he sent his best friend a message.
"What've you done with Jin?" came the response.
"I haven't been kidnapped," Jin said. "And if I had, why would I be contacting you on Skype?"
Pause from the other end, and then, "Jin? Why isn't there a picture?"
"Broken webcam; I've just got a microphone. I'm on someone else's laptop, Pi."
"I know that - I'm on yours."
"You are?"
"Mine keeps overheating. The aircon's fixed, by the way. It's safe to come home now. I've even done the laundry."
Safe to come home? Jin sighed. That was the least of his worries. "I don't know when I'm coming home."
"Where are you? Where did you go when you came down?"
"That's just it - I'm still up here. There's a..." Jin didn't know how to describe it, or how much he ought to say. "There's someone living up here, and I can't leave him right now. He doesn't have anyone else."
"Living up the top of a beanstalk?" Yamapi sounded incredulous, but only for a second. "More magic?"
"He's got a wishing well and everything. It really works, too!"
"Then you'd better wish for a bodyguard, because your manager's spitting nails. Did you forget you've got work today?"
"I didn't forget, I just...found something better to do." Jin smiled to himself. "A lot better."
Yamapi's laughter crackled through the speakers. "You like this guy, don't you?"
"Of course I like him-"
"No," Yamapi interrupted. "I mean you like him." His emphasis left no room for Jin to claim a misunderstanding.
"It doesn't matter if I do," Jin said quietly. "It can't work out, so I want to enjoy these few days while I can."
"If you're worried about other people finding out-"
"No one will ever find out! Because it's not going to happen." Misery had Jin slumping beside the microphone. "We're just not...compatible."
"If he doesn't like chilli oil I'm sure you can talk him around."
"No, I mean we're really incompatible. Physically." Jin couldn't all very well mention the height difference of over a hundred feet, so he settled for saying, "He's much bigger than me."
"Then just be very, very careful in bed, okay?"
Jin was grateful he hadn't tried to use the webcam because he didn't want Yamapi to be able to see his face right now. "I didn't mean it like that!"
Yamapi ignored him and proceeded to offer up every scrap of advice he'd ever learned from reading his sister's magazines, not being in a position to advise on dating men from personal experience. Jin didn't know whether to be irritated or thankful that his friend was trying so hard to help. The latter, mostly. He listened and laughed and promised to be careful, and hoped Ryo never found out about any of this.
They talked until Jin heard the door again and knew he had to wrap things up.
"I don't know what I'm going to tell everyone," he said. "I don't know how I'm going to explain my disappearance, and right now I don't care. I'll worry about it when I go back down."
"So you will be coming home?" Yamapi sounded relieved. "I don't have to start paying all the rent myself?"
"I'll come home." It pained Jin to say it, to force words out around the lump in his throat. "Soon. But not yet. I can't leave him like this."
It was more than he could do to pop into Kame's life for a few days and then disappear, leaving him without any source of human contact. Even a tiny friend had to be better than no friend at all.
The session ended with Yamapi promising to do his best to fob off all enquirers (Jin hoped he wouldn't try to push the kidnapping thing) and Jin vowing to return home before his manager hired a hit man to make sure his disappearance was permanent. By the time Kame returned, completely drenched, the speakers were silent.
"You're soaked!" Jin didn't need to speak into the microphone for Kame to hear that.
"One second the sun was shining and the next, the clouds burst," Kame said, trying to wring out his sodden T-shirt. "It only took me twenty seconds to run inside and I feel like I fell in the sea."
When Jin joked that it looked like it too, Kame flicked water at him and squelched off to change.
The rain didn't let up for two whole days after that; it wouldn't have been safe for Jin to venture down the beanstalk even if he'd felt inclined to do so. The two of them hid indoors, having fun in the kitchen (Kame had managed to pick quite a number of apples before the rain fell and the Internet was full of recipes), the games room (Kame had a whole bunch of games - mostly baseball - for his consoles, which Jin enjoyed even though he had to stand on the controllers and jump on the buttons) and the dining room (where they continued their embarrassing YouTube spree with PVs and made fun of each other's hairstyles).
In fact, they had fun everywhere except the bedroom, where Jin continued to sneak across to Kame's pillow at night despite the risk of being crushed. Kame didn't mention it until he woke up one morning to find Jin cuddling his left pinky.
"You have to stop doing this, Jin."
Jin shrugged. "I like being near you." He didn't have anything to lose by being honest, not at this point.
Kame managed to extricate his finger from Jin's grasp and leaned closer to hear him better. (He refused to set up the laptop and microphone in the bedroom.) "You still have to stop. Do you have any idea how frustrating this is for me? I can't even touch you without crushing you."
"Does that mean you want to?" Jin said hopefully. "Touch me, not crush me."
Air left Kame's lungs in a sigh so big it almost blew Jin off the pillow. "Only for the last four years or so. Not that it makes any difference if I say it now."
"It makes a difference," Jin assured him. "It makes a big difference. Because it's just as frustrating for me."
When Kame didn't respond initially Jin wondered if he'd spoken loud enough. Had he overstepped the boundaries of this strange, mismatched friendship? Wasn't it kind of weird to hug your friend's finger while he slept - and even weirder that the only reason it was a finger was because anywhere else was too big to hold?
But it wasn't that Jin's words were too soft - only that they were too enormous, too significant to sink in so fast. He knew Kame understood, though, when a smile bright enough to light up the entire castle spread across his face.
That day Jin discovered there's nothing worse than to be with the person you like and know that they feel the same, and yet be unable to so much as hold hands. At least the rain had finally stopped and the castle grounds had dried up by the time they ventured outside to enjoy the afternoon sunshine. They sat on the grass, as far from the castle as they could get.
At least, Kame sat on the grass. Jin tried it for all of a minute before grabbing a handful of Kame's navy blue T-shirt and using it to climb up to his shoulder. It was easier to make himself heard from there, he reasoned.
"I think I should go," he said. "Back down to Tokyo. I'm just making things worse for you."
"Things were bad enough that I had to resort to asking a wishing well for a friend," Kame said. "Everything after that was an improvement."
"We could Skype? I'll create an account for you, then you'll still have someone to talk to. I could go tell your family you're okay-"
"I don't want you to lie to my family for me."
"It's not a lie." Jin crept closer to Kame's neck and leant against it for balance. "You're healthy, you're sane, you're-"
"-over a hundred feet tall," Kame finished for him. "I don't think they'd take it too well."
"They're your family. If they can love you when you're tiny, they can love you when you're tall." Jin didn't add the obvious ending but Kame must've inferred it because he turned his head just enough to rub his cheek against Jin's hair.
It was the first time Kame had deliberately touched him for any reason that didn't involve transport and it made his whole body feel light, filled with a giddy, intoxicating warmth, like he could bubble over at any moment and spill sheer joy all over the grass. He nuzzled back and then, daringly, pressed a kiss to Kame's cheek.
A second later, Kame's cheek wasn't there anymore.
Jin clung to the neck of the T-shirt for dear life as his seat dropped away from under him. It wasn't an earthquake, or a skyquake, or whatever the hell you called the sort of quake that rocked giant castles at the top of beanstalks. The world wasn't moving.
Kame was.
Or rather, he was shrinking. Jin couldn't even feel Kame's shoulder under him anymore; if it hadn't been for his grip on the T-shirt he'd be splattered on the ground by now. He had to close his eyes, couldn't handle the dizzying speed at which the grass was coming up to meet him. All he could do was hang on and wait for everything to stop.
He landed hard, but not where he'd expected. Grass didn't generally cry out in pain. He opened his eyes to find himself sprawled across Kame's lap, still clutching his T-shirt.
"You didn't feel this heavy a couple of minutes ago," Kame said, grimacing. Hearing his voice at normal volume threw Jin for a loop. "I shouldn't have kept giving you second helpings."
Jin uncurled stiff fingers to release Kame's shirt and wished his head would catch up with the world. It still felt like he was falling. He struggled to right himself but only succeeded in bruising his stomach on Kame's knee.
"Stop wriggling before one of us loses something important."
"You're...you're..." Jin couldn't even get the words out.
"Yeah, I am." Kame broke into a grin and managed to get one hand - one normal, human-sized hand - on Jin's waist to help him sit up without doing himself an injury. "The second you kissed me. I guess the well just took a really long time to grant that particular wish."
Jin managed to struggle into a sitting position, conscious of the fact that he was still on Kame's legs and Kame still had a hand on his waist and didn't seem to be in any rush to remove it. Truth be told, Jin didn't want him to, either. The giant he'd befriended had shrunk down to become much more accessible, less myth and more man, with short, stubby fingers and a sprinkling of tiny moles. He'd become someone Jin could touch normally...and someone who could touch him without having to hold back.
If Kame still wanted to, of course. Jin leaned forwards just as Kame's other hand slid up his back, coming to rest below his shoulderblades and nudging him closer with light but persistent pressure. He gave in, willingly. Kame met him in the middle, excitement in his eyes and welcome warm on his lips that had Jin forgetting about how he'd never actually taken his possible interest in guys beyond the theoretical stage before. It wasn't that different, really, if you didn't count the tickle of stubble, or the way Kame sounded when he moaned low and deep into Jin's mouth. Jin felt himself stirring in response after days of being driven to the edge of frustration.
He broke away, breathless, when a blade of grass brushed his back and he realised they were still outdoors - and with Kame now back to his own size, the castle was a long way off. But they didn't have to return, did they?
"Don't look at it," Kame murmured. "We're never going back there." He rested his forehead against Jin's, blocking his view of the castle. "We're going to climb down that beanstalk and give the press a heart attack."
Having had several unpleasant encounters with the media, Jin wasn't averse to this. But that didn't mean he was in any rush to embark on the long journey home. Once they were back in Tokyo, he'd have his work cut out for him to keep his manager from killing him while Kame would be caught up in a whirlwind of activity, trying to get his life back on track. Going home meant everything had to change, that the idyllic bubble containing the past few days would pop and deposit them both on the cold, hard floor of reality where Kamenashi Kazuya and Akanishi Jin walked in parallel worlds, always within sight but never within reach.
Not that they'd ever make it anywhere near the beanstalk if Kame didn't let go. He slid one hand under Jin's shirt, skimming lightly over his lower back, and Jin jumped as a nail scraped his skin.
"Sorry," Kame said, smoothing the scrape with gentle fingers. "It just feels so good to be able to touch you without worrying that I'll accidentally crush you."
"I'm not a china doll."
"I know, I know." Kame planted apologetic kisses down Jin's cheek and the side of his neck, ghosting his lips over the exposed collarbone and withdrawing in alarm when Jin yelped and tried to squirm away.
"It tickles," he explained, crossing his arms over his collarbones in case Kame got any funny ideas. "Isn't it ticklish for you?"
"Not really..."
By way of revenge Jin tried a tentative tickle attack but if Kame had vulnerable spots he didn't find them, not that this stopped either of them from laughing like a pair of giddy schoolchildren playing on the beach. He relished being able to get his arms around more of Kame than his little finger; for both of them being cooped up indoors knowing full well that they were attracted to each other but being unable to do anything about it meant that now they could touch, they were in no rush to stop.
The hand under Jin's shirt worked its way along his ribcage; the other roamed anywhere it could reach, doing everything possible to press them closer together as if they were still too far apart. Deciding it was safe to leave his collarbones unguarded Jin did the same, threading his fingers through Kame's sun-warmed hair as they kissed, their lips still sweet from caramel sauce and tongues eager to explore.
He lost track of how long they sat in the grass like that. There seemed to be no end of things to learn about each other, like how Kame loved it when Jin nibbled gently at his pierced ear, or how appreciative Jin could be when Kame kneaded his back in an amateur - but enthusiastic - attempt at a massage.
It was only when the sun vanished briefly behind a cloud that Jin remembered they were outdoors - an unusual state of affairs, given that he normally couldn't kiss anyone in public unless it was for work. He recalled the glinting eyes in the long grass and shivered.
Kame drew back enough to meet his eyes. "Something wrong?"
"Just wondering about the giant insects."
"They won't bother us," Kame said dismissively. "Besides, we'll see them coming."
"I'm more worried that's what they'll see us doing, actually..."
That earned him a tap on the back of the head and a smirk from Kame. "You do a song like Lovejuice and get embarrassed because a couple of oversized insects might be watching us make out?"
"It's about a cocktail!"
"Oh, is that what they're calling it these days? I must be more out of touch than I thought."
Jin resigned himself to being misunderstood for the rest of his life.
"But my legs are going to sleep anyway," Kame said, "so how about we move? The grass will keep us covered. Like this."
He nudged Jin's hip to make him roll off his legs, then pulled him down so they ended up lying next to each other in the long grass, sheltered from prying eyes.
"How are your legs?" Jin asked.
"Numb, thanks to you." Kame clearly didn't hold a grudge, and didn't complain when Jin began to massage life back into his legs, beginning at the ankles and working his way steadily upwards.
When he reached mid-thigh he stopped, uncertain.
"It's okay to keep going," Kame said, squeezing Jin's hip by way of encouragement. "Isn't it?"
The rational part of Jin's brain, which was currently being overwhelmed by the rest of it, pointed out that he couldn't ask for a better first time with a guy than with someone he'd actually had a crush on for years and had already seen naked, even if they were outdoors and therefore totally screwed if the rain came back.
"Yeah." Jin swallowed hard. "It's okay."
It was, he discovered, more than okay when Kame proved just as adventurous exploring below the belt as above it, still eager to lay hands on as much of Jin as he could. It took them a while to coordinate, because Jin was a little clumsy and Kame was a little impatient and hands and elbows went everywhere, but they managed not to inflict any major damage on each other.
Kame had obviously done this before; didn't hesitate for a second once he had Jin's jeans and underwear bunched around his thighs. Jin hadn't - not with guys, and he didn't think his experience with girls would be of much use. Although very pretty, Kame was no girl, as Jin had seen firsthand. But he knew what he liked for himself, at least, so he tried it out on Kame in the hopes that what worked for one guy would work reasonably well for another.
It was hard to concentrate, though, when Kame's hands stroked and squeezed and teased in ways that made Jin's brain stop in its tracks, momentarily overwhelmed by how good it felt. He lay back, stunned and panting; Kame laughed and kissed him again, stealing his remaining breath in the sweetest possible manner.
"See? No giant insects, Jin."
"They're probably just hiding and enjoying the free show," Jin muttered.
"I don't care if they're enjoying it as long as we're enjoying it."
There were no worries on that score. Kame had one leg between Jin's, crawled half atop him to maximise the contact between them. That made the angles more awkward than ever but Jin didn't mind. He didn't even care if they never got to do this again after they returned to Tokyo because it felt like he was about to expire from pleasure on the spot. He rolled his hips up to meet Kame - all that dance practice had to come in handy for something - and found no shortage of friction waiting for him. It didn't take much to finish him off; Kame's clever fingers stroked him just right and he arched his back towards the sky, coming down with slow, unsteady breaths and melted bones.
Kame wiped his sticky hand on the grass; with the other he stroked Jin's hair until his eyes refocused and his mind recovered enough to remember he wasn't the only person involved. Determined to make Kame feel equally undone, Jin wrapped one arm around his waist to hold him still and set to work wih his free hand until Kame and coherency were barely on speaking terms, the sounds emanating from his throat bearing no resemblance whatsoever to real words until he came with Jin's name on his lips, which made Jin feel sort of proud.
They didn't move for a while, cuddled together on the grass with no real energy now all the tension from the past few days had been released. Rebuttoning jeans was about as far as they got until Kame suggested, without much enthusiasm, that they should consider starting on the beanstalk if they were going to reach Tokyo before night fell.
"I'm not sure I can climb down without falling right now," Jin confessed. "And I'm too comfortable to move."
"You've got my elbow in your spleen and you're comfortable?"
With considerable effort, Jin shrugged. "It's not like I need my spleen for anything."
Kame kissed him on the forehead and pushed himself up on one elbow. "All those fansites saying you were M were right, then."
"You looked me up on the Internet?"
It was Kame's turn to shrug. "I've been up here a long time. Which is why the sooner we get back down, the happier I'll be."
Reluctantly, Jin rose to his feet, stretching out heavy limbs in preparation for the long climb down. He brushed dirt off his jeans and groaned.
"If you're that worn out, I guess we could always stay one last night in the castle and climb down tomorrow," Kame said.
"It's not that." Jin patted his empty pockets. "We'd have to return to the castle anyway. I left my phone in your dining room!"
Jin and the Beanstalk (2/2)
Whether Jin dreamt of magic or not, he couldn't remember. He woke up to find a pair of giant eyes peering down at him and since they didn't belong to either his roommate or their dogs, he screamed.
The giant eyes blinked at him. "Good morning to you too," their owner said.
Jin uncurled himself from the ball of cotton wool he'd somehow clasped to his chest during the night and took a calming breath. Kame. Of course.
"I'm not really a morning person," he said, yawning for emphasis. "More of a night owl."
Kame grinned. "So I hear. I hope your head's all right after last night because there's no way I can cut down painkillers small enough for you to swallow."
"My head's fine, I'm just...disoriented. I'm not used to waking up in someone's nightstand drawer." It wasn't the first time he'd woken up in someone else's home, but he'd never been in a situation quite like this before. He rubbed sleep from his eyes and sat up; Kame dropped to the floor to put them on the level. "Did the well work?"
"Shall we go find out?" Kame extended a hand - but sideways, as if inviting Jin to hold hands with him. He realised his mistake when Jin didn't move and turned it palm up for travel. "Sorry. Even though I can see you're that small, it sometimes takes a while to sink in."
"It's not that I'm small," Jin said, indignant. "You're the one who had the growth spurt from hell."
Pain flashed through Kame's eyes, quick enough that Jin might've missed it if he hadn't been watching, and he felt instantly contrite. It wasn't Kame's fault he was stuck like this. Jin had been on the receiving end of crazy fan activity himself, ranging from having his phone bill stolen to people posting comestibles through his mailbox, and there was just no stopping someone if they decided to make your life a misery. Admittedly Kame could now sit on any troublemakers and squash them flat, but still...
"I guess I could stand to gain a few inches," Jin said, trying to make amends. "Some of my American friends dwarf me."
"I've got plenty to spare," Kame said. "Help yourself."
Jin couldn't, of course, but he held Kame's pinky tight - for safety - as they headed for the dining room, and Kame seemed to appreciate that. When they reached the table it looked like Christmas had come half a year early. Boxes of all shapes and sizes buried Kame's red plaid tablecloth.
"You think the well finally gave you your baseball team?" Jin said nervously, hoping the boxes didn't contain body parts. "I didn't wish for that much stuff."
"I might've thrown in a few extras while you were napping in my pocket," Kame said. "I've never been able to master impulse control when it comes to shopping."
Fortunately for Jin, who couldn't handle haunted houses and would've run away screaming from dismembered baseball players, the boxes dripped not with blood but with small blue chunks of polystyrene.
"No wonder they're so big," Kame said in disgust. "It's all this padding!"
Jin sat on one of the chunks and watched as Kame tore into the boxes, not being in a position to help, though he did occasionally have to chase after a stray piece and throw it in the bag Kame had hung from the table. At least it didn't weigh much.
He found the box contents fascinating. The first one Kame opened held clothing - albeit not quite what Jin had wished for.
"You can see my legs in these jeans," he mourned, holding up a pair that, far from being baggy, would cling to him at every opportunity.
"Look at it this way," Kame said. "At least you won't trip over them and fall off the table?
"Besides, it wouldn't kill you to wear clothes that actually fit for a change."
"I like to wear comfortable things. I had enough of skintight stuff when I was starting out." Jin didn't like the look of some of the T-shirts in the clothing pile, either. One of them would definitely show off his ribs. People kept telling him he had a nice figure but he wanted them to pay more attention to his music than his looks. Unfortunately, one couldn't maintain a career in the entertainment industry without spending considerable time under the spotlight.
"Been there," Kame sympathised. "When I think about some of the things I've had to wear over the years..." He shuddered and set to work on the next box while Jin took the chance to slip under an overturned box and change into fresh clothing.
When he emerged in jeans, sandals and a black V-neck T-shirt, Kame stopped to give him a nod of approval.
"Was the underwear okay?"
"I wasn't expecting pink," Jin admitted, "but I can live with it."
"Just be grateful it didn't give you panties," Kame said. "It tried that with me once. I had to threaten to dump a bottle of olive oil in it to make it cooperate."
Jin murmured a few words of thanks under his breath and wandered off to investigate the next box, which Kame had left open. This one looked like a start-up kit for newlyweds, full of cutlery and crockery, all of it in Jin's size.
"I'll put the kettle on," Kame said, clearly charmed by the miniature utensils. "I might need an eyedropper to fill your coffee cup, though."
It didn't matter how the coffee got in the cup, so long as it wasn't decaf - though Jin did wonder, after Kame handed him the tiny cup, if perhaps drinking anything stronger than water was a good idea. He didn't want to be bouncing off the walls.
When it turned out to be weaker than he'd expected Kame explained that he'd watered it down, just to be on the safe side. "I'm sure your fans would get a kick out of seeing you hyper but I don't think it's a good idea."
Jin feigned a pout. "But aren't you my fan too?"
"Oh yeah." Kame laughed over the rim of his own coffee cup. "I'm your biggest fan."
There was no disputing that fact, but Jin had always found it weird meeting fellow celebrities for the first time. There were people he'd known for years, like Yamapi, who weren't "famous" in his eyes because they were his friends and therefore just as human as he was. Then there were people he considered to be his juniors in the entertainment world, who by definition couldn't be classed as intimidating. There were glamorous foreign singers and actors he'd met through work, some of whom had been kind and patient with his halting English conversation while others had barely deigned to notice him.
And then there was Kamenashi Kazuya, who'd joined the entertainment world at the same time as Jin and grown up in front of the cameras, morphing from a spiky-haired, beetle-browed brat to a silk-smooth shining star. Kame had many faces, from the baseball boy who took pride in his wounds, to the fashionable diva who owned enough designer gear to feed a third-world country; from the serious, hard-working actor to the gentle, considerate friend beloved by everyone who knew him; from the guitar-strumming balladeer to the eyeliner-wearing rock god. Oh yes, Jin had seen them all.
But he'd never seen this particular incarnation of Kame, who lounged about in his boxers and laughed at his own lame jokes. Jin couldn't help laughing too.
They'd never met before. Jin had toyed with the idea of slipping backstage after a concert, maybe getting a mutual friend to introduce them so he didn't look quite so desperate, but somehow he'd always managed to talk himself out of it. How did one approach a chameleon, no matter how friendly he seemed? Jin had no idea, couldn't figure out what to say without making a complete fool of himself.
But when they'd finally met he'd had no trouble, perhaps because the whole situation was simply so ridiculous that he couldn't have kept quiet if his life had depended on it. Talking to someone who could crush him with one hand shouldn't have been so easy, so comfortable, but Jin couldn't bring himself to feel awkward or cowed in the slightest and hadn't done since the first time he'd allowed Kame to coax him to his hand.
He did feel a bit embarrassed when his stomach growled loud enough for Kame to hear, though.
"I can take a hint," Kame said. "Now to see what I can fit on these tiny plates of yours."
They decamped to the kitchen where Jin rinsed and dried his unpacked eating implements in the lid of an empty spice jar, upturned and filled with a mix of hot water and washing up liquid. It was a bit like doing the dishes in the bathtub, he thought. Meanwhile, Kame made them an omelette to share. Jin's share, of course, would be a tiny fraction of Kame's.
Kame did his best to cut a piece for Jin but even so, it ended up hanging off the edges of the plate. Jin enjoyed it nevertheless but resisted Kame's attempts to give him a refill.
"You should eat more," Kame said firmly. "You're too skinny."
Jin sighed. Another reason he hated wearing clothes that actually fit. People started worrying about his health. "An elephant would look skinny to you right now. Anyway, I eat tons. I've just been dancing a lot lately."
"I miss dancing." Kame slipped another sliver on Jin's plate despite his protests. "I miss devising complicated performances or just sitting on the stage with my guitar. I miss my family, and my friends, and my dogs.
"I miss my life."
Against his better judgement Jin cleaned his plate again. If it made Kame feel better to feed him up, who was he to argue?
"I'm pretty sure your life misses you too," was what he tried to say, but it emerged as a croak. Constantly projecting his voice had finally caught up with him.
Kame lowered his head to bring his ears within range. "Did you say something?"
"I tried." Jin cleared his throat a couple of times. It didn't seem to help much, only taking him from "jackdaw" to "frog". He pointed to his throat and shook his head.
"I think I've got something that'll help, if the well granted my wish. We'll have to check the other boxes." Kame held out his hand again. Breakfast was over.
Back in the dining room Jin sat on a chunk of polystyrene and sipped his tiny glass of orange juice while Kame tore into the remaining boxes. If the second one had contained a kitchen set for newlyweds, the next held the rest of the house. A small table and chair, doll-sized to Kame but just right for Jin, replaced the polystyrene seat. Then came a proper bed, complete with fluffy pillows and a mattress so springy Jin had to resist the urge to leap on it immediately. A long, luxurious couch with enormous cushions. A shiny white standalone bathtub with matching mirrored washstand. A chest of drawers to hold all the clothes from the first box.
And finally, half a dozen stepladders on wheels, all of which extended far enough for Jin to climb up and down the furniture with ease.
It was more furniture than he'd had in his first apartment. The well must've been incredibly powerful, to be able to produce so much overnight.
Kame didn't seem nearly as thrilled as Jin, though. "I figured the toiletries kit would be in here," he said with a frown. "Deodorant, razor, stuff like that. I asked for it especially."
Since Jin had shaved yesterday and it took him days to grow even the faintest hint of stubble, he didn't mind too much about the lack of razor. Kame, on the other hand, looked like he needed to shave at least twice a day - more, if his legs were any indication.
He started to respond but Kame gestured for him to save his voice, so he stretched out on his brand new couch and waited to see what else the well had brought.
The toiletries kit fell out of the next box as Kame opened it, so Jin made use of the mirror on his washstand and attacked his tangled hair with the brush. It was too bad they couldn't hook the furniture up to the water supply - he'd have to wait to make use of the toothbrush. Fortunately, Kame had thought to wish for some gum.
In the last box Kame finally found what he'd been searching for - a microphone, which, unlike everything else, wasn't in Jin's size. It came up to his knees.
"We can plug it into my laptop and switch on the speakers," Kame explained. "Then you don't have to speak up all the time for me to hear you."
This idea met with Jin's hearty approval. He waited for Kame to break all the boxes down and stack them neatly beside the bin, and remove every last scrap of polystyrene from the table before setting up his laptop. It took Kame a few minutes to remember his password, and then Jin had to plug the microphone in himself since Kame couldn't find the port...
Jin tested the mic with the first couple of lines of 'Kizuna', Kame's most well-known song, and got a real kick out of watching him break into an embarrassed smile. He still sounded a little croaky, sure, but it was a hard song to ruin - sweet, stirring and beautiful.
Kame harmonised with him on a line and stopped, shaking his head but still smiling. "Don't strain yourself. I'm going to set these ladders on the floor," he moved as he spoke, extending one of them so Jin could climb down from the table if he wanted, "and go get dressed. I could put on the radio or something if you want?"
"I need to check my messages anyway." Jin pulled out his phone. It felt so good to be able to speak at normal volume again and know Kame could hear him without straining.
He ignored the racket coming from the bathroom and opened his inbox. Yamapi had sent another couple of mails, as it turned out, with the worry content increasing in magnitude. They started off reporting how he'd baffled the press by vanishing up the beanstalk, and how it was a great laugh but could Jin please come back down now because it was his week to do laundry and the situation was getting critical? Then Pi wanted to know if Jin was still up the beanstalk at all: had he maybe slipped back down and gone out for the night?
By the next one he was enquiring whether or not he should call the fire department for a rescue, thinking that perhaps Jin was stuck a mile above Tokyo and unable to climb down.
The final email just asked if Jin was okay, followed by ice cream emoji. Jin rolled his eyes at the imaginary figure of his best friend and closed the message. As if he'd go that far just because he'd been dumped and was otherwise having a pretty lousy week. The mail from his mother didn't help matters - it took him a while to decipher it, since half of it was in Korean, but she also implied that if her eldest son needed to talk, she was always available.
He'd just started to compose a reply to Yamapi when Kame returned, shaven and dressed in artfully torn denim cut-offs and a plain white V-neck.
"What were you doing in there?" Jin asked, sitting next to the microphone. "It sounded like you had a lawnmower going in your bathroom!"
"Close." Kame rubbed a hand over his now-smooth cheek. "That was my shaver. And then the electric toothbrush."
Just like in the ads for Kame's many endorsements, Jin thought. He only got to do skincare products these days. At least they were for men. He'd been offered the chance to advertise sanitary towels once after making a bad joke during a concert about having his period, but even his manager couldn't blame him for turning it down. Ryo would've ribbed him about it for the rest of his life.
"Did you have many messages?" Kame asked.
"Mostly from my best friend wondering where the hell I am. I really need to answer him." The instant Jin started typing a reply his battery died. He swore under his breath and had a moment of shock when the microphone picked it up and broadcast it all over the room. "I don't suppose the well can handle iPhone chargers?"
"I don't know what kind of adaptor would allow you to plug your phone in up here..."
He had to concede Kame had a point, and resigned himself to leaving Pi in the dark a while longer.
"If you've got a webmail account you could use my laptop to email him?" Kame suggested.
Jin shot him a look of undying gratitude. By the time he made it down the beanstalk his best friend would be frantic, and Jin just couldn't do that to him. It wasn't like they had to talk every day or anything - though since they'd moved in together, it happened anyway - and because of their different schedules sometimes they didn't connect for a while, but they tried not to make each other worry.
It wasn't until Kame opened up Gmail and sat back to let Jin type in his username and password that they realised things weren't going to be quite so straightforward. While not enormous, the keyboard of Kame's laptop was about four times as long as Jin, with each individual key approximately two square feet. Even stretching as carefully as he could, Jin struggled to hit keys on the top row without leaning on anything lower down.
"That's your username?" Kame said. "How do you pronounce it?"
Jin looked up at the screen to discover he'd accidentally thrown in three extra letters. At least he could walk up the keyboard to reach the backspace. If he managed to type his password right it'd be a miracle.
After two failed attempts he successfully logged in, ignoring Kame snickering in the background, and realised he'd have to use keyboard shortcuts for everything unless he wanted to give himself a hernia moving the mouse.
"I'll hit 'Compose mail', shall I?" Kame helpfully opened up a new mail for him and set the cursor in place.
Jin wasn't sure what to type. The thing about the castle at the top of the beanstalk, that worked well as a story told in person, but if he emailed Yamapi to tell him about it he'd sound crazy. Not that the giant beanstalk itself wasn't strange, but there were limits.
In the end he decided to say simply that his phone was out of charge but he was okay, and not hiding away from the press to nurse the broken heart he didn't have, and that nobody had any reason to worry about him.
Easier said than done.
"Wow, your spelling is horrible." Kame voice dripped with awe. "I thought that thing about fans sending you dictionaries was just a rumour, but-"
"Shut up," Jin said. "I can spell - I just can't type." He reached for an "E", slipped, and fell flat on the keyboard. A line of "D"s raced across the screen. "Do you have a pencil?"
The pencil, when Kame found one, proved too heavy for Jin to wield easily, but a toothpick made a better stylus and within the hour they had a complete email waiting to be sent. Jin typed his name and collapsed from the combined exertion of clambering all over the keyboard and contorting himself into strange shapes to reach far-off keys, while trying not to spear himself in the foot with the toothpick. Kame helpfully selected Yamapi's address for him and sent the message before logging Jin out of Gmail.
"There," Jin wheezed into the microphone, still leaning against the laptop. "Now maybe he won't send a rescue team after me."
"I didn't wish for a rescue team," Kame said, deadpan. "They can't come in."
"Did you wish for me?" Jin said lightly.
"Um..." Kame stared at the ceiling.
"You did? Seriously?" Jin didn't know whether to be flattered or creeped out.
"Not exactly." Kame still wouldn't look at him, and the colour rose in his cheeks as he spoke. "The well's never sent me a person before. I wasn't kidding about the baseball team, but I've tried wishing for someone to break the spell, I've tried wishing for the woman who cast it in the first place...I've even tried wishing for my dogs. I figured it only worked on inanimate objects.
"But a couple of days ago I was watching TV online and commercials came on with some of my friends, and I just..." Kame shrugged. "It's so lonely up here. You're the first person I've spoken to in half a year - if I didn't sing to myself in the kitchen, I think I'd have forgotten how to use my voice by now.
"So I went out to the well and wished for a friend. I think it sent me you."
Friend. Jin loved that word. To him it meant warmth and safety, someone with whom he could have stupid fights over who got the last slice of pizza and battle it out for supremacy on the Wii. Someone who'd hit the clubs with him and stop him going home with the wrong girl; someone to sympathise with him when his manager got mad over a trifle. Someone to comfort him when he felt upset, and answer those three a.m. phone calls when he didn't know what to do or where to go.
He wasn't sure what the word meant to Kame, but he kind of liked the idea that it might apply to him. The well seemed to think so, at any rate.
"Friend," Jin said slowly. "You ask for a friend and the well sends you someone you've never even met before?"
Kame finally met his eyes. "Wishing wells work in mysterious ways, I guess."
"I think I like the way this one works." Jin knew his own face had to be about as red as Kame's by now. Maybe he could use the summer heat as an excuse.
The rest of the day flew by. Jin completely forgot he had a PV to shoot the next day, couldn't care less about work or the fact that the laundry back in his apartment had likely evolved into a new lifeform by now. He was having too much fun with his new friend.
They started off by finding the best spots to position the ladders and Jin's furniture. Jin thought it made sense to put the bed by Kame's own bed, and so on, but Kame liked the idea of setting aside a separate area, perhaps on the lowest shelf of his bookcase, and putting it all there.
"Like a dollhouse," Jin said.
"I've got a niece, okay?"
Kame relented when Jin pointed out that while it might be easier for him to get to, he still couldn't fill his bath with water unless it was actually in the bathroom. After that, they placed everything in the appropriate rooms.
Then they went around the castle rigging up elaborate pulley systems wherever Jin decided he wanted to be able to get into things - such as the kitchen cupboards - though whenever conversation became too awkward they had to return to the microphone. Kame couldn't have been happier, throwing himself into the project like he'd been waiting all his life for it.
"How do you normally keep yourself busy?" Jin asked when they sat down to polish off yesterday's curry - now sweetened for his benefit. He had his own plate and spoon, and sat at his little table and chair atop Kame's dining room table with the microphone beside him.
"I play a lot of solitaire." Kame took another spoonful of curry. "Not really. Sometimes I write songs that no one will ever hear, or I take myself on trips around the world over the Internet and think about all the places I'll never get to go because I'd scare the locals if I tried.
"I cook, I watch a lot of streaming baseball games and bad dramas - including yours - and I clean. I clean a lot, actually."
Jin homed in on the most embarrassing part. "You watch my dramas? I wish you hadn't said that."
"I said the dramas were bad, not you specifically. I liked your last one a lot, the one where you were a rookie cop who had to go undercover in a nunnery? I thought you were pretty convincing."
"As a girl or a nun?"
Kame winked. "Just be glad we're not the same size or your virtue would be in serious danger, Sister."
They both pretended their faces were red from the curry, rather than acknowledge that the temperature in the room was rising from something other than summer's heat. Jin wondered if Kame had wished for something more than a friend. After six months with no human contact whatsoever the poor guy was probably desperate for any form of interaction, no matter how innocent, but that last comment was flirting any way you looked at it.
Which meant that maybe Jin's secret crush wasn't entirely hopeless.
But Kame had a history of having chemistry with anyone and anything, animate or otherwise, regardless of gender. (As several deflowered chairs could testify.) Maybe he flirted on autopilot and Jin just happened to be in the right place at the right time. Despite all the rumours about Kame's preferences he'd never heard anything concrete - except that when it came to women, he liked them to be about twice his age. How old he liked men, and even if he liked men, remained to be seen.
An opportunity for investigation arose when Kame decided he wanted to paint his nails that evening. After another strawberry-scented bath, this time with Jin in his own tub, the two of them sat next to the laptop in matching robes - another item from Kame's wishing spree - with an army of nail polish bottles spread before them.
"Red, white and blue," Kame decided, selecting the colours from the line-up.
"American flag!"
"British flag!"
After bickering about this for a few minutes the only thing they could agree on was that it wasn't going to be the French flag.
"I can't do an American flag anyway," Kame said. "The stars are too small for me to paint."
Jin had the perfect solution to this problem in the form of a brush he'd found in the toiletries kit, which was either supposed to be unisex or aimed at men who wore make-up. Using it for nail polish would probably ruin it for eye shadow but Jin didn't care, he only needed it to last long enough to paint the stars. Kame tipped a few drops of white polish into a saucer for him, once the blue background was dry.
They both worked on the nails of Kame's left hand at once; Jin painting stars on the pinky while Kame painted stripes on the thumb. Total accuracy was impossible but they gave it a good shot. Jin sat crosslegged on the table with Kame's little finger across his lap, marvelling at how unexpectedly normal the situation seemed when it should've been a disturbing hybrid between horror and Disney movies. Perhaps the curry had messed with his mind.
"You still paint your nails even when there's no one around to see it?" he asked.
"You're here, aren't you? And I do it for me, for fun."
"See, this is why some of my friends think you're kind of...strange."
"Hmm?" Kame paused in the middle of a red stripe. "Strange how?"
Jin took a deep breath, then wished he hadn't when the nail polish fumes hit him. "Like, one of your PVs will play on TV and they'll start saying, 'Oh, he plucks his eyebrows and paints his nails like a girl, he's so gay'; stuff like that."
"And they're right," Kame said mildly, going back to working on his stripe, "but I don't paint my nails because I'm gay. I paint my nails because I'm a rock star."
"You're not a rock star!"
"I am sometimes," Kame said, and Jin had to admit that after LIPS had come out, the entire country had worshipped Kame as a rock god. "And if I didn't do something about my eyebrows, my career would never have gone anywhere.
"Not that it's going anywhere now..."
Best to avoid that line of thought. Jin squeezed Kame's pinky tightly and hoped he could feel it. There had to be a way to shrink Japan's "biggest" idol down to normal size again. What went up had to come down, right?
"You're smearing the stars," Kame said.
Jin sighed and started over again with the brush.
-----
By the next morning Kame's second bathroom looked like it had been taken over by fishermen - or physics teachers - because there were nets and pulleys everywhere, a result of their combined ingenuity relating to matters of personal hygiene. (After almost falling in the oversized toilet twice, Jin had decided enough was enough and something had to be done about it.)
"It's like you're moving in!"
Kame's smile had rarely left his face since the previous night. They'd taken it in turns to embarrass each other by finding old drama clips on YouTube, and Jin had spent half the evening burying his head in the cushions of his little couch. Watching Kame play a binge-eating boxer in love with a nun? Okay. Watching himself play a rookie cop undercover as a nun? Okay, if somewhat mortifying.
Listening to Kame dream up a crossover where he played a binge-eating boxer in love with a nun who happened to be an undercover cop? Jin wasn't sure whether to bury his head in the cushions or throw himself off the table and be done with it. But Kame's enthusiasm was infectious, and before long he had Jin working on the story too, making it spiral wildly out of control as the two of them teamed up to fight crime and eat delicious food. They glossed over whether or not Kousaku ever noticed the gender discrepancy.
Jin wanted to say that he didn't have time to move in, that he was supposed to be shooting a PV right now and his manager probably wanted his head on a platter...but he couldn't. If he left now, Kame would be lonely again, all by himself at the top of the beanstalk with no one to talk to. No one to laugh with.
No one to scramble across the wide gulf between nightstand and bed (which must've been all of an inch to Kame) to curl up on his pillow. Kame hadn't said anything when he'd found Jin clinging to his hair in the morning, but he hadn't needed to.
Jin couldn't help it. For years, he'd been watching Kame from afar, always wanting to approach him but never even trying, and now he had this wonderful opportunity he wanted to get as close as possible. It still didn't seem real, wouldn't seem real unless they touched. If they didn't, Kame might be nothing more than a figment of his imagination.
He didn't know what to do about it, so after breakfast he had a look at his emails on Kame's laptop. Yamapi's reply made him realise his attempt at reassurance hadn't gone down very well.
"Now he thinks I've been kidnapped," Jin explained when Kame asked why he looked so exasperated. "He thinks my kidnappers forced me to type that, and that he's going to get a demand for ransom to be delivered to the base of the beanstalk. I need to talk to him."
Kame tapped the microphone. "You're too small to use the webcam, but how about this?"
After establishing that Kame didn't have Skype installed, Jin talked him through downloading the program and setting it up. Wonder of wonders, Yamapi was on-line.
"I'm going outside to pick apples," Kame said. "Will you be okay to press buttons by yourself?"
Jin waved his toothpick and waited till he heard the door close before he sent his best friend a message.
"What've you done with Jin?" came the response.
"I haven't been kidnapped," Jin said. "And if I had, why would I be contacting you on Skype?"
Pause from the other end, and then, "Jin? Why isn't there a picture?"
"Broken webcam; I've just got a microphone. I'm on someone else's laptop, Pi."
"I know that - I'm on yours."
"You are?"
"Mine keeps overheating. The aircon's fixed, by the way. It's safe to come home now. I've even done the laundry."
Safe to come home? Jin sighed. That was the least of his worries. "I don't know when I'm coming home."
"Where are you? Where did you go when you came down?"
"That's just it - I'm still up here. There's a..." Jin didn't know how to describe it, or how much he ought to say. "There's someone living up here, and I can't leave him right now. He doesn't have anyone else."
"Living up the top of a beanstalk?" Yamapi sounded incredulous, but only for a second. "More magic?"
"He's got a wishing well and everything. It really works, too!"
"Then you'd better wish for a bodyguard, because your manager's spitting nails. Did you forget you've got work today?"
"I didn't forget, I just...found something better to do." Jin smiled to himself. "A lot better."
Yamapi's laughter crackled through the speakers. "You like this guy, don't you?"
"Of course I like him-"
"No," Yamapi interrupted. "I mean you like him." His emphasis left no room for Jin to claim a misunderstanding.
"It doesn't matter if I do," Jin said quietly. "It can't work out, so I want to enjoy these few days while I can."
"If you're worried about other people finding out-"
"No one will ever find out! Because it's not going to happen." Misery had Jin slumping beside the microphone. "We're just not...compatible."
"If he doesn't like chilli oil I'm sure you can talk him around."
"No, I mean we're really incompatible. Physically." Jin couldn't all very well mention the height difference of over a hundred feet, so he settled for saying, "He's much bigger than me."
"Then just be very, very careful in bed, okay?"
Jin was grateful he hadn't tried to use the webcam because he didn't want Yamapi to be able to see his face right now. "I didn't mean it like that!"
Yamapi ignored him and proceeded to offer up every scrap of advice he'd ever learned from reading his sister's magazines, not being in a position to advise on dating men from personal experience. Jin didn't know whether to be irritated or thankful that his friend was trying so hard to help. The latter, mostly. He listened and laughed and promised to be careful, and hoped Ryo never found out about any of this.
They talked until Jin heard the door again and knew he had to wrap things up.
"I don't know what I'm going to tell everyone," he said. "I don't know how I'm going to explain my disappearance, and right now I don't care. I'll worry about it when I go back down."
"So you will be coming home?" Yamapi sounded relieved. "I don't have to start paying all the rent myself?"
"I'll come home." It pained Jin to say it, to force words out around the lump in his throat. "Soon. But not yet. I can't leave him like this."
It was more than he could do to pop into Kame's life for a few days and then disappear, leaving him without any source of human contact. Even a tiny friend had to be better than no friend at all.
The session ended with Yamapi promising to do his best to fob off all enquirers (Jin hoped he wouldn't try to push the kidnapping thing) and Jin vowing to return home before his manager hired a hit man to make sure his disappearance was permanent. By the time Kame returned, completely drenched, the speakers were silent.
"You're soaked!" Jin didn't need to speak into the microphone for Kame to hear that.
"One second the sun was shining and the next, the clouds burst," Kame said, trying to wring out his sodden T-shirt. "It only took me twenty seconds to run inside and I feel like I fell in the sea."
When Jin joked that it looked like it too, Kame flicked water at him and squelched off to change.
The rain didn't let up for two whole days after that; it wouldn't have been safe for Jin to venture down the beanstalk even if he'd felt inclined to do so. The two of them hid indoors, having fun in the kitchen (Kame had managed to pick quite a number of apples before the rain fell and the Internet was full of recipes), the games room (Kame had a whole bunch of games - mostly baseball - for his consoles, which Jin enjoyed even though he had to stand on the controllers and jump on the buttons) and the dining room (where they continued their embarrassing YouTube spree with PVs and made fun of each other's hairstyles).
In fact, they had fun everywhere except the bedroom, where Jin continued to sneak across to Kame's pillow at night despite the risk of being crushed. Kame didn't mention it until he woke up one morning to find Jin cuddling his left pinky.
"You have to stop doing this, Jin."
Jin shrugged. "I like being near you." He didn't have anything to lose by being honest, not at this point.
Kame managed to extricate his finger from Jin's grasp and leaned closer to hear him better. (He refused to set up the laptop and microphone in the bedroom.) "You still have to stop. Do you have any idea how frustrating this is for me? I can't even touch you without crushing you."
"Does that mean you want to?" Jin said hopefully. "Touch me, not crush me."
Air left Kame's lungs in a sigh so big it almost blew Jin off the pillow. "Only for the last four years or so. Not that it makes any difference if I say it now."
"It makes a difference," Jin assured him. "It makes a big difference. Because it's just as frustrating for me."
When Kame didn't respond initially Jin wondered if he'd spoken loud enough. Had he overstepped the boundaries of this strange, mismatched friendship? Wasn't it kind of weird to hug your friend's finger while he slept - and even weirder that the only reason it was a finger was because anywhere else was too big to hold?
But it wasn't that Jin's words were too soft - only that they were too enormous, too significant to sink in so fast. He knew Kame understood, though, when a smile bright enough to light up the entire castle spread across his face.
That day Jin discovered there's nothing worse than to be with the person you like and know that they feel the same, and yet be unable to so much as hold hands. At least the rain had finally stopped and the castle grounds had dried up by the time they ventured outside to enjoy the afternoon sunshine. They sat on the grass, as far from the castle as they could get.
At least, Kame sat on the grass. Jin tried it for all of a minute before grabbing a handful of Kame's navy blue T-shirt and using it to climb up to his shoulder. It was easier to make himself heard from there, he reasoned.
"I think I should go," he said. "Back down to Tokyo. I'm just making things worse for you."
"Things were bad enough that I had to resort to asking a wishing well for a friend," Kame said. "Everything after that was an improvement."
"We could Skype? I'll create an account for you, then you'll still have someone to talk to. I could go tell your family you're okay-"
"I don't want you to lie to my family for me."
"It's not a lie." Jin crept closer to Kame's neck and leant against it for balance. "You're healthy, you're sane, you're-"
"-over a hundred feet tall," Kame finished for him. "I don't think they'd take it too well."
"They're your family. If they can love you when you're tiny, they can love you when you're tall." Jin didn't add the obvious ending but Kame must've inferred it because he turned his head just enough to rub his cheek against Jin's hair.
It was the first time Kame had deliberately touched him for any reason that didn't involve transport and it made his whole body feel light, filled with a giddy, intoxicating warmth, like he could bubble over at any moment and spill sheer joy all over the grass. He nuzzled back and then, daringly, pressed a kiss to Kame's cheek.
A second later, Kame's cheek wasn't there anymore.
Jin clung to the neck of the T-shirt for dear life as his seat dropped away from under him. It wasn't an earthquake, or a skyquake, or whatever the hell you called the sort of quake that rocked giant castles at the top of beanstalks. The world wasn't moving.
Kame was.
Or rather, he was shrinking. Jin couldn't even feel Kame's shoulder under him anymore; if it hadn't been for his grip on the T-shirt he'd be splattered on the ground by now. He had to close his eyes, couldn't handle the dizzying speed at which the grass was coming up to meet him. All he could do was hang on and wait for everything to stop.
He landed hard, but not where he'd expected. Grass didn't generally cry out in pain. He opened his eyes to find himself sprawled across Kame's lap, still clutching his T-shirt.
"You didn't feel this heavy a couple of minutes ago," Kame said, grimacing. Hearing his voice at normal volume threw Jin for a loop. "I shouldn't have kept giving you second helpings."
Jin uncurled stiff fingers to release Kame's shirt and wished his head would catch up with the world. It still felt like he was falling. He struggled to right himself but only succeeded in bruising his stomach on Kame's knee.
"Stop wriggling before one of us loses something important."
"You're...you're..." Jin couldn't even get the words out.
"Yeah, I am." Kame broke into a grin and managed to get one hand - one normal, human-sized hand - on Jin's waist to help him sit up without doing himself an injury. "The second you kissed me. I guess the well just took a really long time to grant that particular wish."
Jin managed to struggle into a sitting position, conscious of the fact that he was still on Kame's legs and Kame still had a hand on his waist and didn't seem to be in any rush to remove it. Truth be told, Jin didn't want him to, either. The giant he'd befriended had shrunk down to become much more accessible, less myth and more man, with short, stubby fingers and a sprinkling of tiny moles. He'd become someone Jin could touch normally...and someone who could touch him without having to hold back.
If Kame still wanted to, of course. Jin leaned forwards just as Kame's other hand slid up his back, coming to rest below his shoulderblades and nudging him closer with light but persistent pressure. He gave in, willingly. Kame met him in the middle, excitement in his eyes and welcome warm on his lips that had Jin forgetting about how he'd never actually taken his possible interest in guys beyond the theoretical stage before. It wasn't that different, really, if you didn't count the tickle of stubble, or the way Kame sounded when he moaned low and deep into Jin's mouth. Jin felt himself stirring in response after days of being driven to the edge of frustration.
He broke away, breathless, when a blade of grass brushed his back and he realised they were still outdoors - and with Kame now back to his own size, the castle was a long way off. But they didn't have to return, did they?
"Don't look at it," Kame murmured. "We're never going back there." He rested his forehead against Jin's, blocking his view of the castle. "We're going to climb down that beanstalk and give the press a heart attack."
Having had several unpleasant encounters with the media, Jin wasn't averse to this. But that didn't mean he was in any rush to embark on the long journey home. Once they were back in Tokyo, he'd have his work cut out for him to keep his manager from killing him while Kame would be caught up in a whirlwind of activity, trying to get his life back on track. Going home meant everything had to change, that the idyllic bubble containing the past few days would pop and deposit them both on the cold, hard floor of reality where Kamenashi Kazuya and Akanishi Jin walked in parallel worlds, always within sight but never within reach.
Not that they'd ever make it anywhere near the beanstalk if Kame didn't let go. He slid one hand under Jin's shirt, skimming lightly over his lower back, and Jin jumped as a nail scraped his skin.
"Sorry," Kame said, smoothing the scrape with gentle fingers. "It just feels so good to be able to touch you without worrying that I'll accidentally crush you."
"I'm not a china doll."
"I know, I know." Kame planted apologetic kisses down Jin's cheek and the side of his neck, ghosting his lips over the exposed collarbone and withdrawing in alarm when Jin yelped and tried to squirm away.
"It tickles," he explained, crossing his arms over his collarbones in case Kame got any funny ideas. "Isn't it ticklish for you?"
"Not really..."
By way of revenge Jin tried a tentative tickle attack but if Kame had vulnerable spots he didn't find them, not that this stopped either of them from laughing like a pair of giddy schoolchildren playing on the beach. He relished being able to get his arms around more of Kame than his little finger; for both of them being cooped up indoors knowing full well that they were attracted to each other but being unable to do anything about it meant that now they could touch, they were in no rush to stop.
The hand under Jin's shirt worked its way along his ribcage; the other roamed anywhere it could reach, doing everything possible to press them closer together as if they were still too far apart. Deciding it was safe to leave his collarbones unguarded Jin did the same, threading his fingers through Kame's sun-warmed hair as they kissed, their lips still sweet from caramel sauce and tongues eager to explore.
He lost track of how long they sat in the grass like that. There seemed to be no end of things to learn about each other, like how Kame loved it when Jin nibbled gently at his pierced ear, or how appreciative Jin could be when Kame kneaded his back in an amateur - but enthusiastic - attempt at a massage.
It was only when the sun vanished briefly behind a cloud that Jin remembered they were outdoors - an unusual state of affairs, given that he normally couldn't kiss anyone in public unless it was for work. He recalled the glinting eyes in the long grass and shivered.
Kame drew back enough to meet his eyes. "Something wrong?"
"Just wondering about the giant insects."
"They won't bother us," Kame said dismissively. "Besides, we'll see them coming."
"I'm more worried that's what they'll see us doing, actually..."
That earned him a tap on the back of the head and a smirk from Kame. "You do a song like Lovejuice and get embarrassed because a couple of oversized insects might be watching us make out?"
"It's about a cocktail!"
"Oh, is that what they're calling it these days? I must be more out of touch than I thought."
Jin resigned himself to being misunderstood for the rest of his life.
"But my legs are going to sleep anyway," Kame said, "so how about we move? The grass will keep us covered. Like this."
He nudged Jin's hip to make him roll off his legs, then pulled him down so they ended up lying next to each other in the long grass, sheltered from prying eyes.
"How are your legs?" Jin asked.
"Numb, thanks to you." Kame clearly didn't hold a grudge, and didn't complain when Jin began to massage life back into his legs, beginning at the ankles and working his way steadily upwards.
When he reached mid-thigh he stopped, uncertain.
"It's okay to keep going," Kame said, squeezing Jin's hip by way of encouragement. "Isn't it?"
The rational part of Jin's brain, which was currently being overwhelmed by the rest of it, pointed out that he couldn't ask for a better first time with a guy than with someone he'd actually had a crush on for years and had already seen naked, even if they were outdoors and therefore totally screwed if the rain came back.
"Yeah." Jin swallowed hard. "It's okay."
It was, he discovered, more than okay when Kame proved just as adventurous exploring below the belt as above it, still eager to lay hands on as much of Jin as he could. It took them a while to coordinate, because Jin was a little clumsy and Kame was a little impatient and hands and elbows went everywhere, but they managed not to inflict any major damage on each other.
Kame had obviously done this before; didn't hesitate for a second once he had Jin's jeans and underwear bunched around his thighs. Jin hadn't - not with guys, and he didn't think his experience with girls would be of much use. Although very pretty, Kame was no girl, as Jin had seen firsthand. But he knew what he liked for himself, at least, so he tried it out on Kame in the hopes that what worked for one guy would work reasonably well for another.
It was hard to concentrate, though, when Kame's hands stroked and squeezed and teased in ways that made Jin's brain stop in its tracks, momentarily overwhelmed by how good it felt. He lay back, stunned and panting; Kame laughed and kissed him again, stealing his remaining breath in the sweetest possible manner.
"See? No giant insects, Jin."
"They're probably just hiding and enjoying the free show," Jin muttered.
"I don't care if they're enjoying it as long as we're enjoying it."
There were no worries on that score. Kame had one leg between Jin's, crawled half atop him to maximise the contact between them. That made the angles more awkward than ever but Jin didn't mind. He didn't even care if they never got to do this again after they returned to Tokyo because it felt like he was about to expire from pleasure on the spot. He rolled his hips up to meet Kame - all that dance practice had to come in handy for something - and found no shortage of friction waiting for him. It didn't take much to finish him off; Kame's clever fingers stroked him just right and he arched his back towards the sky, coming down with slow, unsteady breaths and melted bones.
Kame wiped his sticky hand on the grass; with the other he stroked Jin's hair until his eyes refocused and his mind recovered enough to remember he wasn't the only person involved. Determined to make Kame feel equally undone, Jin wrapped one arm around his waist to hold him still and set to work wih his free hand until Kame and coherency were barely on speaking terms, the sounds emanating from his throat bearing no resemblance whatsoever to real words until he came with Jin's name on his lips, which made Jin feel sort of proud.
They didn't move for a while, cuddled together on the grass with no real energy now all the tension from the past few days had been released. Rebuttoning jeans was about as far as they got until Kame suggested, without much enthusiasm, that they should consider starting on the beanstalk if they were going to reach Tokyo before night fell.
"I'm not sure I can climb down without falling right now," Jin confessed. "And I'm too comfortable to move."
"You've got my elbow in your spleen and you're comfortable?"
With considerable effort, Jin shrugged. "It's not like I need my spleen for anything."
Kame kissed him on the forehead and pushed himself up on one elbow. "All those fansites saying you were M were right, then."
"You looked me up on the Internet?"
It was Kame's turn to shrug. "I've been up here a long time. Which is why the sooner we get back down, the happier I'll be."
Reluctantly, Jin rose to his feet, stretching out heavy limbs in preparation for the long climb down. He brushed dirt off his jeans and groaned.
"If you're that worn out, I guess we could always stay one last night in the castle and climb down tomorrow," Kame said.
"It's not that." Jin patted his empty pockets. "We'd have to return to the castle anyway. I left my phone in your dining room!"