[JE] Clueless
Title: Clueless
Fandom: KAT-TUN
Pairing: Akame
Rating: PG-13
Word count: Approx. 11,000
Genre: Crack, which means you all have to suspend your disbelief for the duration of the fic. ^_^
Disclaimer: Not mine, damnit.
Summary: KAT-TUN find themselves embroiled in a game of Cluedo with a twist for the 'Cartoon KAT-TUN Murder Mystery Special!', in which Jin gets to have fun with candlesticks, Koki has incredibly bad timing, and everyone - with the possible exception of Ueda - is simply...clueless.
Author's Note: Dedicated to lip_stick_love, whose comment about Koki disposing of Jin in the lighting booth with the candlestick inspired this fic. Does not use the theme, I'm afraid - the closest I get to a white wedding is having a 'Mrs. White'!
'Cluedo' (or 'Clue', if you're American) is, I think, 'Mystery Game' in Japan. However, to keep things simple, I've left the game's name unchanged here.
Clueless
Jin didn't mean to fall asleep in the car. He'd made a bold declaration to this effect, vowing to remain awake for the entire journey because he was desperate to know where they were going.
He wasn't alone in this. For a two-part 'Cartoon KAT-TUN Murder Mystery Special!', the members of KAT-TUN were crammed in a car for three hours, en route to a mansion so secret only their driver knew where they were going - and he was under orders not to tell, on pain of receiving a tongue-lashing from Nishikido Ryo. Since this was considered by many of Johnny's minions to be a fate worse than death, he wasn't talking.
Neither was anyone else, much. There was the expected speculation on their destination, the (ignored) complaints at having their cell phones, cigarettes and mp3 players taken from them, and the marvelling at how well Junno was adjusting to having his DS confiscated.
"He doesn't stop smiling at all!" Nakamaru said.
Ueda looked at Junno's frozen grin and checked his watch for the millionth time since they'd left. "Delayed shock," he explained. "It'll hit him later."
After Jin fell asleep twenty minutes outside Tokyo, nobody except Kame spoke, and only then to warn Koki to put down those marker pens. Jin was wedged comfortably between them in the back seat, and as much as Kame liked the idea of doodling all over Jin's face to pay him back for the pins-and-needles caused by his head resting on Kame's shoulder, he didn't think it was safe to do so with permanent markers. Not when they were going to be on camera for the better part of the next thirty-six hours.
"You think we should film some of this?" Nakamaru murmured, holding up one of the handheld cameras they'd been given. "I bet the fans would love it. He looks so peaceful and harmless when he's asleep."
Jin promptly disproved this by stirring, clutching with clawed hands for a blanket that simply wasn't there. Koki narrowly avoided having the hood of his sweatshirt ripped off, and Kame had to save the day by offering his jacket for sacrifice. As long as Jin stayed asleep, he couldn't ask every five minutes if they were there yet, and for that, Kame was prepared to risk one of the less fashionable items in his wardrobe.
"You can't film him when he's using me as a pillow," Kame pointed out, keeping his voice as quiet as possible. "We're supposed to be easing back into being friends in public, not jumping right up to Arashi-level. They'll never let it be shown."
Nakamaru filmed a few minutes anyway - testing out the zoom, he said - and lapsed back into inactivity when it became clear that no one was interested in acting up for the camera. It was a grey, gloomy morning and everyone's enthusiasm was at an all-time low.
Matters didn't improve much when they reached their destination. The car pulled up in front of an imposing, stately building surrounded by high bushes, penned in by ornate twists of iron. The owners, who used the place as a holiday home, clearly enjoyed their privacy. The house didn't look welcoming in the slightest.
The second car pulled up, carrying members of the film crew. Since the boys were largely being left to their own devices, however, most of the filming was to be done using cameras and microphones secreted throughout the mansion. It had been a haunted house attraction, once-upon-a-time, and the security system was still in place. Only the bathrooms and bedrooms were off-limits, though they could use the handheld cameras to film each other, obviously.
Jin didn't wake up until Kame tugged his jacket free, and even then he didn't really come to his senses until they were all standing in the foyer, clustered round their small pile of luggage. He'd sleepwalked his way out of the car, avoiding a nasty tumble on the steps only because Ueda and Koki had sandwiched him between them, and he'd been so out of it that he'd ended up carrying Kame's bag as well as his own - though only because Kame had handed it to him.
A staff member, cunningly disguised as a French maid, approached with their room assignments. "Same sleeping arrangements as the Okinawa trip," he said.
Nakamaru and Koki high-fived.
"But I want to share with Kame!" Jin blurted out, fully awake now. "I don't care if they're not using it as an attraction anymore; this house is probably still haunted." He looked around at the maudlin decor, at the dead-eyed gargoyles and wallpaper dark with old stains, and added, "Definitely haunted!"
"Which concerns Kamenashi how, exactly?" the maid asked.
Jin ignored the bewildered looks KT-TUN were giving him, speaking with the utmost conviction. "He's going to protect me from the ghosts. He's the only one who can do it."
Ueda begged to differ. "I'm the one who's been boxing for two years - if anyone's qualified to protect you, Akanishi, it's me!"
"I may not be a boxer, but I have played one on TV! And on the stage!" Like Ueda, Kame chose to disregard the non-existence of ghosts - particularly ones who could be disposed of with a right hook.
The unfortunate staff member tried to argue, to convince them that it would be a really bad idea to put Kame and Jin in the same room because all the rumours would start up again - Kanjani8's Yokoyama was already doing his best to get the gossip going - but gave up after battling Jin's own brand of logic for five minutes. It was easier, he thought, just to give in and simply omit any mention on film of the sleeping arrangements.
"Kamenashi and Akanishi, Ueda and Taguchi, Tanaka and Nakamaru," he said wearily, handing a folder to the last named and removing himself to the kitchen for a fortifying drink.
"All that stuff about me protecting you, did you really mean it?" Kame asked. "Because I don't think any of the training I did at the gym is going to save you if a ghost decides it doesn't like you."
"Why wouldn't it like me?" Jin pretended to be hurt. "Besides, of course I didn't mean it. But it got us sharing a room, didn't it?"
"So you're not scared at all, then?"
That was Nakamaru's cue to discreetly trail the end of his scarf over Jin's shoulders, prompting the other man to shiver and admit that yes, perhaps, he was just a tiny little bit on the nervous side.
"I'm not surprised," Koki muttered. "Look at the paintings! The eyes are watching us!"
"Of course they're watching us." Ueda said this so matter-of-factly that everyone felt that it was only natural for dreary, foreboding paintings of long-dead people to have shining eyes that winked and flashed in the light. "Where do you think they're hiding the cameras?"
"Anywhere and anywhere they can, except the bedrooms and bathrooms." Nakamaru waved the folder he'd been handed. He was consulting the first of a dozen sheets of paper. "The instructions say we're supposed to get changed first, and then explain the rules of the game to the audience."
"Game?" KAT-TU chorused. "What game?"
"Cluedo," came the reply. "One of us is going to be a murderer."
-----
Twenty minutes later, KAT-TUN were seated in the lounge, having been issued their "costumes". Reactions were mixed. It wasn't that the clothes were bad, but the colouring...
"You think they got us mixed up with Kanjani8?" Koki asked, gazing down in horror at his bright yellow tracksuit with 'JOKER' emblazoned on the front. "We don't do the 'members by colour' thing."
"I don't think it's so terrible." Ueda wasn't badly off, in tight white jeans and a matching, long-sleeved top that could've come from his own wardrobe.
"Yeah, it's only till tomorrow afternoon," Junno chimed in, not caring one jot about how his forest green leggings and sweater made him resemble a woodland folk hero.
Nakamaru felt a lot better about his own attire, a brilliant purple suit, once he realised that it came complete with a hat. This addition, he felt, went a long way towards making the outfit more acceptable.
"They'll want us to pretend to be superheroes next," Kame said darkly. "On bicycles." At least the blue jeans he'd been given were designer, but the accompanying tank top and jacket were suspiciously free from labels.
"Then I get to be the leader! The guy in red's always the leader, right?"
This revelation made Jin extremely happy. Even happier, in fact, than the burgundy jeans, matching top and plaid shirt had made him. One could never have too much plaid, he felt.
Nakamaru grinned at him. "Nope, according to this it means you get to be Miss Scarlett, the beautiful, young, free and single one who discovers the body of our esteemed host, Dr. Black."
"But you guys all know I'm not single-"
There was a brief scuffle as the rest of the group tried to smother Jin for almost admitting on camera that he was in a relationship.
"-minded enough to...uh...can I have some room to breathe?" he gasped out, abandoning his attempt to twist his sentence into something unrelated and thus save himself from interrogation when he got back home.
Reluctantly, everyone returned to their former resting places. There was no telling what KAT-TUN's bluntest, most straightforward member was likely to say, especially if he forgot about the hidden cameras.
"You're taking the part of Miss Scarlett," Nakamaru continued. "Koki's Colonel Mustard, Taguchi's the Reverend Green, Ueda's Mrs. White, Kame's Mrs. Peacock, and I," he twirled his hat elegantly between his fingers, "am Professor Plum."
Ueda, secure in the knowledge that he was actually the toughest guy in the room, was resigned to being a girl for the rest of his life. In any case, he looked good in white.
Kame didn't really care, as long as they didn't make him shave his legs. "So which one of us is a murderer?"
"That's what we have to find out."
Nakamaru attempted to explain the principles behind Cluedo to those who didn't know, but ended up surrendering the floor to Junno. The group's resident gaming-addict had the knowledge of half-a-dozen electronic versions at his fingertips.
"But that doesn't sound like much of a ratings-winner," Jin mused. "Not if we're just sitting around in bright colours and suggesting stuff."
More sheets flew from Nakamaru's folder. "We're going to have the game in a different format, since the fans obviously don't want to watch us playing with cards all night."
Kame snorted. "You haven't seen all the mail suggesting we have a new 'Strip Poker' segment for the show, then?"
"We really get mail like that?" Koki sounded intrigued. "Because I wouldn't mind-"
There was another brief scuffle as everyone leapt on Koki to stop him demonstrating on camera just how happy he'd be to go along with that suggestion.
"I wasn't going to do it," he sulked, once they finally let him up for air.
"We haven't got any cards, anyway," Ueda pointed out. "They were confiscated along with everything else."
"But there *are* cards!" Nakamaru made a desperate attempt to regain everyone's attention with a short beatbox routine, segueing neatly into an explanation of the rules of the game. "It's like a scavenger hunt, except that we're only supposed to collect information. Hidden all over the house - rooms only, no hallways - are Suspect, Room and Weapon cards, and as we find them, we have to check them off on these." He distributed the six checklists. "We work alone, but we can trade information if we want, and we can make an accusation at any time. The first person to make a correct accusation wins a trip to Kyoto with the member of his choice - on camera, of course."
"Of course," they groaned as one. No matter which of them won, it was a foregone conclusion as to who he'd take with. Unless the powers that be chose to meddle, of course, in which case Jin had a horrible feeling that in the unlikely event that he won, he'd be stuck going sightseeing with Taguchi Junnosuke and his store of bad puns.
"It's every man for himself!" the apron-clad staff member cried as he reappeared.
So naturally, once they'd finished explaining the rules for the benefit of the audience and collected their individual instruction sheets, the six members of KAT-TUN set off in teams.
-----
They didn't get very far.
"Where's the body?" Jin asked. "Aren't I supposed to find it?"
"You've lost the corpse already?" Kame teased. "We haven't even started yet!"
"There isn't a real corpse," Nakamaru explained patiently as the six of them stood by the cellar stairs, where a large 'X' had been marked on the floor with two strips of fabric. "We're not filming a horror movie - and if we were, Akanishi would be too scared to come out from under the bed."
"Hey!"
"The 'X' marks where 'Dr. Black' was found by our lovely, plaid-clad Miss Scarlett - but..." Nakamaru paused for dramatic effect, "this wasn't where he was killed. And since we don't have a body to look at, we can't tell the method, either.
"We have to investigate using only our wits. Good luck, everyone."
"What would Miroku do?" Jin wondered to himself as everyone but Kame disappeared.
Kame stifled a laugh. "Probably call in his network of informants to search the house for him. But you don't have that option, so let's start looking for cards, shall we? According to the instruction sheet, some of the rooms have hidden doors and things, so we're going to have to check everywhere."
"Hidden doors?" Jin was getting excited. "Like, we pull down candlesticks and the wall slides open?"
"Yeah." Kame was struck by a thought. "Just make sure the candle isn't lit before you go tugging on candlesticks, okay?"
"I'm not going to burn myself," Jin said crossly. "And you should keep away from flames altogether so your hair doesn't catch fire."
Kame ran a hand carelessly through his short black locks. "No hairspray today. They confiscated that as well."
"Never mind," Jin consoled him. "By the end of the day we'll all be tearing our hair out anyway."
"Or each other's. Any preference where we start our search?"
Jin consulted his map of the mansion. "Third floor, West Wing."
"Why there?"
"I overheard Taguchi saying he was starting in the basement of the East Wing."
-----
Sure enough, Jin and Kame didn't encounter any interruptions as they made their way to the westernmost end of the building. Using the handheld cameras, they filmed at odd intervals, capturing the rust-brown of the torn wallpaper, the greenish gold of the picture frames, and the tarnished silver of the candlesticks that graced many of the silent passages.
They also ended up with a lot of footage of the floor, because Jin forgot to switch his camera off once, and there were several minutes of nothing but Jin reaching up to try and unbolt a door, where Kame got sidetracked by the sudden flash of stomach and hit 'zoom in' by accident.
"The more I see of this place, the less I like it," Jin complained. "I'm surprised they've even got electricity."
Kame grimaced. "I suspect the only reason they haven't switched it off and left us to wander around with torches is that the staff members are here too, and there's no reason to deprive them of things like lighting and television."
"No, only their dignity," Jin agreed with a giggle, remembering the French maid's outfit.
The first room they investigated was the study, in which the windows were positioned just right for the occupants to have a marvellous view of the garden pond, and thus avoid doing any studying whatsoever.
"Hidden drawers," Jin decided, tugging on the handles. "The desks always have hidden drawers, in the movies. I bet there's a card in here somewhere."
Kame, who was opening all the reference books on the shelf and shaking them out, wasn't so sure. "Those drawers are probably locked because the owners have private documents in them, not to stop you from rummaging around inside the desk to find its secrets."
After several unsuccessful attempts to prise said drawers open with a plastic ruler, Jin was forced to admit that Kame might be right. He hid the broken halves carefully under a dictionary and tiptoed away from the desk.
"What about the fireplace?" he suggested. "Do you think they might have hidden one in there?"
Kame shot him a disparaging look. "Who hides a piece of card in a fireplace?"
Undeterred, Jin dropped to his knees and cautiously tested the fireplace for warmth. Upon closer inspection, the neat stack of logs proved to be artificial; the entire contraption, powered by electricity. It was switched off. Peeking out round the corner of the frame was a small black card.
Jin picked it up. "Colonel Mustard."
Kame crossed the name out on both their checklists. "I guess Koki isn't a murderer."
"That's always good to know, given that our bedroom for the night is next door to his." Jin flashed an impish smile at Kame. "You think we should tell him he's not guilty?"
Kame grinned right back. "Not until he's got information to trade in return."
According to the instructions, no room held more than one card, so they felt safe in moving on to the next. Jin replaced the card for the other players to find and accepted Kame's helping hand to rise to his feet.
Then he accepted Kame's brushing the dust from his jeans.
By the time he got round to accepting Kame's attempts to warm his chilled lips with his own body heat, Jin remembered that they weren't alone.
"Cameras!" he squawked, ducking away so Kame couldn't back him up against the desk.
Kame swore, then realised he shouldn't have said such things on camera and swore again, much milder this time. He apologised twice to the room in general, caught Jin by the arm and dragged him out.
"It's going to be a long two days, isn't it?" Jin said.
"You're blushing, Miss Scarlett."
Jin caught sight of himself in the mirror as they passed. "At least I match. If you start turning blue, Mrs. Peacock, we'll have to cut the game short and go to hospital."
"That's my last-resort escape plan. Think it'll work?"
"Only if you take me with you so I can give you the Kiss of Life."
-----
The next couple of rooms yielded nothing, but the fourth, an unused bedroom where all the furniture was covered by sheets, proved more worthwhile.
"We're going to find one in here," Jin declared. "I can feel it."
Kame couldn't resist ribbing him. "Ah, Miss Scarlett certainly has excellent feminine intuition..."
"Shut up."
Jin turned away, began peering under covers in search of the sought-after piece of card. The number of spiders he encountered made him wish he hadn't bothered.
"Maybe we'll find one of those secret rooms," Kame said optimistically. "There might be a trap door or something under one of these sheets."
Suddenly enthused by the thought, Jin reached for one sheet and accidentally slipped on another, ending up flat on his back and staring up at the low ceiling in a daze. It was a pretty ceiling - much prettier than the carpet - with swirls and checks and possibly a pair of bunny rabbits made from clouds, standing on either side of a suitcase.
A suitcase?
As Kame approached to see if he was all right, Jin pointed up above. "You were saying about a trap door?"
Kame leaned back to study the ceiling, almost tripping over Jin in the process. "It looks like a suitcase. The handle's jutting out."
"Can we reach it?"
"If you get up off the floor and give me a boost, yeah."
Obligingly, Jin put all those hours at the gym to good use, hoisting Kame up to reach the handle. It was attached to a small panel which swung open easily, allowing Kame to pull down the ladder inside.
"Hidden room?" Jin asked.
"Attic." Kame scrambled up the ladder. He vanished for a moment, reappearing with a triumphant grin and dust smears all over the sleeves of his jacket. "The ballroom!"
"But I'm not in the mood for dancing..."
-----
Two more rooms cleared the corridor but didn't score them any more clues. Kame decided they were better off going down to the second floor, in order to give Junno and Ueda time to work on the East Wing and acquire information that could be bargained out of them later. No one knew where Nakamaru and Koki had disappeared to, but Jin suspected they'd headed straight for the billiard room.
The first door they tried led to a dressing room of such immense proportions that Kame was immediately jealous of all the closet space.
"Just look at this! Jin, do you know how long I'd have to shop for to fill it all up?"
Jin was more interested in the suit of armour that stood, inexplicably, in the corner of the room. "You think the owners would mind if I tried it on?" he asked.
Kame allowed himself to be distracted long enough for Jin's question to sink in. The armour looked uncomfortable, but who was he to squash Jin's fantasies of knighthood? "Better go to the bathroom first," he advised. "I hear it's difficult to get out of these things in a hurry."
In the end, Jin passed on playing dress-up. The dust that flew out when he opened the helmet's visor made up his mind for him.
"At least they left us our water bottles." Kame handed one to Jin once he'd stopped coughing.
"Thanks." Jin wiped his mouth with the back of his hand and glared at the suit of armour. "I don't think there's a card in there."
"Let's take a look in here." Kame threw open the nearest closet door, finding it full of clothing that wouldn't have looked out of place at an Arashi concert, and shut it again in a hurry. "I mean, *this* one." He tried a second door and got hit in the face by a falling fur coat.
The closet was actually bigger than Jin's apartment, or so it seemed, and filled with furs of assorted shapes and colours. They were ill-cared for, though - a large pile sat in the centre, looking comfortable and inviting, and Jin figured it was a good time to take a break.
"You're right; we'll look in this one." He beckoned Kame inside and plumped down on the heap, settling with a contented sigh.
Kame switched on the dim closet light and shut the door after them, feeling reasonably certain that there were no cameras inside. And if he was wrong, well, they were just about to get some footage for a 'Cartoon KAT-TUN - Adults Only!' special.
He dropped down next to Jin; the furs made a cosy nest, soft and plush, parting to welcome them inside. Kame's arm slipped automatically around Jin's back, a move second nature to him now, and he turned his head to meet Jin's lips with his own.
"Is there a lock on the door?" Jin's words, uttered between kisses, were badly muffled.
"Don't know, don't care," Kame mumbled back. They didn't have time to talk. The precious few minutes they could snatch together couldn't be wasted, not when Jin's plump, luscious lips were crying out to be kissed and every kiss was rewarded with a touch, warmth spreading from Jin's fingers, soft, feather-strokes along Kame's face, sliding down beneath his shirt to caress the curve between neck and shoulder.
Kame knew they didn't have long, knew he shouldn't have followed Jin inside and all but jumped him on the pile of furs, but even though Kame was ordinarily KAT-TUN's #1 when it came to resisting temptation, the one thing he'd never been able to deny himself was Jin.
Jin, not over-burdened with willpower himself, had no issue with this, even though his intentions upon entering the closet had been nothing more complicated than resting a moment on a comfortable fur mountain. Kame's hand pushed past the plaid and then the shirt underneath, searching for bare skin; Jin's breath came out as a hiss as Kame's nails traced a ragged path up his spine.
"Sorry." Kame's apology was lost somewhere in the vicinity of Jin's hair, words wandering off for a walk through the dark, curling strands.
It hadn't hurt, much. Kame always tried to be gentle. He didn't always succeed, but any damage dealt Jin was inevitably the result of desire, not malicious intent, and on that count, Jin could give back as good as he got.
Most of the time.
"S'okay," he muttered. "Just don't leave any marks where the camera might see them."
Jin let out a soft moan when Kame's questing fingers sought and found the button on his jeans. He squirmed, pressing into the other man's hand, trying to get the pressure where he wanted it most; Kame caught Jin's hand with his free one and trailed it down to his own belt buckle.
He'd just succeeded in getting Jin to unfasten his belt when the door slid open, revealing the bright yellow figure of Colonel "JOKER" Mustard.
"What are you guys doing in the closet?" Koki asked, blurting out his question before he got a good look at the scene.
Though red-faced and furious, Kame didn't bat so much as an eyelash. "We're looking for clues," he said shortly, and slammed the door shut again.
Koki mentally reviewed the situation: Jin's shirt had been half-off, falling to his wrists, his lips had been firmly fixed to Kame's, and both of them had been fumbling at each other's waistbands. The memory left Koki blushing like the first time he'd seen himself in a drama, which was how Nakamaru found him when he made it back from the bathroom.
"Anything in that one?" Nakamaru asked, pointing to the fur-closet.
"Nothing. Nothing at all. This room's a complete waste of time."
"Then why do you look so embarrassed?"
Koki thought fast. "Naked mannequin," he explained.
Nakamaru gave him a bewildered look and followed him out the door.
-----
Koki's untimely intervention had killed the mood, thoroughly quenching Jin's desire to take a break on the furs. He had no wish to be caught again - it was bad enough that he had to watch himself around the cameras, try not to blurt out anything that could later be held against him in a court of law.
Kame, too, felt as though someone had poured a bucket of cold water all over him. "It's not like Koki didn't already know," he pointed out, but it didn't make either of them feel like picking up where they'd left off. The way to raise Jin's spirits, he knew, was by offering food. "Want to go get something to eat? They're leaving snacks out for us downstairs."
Jin considered the hour left till lunch, and the number of rooms remaining in their current passage, and shook his head. "We might as well finish up around here. Can't possibly be less productive, can it? Koki can owe us a clue when we catch up to him again."
With a triumphant flourish, Kame produced the card hidden inside the fur coat that had fallen on his head earlier. "Actually, we'll owe him one - he won't come back in here again, not now, which means he'll never know that," he cast a quick glance at his prize, "Dr. Black wasn't killed with a revolver!"
(In the next room, one thin wall away, Nakamaru pricked up his ears. "Did you hear that?"
Koki listened carefully, but he was too late. "Hear what?"
"That voice, saying Dr. Black wasn't killed with a revolver! Quick, mark it on the checklist!")
Jin dutifully applauded Kame's not-quite card trick, and checked 'revolver' off on both their lists. They weren't getting very far, he noted. That wasn't good. The sooner they won the game - because Jin liked to win, no matter what - the sooner they could get out of there, away from the creepy house and its hidden cameras.
"We need to get moving," he said. "There's no way we're losing to guys like them!"
Kame couldn't help cracking up as he followed in Jin's wake, amused by the enthusiasm his sense of competition could produce. "Good thing they're our friends, or you'd be saying really unflattering things about them, right?"
"Saying really unflattering things about who?"
Jin gave an imperious little toss of the head, suddenly confronted by Nakamaru on his way out of the next room. "Nobody."
"He's getting competitive again," Kame explained, still laughing. "You might as well just hand over your information now, because you know he's going to insist he won anyway."
Nakamaru stuffed his checklist inside his suit jacket. He was on the verge of a witty retort when Koki, blushing an even darker red than Jin's outfit, grabbed him by the arm and dragged him off down the corridor.
Jin turned to Kame, disgusted. "See what you've done? Now they're going to be on their guard and we won't be able to get anything out of them!"
Kame shrugged. "Then we'll have to get it when they're asleep, won't we?"
The sparkles in Jin's eyes could've lit up Tokyo for Christmas. "Secret midnight raid? Ninja-style? Kame!"
He went to throw gleeful arms around Kame, but the other man sidestepped to evade him, mouthing "Cameras".
Jin recoiled just in time to avoid hitting the wall.
-----
An hour later, Jin and Kame had managed to double their store of information. Whoever had killed Dr. Black, it wasn't Miss Scarlett (Jin was thrilled to be innocent) and the crime hadn't been committed with the rope, or in the hall.
The last of these clues had been obtained at great personal cost to Kame - he'd chipped his nail polish reaching behind a chest of drawers. Jin's knuckles were sore from rapping the walls in search of hollow spaces, and he'd spent ten minutes looking for a bathroom before noticing that his map was upside-down.
"You'd like that one, Kame," he commented afterwards. "Skulls all over the wallpaper."
Kame poked his head through the bathroom doorway to have a look for himself. "Didn't you find it intimidating to have all those empty little eye sockets watching you?"
Jin's smile was understandably sheepish. "I had to close my eyes."
They made their way down to the kitchen, where a cold lunch had been left for them by the staff. The others were already there, and based on the number of gaps in the dishes, they'd arrived some time ago.
"I can understand Akanishi being late," Nakamaru greeted them, "but late for lunch?"
Jin shot him a mock-glare in response and made a grab for the nearest sushi platter.
"How's everyone doing?" Kame said casually once he'd managed to snatch enough food away from Jin's eager chopsticks to fill his own plate. "Found many clues?"
"We," Ueda indicated himself and Junno, "found ten cards."
Kame's eyes widened. "Impressive! You guys must've covered a lot of ground - that's more than half the cards already!"
"We've only got six," Koki admitted.
Not counting the three cards that formed the solution, there were eighteen cards altogether - eight rooms, five weapons and five suspects. Kame thought it was quite possible that between the three teams, they actually had all the answers they needed - and even if they didn't, if he could get a look at Ueda's checklist, it would go a long way towards furthering his own.
"We've also got six," he said, and took a generous swallow of the glass of juice Jin had just handed him.
"Are you sure you want to be drinking something given to you by Miss Scarlett?" Ueda said slyly. "You never know - she might be the killer."
"Am not!" Jin stabbed his chopsticks viciously in Ueda's direction. "I'm completely innocent!"
There was a sudden flurry of activity as everyone at the table bar Kame and Jin himself started crossing off 'Miss Scarlett' on their checklists.
Realising what he'd done, Jin tried to make amends so that Kame would stop giving him that horrible, disappointed look. "I mean...I couldn't possibly be a killer, right?" he said weakly. "I'm so nice and harmless, and who ever heard of a murderer who'd run away if the person he was trying to kill managed to touch his collarbone?"
Kame's sigh consumed half the available oxygen in the room. "Just give it up," he advised. "And don't say anything else, please."
Jin's face fell. He turned his attention back to his lunch, careful to avoid looking at anyone else in case he somehow managed to give away the rest of their cards by blinking in the wrong direction or something.
He presented such a miserable figure, in fact, that it made Koki feel quite sorry for him - though this was mostly out of guilt at having earlier caught him in a compromising position. This desire to make it up to Jin and Kame, while admirable, could have been better expressed. Koki had no intention of giving free clues to Ueda's team - he hadn't caught *them* making out in a closet, after all - and he couldn't say anything aloud. He definitely couldn't show Jin his own checklist, and writing things down was out of the question.
That left pantomime.
As luck would have it, Miss Scarlett and Colonel Mustard were seated opposite each other at the table, and as such it was simple enough for the latter to catch the former's attention with a well-placed tap on the ankle.
"Did one of you guys just kick me?"
Koki apologised to Junno and tried again. This time he connected successfully with Jin, who looked up, surprised, but didn't say a word. Koki managed to catch his eye, and pointed a furtive chopstick first towards Jin, to indicate the innocence of Miss Scarlett, and then towards Kame, who remained oblivious. He followed it with a broad grin and a vigorous thumbs-up.
Jin seemed baffled at first, so Koki repeated the sequence.
Twice.
Third time lucky. Jin threw down his chopsticks and leapt to his feet. "Kame, I need to talk to you. Now."
"Can't it wait until after lunch?"
"No, it can't." Jin was shifting his weight impatiently from foot to foot. "Now."
Kame was reluctant to abandon his meal, but Jin seemed horribly agitated and he was blushing like he'd been in some terrible fight with a make-up artist. It was probably best to find out what he wanted. Kame swallowed one last mouthful of rice and followed him to the nearest bathroom, where there were no cameras lurking to record their conversation.
"What's wrong?" he asked when Jin didn't immediately begin. "Because if it's not serious, I'm going back to rescue my lunch before the others finish all the food."
Jin leaned against the towel rack and hung his head in misery. "Um..."
"Yes?"
"You...uh...I..."
"That's a good start," Kame encouraged him. "What about us?"
There was no easy way to say it, Jin supposed. No means by which he could spare himself the embarrassment. But he had to tell Kame, and then...oh, what if Kame actually liked the idea? What then? Just because Jin couldn't bear the thought didn't mean that Kame would feel the same way.
He took a deep breath, looked Kame straight in the eye, and blurted out, "I think Koki wants a threesome!"
Kame clutched the side of the sink to steady himself and wondered what Jin could possibly have misinterpreted to have reached that conclusion. It wouldn't have been the first time.
"I don't want to share you with anyone," Jin whispered. "You always give so much of yourself to the fans - to anyone who's ever met you! I just want to keep the rest for myself."
Jin's words brought a tender smile to Kame's face. "I don't have a problem with that."
He placed his hands on Jin's hips, a light squeeze through the layer of denim; Jin whimpered when those hands began to work their way under both of his shirts, gliding smoothly over his back. He brought his own arms up to wrap them around Kame's neck, and...
"Don't you guys ever lock the door?"
Koki stood in the doorway, apparently sporting a fever of well over two hundred degrees, if his colour was anything to go by.
Kame detached himself with as much dignity as he could muster - not much, under the circumstances - and figured since Koki was there, he might as well find out what all the fuss was about.
"You didn't want a threesome, did you?" he asked.
Koki ruthlessly trampled all over his first response - Now? - and went with the answer that wasn't going to get him killed. Jin still hadn't forgiven him for trying to kiss Kame in all those performances of 'Dream Boys'. "What gave you that idea?"
"Wasn't that what you were trying to tell me at the table?" Jin said.
"N-no!" Koki stammered. "I was trying to tell you the killer isn't Mrs. Peacock. The card was in the dining room. I figured I owed you guys a clue since I walked in on you earlier."
"You've just done it again." Kame wasted no time in pointing this out. "Can we have another one?"
Koki's scowl said there was no way this was going to happen. "I only followed you because I wasn't sure I managed to get my message across - it's not my fault the two of you have no self-control!"
He left before either of them could argue; Kame rolled his eyes and yelled out his thanks.
Then he turned to Jin. "I don't really want to know how you interpreted 'Guess what? Your boyfriend's innocent!' as 'Hey, how about letting me in on some of that hot AkaKame action?', but I'd say this was even more impressive than some of your early English screw-ups."
"At least when I say 'love', it doesn't come out sounding like 'rabu'." Jin smiled sweetly, turned on his heel and left Kame alone in the bathroom to fume about his inability to master the letter 'L'.
-----
After lunch, Jin and Kame finished off the West Wing. On the first floor, in the library, they finally found a secret passage.
"It's about time!" Jin wiped his hand on his jeans - the candlestick he'd yanked had been very, very dusty - and peered into the gaping hole in the wall left by the sudden slide of one of the smaller bookcases.
Kame stared at him in amazement. One wall of the library was entirely taken up by a row of reading desks, each with a pair of candlesticks mounted above. Jin had somehow latched on to the correct device instantly. "What made you go for that one?"
"Simple. It's the one in the middle."
To Jin's credit, it was a plausible reason. And they were in a library, after all, and everyone knew that the library was the best place to find a secret passage. Unless of course you happened to have a stable, in which case there was bound to be one under a bale of hay.
"Got a light?"
"They took our lighters," Kame reminded his partner in crime-solving. "I've got a little torch on my keys?"
Jin stuck his head as far into the passage as he could manage without physically stepping into it, but he couldn't see a thing. "Can I borrow it?"
Kame handed it over, and Jin flicked the switch, sending a narrow beam into the darkness to provide faint illumination. It didn't help much.
"I think I see stairs," Kame said. "Should we go in?"
"Seriously?"
"Well...perhaps just one of us. We don't know where it comes out, and it's probably not a good idea to leave the entrance open like this without someone to guard it. The staff can see us on the security system, but I bet they're not paying much attention."
Jin swallowed hard. Venturing alone into a hidden passage in a spooky old mansion wasn't high on his list of favourite activities. On the other hand, he didn't want Kame to think he was afraid, and if something went wrong, he felt slightly more confident in Kame's ability to get him out of there than in his own if the situation were to be reversed.
"I'll go," he said bravely.
"I knew you would." Kame's tone was encouraging, yet Jin couldn't help but wonder if there had been some manipulation at work. "I'll wait here. If you're not back in an hour, I'll go get help and come find you."
"One hour." Jin licked his lips nervously. "You promise?"
Kame held out his pinky; Jin hooked it with his own. "Promise. I'm not going to leave you wandering around in the dark by yourself."
Jin watched Kame pick out a book from the shelves and settle down opposite the passage entrance, then tightened his grip on the tiny torch and took his first steps into the darkness.
It wasn't as bad as he'd feared. The floor was bare but even and in good repair; Jin's steps grew more confident as he progressed without stumbling, using the walls for balance. Kame had been right about the steps. They wound up and round, taking Jin high enough that he thought he might be on the third floor by now. It was hard to gauge because they didn't climb straight up - instead, they evened out for long spells, and just when he thought he'd walked the length of another corridor he encountered another few steps, taking him ever nearer to the roof of the mansion.
The torch didn't provide much light, so Jin's hands on the walls were not only for balance, but to search for an exit. He didn't find one, not until he reached the end of the passage, where his fingers located a doorknob attached to a wooden door. Relieved, Jin opened it, expecting to find himself in another room.
What he found was total darkness.
Darkness...and a couple of coats.
It took him a few minutes to realise that he was actually standing in a wardrobe with a false back, and that he could quite easily escape by opening the doors directly in front of him. He did so, confirming the theory that had begun forming when he'd seen the coats in the weak torchlight.
The passage from the library led to the bedroom assigned to Ueda Tatsuya and Taguchi Junnosuke.
Jin switched off the torch, closed the wardrobe - both front and back - and sat down on the padded windowseat to rest. The bedrooms they'd been given were all on the third floor, in the central part of the building, and the staff had the same on the second floor. He'd walked up two flights of stairs, though it had seemed much longer because they'd brought him all the way from the farthest end of the West Wing.
If he hadn't had his cell phone confiscated, he'd have called Kame with the news. As it was, he had to go back to the library and tell him in person. He wasn't going back through the passage, though. No way.
He bounced back into the library a short while later, slightly out of breath. "Guess where I ended up?"
Kame held up a 'wrench' card that had been marking the place in his book - a history of board games. "Anywhere with a card?"
"Better." Jin was starting to get excited. "Still up for raiding Ueda's room to see his checklist? Because that's where the passage goes. Even if he locks the door, we can get in through the wardrobe!"
Kame hated to deflate him, but occasionally, reality had to intervene in even Akanishi Jin's life. "And you don't think he'll notice us sneaking out of it, then? Because wardrobe doors aren't exactly known for being stealth-enabling."
Jin pulled out his checklist so he could mark off the weapon card, crossing it with a pencil stroke so angry that he went through the paper. "So we'll distract them both and lure them out of their room somehow, okay? Do I have to think of everything?"
"I just found a card!"
"And I just found a secret passage!"
"And if you keep yelling about it, it's not going to be a secret much longer, is it?"
Grudgingly, Jin conceded that Kame might have a point. He moderated his tone and changed the subject. "How do you think we close the gap again?"
Kame replaced the card in the book and repositioned it on the shelf before crossing over to the candlestick. It was still hanging down at an odd angle; he pushed it back up into position and there was a low rumble as the bookcase returned to its home.
"Like that," he said, and Jin pulled a face in lieu of a suitable retort.
-----
The 'billiard room' and 'conservatory' cards were the next to fall prey to the combined investigative talents of Akanishi Jin and Kamenashi Kazuya - 'fall' being the operative word, as the top step of the wine cellar stairs, a simple plank of wood, snapped the moment Kame set foot upon it. Rot had set in, and even Kame's inconsequential weight was too much for it to bear.
Luckily, Kame had years of practice at a) staying on things and b) falling off things, though the latter had mostly been gained by accident. He clutched at both handrails, managing to channel his forward momentum into a somersault, and landed gingerly a few steps further down.
Jin applauded from the top of the stairs. "That was great! Do you think it'll be on camera?"
Kame took a deep breath, held it for ten seconds, and released it slowly so he wasn't tempted to race back up to the top and kill Jin. "If it isn't, I'm not doing it again," he said through gritted teeth. "Stay up there, okay? No sense in both of us risking our necks."
He continued his cautious descent, making it to the wine cellar floor without further disaster. Most of the racks were empty: the few that weren't contained bottles so covered in cobwebs that Kame wondered if the room had even been entered in the last decade or so.
His answer came in the form of the 'conservatory' card, hastily tucked between two bottles of wine. It wasn't hard to spot - the bottles were in the only area free from webs and dust. He pocketed the card and returned to an anxious Jin.
Jin was looking for paper. "I know it'll give it away," he explained, "but if anyone else comes down here they'll probably fall through the step." He left Kame for a moment to find paper and pen in the library, and came back to write a warning note.
"In Japanese, Jin!"
At Kame's correction, Jin crossed through his carefully-printed 'DANGER!!' and began again in Japanese.
Once the note was finished, Kame fished the card out of his pocket and placed it and the paper by the wine cellar door. No matter how much Jin liked to win, neither of them wanted to do it by giving one of their friends a broken leg or worse.
The 'billiard room' card was marginally easier to obtain, involving no acrobatics at all and only one phenomenal act of bravery - Jin had to walk through a room of creepy-looking dolls, one of which was marching back and forth across the floor until Kame ventured in and removed its batteries.
"Found a card!" Jin exclaimed once he'd made it to the other side. It had been in plain sight, propped up on an Empress doll in the display cabinet.
Kame crossed it off on the list. "Ten down, including the one Koki gave us."
"Ueda's probably got them all by now," Jin said glumly. "He had ten by lunchtime."
"He can't have won yet. According to the instructions, when we're ready to make an accusation we have to go the lounge and say it in front of the staff members, who have the cards with the answer. If anyone wins, the staff should come and round up the rest of us so we can film a big finalé."
"Then there's still hope for us." Jin happily turned his back on the doll room and trotted down the hallway in search of more cards.
-----
They only found one more card before dinner. Jin got carried away in a children's playroom, uncovering the 'kitchen' card at the bottom of a toybox filled with old teddy bears. Kame wondered if anyone would notice if he kidnapped the baseball bear, complete with its little bat and ball.
Dinner itself was held in the dining room - a somewhat subdued affair, since Jin was determined not to be tricked out of any more clues, Ueda and Junno refused to admit how many cards they'd found and Koki kept giving Jin strange looks. Kame and Nakamaru shrugged and carried on their own conversation at the far end of the table.
Thanks to the strained atmosphere, there were no trades of information, and the teams went their separate ways after the food. There would be no telling of ghost stories on this trip.
"No searching for clues, all right?" Kame said before they split up. "We wait until after breakfast tomorrow."
Everyone agreed to this - it had been a late meal anyway, and after a day spent searching the house, no one really wanted to do much more than collapse in their rooms.
"You want to shower first?" Kame asked politely. Each of the bedrooms they'd been assigned had an en-suite, complete with shower, though the separate bathrooms had actual baths for anyone who preferred it. But since that involved venturing out down the hallway, neither Jin nor Kame cared for that idea.
"You'd better go first," Jin replied, equally polite. "You were the one who went into the wine cellar with all those cobwebs."
Kame's hands immediately flew to his hair, which he hadn't had many opportunities to fix during the day. "If you've let me walk around with cobwebs in my hair..."
Despite the threat to his person, Jin couldn't resist laughing. Kame's face was priceless.
"I'm showering first." Kame slammed the door after himself, leaving Jin curled up on one of the twin beds.
It was fortunate that Kame's hair-dryer had been one of the few personal items they'd actually been permitted to bring, though Jin wasn't allowed to use it until he'd apologised. They had to be up early the next morning, the plan being to leave the mansion after lunch, so if they weren't close to an accusation by midday, the staff were prepared to drop heavy hints to the whereabouts of the remaining cards.
And thanks to the early start, it was better to have an early night, too. Even without the air of competition stifling them, there would be no dashing in and out of each other's rooms.
It was, Kame thought as he lay in bed, like the early days of KAT-TUN, when nobody was certain what was going to happen, or how long they would stay together, or if they even wanted to stay together. Except that now, he knew the distance was only temporary, and everything would be all right after the mystery was solved and they could go back home.
And besides, there was one major difference between those days and now...
An hour after they'd switched off the light and settled down to sleep, Jin left his own narrow bed and climbed into Kame's, spooning up against his back.
Kame, who was just starting to drift off into a pleasant haze, pushed back with his elbow. "There's not enough room." His complaint was muzzy with not-quite-attained sleep.
"There is if I lie like this," Jin murmured. "I can't sleep, Kame."
"And now, neither can I." Kame sighed. "This is just like being in bed with Yamapi."
Jin was instantly suspicious. "When were you in bed with Pi?"
"When we were filming Nobuta together. Do you have any idea how many takes we needed for that scene?"
"No, and I don't want to know either," Jin huffed. "Why didn't Ryu and Hayato ever get any scenes in bed together?"
"Because guys from a rival school would've come along and beaten them up, completely ruining the moment - much like you've just done to my chances of getting a decent night's rest."
"Sorry." Jin nuzzled Kame's messy black hair. "But I really can't sleep."
Kame switched on the nightlight and felt down the side of the bed for his bag, containing the 'Akanishi Jin Survival Kit' - a bag of essentials that someone in KAT-TUN, usually Kame, had to bring with whenever they travelled anywhere as a group.
The kit contained the following: emergency snacks (in case they got stranded miles away from the nearest convenience store), first aid supplies (Jin liked the plasters with the tiny turtles on them), painkillers (more for Kame than Jin, owing to his unfortunate habit of falling from high places), cold remedies (because one hint of a sniffle and Jin's singing voice went out the window), vitamins (Jin liked to eat a lot, but not always the right things), stimulants (legal, only) and a whole slew of sedatives for every occasion.
"You want something to help?" Kame asked, rummaging through the various pill bottles. Jin normally slept like the dead, so if he was having problems, that was a bad sign.
Of course, he *had* slept for a good few hours in the car that morning...
Jin shook his head. "No thanks. I want to get out of here."
Kame gave him a long, searching look. "Is this going to involve me stealing car keys?" he said at last. "Because I don't think we're going to be able to persuade anyone to drive you home unless we fake some sort of medical emergency, and even then you're more likely to wind up going to the nearest hospital."
"That wasn't what I meant." Jin sat up in bed, crossing his legs. "We should be sneaking a peek at Ueda's checklist, not wasting our time lying around in bed."
"I wasn't aware any time spent lying in bed with me was 'wasted'," Kame said mildly.
"You know what I mean. We can't let them beat us, Kame!"
"So you want us to cheat?"
"Well...we don't have to look at all their clues," Jin hedged. "We could just look at the rooms and the suspects."
Kame rephrased. "So you still want us to cheat, but only a bit?"
"Yeah!"
"Jin, if going on a trip means so much to you we'll go by ourselves sometime - without the cameras!"
"That's not the point at all," Jin said crossly. "I just really think we're the ones who deserve to win this game."
"Ah!" Kame thought he saw what was going on. "This is because Koki walked in on us - twice - and Ueda tricked you out of a clue, isn't it?"
Jin gave Kame the cute little half-smile that meant he was trying to look innocent, thereby announcing his guilt to the world. "So will you help me or not?"
"I'm probably going to regret this, aren't I?" Kame grinned mischievously and handed Jin the small torch from his keyring. "One condition: you go through the passage. You've already done it once, you know what to expect."
"And what are you going to be doing?"
"Me?" Kame grinned all the wider. "I'm going to be the distraction."
-----
Half an hour later, when Jin had had time to make his way back to the library and most of the way through the passage, Kame pounded frantically on Ueda and Junno's door. After a few minutes, it opened to reveal a bleary Ueda, rubbing his eyes and muttering irritably under his breath.
"Akanishi, if this is your idea of a joke I'm going to...oh. Kame?"
Kame did his best to appear desperate and panicked half out of his mind. He'd managed it in dramas before, had even won awards for his acting. So it was only logical that he got to play the part of the distraction.
"Jin's missing!" he burst out, pushing his way into the room as though he might somehow find his absent other half in there. "I woke up a couple of minutes ago and he was gone!"
Ueda blinked. "He's probably in the bathroom."
Kame shook his head. "I've checked! And the one in the corridor. He's just vanished!"
"Maybe he's gone down for a drink?" Junno suggested, sitting up in bed. "Or a snack? I think there was some stuff left out in the kitchen..."
This wasn't going well, Kame thought. Neither of them sounded remotely worried enough to actually volunteer to help look for Jin. He had to turn up the panic a little.
"I really don't think so! Jin wasn't...look, he wasn't feeling so good when we went to bed, okay?" Kame's words were hushed, taking Ueda into his confidence. "If he's gone wandering around by himself, he might have collapsed somewhere. He could be lying unconscious at the bottom of the stairs!"
"All right, all right!" Ueda shook the hair out of his eyes and beckoned Junno over. "We'll help you look for him. It shouldn't take too long for us to find him if we take a floor each."
"I'll take the ground floor," Kame jumped in before anyone else could claim it. He didn't want them seeing the gaping hole in the library.
"I'll take second," Junno volunteered.
"Leaving me this one. Okay." Ueda ushered them all out the door, locked it and pocketed the key. He cast a glance at the remaining bedroom. "Should we wake the others?"
"Not unless we don't have any luck," Kame said firmly. No sense complicating the situation, since he knew Jin definitely wasn't in Nakamaru and Koki's room. "We'll let them sleep for now."
The three of them split up; Kame hurried to the library to wait for Jin's return so that he could triumphantly claim to have "found" him. The passage was open; of Jin, there was no sign.
Some twenty minutes later, a depressed-looking face emerged from the hole in the wall. Kame let him climb free, then pushed the candlestick back into position.
"Well? Did you manage to get anything?"
Jin's shoulders drooped. "I searched all over the room - did you know Taguchi managed to smuggle in a GBA? - but I couldn't find their checklists anywhere! They must've hidden them."
"That's incredibly paranoid," Kame mused. "Especially since Ueda locked the door again before going to look for you, so it's not like anyone could've gotten in."
Jin had a horrible thought. "Kame," he said slowly, "did you lock our door?"
Kame and Jin exchanged despairing looks and raced for the stairs.
Without stopping to alert the others to Jin's reappearance, they rushed straight to their room. All seemed quiet from the outside, but...
"Kame," Jin whispered, "does it look like there's light shining under the door?"
Kame strained to see, but it was difficult to tell. Only one way to find out for sure - he flung the door open.
This brought him face to face with an extremely embarrassed Koki for the third time that day.
"I was just looking for aspirin," he mumbled, but the small torch and rumpled checklist he held suggested otherwise. Then he noticed Jin. "Weren't you missing?"
Jin stormed into the bedroom and snatched his paper from Koki's hand, looming over him threateningly. "In a minute you'll wish I was."
Ueda chose that moment to reappear, looking no less confused than he had when he'd opened the door to Kame. "I don't really know what's going on-" he began; Kame cut him off.
"I found Jin downstairs," he said. "He was getting a drink. When we came back we found Koki in our room. Stealing our clues."
Koki didn't have a lot to say for himself, being caught red-handed; he tried anyway. "You guys made so much noise earlier you woke us up! Then you all disappeared, and when I tried the door to see if anyone was still here, I saw..." He looked over at the nightstand, where Jin had left his checklist.
"And you just couldn't resist looking," Jin finished for him.
"You can't really blame him." Nakamaru was standing in the doorway now. "If you're going to leave it out in the open like that you have to expect that someone will come along and read it."
"Not when the door's closed!"
Junno turned up just in time to catch Jin's lecture on respecting other people's privacy; said lecture immediately prompted everyone to call Jin a hypocrite since he tended to favour the 'what's mine is mine and what's yours is mine too' approach to life.
Kame, who was beginning to get crotchety over the whole fiasco, silenced the lot of them with a glare. "I only want to know one thing," he said to Koki. "Do you have enough to make an accusation now?"
At least Koki had the decency to look embarrassed, bowing his head low. "Yeah. I'm really sorry!"
Jin was about to make a comment along the lines of "You should be!", but a stern look from Kame was enough to remind him that he'd been trying to do the same thing himself, only to Ueda, and he kept quiet.
"What should we do now?"
There was no immediate answer to Nakamaru's question, so the members of KAT-TUN crowded into Jin and Kame's room in order to find one.
By the time half an hour had passed, Kame was ready to kick everyone out - literally, if need be - so he didn't have to stop pretending to be awake. "I don't care who wins," he said, stilling Jin's protests with a hand on his knee, "but the sooner someone solves the murder, the sooner we can all go home. Somebody make an accusation after breakfast, okay?"
"It shouldn't be Koki," Ueda said. "He didn't work for all of his clues."
"We got most of them by ourselves!"
"And the rest?"
Koki fell silent.
"Kame's team should do it," Junno suggested, but Ueda objected to that.
"We only needed two more cards! How many did Kame need?"
"Seven," Jin said. "We still needed seven."
"And we needed five." Nakamaru produced his own checklist. "Want to draw lots to see who wins? That's fairest, isn't it?"
Jin couldn't make a convincing argument to the others that they should let him win...and really, he supposed, he couldn't have accepted the trip even if they did, since he'd been intending to cheat too. It was purely down to Ueda's canniness that he'd failed.
That didn't mean he had to be a graceful loser, though, and he didn't spare the sulks. "We should all go together."
Kame arched an eyebrow. "Together?" he repeated.
-----
Next morning after breakfast, the six suspects marched into the lounge, where the camera crew were waiting to film the dénouement. The range of baffled expressions they sported suggested that they hadn't been expecting the entire group to show up.
"We've come to make an accusation," Mrs. Peacock announced, smoothing down his hair. "Thanks to everyone's hard work, we've solved the case!"
There was a round of applause at this, complete with whooping, high-fiving, and the odd backslap; somehow, the Reverend Green ended up on the ground.
Professor Plum took the floor, hat in hand. "Everyone, I have a confession to make. I'm the one who killed Dr. Black! It was an accident! I'm very sorry!" He fell to the carpet and bowed, covering his smile with his fedora.
"Ah, the poor professor," Mrs. White sympathised. "He's so traumatised by the whole experience that he doesn't even remember hitting Dr. Black with a candlestick."
"Dr. Black was asking for it," Colonel Mustard said, throwing a supportive arm around his guilty friend. "He shouldn't have kept making jokes about Plum's nose!"
Miss Scarlett put his hands on his hips. "That's no excuse for sneaking up behind him and cracking a candlestick down on his head! Especially in the library. You're supposed to be silent in there, you know? Even when I opened the secret passage, I didn't make any noise!"
Even the staff members picked up on the sudden change in atmosphere.
"Secret passage?" Junno asked innocently. "In the library?"
Jin gathered from this that no one had been skilled enough to duplicate his amazing discovery. "Yeah, a secret passage! It goes up to the room you and Ueda were in and it's really long, and kind of scary - not so much the second time - and-"
"Second time?" Ueda gave him a suspicious look. "Why would you go through it a second time?"
Kame felt the bottom drop out of his stomach.
"I...um...dropped my earring the first time?" Jin's explanation didn't convince anyone. He scrabbled around for another answer, landing conveniently on the truth. "Uh...actually...Kame told me to do it!"
All eyes turned to Kame.
"I said that the one who went through should be you because you'd done it before - I didn't order you to sneak into their room! JIN!"
Jin offered up a prayer of thanks that being 'Miss Scarlett' didn't actually involve dressing up as a woman, because he wasn't very good at running in high heels.
----- The End -----
Fandom: KAT-TUN
Pairing: Akame
Rating: PG-13
Word count: Approx. 11,000
Genre: Crack, which means you all have to suspend your disbelief for the duration of the fic. ^_^
Disclaimer: Not mine, damnit.
Summary: KAT-TUN find themselves embroiled in a game of Cluedo with a twist for the 'Cartoon KAT-TUN Murder Mystery Special!', in which Jin gets to have fun with candlesticks, Koki has incredibly bad timing, and everyone - with the possible exception of Ueda - is simply...clueless.
Author's Note: Dedicated to lip_stick_love, whose comment about Koki disposing of Jin in the lighting booth with the candlestick inspired this fic. Does not use the theme, I'm afraid - the closest I get to a white wedding is having a 'Mrs. White'!
'Cluedo' (or 'Clue', if you're American) is, I think, 'Mystery Game' in Japan. However, to keep things simple, I've left the game's name unchanged here.
Clueless
Jin didn't mean to fall asleep in the car. He'd made a bold declaration to this effect, vowing to remain awake for the entire journey because he was desperate to know where they were going.
He wasn't alone in this. For a two-part 'Cartoon KAT-TUN Murder Mystery Special!', the members of KAT-TUN were crammed in a car for three hours, en route to a mansion so secret only their driver knew where they were going - and he was under orders not to tell, on pain of receiving a tongue-lashing from Nishikido Ryo. Since this was considered by many of Johnny's minions to be a fate worse than death, he wasn't talking.
Neither was anyone else, much. There was the expected speculation on their destination, the (ignored) complaints at having their cell phones, cigarettes and mp3 players taken from them, and the marvelling at how well Junno was adjusting to having his DS confiscated.
"He doesn't stop smiling at all!" Nakamaru said.
Ueda looked at Junno's frozen grin and checked his watch for the millionth time since they'd left. "Delayed shock," he explained. "It'll hit him later."
After Jin fell asleep twenty minutes outside Tokyo, nobody except Kame spoke, and only then to warn Koki to put down those marker pens. Jin was wedged comfortably between them in the back seat, and as much as Kame liked the idea of doodling all over Jin's face to pay him back for the pins-and-needles caused by his head resting on Kame's shoulder, he didn't think it was safe to do so with permanent markers. Not when they were going to be on camera for the better part of the next thirty-six hours.
"You think we should film some of this?" Nakamaru murmured, holding up one of the handheld cameras they'd been given. "I bet the fans would love it. He looks so peaceful and harmless when he's asleep."
Jin promptly disproved this by stirring, clutching with clawed hands for a blanket that simply wasn't there. Koki narrowly avoided having the hood of his sweatshirt ripped off, and Kame had to save the day by offering his jacket for sacrifice. As long as Jin stayed asleep, he couldn't ask every five minutes if they were there yet, and for that, Kame was prepared to risk one of the less fashionable items in his wardrobe.
"You can't film him when he's using me as a pillow," Kame pointed out, keeping his voice as quiet as possible. "We're supposed to be easing back into being friends in public, not jumping right up to Arashi-level. They'll never let it be shown."
Nakamaru filmed a few minutes anyway - testing out the zoom, he said - and lapsed back into inactivity when it became clear that no one was interested in acting up for the camera. It was a grey, gloomy morning and everyone's enthusiasm was at an all-time low.
Matters didn't improve much when they reached their destination. The car pulled up in front of an imposing, stately building surrounded by high bushes, penned in by ornate twists of iron. The owners, who used the place as a holiday home, clearly enjoyed their privacy. The house didn't look welcoming in the slightest.
The second car pulled up, carrying members of the film crew. Since the boys were largely being left to their own devices, however, most of the filming was to be done using cameras and microphones secreted throughout the mansion. It had been a haunted house attraction, once-upon-a-time, and the security system was still in place. Only the bathrooms and bedrooms were off-limits, though they could use the handheld cameras to film each other, obviously.
Jin didn't wake up until Kame tugged his jacket free, and even then he didn't really come to his senses until they were all standing in the foyer, clustered round their small pile of luggage. He'd sleepwalked his way out of the car, avoiding a nasty tumble on the steps only because Ueda and Koki had sandwiched him between them, and he'd been so out of it that he'd ended up carrying Kame's bag as well as his own - though only because Kame had handed it to him.
A staff member, cunningly disguised as a French maid, approached with their room assignments. "Same sleeping arrangements as the Okinawa trip," he said.
Nakamaru and Koki high-fived.
"But I want to share with Kame!" Jin blurted out, fully awake now. "I don't care if they're not using it as an attraction anymore; this house is probably still haunted." He looked around at the maudlin decor, at the dead-eyed gargoyles and wallpaper dark with old stains, and added, "Definitely haunted!"
"Which concerns Kamenashi how, exactly?" the maid asked.
Jin ignored the bewildered looks KT-TUN were giving him, speaking with the utmost conviction. "He's going to protect me from the ghosts. He's the only one who can do it."
Ueda begged to differ. "I'm the one who's been boxing for two years - if anyone's qualified to protect you, Akanishi, it's me!"
"I may not be a boxer, but I have played one on TV! And on the stage!" Like Ueda, Kame chose to disregard the non-existence of ghosts - particularly ones who could be disposed of with a right hook.
The unfortunate staff member tried to argue, to convince them that it would be a really bad idea to put Kame and Jin in the same room because all the rumours would start up again - Kanjani8's Yokoyama was already doing his best to get the gossip going - but gave up after battling Jin's own brand of logic for five minutes. It was easier, he thought, just to give in and simply omit any mention on film of the sleeping arrangements.
"Kamenashi and Akanishi, Ueda and Taguchi, Tanaka and Nakamaru," he said wearily, handing a folder to the last named and removing himself to the kitchen for a fortifying drink.
"All that stuff about me protecting you, did you really mean it?" Kame asked. "Because I don't think any of the training I did at the gym is going to save you if a ghost decides it doesn't like you."
"Why wouldn't it like me?" Jin pretended to be hurt. "Besides, of course I didn't mean it. But it got us sharing a room, didn't it?"
"So you're not scared at all, then?"
That was Nakamaru's cue to discreetly trail the end of his scarf over Jin's shoulders, prompting the other man to shiver and admit that yes, perhaps, he was just a tiny little bit on the nervous side.
"I'm not surprised," Koki muttered. "Look at the paintings! The eyes are watching us!"
"Of course they're watching us." Ueda said this so matter-of-factly that everyone felt that it was only natural for dreary, foreboding paintings of long-dead people to have shining eyes that winked and flashed in the light. "Where do you think they're hiding the cameras?"
"Anywhere and anywhere they can, except the bedrooms and bathrooms." Nakamaru waved the folder he'd been handed. He was consulting the first of a dozen sheets of paper. "The instructions say we're supposed to get changed first, and then explain the rules of the game to the audience."
"Game?" KAT-TU chorused. "What game?"
"Cluedo," came the reply. "One of us is going to be a murderer."
-----
Twenty minutes later, KAT-TUN were seated in the lounge, having been issued their "costumes". Reactions were mixed. It wasn't that the clothes were bad, but the colouring...
"You think they got us mixed up with Kanjani8?" Koki asked, gazing down in horror at his bright yellow tracksuit with 'JOKER' emblazoned on the front. "We don't do the 'members by colour' thing."
"I don't think it's so terrible." Ueda wasn't badly off, in tight white jeans and a matching, long-sleeved top that could've come from his own wardrobe.
"Yeah, it's only till tomorrow afternoon," Junno chimed in, not caring one jot about how his forest green leggings and sweater made him resemble a woodland folk hero.
Nakamaru felt a lot better about his own attire, a brilliant purple suit, once he realised that it came complete with a hat. This addition, he felt, went a long way towards making the outfit more acceptable.
"They'll want us to pretend to be superheroes next," Kame said darkly. "On bicycles." At least the blue jeans he'd been given were designer, but the accompanying tank top and jacket were suspiciously free from labels.
"Then I get to be the leader! The guy in red's always the leader, right?"
This revelation made Jin extremely happy. Even happier, in fact, than the burgundy jeans, matching top and plaid shirt had made him. One could never have too much plaid, he felt.
Nakamaru grinned at him. "Nope, according to this it means you get to be Miss Scarlett, the beautiful, young, free and single one who discovers the body of our esteemed host, Dr. Black."
"But you guys all know I'm not single-"
There was a brief scuffle as the rest of the group tried to smother Jin for almost admitting on camera that he was in a relationship.
"-minded enough to...uh...can I have some room to breathe?" he gasped out, abandoning his attempt to twist his sentence into something unrelated and thus save himself from interrogation when he got back home.
Reluctantly, everyone returned to their former resting places. There was no telling what KAT-TUN's bluntest, most straightforward member was likely to say, especially if he forgot about the hidden cameras.
"You're taking the part of Miss Scarlett," Nakamaru continued. "Koki's Colonel Mustard, Taguchi's the Reverend Green, Ueda's Mrs. White, Kame's Mrs. Peacock, and I," he twirled his hat elegantly between his fingers, "am Professor Plum."
Ueda, secure in the knowledge that he was actually the toughest guy in the room, was resigned to being a girl for the rest of his life. In any case, he looked good in white.
Kame didn't really care, as long as they didn't make him shave his legs. "So which one of us is a murderer?"
"That's what we have to find out."
Nakamaru attempted to explain the principles behind Cluedo to those who didn't know, but ended up surrendering the floor to Junno. The group's resident gaming-addict had the knowledge of half-a-dozen electronic versions at his fingertips.
"But that doesn't sound like much of a ratings-winner," Jin mused. "Not if we're just sitting around in bright colours and suggesting stuff."
More sheets flew from Nakamaru's folder. "We're going to have the game in a different format, since the fans obviously don't want to watch us playing with cards all night."
Kame snorted. "You haven't seen all the mail suggesting we have a new 'Strip Poker' segment for the show, then?"
"We really get mail like that?" Koki sounded intrigued. "Because I wouldn't mind-"
There was another brief scuffle as everyone leapt on Koki to stop him demonstrating on camera just how happy he'd be to go along with that suggestion.
"I wasn't going to do it," he sulked, once they finally let him up for air.
"We haven't got any cards, anyway," Ueda pointed out. "They were confiscated along with everything else."
"But there *are* cards!" Nakamaru made a desperate attempt to regain everyone's attention with a short beatbox routine, segueing neatly into an explanation of the rules of the game. "It's like a scavenger hunt, except that we're only supposed to collect information. Hidden all over the house - rooms only, no hallways - are Suspect, Room and Weapon cards, and as we find them, we have to check them off on these." He distributed the six checklists. "We work alone, but we can trade information if we want, and we can make an accusation at any time. The first person to make a correct accusation wins a trip to Kyoto with the member of his choice - on camera, of course."
"Of course," they groaned as one. No matter which of them won, it was a foregone conclusion as to who he'd take with. Unless the powers that be chose to meddle, of course, in which case Jin had a horrible feeling that in the unlikely event that he won, he'd be stuck going sightseeing with Taguchi Junnosuke and his store of bad puns.
"It's every man for himself!" the apron-clad staff member cried as he reappeared.
So naturally, once they'd finished explaining the rules for the benefit of the audience and collected their individual instruction sheets, the six members of KAT-TUN set off in teams.
-----
They didn't get very far.
"Where's the body?" Jin asked. "Aren't I supposed to find it?"
"You've lost the corpse already?" Kame teased. "We haven't even started yet!"
"There isn't a real corpse," Nakamaru explained patiently as the six of them stood by the cellar stairs, where a large 'X' had been marked on the floor with two strips of fabric. "We're not filming a horror movie - and if we were, Akanishi would be too scared to come out from under the bed."
"Hey!"
"The 'X' marks where 'Dr. Black' was found by our lovely, plaid-clad Miss Scarlett - but..." Nakamaru paused for dramatic effect, "this wasn't where he was killed. And since we don't have a body to look at, we can't tell the method, either.
"We have to investigate using only our wits. Good luck, everyone."
"What would Miroku do?" Jin wondered to himself as everyone but Kame disappeared.
Kame stifled a laugh. "Probably call in his network of informants to search the house for him. But you don't have that option, so let's start looking for cards, shall we? According to the instruction sheet, some of the rooms have hidden doors and things, so we're going to have to check everywhere."
"Hidden doors?" Jin was getting excited. "Like, we pull down candlesticks and the wall slides open?"
"Yeah." Kame was struck by a thought. "Just make sure the candle isn't lit before you go tugging on candlesticks, okay?"
"I'm not going to burn myself," Jin said crossly. "And you should keep away from flames altogether so your hair doesn't catch fire."
Kame ran a hand carelessly through his short black locks. "No hairspray today. They confiscated that as well."
"Never mind," Jin consoled him. "By the end of the day we'll all be tearing our hair out anyway."
"Or each other's. Any preference where we start our search?"
Jin consulted his map of the mansion. "Third floor, West Wing."
"Why there?"
"I overheard Taguchi saying he was starting in the basement of the East Wing."
-----
Sure enough, Jin and Kame didn't encounter any interruptions as they made their way to the westernmost end of the building. Using the handheld cameras, they filmed at odd intervals, capturing the rust-brown of the torn wallpaper, the greenish gold of the picture frames, and the tarnished silver of the candlesticks that graced many of the silent passages.
They also ended up with a lot of footage of the floor, because Jin forgot to switch his camera off once, and there were several minutes of nothing but Jin reaching up to try and unbolt a door, where Kame got sidetracked by the sudden flash of stomach and hit 'zoom in' by accident.
"The more I see of this place, the less I like it," Jin complained. "I'm surprised they've even got electricity."
Kame grimaced. "I suspect the only reason they haven't switched it off and left us to wander around with torches is that the staff members are here too, and there's no reason to deprive them of things like lighting and television."
"No, only their dignity," Jin agreed with a giggle, remembering the French maid's outfit.
The first room they investigated was the study, in which the windows were positioned just right for the occupants to have a marvellous view of the garden pond, and thus avoid doing any studying whatsoever.
"Hidden drawers," Jin decided, tugging on the handles. "The desks always have hidden drawers, in the movies. I bet there's a card in here somewhere."
Kame, who was opening all the reference books on the shelf and shaking them out, wasn't so sure. "Those drawers are probably locked because the owners have private documents in them, not to stop you from rummaging around inside the desk to find its secrets."
After several unsuccessful attempts to prise said drawers open with a plastic ruler, Jin was forced to admit that Kame might be right. He hid the broken halves carefully under a dictionary and tiptoed away from the desk.
"What about the fireplace?" he suggested. "Do you think they might have hidden one in there?"
Kame shot him a disparaging look. "Who hides a piece of card in a fireplace?"
Undeterred, Jin dropped to his knees and cautiously tested the fireplace for warmth. Upon closer inspection, the neat stack of logs proved to be artificial; the entire contraption, powered by electricity. It was switched off. Peeking out round the corner of the frame was a small black card.
Jin picked it up. "Colonel Mustard."
Kame crossed the name out on both their checklists. "I guess Koki isn't a murderer."
"That's always good to know, given that our bedroom for the night is next door to his." Jin flashed an impish smile at Kame. "You think we should tell him he's not guilty?"
Kame grinned right back. "Not until he's got information to trade in return."
According to the instructions, no room held more than one card, so they felt safe in moving on to the next. Jin replaced the card for the other players to find and accepted Kame's helping hand to rise to his feet.
Then he accepted Kame's brushing the dust from his jeans.
By the time he got round to accepting Kame's attempts to warm his chilled lips with his own body heat, Jin remembered that they weren't alone.
"Cameras!" he squawked, ducking away so Kame couldn't back him up against the desk.
Kame swore, then realised he shouldn't have said such things on camera and swore again, much milder this time. He apologised twice to the room in general, caught Jin by the arm and dragged him out.
"It's going to be a long two days, isn't it?" Jin said.
"You're blushing, Miss Scarlett."
Jin caught sight of himself in the mirror as they passed. "At least I match. If you start turning blue, Mrs. Peacock, we'll have to cut the game short and go to hospital."
"That's my last-resort escape plan. Think it'll work?"
"Only if you take me with you so I can give you the Kiss of Life."
-----
The next couple of rooms yielded nothing, but the fourth, an unused bedroom where all the furniture was covered by sheets, proved more worthwhile.
"We're going to find one in here," Jin declared. "I can feel it."
Kame couldn't resist ribbing him. "Ah, Miss Scarlett certainly has excellent feminine intuition..."
"Shut up."
Jin turned away, began peering under covers in search of the sought-after piece of card. The number of spiders he encountered made him wish he hadn't bothered.
"Maybe we'll find one of those secret rooms," Kame said optimistically. "There might be a trap door or something under one of these sheets."
Suddenly enthused by the thought, Jin reached for one sheet and accidentally slipped on another, ending up flat on his back and staring up at the low ceiling in a daze. It was a pretty ceiling - much prettier than the carpet - with swirls and checks and possibly a pair of bunny rabbits made from clouds, standing on either side of a suitcase.
A suitcase?
As Kame approached to see if he was all right, Jin pointed up above. "You were saying about a trap door?"
Kame leaned back to study the ceiling, almost tripping over Jin in the process. "It looks like a suitcase. The handle's jutting out."
"Can we reach it?"
"If you get up off the floor and give me a boost, yeah."
Obligingly, Jin put all those hours at the gym to good use, hoisting Kame up to reach the handle. It was attached to a small panel which swung open easily, allowing Kame to pull down the ladder inside.
"Hidden room?" Jin asked.
"Attic." Kame scrambled up the ladder. He vanished for a moment, reappearing with a triumphant grin and dust smears all over the sleeves of his jacket. "The ballroom!"
"But I'm not in the mood for dancing..."
-----
Two more rooms cleared the corridor but didn't score them any more clues. Kame decided they were better off going down to the second floor, in order to give Junno and Ueda time to work on the East Wing and acquire information that could be bargained out of them later. No one knew where Nakamaru and Koki had disappeared to, but Jin suspected they'd headed straight for the billiard room.
The first door they tried led to a dressing room of such immense proportions that Kame was immediately jealous of all the closet space.
"Just look at this! Jin, do you know how long I'd have to shop for to fill it all up?"
Jin was more interested in the suit of armour that stood, inexplicably, in the corner of the room. "You think the owners would mind if I tried it on?" he asked.
Kame allowed himself to be distracted long enough for Jin's question to sink in. The armour looked uncomfortable, but who was he to squash Jin's fantasies of knighthood? "Better go to the bathroom first," he advised. "I hear it's difficult to get out of these things in a hurry."
In the end, Jin passed on playing dress-up. The dust that flew out when he opened the helmet's visor made up his mind for him.
"At least they left us our water bottles." Kame handed one to Jin once he'd stopped coughing.
"Thanks." Jin wiped his mouth with the back of his hand and glared at the suit of armour. "I don't think there's a card in there."
"Let's take a look in here." Kame threw open the nearest closet door, finding it full of clothing that wouldn't have looked out of place at an Arashi concert, and shut it again in a hurry. "I mean, *this* one." He tried a second door and got hit in the face by a falling fur coat.
The closet was actually bigger than Jin's apartment, or so it seemed, and filled with furs of assorted shapes and colours. They were ill-cared for, though - a large pile sat in the centre, looking comfortable and inviting, and Jin figured it was a good time to take a break.
"You're right; we'll look in this one." He beckoned Kame inside and plumped down on the heap, settling with a contented sigh.
Kame switched on the dim closet light and shut the door after them, feeling reasonably certain that there were no cameras inside. And if he was wrong, well, they were just about to get some footage for a 'Cartoon KAT-TUN - Adults Only!' special.
He dropped down next to Jin; the furs made a cosy nest, soft and plush, parting to welcome them inside. Kame's arm slipped automatically around Jin's back, a move second nature to him now, and he turned his head to meet Jin's lips with his own.
"Is there a lock on the door?" Jin's words, uttered between kisses, were badly muffled.
"Don't know, don't care," Kame mumbled back. They didn't have time to talk. The precious few minutes they could snatch together couldn't be wasted, not when Jin's plump, luscious lips were crying out to be kissed and every kiss was rewarded with a touch, warmth spreading from Jin's fingers, soft, feather-strokes along Kame's face, sliding down beneath his shirt to caress the curve between neck and shoulder.
Kame knew they didn't have long, knew he shouldn't have followed Jin inside and all but jumped him on the pile of furs, but even though Kame was ordinarily KAT-TUN's #1 when it came to resisting temptation, the one thing he'd never been able to deny himself was Jin.
Jin, not over-burdened with willpower himself, had no issue with this, even though his intentions upon entering the closet had been nothing more complicated than resting a moment on a comfortable fur mountain. Kame's hand pushed past the plaid and then the shirt underneath, searching for bare skin; Jin's breath came out as a hiss as Kame's nails traced a ragged path up his spine.
"Sorry." Kame's apology was lost somewhere in the vicinity of Jin's hair, words wandering off for a walk through the dark, curling strands.
It hadn't hurt, much. Kame always tried to be gentle. He didn't always succeed, but any damage dealt Jin was inevitably the result of desire, not malicious intent, and on that count, Jin could give back as good as he got.
Most of the time.
"S'okay," he muttered. "Just don't leave any marks where the camera might see them."
Jin let out a soft moan when Kame's questing fingers sought and found the button on his jeans. He squirmed, pressing into the other man's hand, trying to get the pressure where he wanted it most; Kame caught Jin's hand with his free one and trailed it down to his own belt buckle.
He'd just succeeded in getting Jin to unfasten his belt when the door slid open, revealing the bright yellow figure of Colonel "JOKER" Mustard.
"What are you guys doing in the closet?" Koki asked, blurting out his question before he got a good look at the scene.
Though red-faced and furious, Kame didn't bat so much as an eyelash. "We're looking for clues," he said shortly, and slammed the door shut again.
Koki mentally reviewed the situation: Jin's shirt had been half-off, falling to his wrists, his lips had been firmly fixed to Kame's, and both of them had been fumbling at each other's waistbands. The memory left Koki blushing like the first time he'd seen himself in a drama, which was how Nakamaru found him when he made it back from the bathroom.
"Anything in that one?" Nakamaru asked, pointing to the fur-closet.
"Nothing. Nothing at all. This room's a complete waste of time."
"Then why do you look so embarrassed?"
Koki thought fast. "Naked mannequin," he explained.
Nakamaru gave him a bewildered look and followed him out the door.
-----
Koki's untimely intervention had killed the mood, thoroughly quenching Jin's desire to take a break on the furs. He had no wish to be caught again - it was bad enough that he had to watch himself around the cameras, try not to blurt out anything that could later be held against him in a court of law.
Kame, too, felt as though someone had poured a bucket of cold water all over him. "It's not like Koki didn't already know," he pointed out, but it didn't make either of them feel like picking up where they'd left off. The way to raise Jin's spirits, he knew, was by offering food. "Want to go get something to eat? They're leaving snacks out for us downstairs."
Jin considered the hour left till lunch, and the number of rooms remaining in their current passage, and shook his head. "We might as well finish up around here. Can't possibly be less productive, can it? Koki can owe us a clue when we catch up to him again."
With a triumphant flourish, Kame produced the card hidden inside the fur coat that had fallen on his head earlier. "Actually, we'll owe him one - he won't come back in here again, not now, which means he'll never know that," he cast a quick glance at his prize, "Dr. Black wasn't killed with a revolver!"
(In the next room, one thin wall away, Nakamaru pricked up his ears. "Did you hear that?"
Koki listened carefully, but he was too late. "Hear what?"
"That voice, saying Dr. Black wasn't killed with a revolver! Quick, mark it on the checklist!")
Jin dutifully applauded Kame's not-quite card trick, and checked 'revolver' off on both their lists. They weren't getting very far, he noted. That wasn't good. The sooner they won the game - because Jin liked to win, no matter what - the sooner they could get out of there, away from the creepy house and its hidden cameras.
"We need to get moving," he said. "There's no way we're losing to guys like them!"
Kame couldn't help cracking up as he followed in Jin's wake, amused by the enthusiasm his sense of competition could produce. "Good thing they're our friends, or you'd be saying really unflattering things about them, right?"
"Saying really unflattering things about who?"
Jin gave an imperious little toss of the head, suddenly confronted by Nakamaru on his way out of the next room. "Nobody."
"He's getting competitive again," Kame explained, still laughing. "You might as well just hand over your information now, because you know he's going to insist he won anyway."
Nakamaru stuffed his checklist inside his suit jacket. He was on the verge of a witty retort when Koki, blushing an even darker red than Jin's outfit, grabbed him by the arm and dragged him off down the corridor.
Jin turned to Kame, disgusted. "See what you've done? Now they're going to be on their guard and we won't be able to get anything out of them!"
Kame shrugged. "Then we'll have to get it when they're asleep, won't we?"
The sparkles in Jin's eyes could've lit up Tokyo for Christmas. "Secret midnight raid? Ninja-style? Kame!"
He went to throw gleeful arms around Kame, but the other man sidestepped to evade him, mouthing "Cameras".
Jin recoiled just in time to avoid hitting the wall.
-----
An hour later, Jin and Kame had managed to double their store of information. Whoever had killed Dr. Black, it wasn't Miss Scarlett (Jin was thrilled to be innocent) and the crime hadn't been committed with the rope, or in the hall.
The last of these clues had been obtained at great personal cost to Kame - he'd chipped his nail polish reaching behind a chest of drawers. Jin's knuckles were sore from rapping the walls in search of hollow spaces, and he'd spent ten minutes looking for a bathroom before noticing that his map was upside-down.
"You'd like that one, Kame," he commented afterwards. "Skulls all over the wallpaper."
Kame poked his head through the bathroom doorway to have a look for himself. "Didn't you find it intimidating to have all those empty little eye sockets watching you?"
Jin's smile was understandably sheepish. "I had to close my eyes."
They made their way down to the kitchen, where a cold lunch had been left for them by the staff. The others were already there, and based on the number of gaps in the dishes, they'd arrived some time ago.
"I can understand Akanishi being late," Nakamaru greeted them, "but late for lunch?"
Jin shot him a mock-glare in response and made a grab for the nearest sushi platter.
"How's everyone doing?" Kame said casually once he'd managed to snatch enough food away from Jin's eager chopsticks to fill his own plate. "Found many clues?"
"We," Ueda indicated himself and Junno, "found ten cards."
Kame's eyes widened. "Impressive! You guys must've covered a lot of ground - that's more than half the cards already!"
"We've only got six," Koki admitted.
Not counting the three cards that formed the solution, there were eighteen cards altogether - eight rooms, five weapons and five suspects. Kame thought it was quite possible that between the three teams, they actually had all the answers they needed - and even if they didn't, if he could get a look at Ueda's checklist, it would go a long way towards furthering his own.
"We've also got six," he said, and took a generous swallow of the glass of juice Jin had just handed him.
"Are you sure you want to be drinking something given to you by Miss Scarlett?" Ueda said slyly. "You never know - she might be the killer."
"Am not!" Jin stabbed his chopsticks viciously in Ueda's direction. "I'm completely innocent!"
There was a sudden flurry of activity as everyone at the table bar Kame and Jin himself started crossing off 'Miss Scarlett' on their checklists.
Realising what he'd done, Jin tried to make amends so that Kame would stop giving him that horrible, disappointed look. "I mean...I couldn't possibly be a killer, right?" he said weakly. "I'm so nice and harmless, and who ever heard of a murderer who'd run away if the person he was trying to kill managed to touch his collarbone?"
Kame's sigh consumed half the available oxygen in the room. "Just give it up," he advised. "And don't say anything else, please."
Jin's face fell. He turned his attention back to his lunch, careful to avoid looking at anyone else in case he somehow managed to give away the rest of their cards by blinking in the wrong direction or something.
He presented such a miserable figure, in fact, that it made Koki feel quite sorry for him - though this was mostly out of guilt at having earlier caught him in a compromising position. This desire to make it up to Jin and Kame, while admirable, could have been better expressed. Koki had no intention of giving free clues to Ueda's team - he hadn't caught *them* making out in a closet, after all - and he couldn't say anything aloud. He definitely couldn't show Jin his own checklist, and writing things down was out of the question.
That left pantomime.
As luck would have it, Miss Scarlett and Colonel Mustard were seated opposite each other at the table, and as such it was simple enough for the latter to catch the former's attention with a well-placed tap on the ankle.
"Did one of you guys just kick me?"
Koki apologised to Junno and tried again. This time he connected successfully with Jin, who looked up, surprised, but didn't say a word. Koki managed to catch his eye, and pointed a furtive chopstick first towards Jin, to indicate the innocence of Miss Scarlett, and then towards Kame, who remained oblivious. He followed it with a broad grin and a vigorous thumbs-up.
Jin seemed baffled at first, so Koki repeated the sequence.
Twice.
Third time lucky. Jin threw down his chopsticks and leapt to his feet. "Kame, I need to talk to you. Now."
"Can't it wait until after lunch?"
"No, it can't." Jin was shifting his weight impatiently from foot to foot. "Now."
Kame was reluctant to abandon his meal, but Jin seemed horribly agitated and he was blushing like he'd been in some terrible fight with a make-up artist. It was probably best to find out what he wanted. Kame swallowed one last mouthful of rice and followed him to the nearest bathroom, where there were no cameras lurking to record their conversation.
"What's wrong?" he asked when Jin didn't immediately begin. "Because if it's not serious, I'm going back to rescue my lunch before the others finish all the food."
Jin leaned against the towel rack and hung his head in misery. "Um..."
"Yes?"
"You...uh...I..."
"That's a good start," Kame encouraged him. "What about us?"
There was no easy way to say it, Jin supposed. No means by which he could spare himself the embarrassment. But he had to tell Kame, and then...oh, what if Kame actually liked the idea? What then? Just because Jin couldn't bear the thought didn't mean that Kame would feel the same way.
He took a deep breath, looked Kame straight in the eye, and blurted out, "I think Koki wants a threesome!"
Kame clutched the side of the sink to steady himself and wondered what Jin could possibly have misinterpreted to have reached that conclusion. It wouldn't have been the first time.
"I don't want to share you with anyone," Jin whispered. "You always give so much of yourself to the fans - to anyone who's ever met you! I just want to keep the rest for myself."
Jin's words brought a tender smile to Kame's face. "I don't have a problem with that."
He placed his hands on Jin's hips, a light squeeze through the layer of denim; Jin whimpered when those hands began to work their way under both of his shirts, gliding smoothly over his back. He brought his own arms up to wrap them around Kame's neck, and...
"Don't you guys ever lock the door?"
Koki stood in the doorway, apparently sporting a fever of well over two hundred degrees, if his colour was anything to go by.
Kame detached himself with as much dignity as he could muster - not much, under the circumstances - and figured since Koki was there, he might as well find out what all the fuss was about.
"You didn't want a threesome, did you?" he asked.
Koki ruthlessly trampled all over his first response - Now? - and went with the answer that wasn't going to get him killed. Jin still hadn't forgiven him for trying to kiss Kame in all those performances of 'Dream Boys'. "What gave you that idea?"
"Wasn't that what you were trying to tell me at the table?" Jin said.
"N-no!" Koki stammered. "I was trying to tell you the killer isn't Mrs. Peacock. The card was in the dining room. I figured I owed you guys a clue since I walked in on you earlier."
"You've just done it again." Kame wasted no time in pointing this out. "Can we have another one?"
Koki's scowl said there was no way this was going to happen. "I only followed you because I wasn't sure I managed to get my message across - it's not my fault the two of you have no self-control!"
He left before either of them could argue; Kame rolled his eyes and yelled out his thanks.
Then he turned to Jin. "I don't really want to know how you interpreted 'Guess what? Your boyfriend's innocent!' as 'Hey, how about letting me in on some of that hot AkaKame action?', but I'd say this was even more impressive than some of your early English screw-ups."
"At least when I say 'love', it doesn't come out sounding like 'rabu'." Jin smiled sweetly, turned on his heel and left Kame alone in the bathroom to fume about his inability to master the letter 'L'.
-----
After lunch, Jin and Kame finished off the West Wing. On the first floor, in the library, they finally found a secret passage.
"It's about time!" Jin wiped his hand on his jeans - the candlestick he'd yanked had been very, very dusty - and peered into the gaping hole in the wall left by the sudden slide of one of the smaller bookcases.
Kame stared at him in amazement. One wall of the library was entirely taken up by a row of reading desks, each with a pair of candlesticks mounted above. Jin had somehow latched on to the correct device instantly. "What made you go for that one?"
"Simple. It's the one in the middle."
To Jin's credit, it was a plausible reason. And they were in a library, after all, and everyone knew that the library was the best place to find a secret passage. Unless of course you happened to have a stable, in which case there was bound to be one under a bale of hay.
"Got a light?"
"They took our lighters," Kame reminded his partner in crime-solving. "I've got a little torch on my keys?"
Jin stuck his head as far into the passage as he could manage without physically stepping into it, but he couldn't see a thing. "Can I borrow it?"
Kame handed it over, and Jin flicked the switch, sending a narrow beam into the darkness to provide faint illumination. It didn't help much.
"I think I see stairs," Kame said. "Should we go in?"
"Seriously?"
"Well...perhaps just one of us. We don't know where it comes out, and it's probably not a good idea to leave the entrance open like this without someone to guard it. The staff can see us on the security system, but I bet they're not paying much attention."
Jin swallowed hard. Venturing alone into a hidden passage in a spooky old mansion wasn't high on his list of favourite activities. On the other hand, he didn't want Kame to think he was afraid, and if something went wrong, he felt slightly more confident in Kame's ability to get him out of there than in his own if the situation were to be reversed.
"I'll go," he said bravely.
"I knew you would." Kame's tone was encouraging, yet Jin couldn't help but wonder if there had been some manipulation at work. "I'll wait here. If you're not back in an hour, I'll go get help and come find you."
"One hour." Jin licked his lips nervously. "You promise?"
Kame held out his pinky; Jin hooked it with his own. "Promise. I'm not going to leave you wandering around in the dark by yourself."
Jin watched Kame pick out a book from the shelves and settle down opposite the passage entrance, then tightened his grip on the tiny torch and took his first steps into the darkness.
It wasn't as bad as he'd feared. The floor was bare but even and in good repair; Jin's steps grew more confident as he progressed without stumbling, using the walls for balance. Kame had been right about the steps. They wound up and round, taking Jin high enough that he thought he might be on the third floor by now. It was hard to gauge because they didn't climb straight up - instead, they evened out for long spells, and just when he thought he'd walked the length of another corridor he encountered another few steps, taking him ever nearer to the roof of the mansion.
The torch didn't provide much light, so Jin's hands on the walls were not only for balance, but to search for an exit. He didn't find one, not until he reached the end of the passage, where his fingers located a doorknob attached to a wooden door. Relieved, Jin opened it, expecting to find himself in another room.
What he found was total darkness.
Darkness...and a couple of coats.
It took him a few minutes to realise that he was actually standing in a wardrobe with a false back, and that he could quite easily escape by opening the doors directly in front of him. He did so, confirming the theory that had begun forming when he'd seen the coats in the weak torchlight.
The passage from the library led to the bedroom assigned to Ueda Tatsuya and Taguchi Junnosuke.
Jin switched off the torch, closed the wardrobe - both front and back - and sat down on the padded windowseat to rest. The bedrooms they'd been given were all on the third floor, in the central part of the building, and the staff had the same on the second floor. He'd walked up two flights of stairs, though it had seemed much longer because they'd brought him all the way from the farthest end of the West Wing.
If he hadn't had his cell phone confiscated, he'd have called Kame with the news. As it was, he had to go back to the library and tell him in person. He wasn't going back through the passage, though. No way.
He bounced back into the library a short while later, slightly out of breath. "Guess where I ended up?"
Kame held up a 'wrench' card that had been marking the place in his book - a history of board games. "Anywhere with a card?"
"Better." Jin was starting to get excited. "Still up for raiding Ueda's room to see his checklist? Because that's where the passage goes. Even if he locks the door, we can get in through the wardrobe!"
Kame hated to deflate him, but occasionally, reality had to intervene in even Akanishi Jin's life. "And you don't think he'll notice us sneaking out of it, then? Because wardrobe doors aren't exactly known for being stealth-enabling."
Jin pulled out his checklist so he could mark off the weapon card, crossing it with a pencil stroke so angry that he went through the paper. "So we'll distract them both and lure them out of their room somehow, okay? Do I have to think of everything?"
"I just found a card!"
"And I just found a secret passage!"
"And if you keep yelling about it, it's not going to be a secret much longer, is it?"
Grudgingly, Jin conceded that Kame might have a point. He moderated his tone and changed the subject. "How do you think we close the gap again?"
Kame replaced the card in the book and repositioned it on the shelf before crossing over to the candlestick. It was still hanging down at an odd angle; he pushed it back up into position and there was a low rumble as the bookcase returned to its home.
"Like that," he said, and Jin pulled a face in lieu of a suitable retort.
-----
The 'billiard room' and 'conservatory' cards were the next to fall prey to the combined investigative talents of Akanishi Jin and Kamenashi Kazuya - 'fall' being the operative word, as the top step of the wine cellar stairs, a simple plank of wood, snapped the moment Kame set foot upon it. Rot had set in, and even Kame's inconsequential weight was too much for it to bear.
Luckily, Kame had years of practice at a) staying on things and b) falling off things, though the latter had mostly been gained by accident. He clutched at both handrails, managing to channel his forward momentum into a somersault, and landed gingerly a few steps further down.
Jin applauded from the top of the stairs. "That was great! Do you think it'll be on camera?"
Kame took a deep breath, held it for ten seconds, and released it slowly so he wasn't tempted to race back up to the top and kill Jin. "If it isn't, I'm not doing it again," he said through gritted teeth. "Stay up there, okay? No sense in both of us risking our necks."
He continued his cautious descent, making it to the wine cellar floor without further disaster. Most of the racks were empty: the few that weren't contained bottles so covered in cobwebs that Kame wondered if the room had even been entered in the last decade or so.
His answer came in the form of the 'conservatory' card, hastily tucked between two bottles of wine. It wasn't hard to spot - the bottles were in the only area free from webs and dust. He pocketed the card and returned to an anxious Jin.
Jin was looking for paper. "I know it'll give it away," he explained, "but if anyone else comes down here they'll probably fall through the step." He left Kame for a moment to find paper and pen in the library, and came back to write a warning note.
"In Japanese, Jin!"
At Kame's correction, Jin crossed through his carefully-printed 'DANGER!!' and began again in Japanese.
Once the note was finished, Kame fished the card out of his pocket and placed it and the paper by the wine cellar door. No matter how much Jin liked to win, neither of them wanted to do it by giving one of their friends a broken leg or worse.
The 'billiard room' card was marginally easier to obtain, involving no acrobatics at all and only one phenomenal act of bravery - Jin had to walk through a room of creepy-looking dolls, one of which was marching back and forth across the floor until Kame ventured in and removed its batteries.
"Found a card!" Jin exclaimed once he'd made it to the other side. It had been in plain sight, propped up on an Empress doll in the display cabinet.
Kame crossed it off on the list. "Ten down, including the one Koki gave us."
"Ueda's probably got them all by now," Jin said glumly. "He had ten by lunchtime."
"He can't have won yet. According to the instructions, when we're ready to make an accusation we have to go the lounge and say it in front of the staff members, who have the cards with the answer. If anyone wins, the staff should come and round up the rest of us so we can film a big finalé."
"Then there's still hope for us." Jin happily turned his back on the doll room and trotted down the hallway in search of more cards.
-----
They only found one more card before dinner. Jin got carried away in a children's playroom, uncovering the 'kitchen' card at the bottom of a toybox filled with old teddy bears. Kame wondered if anyone would notice if he kidnapped the baseball bear, complete with its little bat and ball.
Dinner itself was held in the dining room - a somewhat subdued affair, since Jin was determined not to be tricked out of any more clues, Ueda and Junno refused to admit how many cards they'd found and Koki kept giving Jin strange looks. Kame and Nakamaru shrugged and carried on their own conversation at the far end of the table.
Thanks to the strained atmosphere, there were no trades of information, and the teams went their separate ways after the food. There would be no telling of ghost stories on this trip.
"No searching for clues, all right?" Kame said before they split up. "We wait until after breakfast tomorrow."
Everyone agreed to this - it had been a late meal anyway, and after a day spent searching the house, no one really wanted to do much more than collapse in their rooms.
"You want to shower first?" Kame asked politely. Each of the bedrooms they'd been assigned had an en-suite, complete with shower, though the separate bathrooms had actual baths for anyone who preferred it. But since that involved venturing out down the hallway, neither Jin nor Kame cared for that idea.
"You'd better go first," Jin replied, equally polite. "You were the one who went into the wine cellar with all those cobwebs."
Kame's hands immediately flew to his hair, which he hadn't had many opportunities to fix during the day. "If you've let me walk around with cobwebs in my hair..."
Despite the threat to his person, Jin couldn't resist laughing. Kame's face was priceless.
"I'm showering first." Kame slammed the door after himself, leaving Jin curled up on one of the twin beds.
It was fortunate that Kame's hair-dryer had been one of the few personal items they'd actually been permitted to bring, though Jin wasn't allowed to use it until he'd apologised. They had to be up early the next morning, the plan being to leave the mansion after lunch, so if they weren't close to an accusation by midday, the staff were prepared to drop heavy hints to the whereabouts of the remaining cards.
And thanks to the early start, it was better to have an early night, too. Even without the air of competition stifling them, there would be no dashing in and out of each other's rooms.
It was, Kame thought as he lay in bed, like the early days of KAT-TUN, when nobody was certain what was going to happen, or how long they would stay together, or if they even wanted to stay together. Except that now, he knew the distance was only temporary, and everything would be all right after the mystery was solved and they could go back home.
And besides, there was one major difference between those days and now...
An hour after they'd switched off the light and settled down to sleep, Jin left his own narrow bed and climbed into Kame's, spooning up against his back.
Kame, who was just starting to drift off into a pleasant haze, pushed back with his elbow. "There's not enough room." His complaint was muzzy with not-quite-attained sleep.
"There is if I lie like this," Jin murmured. "I can't sleep, Kame."
"And now, neither can I." Kame sighed. "This is just like being in bed with Yamapi."
Jin was instantly suspicious. "When were you in bed with Pi?"
"When we were filming Nobuta together. Do you have any idea how many takes we needed for that scene?"
"No, and I don't want to know either," Jin huffed. "Why didn't Ryu and Hayato ever get any scenes in bed together?"
"Because guys from a rival school would've come along and beaten them up, completely ruining the moment - much like you've just done to my chances of getting a decent night's rest."
"Sorry." Jin nuzzled Kame's messy black hair. "But I really can't sleep."
Kame switched on the nightlight and felt down the side of the bed for his bag, containing the 'Akanishi Jin Survival Kit' - a bag of essentials that someone in KAT-TUN, usually Kame, had to bring with whenever they travelled anywhere as a group.
The kit contained the following: emergency snacks (in case they got stranded miles away from the nearest convenience store), first aid supplies (Jin liked the plasters with the tiny turtles on them), painkillers (more for Kame than Jin, owing to his unfortunate habit of falling from high places), cold remedies (because one hint of a sniffle and Jin's singing voice went out the window), vitamins (Jin liked to eat a lot, but not always the right things), stimulants (legal, only) and a whole slew of sedatives for every occasion.
"You want something to help?" Kame asked, rummaging through the various pill bottles. Jin normally slept like the dead, so if he was having problems, that was a bad sign.
Of course, he *had* slept for a good few hours in the car that morning...
Jin shook his head. "No thanks. I want to get out of here."
Kame gave him a long, searching look. "Is this going to involve me stealing car keys?" he said at last. "Because I don't think we're going to be able to persuade anyone to drive you home unless we fake some sort of medical emergency, and even then you're more likely to wind up going to the nearest hospital."
"That wasn't what I meant." Jin sat up in bed, crossing his legs. "We should be sneaking a peek at Ueda's checklist, not wasting our time lying around in bed."
"I wasn't aware any time spent lying in bed with me was 'wasted'," Kame said mildly.
"You know what I mean. We can't let them beat us, Kame!"
"So you want us to cheat?"
"Well...we don't have to look at all their clues," Jin hedged. "We could just look at the rooms and the suspects."
Kame rephrased. "So you still want us to cheat, but only a bit?"
"Yeah!"
"Jin, if going on a trip means so much to you we'll go by ourselves sometime - without the cameras!"
"That's not the point at all," Jin said crossly. "I just really think we're the ones who deserve to win this game."
"Ah!" Kame thought he saw what was going on. "This is because Koki walked in on us - twice - and Ueda tricked you out of a clue, isn't it?"
Jin gave Kame the cute little half-smile that meant he was trying to look innocent, thereby announcing his guilt to the world. "So will you help me or not?"
"I'm probably going to regret this, aren't I?" Kame grinned mischievously and handed Jin the small torch from his keyring. "One condition: you go through the passage. You've already done it once, you know what to expect."
"And what are you going to be doing?"
"Me?" Kame grinned all the wider. "I'm going to be the distraction."
-----
Half an hour later, when Jin had had time to make his way back to the library and most of the way through the passage, Kame pounded frantically on Ueda and Junno's door. After a few minutes, it opened to reveal a bleary Ueda, rubbing his eyes and muttering irritably under his breath.
"Akanishi, if this is your idea of a joke I'm going to...oh. Kame?"
Kame did his best to appear desperate and panicked half out of his mind. He'd managed it in dramas before, had even won awards for his acting. So it was only logical that he got to play the part of the distraction.
"Jin's missing!" he burst out, pushing his way into the room as though he might somehow find his absent other half in there. "I woke up a couple of minutes ago and he was gone!"
Ueda blinked. "He's probably in the bathroom."
Kame shook his head. "I've checked! And the one in the corridor. He's just vanished!"
"Maybe he's gone down for a drink?" Junno suggested, sitting up in bed. "Or a snack? I think there was some stuff left out in the kitchen..."
This wasn't going well, Kame thought. Neither of them sounded remotely worried enough to actually volunteer to help look for Jin. He had to turn up the panic a little.
"I really don't think so! Jin wasn't...look, he wasn't feeling so good when we went to bed, okay?" Kame's words were hushed, taking Ueda into his confidence. "If he's gone wandering around by himself, he might have collapsed somewhere. He could be lying unconscious at the bottom of the stairs!"
"All right, all right!" Ueda shook the hair out of his eyes and beckoned Junno over. "We'll help you look for him. It shouldn't take too long for us to find him if we take a floor each."
"I'll take the ground floor," Kame jumped in before anyone else could claim it. He didn't want them seeing the gaping hole in the library.
"I'll take second," Junno volunteered.
"Leaving me this one. Okay." Ueda ushered them all out the door, locked it and pocketed the key. He cast a glance at the remaining bedroom. "Should we wake the others?"
"Not unless we don't have any luck," Kame said firmly. No sense complicating the situation, since he knew Jin definitely wasn't in Nakamaru and Koki's room. "We'll let them sleep for now."
The three of them split up; Kame hurried to the library to wait for Jin's return so that he could triumphantly claim to have "found" him. The passage was open; of Jin, there was no sign.
Some twenty minutes later, a depressed-looking face emerged from the hole in the wall. Kame let him climb free, then pushed the candlestick back into position.
"Well? Did you manage to get anything?"
Jin's shoulders drooped. "I searched all over the room - did you know Taguchi managed to smuggle in a GBA? - but I couldn't find their checklists anywhere! They must've hidden them."
"That's incredibly paranoid," Kame mused. "Especially since Ueda locked the door again before going to look for you, so it's not like anyone could've gotten in."
Jin had a horrible thought. "Kame," he said slowly, "did you lock our door?"
Kame and Jin exchanged despairing looks and raced for the stairs.
Without stopping to alert the others to Jin's reappearance, they rushed straight to their room. All seemed quiet from the outside, but...
"Kame," Jin whispered, "does it look like there's light shining under the door?"
Kame strained to see, but it was difficult to tell. Only one way to find out for sure - he flung the door open.
This brought him face to face with an extremely embarrassed Koki for the third time that day.
"I was just looking for aspirin," he mumbled, but the small torch and rumpled checklist he held suggested otherwise. Then he noticed Jin. "Weren't you missing?"
Jin stormed into the bedroom and snatched his paper from Koki's hand, looming over him threateningly. "In a minute you'll wish I was."
Ueda chose that moment to reappear, looking no less confused than he had when he'd opened the door to Kame. "I don't really know what's going on-" he began; Kame cut him off.
"I found Jin downstairs," he said. "He was getting a drink. When we came back we found Koki in our room. Stealing our clues."
Koki didn't have a lot to say for himself, being caught red-handed; he tried anyway. "You guys made so much noise earlier you woke us up! Then you all disappeared, and when I tried the door to see if anyone was still here, I saw..." He looked over at the nightstand, where Jin had left his checklist.
"And you just couldn't resist looking," Jin finished for him.
"You can't really blame him." Nakamaru was standing in the doorway now. "If you're going to leave it out in the open like that you have to expect that someone will come along and read it."
"Not when the door's closed!"
Junno turned up just in time to catch Jin's lecture on respecting other people's privacy; said lecture immediately prompted everyone to call Jin a hypocrite since he tended to favour the 'what's mine is mine and what's yours is mine too' approach to life.
Kame, who was beginning to get crotchety over the whole fiasco, silenced the lot of them with a glare. "I only want to know one thing," he said to Koki. "Do you have enough to make an accusation now?"
At least Koki had the decency to look embarrassed, bowing his head low. "Yeah. I'm really sorry!"
Jin was about to make a comment along the lines of "You should be!", but a stern look from Kame was enough to remind him that he'd been trying to do the same thing himself, only to Ueda, and he kept quiet.
"What should we do now?"
There was no immediate answer to Nakamaru's question, so the members of KAT-TUN crowded into Jin and Kame's room in order to find one.
By the time half an hour had passed, Kame was ready to kick everyone out - literally, if need be - so he didn't have to stop pretending to be awake. "I don't care who wins," he said, stilling Jin's protests with a hand on his knee, "but the sooner someone solves the murder, the sooner we can all go home. Somebody make an accusation after breakfast, okay?"
"It shouldn't be Koki," Ueda said. "He didn't work for all of his clues."
"We got most of them by ourselves!"
"And the rest?"
Koki fell silent.
"Kame's team should do it," Junno suggested, but Ueda objected to that.
"We only needed two more cards! How many did Kame need?"
"Seven," Jin said. "We still needed seven."
"And we needed five." Nakamaru produced his own checklist. "Want to draw lots to see who wins? That's fairest, isn't it?"
Jin couldn't make a convincing argument to the others that they should let him win...and really, he supposed, he couldn't have accepted the trip even if they did, since he'd been intending to cheat too. It was purely down to Ueda's canniness that he'd failed.
That didn't mean he had to be a graceful loser, though, and he didn't spare the sulks. "We should all go together."
Kame arched an eyebrow. "Together?" he repeated.
-----
Next morning after breakfast, the six suspects marched into the lounge, where the camera crew were waiting to film the dénouement. The range of baffled expressions they sported suggested that they hadn't been expecting the entire group to show up.
"We've come to make an accusation," Mrs. Peacock announced, smoothing down his hair. "Thanks to everyone's hard work, we've solved the case!"
There was a round of applause at this, complete with whooping, high-fiving, and the odd backslap; somehow, the Reverend Green ended up on the ground.
Professor Plum took the floor, hat in hand. "Everyone, I have a confession to make. I'm the one who killed Dr. Black! It was an accident! I'm very sorry!" He fell to the carpet and bowed, covering his smile with his fedora.
"Ah, the poor professor," Mrs. White sympathised. "He's so traumatised by the whole experience that he doesn't even remember hitting Dr. Black with a candlestick."
"Dr. Black was asking for it," Colonel Mustard said, throwing a supportive arm around his guilty friend. "He shouldn't have kept making jokes about Plum's nose!"
Miss Scarlett put his hands on his hips. "That's no excuse for sneaking up behind him and cracking a candlestick down on his head! Especially in the library. You're supposed to be silent in there, you know? Even when I opened the secret passage, I didn't make any noise!"
Even the staff members picked up on the sudden change in atmosphere.
"Secret passage?" Junno asked innocently. "In the library?"
Jin gathered from this that no one had been skilled enough to duplicate his amazing discovery. "Yeah, a secret passage! It goes up to the room you and Ueda were in and it's really long, and kind of scary - not so much the second time - and-"
"Second time?" Ueda gave him a suspicious look. "Why would you go through it a second time?"
Kame felt the bottom drop out of his stomach.
"I...um...dropped my earring the first time?" Jin's explanation didn't convince anyone. He scrabbled around for another answer, landing conveniently on the truth. "Uh...actually...Kame told me to do it!"
All eyes turned to Kame.
"I said that the one who went through should be you because you'd done it before - I didn't order you to sneak into their room! JIN!"
Jin offered up a prayer of thanks that being 'Miss Scarlett' didn't actually involve dressing up as a woman, because he wasn't very good at running in high heels.
----- The End -----